The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

94 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 5 Not-So-Tall Tales? A Diplomat’s Prog ress: Ten Tales of Diplomatic Adventure in and a round the Middle East Henry Precht, Williams & Company, 2005, $14.95, paperback, 233 pages. R EVIEWED BY D AVE D UNFORD As its title suggests, A Diplomat’s Progress functions on some levels as an homage to John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress : a series of allegorical tales told by a dreamer. There are obvious parallels between John Bunyan’s myth- ical places, like the Slough of Despond, and the exotic settings, such as Assiut and Mauritius, of Henry Precht’s tales. And like Bunyan’s hero, Harry Prentice of Savannah, Ga., the first- person narrator of all 10 tales, tries to find meaning and fulfillment in his journey through a world where larger forces control his fate. Instead of the evil Giant Despair, he meets wily Sunnis, Shia, Iranians, Maronites, Israelis, Palestinians and Kurds. The author unapologetically plays fast and loose with the line between truth and fiction. He advises us in the introduction not to “worry about what might be real; swallow it all.” This is good advice, because Harry is often far from heroic. We learn he is ethically challenged as he conspires with an Egyptian police officer to pocket some of the cash found on a dead American. After an embarrassingly brief bout of soul-searching, Harry elects to do nothing about the obvious rape of a young Japanese woman by a senior Mauritian official. Later he unwitting- ly allows the Iranian government to use him as bait to lure a Kurdish dissi- dent out into the open and hang him. While on vacation in Israel Harry seizes an opportunity to talk with a Palestinian, and gets duped into help- ing him carry out a bombing there. In such situations, Harry resembles no one as much as Inspector Clouseau, wandering innocently through a world of mayhem, evil and betrayal without ever being harmed or losing his faith in the goodness of humanity. Yet he strikes us as very real, in a way that no former diplomat authoring his own memoirs could ever duplicate. Two chapters nestled in the middle of the volume about the days preced- ing the Iranian revolution are so com- pelling as to be alone worth the price of the book. They give us a classic example of tragedies brought about by political leaders who stubbornly cling to familiar policies even though there is abundant evidence for all to see that the policies are bankrupt. Harry, the consummate political officer, sees the train wreck coming. He carefully mar- shals his evidence and presents it to his superiors, but to no avail. He shows real courage by soldier- ing on even after his superiors signal clearly that they don’t want to hear evi- dence pointing to the impending col- lapse of the shah’s reign. We know that Harry will fall victim to that iron law of bureaucracy (applicable well beyond the Foreign Service) that tells us it does nothing for your career to be right if the people who are wrong are above your pay grade. Eight of the stories transport us to exotic places like Afghanistan and Damascus (the other two are set in Washington, D.C., and England, respectively), where we see Harry matching wits with Middle Easterners who come to life as believable charac- ters with good lines rather than the stereotypical Arab terrorists that inhabit our best sellers. The exotic sights, sounds and smells of the Middle East permeate these pages. My favorite tale is “Mission to Assiut,” whose plot — Washington sends Harry from Embassy Cairo to Upper Egypt to ask a radical Sunni cleric to intervene with Shia terrorists holding Americans hostage in Lebanon — is so absurd that I con- clude it must have been inspired by a true incident. You will find A Diplomat’s Progress to be a fun and easy read, even if you no longer care who lost Iran. Dave Dunford is a retired Foreign Service officer who served in Quito, Helsinki, Cairo, Riyadh, Muscat and Washington, D.C. He currently teach- es, writes and consults in Tucson, Ariz. B OOKS Precht’s protagonist resembles no one as much as Inspector Clouseau. Yet he also seems very real. w