The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

104 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Ambassador (ret.) Walter Cutler served as president of Meridian International Center from 1989 to 2006. A career diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service, he served twice as ambassador to Saudi Arabia and as ambassador to Tunisia and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Other overseas postings included Cameroon, Algeria, Iran, Korea and Vietnam. In Washington, D.C., he served as deputy assistant secretary of State for congressional relations and as staff assistant to the Secretary of State. The following is adapted from his memoir, Wandering the World: Personal Recollections of a Life in Diplomacy (Kindle, 2018). A s if two armed uprisings were not enough, my time in Zaire remains memorable because of a third crisis—this one created not by rebels, but by monkeys. In August 1976 the embassy picked up word that two Belgian nuns, working as nurses at a medi- cal mission in the remote Yambuku region of northern Zaire, had suddenly fallen ill and died after being rushed to a hospital in Kinshasa. Soon, reports of other such deaths came in, including no fewer than 11 of that mission’s staff members. I had heard about something labeled “Green Monkey Fever” when, not long before, it had broken out in nearby Sudan. Believed to be a virus coming from the blood of monkeys, its symptoms ranged from high fevers and nausea to rashes and internal bleeding, with a very rapid and high fatality rate. The same, or a very similar, deathly disease now seemed to be breaking out in Zaire; and the government, fearing a widespread epidemic, placed the afflicted region under a tight quarantine. My immediate concern was the welfare of a handful of American Peace Corps volunteers serving—and now trapped by the stringent quarantine—in the Yambuku area. After urgent consul- tations with our Peace Corps director and the embassy’s medical doctor and military attachés, I decided that, one way or another, the stranded volunteers must be quickly extracted from the afflicted region. It would not be easy: No road travel was permitted, and all commercial flights had been suspended. Even Zairian government officials were reluctant to breach the quarantine, partly because of personal fears of contracting the mysterious disease, and partly because of dangers posed by an increasingly petri- fied local populace trying to find any way to get out. Given this situation, asking the Zair- ian government to rescue our volunteers, while ignoring its own people, was to my mind not the best way to go. But we had to act—the medical risk persisted each additional day they were there; and, understandably, Peace Corps head- quarters in Washington was becoming increasingly alarmed. So we devised our own rescue plan. Using short-wave radio contact with REFLECTIONS Public Health in Foreign Policy—Ebola 1976 BY WALTER CUT L ER the volunteers, we arranged for them to quietly gather one night at a small dirt airstrip we had discovered in a village near Yambuku. At dawn, our embassy plane—an eight-seat Cessna piloted by our two air attachés—found its way to the strip and quickly took the volunteers on board. By this time, word of the “Ameri- can rescue” was beginning to spread, and the plane was just able to take off before being besieged by a mob of Zairian would-be evacuees. On their arrival in Kinshasa, the vol- unteers were again quarantined together in a safe house. Thankfully, all of them survived. The operation, while not pretty, had succeeded. And my decision to confidentially inform President Mobutu’s office of what we were doing—but only after the operation was well underway— also escaped negative repercussions. In fact, I figured, the government was glad to have avoided the politically delicate position that a request for prior flight authorization would have created. During the ensuing weeks, a good deal of the embassy’s time was focused on learning more about, and developing protection against, this strange disease that became known as Ebola fever (Ebola being the name of a river that flows not far from Yambuku and into the Congo River). To its credit, the Zairian govern- ment, eschewing the possible embar- rassment of admitting to the world the Deathly disease now seemed to be breaking out in Zaire; and the government, fearing a widespread epidemic, placed the afflicted region under a tight quarantine. DIDICUTLER