The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2020 11 Vice Consul Mackiernan was to fol- low Paxton. He did so in the company of three White Russians, two of whom were killed alongside Mackiernan, and Fulbright scholar Frank Bessac, a retired anthropology professor whom I’ve vis- ited in Missoula, Montana. In 2006 Douglas Mackiernan was officially acknowledged by the CIA as their first casualty. His name was then added to their Book of Honor next to the existing 1950 black star. I was told that a classified CIA study noted my article as having “preserved cover.” The Mackiernan and Paxton story is told in Overtime in Heaven: Adventures in the Foreign Service , by Peter Lisagor and Marguerite Higgins (1964), and Bessac gave an account to Life magazine. Chapter One of The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA by Ted Gup (2000) is devoted to an encyclopedic account of Douglas Mackiernan, an even more complicated story than the one I wrote. (I never made it as a China officer.) Fred Donner Former FSO Falls Church, Virginia Discovering ConGen Calcutta History Moises Mendoza’s fascinating article about Consulates General Matamoros and Ponta Delgada in the April FSJ (“Discovering Our Consulate’s History, We Discovered Ourselves”) reminded me of the history of another post— ConGen Calcutta (now Kolkata). Its origins preceded Matamoros and Ponta Delgada. The State Department states that Ponta Delgada has been operating continuously since its founding in 1795. Technically, the claim that it is the oldest continuously operating U.S. consulate could be accurate, because in the beginning Calcutta was not termed a consulate but rather a “commercial agent.” On Nov. 19, 1792, Presi- dent George Washington nominated Benjamin Joy of Newburyport, Massachu- setts, as the first American consul to Calcutta. With the advice of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and consent of the U.S. Senate, the president commissioned Joy to that office on Nov. 21, 1792. Joy reached Calcutta in April 1794. He was not recognized as consul by the British East India Company but was permitted to “reside here as a Com- mercial Agent, subject to the Civil and Criminal Jurisdiction of this Country.” While the East India Company refused to let his post be called a con- sulate, Joy remained there until 1795 and formally resigned on Jan. 24, 1796. On Feb. 22 of that year, William James Miller of Pennsylvania was commis- sioned consul at Calcutta, where he was issued an exequatur by the British government. Equally interesting is the reason the infant U.S. government established an official presence in Calcutta. During the American Revolution, the British ceased exporting tea and spices from Calcutta to the American colonies, so New England traders decided to pick up the business. To pay for their voyages, which took an average of six months each way between Boston and Calcutta, the traders exported a unique commodity. One might assume it was coal. But no, the nawabs of Bengal had enough fossil fuel of their own; they wanted some- thing the Yankees had in abundance in winter—ice, mostly carved out of New England millponds. While there was plenty of ice and snow in the nearby Indian Himalayas, it melted on pack animals and carts before it could reach the nawabs, who loved ice cream and other frigid delights. Amazingly, the shippers lost only about 15 percent of their icy weight during the long voyages around Cape Horn from New Bedford to Calcutta in large sailing vessels, with the ice packed in pine straw in deep hulls. I was head of the political section in Calcutta from 1969 to 1972, which is when the leftist state government decided to change the name of our con- sulate address from Harrington Street to Ho Chi Minh Sarani, just as we were in the midst of the Vietnam War. We wrote up a history of the post at that time, and years later, in 1993, I col- laborated with Dennis Kux on his book, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941-1991 . As deputy business coordinator with Paul Cleveland under Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, I used the ice-from-New England-to-India story to illustrate to political officers why knowledge of business and politics is critical for the Foreign Service around the world. Keep up the good work. George Griffin FSO, retired Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania