THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 39 the crowds outside, and not long after, we smelled tires burning and heard explosions just outside the walls. By late morning, protesters entered the former embassy building and began looting it. Throughout the morning, I was in continuous contact with the regional security officer (RSO), providing updates and receiving guidance. The assessment we reached together was straightforward: Stay inside, keep quiet, do nothing to draw attention to the residence. At that point, the house did not appear to be a deliberate target. Rocks occasionally cleared the compound wall, but the crowds seemed focused next door. We sheltered in place and waited. By midday, something shifted. The noise outside began to diminish. I called the embassy and reported that conditions around the residence appeared to be stabilizing. What had been an “8” on the urgency scale had diminished to a “4.” I believed the worst had passed. I was wrong. A Rain of Rocks on the Roof At approximately 1 p.m., I heard rocks striking the roof—not stray debris but deliberate impacts, and from a different direction, a side street where only our house faced. I looked outside and understood immediately: The rocks were being aimed at us. Over the next 15 minutes, the barrage steadily intensified. The windows of my car shattered. The exterior of the house took visible damage. As I watched from inside my own home, the driveway gates began to sway violently back and forth. A gate giving way does not happen all at once. The hinges strain. The frame bows. The whole structure swings back and forth under external pressure, and you stand on the other side knowing there is nothing you can do. Within minutes, the gates collapsed. The compound was breached, and what seemed to be hundreds of people were streaming into the compound. The situation had changed shockingly suddenly, but it was clear we needed evacuation immediately. I knew what that request meant and had discussed it earlier with the RSO—leaving would almost certainly mean losing everything inside. But there was no other choice. Angelique and I moved to the safe haven area of the residence and called the RSO. The rioters had not yet come through the door of the house itself, but they were everywhere outside, on the grounds, moving through the outbuildings, taking whatever they could carry. This may sound silly, but I had borrowed the ambassador’s warming trays for a reception we had hosted a few nights earlier, and they were sitting outside waiting to be returned. They were one of the first things to be stolen. “I’m not gonna hear the end of that,” I thought. The RSO dispatched an assistant RSO and a SPEAR team— a specially trained unit of local police seconded to embassy protection—in an armored vehicle. They arrived approximately 20 minutes after the gates fell, cleared the compound of looters, positioned the vehicle at the gate, and pounded on the door. We came out of the safe haven, taking our dogs, “go bags,” and almost nothing else, climbed into the armored van, and fled. As we drove away, I watched through the window as the crowd that had been waiting outside surged back through the gates. Video footage later shared on social media, filmed from an apartment building overlooking our compound, showed the looting continuing for hours. In some of that footage, you could clearly identify Congolese police officers among the crowd. They were not intervening. They were taking. A subsequent visit to the property confirmed what we had feared. The residence and all the outbuildings had been stripped to bare walls. The light fixtures and electrical sockets had been ripped out. Every piece of furniture, every appliance, every piece of clothing we owned (my beloved suits!) had been taken. But the detail that stayed with me most was what they had done to access the safe haven. They had sledgehammered through a cement wall, a process that must have taken at least an hour and required equipment brought to the site for exactly that purpose. They had also climbed to the roof and broken in through the ceiling, leaving dirty footprints on the wall of our bedroom from ceiling to floor as they climbed down. That detail brings me to the hardest part of this account. A Targeted Attack In the days that followed, multiple sources, people with no connection to one another, independently reported to us that Angelique and I had not simply been caught in the chaos of a city coming apart. We had been targeted. My driver and our When U.S. diplomats are attacked, when there is credible evidence of a plot to kill them, the government they serve owes them an accounting.
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