The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

26 SEPTEMBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL level officer in Tel Aviv when I was working there. She was so unhappy and felt so unappreciated that she told me she planned to leave the Foreign Service. So one night my wife and I took her out to dinner and the outdoor opera in Caesarea, and we spent three or four hours talking. She never said she’d changed her mind, but she stayed in the Service. And she recently became an ambassador. FSJ: That must be very gratifying. WCH: Yes. It shows why it’s so important for experienced people to mentor younger officers. That’s one of the great chal- lenges the Foreign Service faces today: It’s so young. After the end of the Cold War, appropriations were way down—something else AFSA fought to fix—and there was a period where no one came into the Foreign Service. Now we have so many FSOs who have been in for less than 10 years that there’s a shortage of more experienced folks to work with them. FSJ: You’re no stranger to the challenges associated with working with the Hill. How do you think that the current budget battles will impact the Foreign Service and its effectiveness in its mission overseas? WCH: Well, I think we may not come out too badly on this in the end. I think there’s a recognition by Republicans as well as Democrats of the importance of diplomacy. A big difficulty is that we don’t have a personnel “float” like that of the military, which is really very important. The actual competency of the Foreign Service has declined somewhat in recent years. There’s not enough professional train- ing by any means. And Congress is very reluctant to appropriate much money for that. FSJ: Three of your five ambassadorships were to African countries and came during the Cold War. That must have been a very fascinating time of power politics. How do you think our policies during that era influenced Africa’s development? WCH: When I arrived in Conakry as chief of mission in 1975, I had an office of 15 people. There were 700, I think, in the Chinese mission, and about 1,100 in the Soviet embassy. Both countries were spending a good deal of money in Guinea and throughout Africa, but the Chinese were there primarily to oppose the Soviets, not us. The Soviets were building a big refinery for bauxite, which is one of Guinea’s biggest resources. The main bauxite company was internationally owned, and because the World Bank had conditioned its support on all transactions being done in hard currency outside the country, President Sékou Touré, a dictator, could not manipulate the money. For their part, the Chinese built a magnificent public palace, which was a huge auditorium and opera house. They did the same thing in other African countries and also built railroads. Moscow had built the main airport in Conakry, and its huge transport aircraft would fly from the Soviet Union over the Atlantic to survey the NATO fleet and sometimes harass it. Then they would land in Conakry, refuel and get maintenance before flying over to Cuba. FSJ: Which was a problem for the United States. WCH: Yes, so without instructions fromWashington I really put pressure on Sékou Touré to stop those landings. Because of the complete inefficiency of socialized agriculture, his agricul- turally rich little country was starving. So when the time came to negotiate the next round of our PL-480 food support, I made it clear that I was having trouble working out a renewal; no telling how long it would take. Sékou Touré was furious, but he couldn’t manage without our food. William C. Harrop, center, with President George H.W. Bush and Yitzhak Rabin in Kennebunkport, Maine on July 10, 1992. COURTESYOFWILLIAMC.HARROP