The Foreign Service Journal, October 2007

O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 51 n Aug. 30, 1971, Alfred Erdos, the chargé d’affaires in Santa Isabel, Equatorial Guinea, stabbed adminis- trative officer Donald Leahy to death. At the time, I was principal officer in Douala, Cameroon, the nearest con- sulate to the scene of the crime, so I still recall the incident vividly. Below, I outline the major facets of what transpired, based on my memory, documents obtained from the National Archives and consultations with others involved at the time. It is not an uplifting account, for there is no moral or pol- icy lesson to be drawn from it. But it is a legendary Foreign Service tale, often embellished in the retelling, and the case set an important legal precedent. Equatorial Guinea had become independent from Spain in 1968, just three years before the murder. Two American officers and their wives were stationed at the embassy in Santa Isabel (now Malabo), a tiny city of about 25,000 inhab- itants at the time, situated a few miles offshore from Douala on the volcanic island of Fernando Poo (now Bioko). Oil had yet to be discovered there, so the country was best known for its high-quality cocoa crop. An estuary port and one of the rainiest spots on earth, Douala is Cameroon’s commercial center, with a population of just under a million in 1971. It was the site of a three-per- son U.S. consulate and, later, consulate general until 1993, when it was made a branch of Embassy Yaounde. Both Santa Isabel and Douala were steamy tropical back- waters at the time, dependent on commercial communica- tions and manual code systems for confidential reporting. Both had intermittent international radio phone service in those days before satellite communications became com- mon. On that fateful day, Lannon Walker, the deputy chief of mission in Yaounde, called me after lunch to report that Al Erdos, our chargé in Santa Isabel, had apparently gone off his rocker. Walker had been concerned for several weeks about the tone and substance of the cables coming out of Santa Isabel. But now Erdos was on the shortwave radio reporting a communist plot involving his administrative officer, whom he had tied up in the chancery vault. Walker instructed me to go immediately to the consulate, a 20-minute flight from Douala, and take charge. A Grim Discovery I had visited the capital only two weeks before, one of many trips I made there to keep current on events and per- sonalities in Equatorial Guinea so that I might relieve the chargé when he vacationed. In fact, I had been following events there ever since independence, helped by the fact that I spoke Spanish. The political and economic situation had steadily deteriorated under the erratic, capricious and vicious rule of President Francisco Macias Nguema. Arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, torture and even murder on an in- creasingly large scale were all common. The local atmos- A F OREIGN S ERVICE M URDER T HIS GRISLY INCIDENT , OFTEN EMBELLISHED IN THE RETELLING , SET AN IMPORTANT LEGAL PRECEDENT . O B Y L EN S HURTLEFF Len Shurtleff retired in 1995 after a 32-year career as a Foreign Service officer in Africa, Latin America and Washington, D.C.