The Foreign Service Journal, October 2007

phere was paranoid and poisonous in the extreme. Because there were no scheduled flights that afternoon, I arrived in San- ta Isabel by charter aircraft just after 5 p.m. I instructed the pilot to depart if I had not returned before the airport closed at dusk. My single-entry visa having expired, I talked my way into the country by treating customs and immigration officers to rounds of beer. It took time to find a taxi into town, so I didn’t get to the chancery until dusk. When I rang the bell, Erdos responded that he wouldn’t open the door to anyone but Louis Hoffacker, the American ambassador to Camer- oon (who was also accredited to Equatorial Guinea). However, Hof- facker was on leave in the U.S. Rebuffed, I walked the few blocks to the chargé’s residence in search of his wife, Jean. I also telephoned Leahy’s home and talked with his wife Rosita, who assumed Leahy was still at work. Locating Mrs. Erdos at the res- idence of the Cameroonian am- bassador to Equatorial Guinea, I per- suaded her to accompany me back to the U.S. chancery. She entered the building, a convert- ed family residence, carrying her infant son. Rather than confront Erdos again, I went to use the telephone at the neighborhood bar next door. By this time a crowd had begun gathering, and the Guinean police arrived. As the Cameroonian ambassador had told me, Erdos had been phoning diplomatic colleagues to say that he was holed up in the chancery under threat from a communist plot involv- ing his administrative officer. I man- aged to phone the dean of the diplo- matic corps, the Nigerian ambassador, and to locate a doctor to stand by with me outside the chancery. It grew darker and the curious crowd gather- ing outside grew larger. I also talked by phone with Erdos, who after about an hour, agreed to come out. Leaving the chancery, he pulled me to one side and said, “I lost my cool. I killed Don Leahy.” That was my last conversation with Erdos. I put him, his wife and infant son into the Nigerian ambassador’s Mercedes and they sped away to the Nigerian Embassy residence. I entered the chancery and conducted a quick, fran- tic search of the ground floor. There I found papers strewn around and blood spattered on floors and walls, but no sign of Leahy. I opened the vault and contacted Embassy Yaounde by shortwave radio. No sooner had I established contact with Walker, who was standing by, than I heard a scream from the foyer. I ran out of the vault to discover Mrs. Leahy kneeling over the body of her husband, sprawled lifeless in a pool of blood on the floor of an unused office just inside the front door that in my haste I had neglected to search. I called in the doctor, who pronounced Leahy dead. An autopsy revealed he had bled to death. I was immediately thereafter con- fronted by the irate Guinean minister of the interior, who had entered upon hearing Mrs. Leahy’s scream. With both the president and vice president absent from the island, he was appar- ently the senior official in the capital. He demanded to know what had hap- pened. I showed him Leahy’s body and asserted that I had arrived from Douala to take charge of American interests. He refused to accept my bona fides and ordered me to the chargé’s residence under police escort. I spent a sleepless night there until Walker arrived from Cameroon by charter aircraft the following morning. He was accompanied by Public Affairs Officer John Graves and State Depart- ment nurse Mary-Ann Dumkowski. Cleaning up the Mess There ensued four days of frenetic activity as we attempted to secure Leahy’s body and other physical evi- dence, and to evacuate both the body and the Erdos family back to the United States. Complicating matters, the Guinean authorities adamantly re- fused to recognize either my or Wal- ker’s authority to act on behalf of the U.S. government. Demanding to deal only with Amb. Hoffacker, they claim- ed to have evidence of Erdos’ com- plicity in a shadowy, inchoate plot to overthrow the Guinean government. As we awaited the ambassador’s return from leave, we attempted to keep the lid on a volatile situation. I immediately arranged for the body to be sealed in a zinc-lined box and secured in cold storage. Meanwhile, Mrs. Leahy was making hysterical accusations of U.S. government in- volvement in her husband’s death, so we arranged to bring Mrs. Leahy’s sis- ter and brother-in-law from Tangier to calm her. It certainly did not help that mem- bers of the large local Latin American community (Mrs. Leahy was a native of Ecuador) were spreading wild, un- confirmed rumors. Several of them asserted that Leahy and Erdos were homosexual lovers who’d had a falling out. In the midst of the crisis, we held a hastily arranged memorial service for Leahy at the cathedral. Because the Equatorial Guinean government re- peatedly refused our requests to inter- view Erdos at the Nigerian residence and to permit the FBI to investigate, we received assistance from the regional medical and regional security officers based in Lagos in our probe. PAO Graves and I scoured the 52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 The State Department’s attitude toward the case was ambiguous.