The Foreign Service Journal, October 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2016 43 T he Angolans had put me alone in a guest house somewhere in the suburbs of Luanda awaiting the beginning of talks where the United States planned to trade off a warming of relations with the Popular Move- ment for the Liberation of Angola government in return for removal of Cuban forces from Angola. This was an opening we had been preparing for some time via the presidents of Gabon and Congo (Brazzaville), and I was primed and anxious to begin my secret mission. Neither Washington nor Luanda wanted publicity at this stage. As night fell and boredom set in, there was a knock at the door. Expecting my Angolan contact, I was surprised to see the British ambassador, who formally represented U.S. interests, but who wasn’t supposed to know I was in town. Travels with The Champ in Africa, 1980 The late Muhammad Ali was a diplomat extraordinaire, as this firsthand account of a mission to Africa attests. BY LANNON WALKER Ambassador Lannon Walker, now retired and working as a consultant, served some 38 years in the Foreign Service, mainly in north and sub-Saharan Africa, but also in Vietnam. In Washington, D.C., he held the positions of director of the Office of Central African Affairs, senior deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of African Affairs and acting deputy inspec- tor general, among others. In the mid-1960s, he led the Young Turk reformist movement, which took over AFSA in 1967. He later served as U.S. ambassador to Senegal, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast. FEATURE President Jimmy Carter greets Muhammad Ali at a White House dinner in 1977. Three years later Ali toured Africa at Carter’s request to enlist support for a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow. MARIONS.TRIKOSKO/WIKIMEDIACOMMONS