The Foreign Service Journal, November 2005

56 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5 n June 1919, Gordon Paddock, the United States consul in Tabriz, Persia (changed to Iran in 1935), received a stark message delivered by a messenger who, to get through Kurdish lines, had hidden the paper in the sole of his sandal: “May 24. Kurds fought with Persians. Kurds driven from city. Persians massacred 200 Christians in American mission yard and wounded 100 more. Many attempts on lives of Clarence Packard and Yacob, but both are safe. City mob looted all mission property and burned some. Secure immediate protection and help. Packard.” In response, Paddock set out to save the missionaries and 600 of their Assyrian Christian fol- lowers, who were trapped in the Persian city of Urmia (also spelled Urumiah; later changed to Rezaiyeh). Letters from the missionaries and from Paddock in the National Archives and in the archives of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia tell the story of the res- cue, and of Paddock’s subsequent problems with the State Department bureaucracy. “Deliberateness Instead of Energy and Action” Gordon Paddock was an unlikely hero. Born in New York in 1865, he graduated from Princeton and Columbia Law School. After practicing law in New York for 10 years, he entered the United States Diplomatic Service in 1901. On June 5, 1911, shortly after Paddock took up his con- sular duties in Tabriz, State Department inspector Alfred L.M. Gottschalk described him as “a gentleman, trained to the life of the idle rich in his youth. He has no money left now and is trying, late in life, to learn something of business.” Knowing that background, the inspector sym- pathized all the more with Paddock’s living conditions. “He has to live in a mud-walled village where there is practically no social life and where the only fellow coun- trymen that he meets are well meaning, but certainly not broad-minded, missionaries, where clean or well-trained servants are unattainable, and where the house he lives in is not weatherproof and therefore impossible to heat through the severe mountain-winter of Persia.” In addition, communications were poor and subject to misunderstanding, as when he reported his marriage on April 29, 1918, in Tabriz to Marie Josephine Irma Lefebvre, a French citizen. In a subsequent letter to the American minister in Tehran, he wrote: “I am entirely obliged to you for the trouble the legation has taken in R ESCUE AT U RMIA I N AN OBSCURE CORNER OF P ERSIA FOLLOWING W ORLD W AR I, AN UNDERESTIMATED CONSUL BECAME AN UNLIKELY HERO . B Y D AVID D. N EWSOM David D. Newsom, an FSO from 1947 to 1981, served as ambassador to Libya, Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as assistant secretary for African affairs, among many other assignments. From 1978 to 1981, he was under sec- retary of State for political affairs. He received AFSA’s award for Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy in 2000. Ambassador Newsom was assisted in the prepa- ration of this article by two other FSOs and their wives, who had heard NEA Assistant Secretary George Allen tell this story in the 1950s (somewhat embellished?): Harold and Sylvia Josif, and Fred and Winifred Hadsel. (Harold Josif was consul in Tabriz from 1957 to 1959.) In November 1962, the Foreign Service Journal published an account of the rescue by Edward M. Dodd, one of the mis- sionaries involved. I