The Foreign Service Journal, December 2012

32 DECEMBER 2012 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Ann B. Sides was a Foreign Service consular officer from 1983 to 2011. Her overseas assignments included Niamey, Dakar, Oran, Belgrade (twice), Zagreb, Dublin, Sarajevo and Athens, where she was consul general from 2004 to 2008. G ordon Jones is a lucky man. Now 68 and retired from the Foreign Service, he was kidnapped by the Uruguayan guerrilla orga- nization known as the Tupamaros in 1970, escaping in an astonishing feat of physical agility and quick thinking. Diplomats have long been targets of assassins with a grudge against the government the diplomat represents. However, many of the terrorist movements that proliferated in the late 1960s and early 1970s had a more pragmatic motive. They abducted diplo- mats of many nationalities to extort money or political conces- sions from host governments. Jones, then 27 and the father of newborn twins, was an up-and-coming economic and commercial officer at the U.S. embassy in Montevideo. On a chilly morning, July 31, 1970, he and cultural attaché Nathan Rosenfeld were in a parking garage beneath the apartment building where they both lived, prepar- ing to share a ride to work. A snatch squad of masked urban guerillas pounced on the two colleagues, stunning them with blows to the back of the neck. “They didn’t know either of us by sight, so they checked our diplomatic ID cards. It was me they wanted. They left Nathan on the garage floor, knocked me out—or so they thought—tied me up and shoved me into the back of the car. Soon, by some prear- rangement, we met a pickup truck and I was transferred to the flatbed at the back of the truck. They rolled me in a blanket and hog-tied me, hand to foot.” One captor stayed in the back of the pickup with Jones, while the other three got into the cab of the truck. Despite the blow to his head, Jones never totally lost consciousness. Intensely alert, he “played possum” to deceive his captors, his mind racing through possible escape scenarios. Going with Plan B “Plan A was that I’d find an opportunity to throw myself off the truck. Plan B was that I’d yell to attract attention, and people would help me,” Jones recalls. “As the truck picked up speed on Avenida Italia, the only fast road out of the city, I discarded Plan A and began focusing on Plan B. As long as we were going fast, there wasn’t much I could do. “But then the truck began to slow down again, and I realized we were passing through a little suburb. I could hear the voices of shoppers. We were coming into a plaza, a shopping area where there were crowds. I started calling out, yelling for help.” As Jones shouted frantically for assistance, his captor slugged him with the butt of a 45-caliber pistol. “They’d seen too many BACKFLIP TO FREEDOM Between 1968 and 1975, 33 U.S. government officials abroad were targeted for kidnapping. Here is one of those stories. BY ANN B . S I DES