Grigori Rasputin
Former Somali Minister of Mismanagement & Misinfo.
Staff Member
Wariyaha SomaliSpot
Dude talking about how we refuse to acknowledge ourselves as Africans and how we repeatedly drilled in foreign ambassadors that we are Arabs
KULICK: Well, it certainly seemed so at the time. I must say, in very idiosyncratic terms. It was not a place that anybody held up as a paragon of the way Africa should be, simply because it was different. They spoke Italian there. Where else in Africa except for Eritrea did people speak Italian? So it didn't fit into the conventional mode that we have of being a part of British or French or Portuguese colonial history. The Somalis were still a little bit ambivalent about whether they were Africans. To an American they looked like Africans, like other Africans. But those who know the region can very readily recognize a Somali Arab, even from a highland Ethiopian, much less by comparison with so-called "Negro" Africans from the southern and western part of the continent. They were all Muslims--not terribly devout, on the whole. But they had kind of a schizophrenic picture of themselves, betwixt and between the Arab world and Africa. I found them thoroughly engaging people.
They were very irreverent and very democratic, in the sense that they did not have much regard for hierarchical rank or for pretensions among politicians. There were no real social classes. That was characteristic of a nomadic society. Everyone in Somalia has a nickname because two-thirds of the people in the country are named either Mohammed or Ali or Achmad. So they have to have some other way of distinguishing among themselves. They tended to single out physical characteristics or personality characteristics, usually very negative ones. You might have a politician whose name was "Zuppo," for example, which I think means "lame" in Italian, because he dragged one leg. If a man had a broad nose, they'd call him "Flat Nose" or "Cross Eyes" or "Big Mouth." In fact, Siad Barre, who, at the time I was there, was the Army commander. In 1969 he led a coup d'etat and, for the next 22 years, was the military dictator of Somalia. He was universally known among Somalis as "Aphuain", which means "Big Mouth."
That's what they called him. I don't know whether it referred to his loquacity or just that he happened to have a large, oral aperture. To an American this was a kind of appealing, national personality characteristic. I used to contrast this with the situation in Ethiopia, which was very different. The Ethiopians are very formal, very proper, very deferential, and very polite and soft-spoken--extremely conscious of social class. They are very--what's the word? "Devious" sounds too sinister but they are very convoluted in their speech. You had to read between the lines to understand what they were saying. By contrast, the Somalis were very straightforward. They told you exactly what they thought. I mentioned Ethiopia because that was my next assignment. I was the junior officer in the Embassy [in Mogadishu] and I did a little bit of everything. As the youngest officer they tried to get me to follow student affairs, although there was no university, and it was a little hard to do that. However, I used the fact that I had worked for the National Students Association, which at that time was still known among African students as a very liberal force in the United States, as a way of kind of ingratiating myself with young people. This was on the somewhat naive assumption that they knew or cared anything about American politics or that they made those kinds of distinctions. I experienced a period of near panic in February, 1967, when I was listening to the Voice of America one morning, over my cornflakes. I heard the announcer state that the National Students Association had revealed that for the previous 20 or 25 years it had been subsidized by the Central Intelligence Agency. Of course, this caused a great brouhaha back in the U.S. for days, because it turned out to be the kind of loose thread that, when pulled, unraveled the whole skein of other ventures by the Agency. It turned out that they were subsidizing labor unions and youth and cultural organizations. They had this whole, elaborate series of international operations that they were secretly funding. It was not all as malign as it was made out to be. In a lot of areas it was simply providing funding that was not available from private sources for organizations which they felt would assist us in our world-wide cultural and political confrontation with the Soviets. It created a great scandal in the U.S. Anyhow, it turned out that, just as I had exaggerated the effect of my having played this up before, the Somalis seemed equally indifferent to the fact, later on, that it had all turned out to be an elaborate CIA operation. But that was a moment of real fright for me during the first three months of my diplomatic career. Q: What was the feeling at that time about the "Soviet threat," because this was a theme that ran through an awful lot of our African policy. In Somalia from 1966-68, when you were there, how did people view the Soviets? KULICK: The Somalis were playing the East-West game very actively. This was, perhaps, epitomized by the fact that the Somali Army was receiving training from the Soviets, while the National Police force was under the tutelage of what was then West Germany [the Federal Republic of Germany]. We used to joke about what would happen when the confrontation came. Would "our" police be able to whip "their" army? The Somalis didn't take any of this very seriously, on an ideological level. They simply saw this situation as a way of maximizing their bargaining position to obtain aid. We had quite a sizeable AID mission then. I think that there were probably 30 or 35 Americans. I don't remember what the dollar amount of the aid was, but it was not insignificant. We had a large agricultural training program in a town called Afgoy outside Mogadishu, we contributed to the police training program, and there was a certain amount of public works assistance. The Russians had a larger presence there because of their role in training the military. I should say not only the Russians, but the Chinese. I don't think that there were North Koreans there, but there was a large Chinese contingent handling grass roots projects. They built an assembly hall, a convention hall where all national rallies took place. Of course, in 1967-68 China was still totally off limits to the United States. We were not supposed to have anything to do with the Chinese there. This was still when we were fighting a rear guard action to keep Communist China out of the United Nations, when they were seen as the "Yellow Peril." I should say that this was before the Chinese Communists abandoned any real effort to proselytize or fight the Cold War. They were out there competing, both against us and against the Soviets. There was a funny little vignette here. Every two years there was a major trade fair in Mogadishu. All of the countries with which Somalia had diplomatic relations had pavilions there, displayed their wares, and had cultural displays and so forth. As it turned out, the American Pavilion was right in the center of the fairgrounds, directly facing, nose to nose, the Chinese Pavilion. They were about 20 yards apart. American Embassy officers were assigned, on a rotation basis, to work in the American Pavilion as resource people, as guides through the exposition, and so forth. I had the duty one evening--it was very quiet and there were very few people in the pavilion. I was standing at the entrance to the pavilion, looking across this open area or parade ground at the Chinese Pavilion. You could look through the entrance and see a statue of Mao Zedong, about eight feet high, brilliantly lit, with a crimson background behind it. It was very alluring to me. I was really fascinated and drawn to see what was going on in there. When my relief arrived at the American Pavilion, I very casually strolled across this open ground and went into the Chinese Pavilion. I walked around, looking at the various exhibits. It was like tasting forbidden fruit--a 16 year old kid going into a burlesque house. [Laughter] That was the feeling I had, a very exotic, tantalizing taste of the unknown. I walked around, viewing the various exhibits. As I neared the entrance, there was a table piled high with copies of Mao's "Little Red Book," the sayings of Chairman Mao. Even at the time these were kind of banal cliches with which Mao exhorted his people. But in 1967 Mao was at the zenith of his power and had the entire 600 million Chinese in his thrall, memorizing his thoughts. Actually, it was called, "The Thoughts of Chairman Mao." The sayings were rather pretentious. Anyhow, I thought what a gas it would be to pick up one of these books and have it around my office. I reached out to take a copy of the book. I felt this hand come down and stop me. I turned around, and there was a Chinese guy. He looked at me and said, "Where are you from?" I guess that they had orders just like us, to stay away from the Americans. I looked up and said, "Oh, I'm from Egypt." He said, "Oh, all right. I thought that you were an American." I said, "No, no, my name is Mustafa. I'm from the Egyptian Embassy." This was the first name I came up with. So we got into a conversation. I was, sweating bullets. You sweat there even when you're not nervous. I managed to persuade the guy, although in retrospect I don't know how that was possible. Mogadishu was a small town and people knew each other. But I think that this guy was not from the Chinese Embassy. He was from Beijing, or Peking, as it was known then. Anyhow, the amusing part of the story is that, as I worked my way out of that and left the Chinese Pavilion, a young Somali came up to me and started speaking to me in Arabic. Well, I don't know Arabic but I recognized the language. It was clear that he had overheard me, thought I was Egyptian, and wanted to practice his Arabic on me. I must say, I was much more quick-witted in those days than I am now. I very quickly said to him, in Somali, "Oh, please, since I'm in your country, I would rather speak Somali. I am learning your language. I can speak my language any time." I'd been studying Somali. But he persisted in wanting to speak Arabic. I said, "No, no, we must speak Somali." I managed to extricate myself after I had this brief, painful conversation in Somali. During the rest of the time I was in Mogadishu, I kept running into this guy on the street. He would call out to me, "Mustafa, Mustafa." I was deathly afraid that he would see me one day walking with the DCM or someone from the Embassy and have to explain. But my luck held, and it never happened. As the attentive listener will begin to perceive, I was a rather brash young Foreign Service Officer. Q: But this, of course, is some of the fun of the Foreign Service. You're allowed to be brash in a lot of places. KULICK: We had a very traditional Ambassador and DCM, and I don't think that they would have appreciated these antics if they had known about them at all. Q: Could you talk a little about your first Ambassador and DCM and how you got along with them. This was your first Embassy. How was it run? The Ambassador was Raymond Thurston. KULICK: The Ambassador was Raymond Thurston. I'm not sure how old he was at that time. He was completely white-haired, though, and very distinguished looking. He loved to have people tell him that he looked like Spencer Tracy, which, in fact, he did, to some extent. He was a fairly superficial person, I think. Well, I won't get into personalities too much. I lived right next door to the DCM. He was a fairly dour, relatively humorless person. He's still living around Washington, so I won't give you his name. Ambassador Thurston has since died. I think that they saw me as kind of brash and in need of some seasoning, fairly quickly, which is why they gave me these lousy jobs to do. As I mentioned, my first assignment was in AID for three months. The job involved basically collating statistics of one sort or other. Then I came over to work in the Economic Section of the Embassy for another three months, doing WTDRs (World Trade Directory Reports), which are sort of real "scut work" in an Embassy. People [in the U. S.] would be interested in importing from some company or exporting to it and would inquire of the State Department about the company. We would go out and do a report on the bona fides of the company. But in retrospect all of this looks much more interesting and useful than it appeared at the time. I wanted to be a political officer, I wanted to start doing political work right away. I was so young and I looked even younger, so people often took me for a Peace Corps Volunteer. In fact, I felt much more at home with the Peace Corps Volunteers than I did with other Embassy officers. But the Peace Corps Volunteers were instructed not to hang around with Embassy people for the opposite reasons. They didn't want any confusion among Somalis and wanted to make sure that the Somalis understood that the Peace Corps didn't work for the Embassy and therefore the Peace Corps Volunteers were not Embassy "agents." They were agents of the U. S. Government but they weren't there to gather intelligence. Then I did a six-month stint as consular officer, which, as it turned out, was probably the most interesting work I did while I was there. This was because, at a small post, one consular officer did everything--visa work, citizenship, and passports. In addition to that I had the rather grandiloquent title of "Officer in Charge of British Interests," because the U.S. was the "protecting power" for the U. K. [United Kingdom] in Somalia at that time. This arrangement was made about in 1964, after Somalia broke diplomatic relations with the U.K. The British, for reasons which no one has ever explained to me, had held a referendum in the northeastern province or Northern Frontier District of Kenya, as a part of preparing that country for independence. About 80 or 85% of the population of this area was composed of ethnic Somalis. The referendum was held there to see whether [the people wanted to be part of Kenya]. Somalia already claimed all of the Somali speaking areas adjacent to it. To no one's surprise the people voted overwhelmingly in favor of separating from Kenya and joining Somalia. Whereupon the British said, in effect, "Thank you very much. Kenya will get its independence in December, 1964, and the area in question will be part of Kenya." Not surprisingly, the Somalis took great exception to this. Some day I've got to find out why the British did this, because obviously they had no intention of honoring the wishes of the [Somali-speaking] residents [of the Northern Frontier District]. Anyhow, at that point the Somalis broke diplomatic relations with the British, and the U.S. became the protecting power. This meant that we took over protection of the welfare of British subjects and British Protected Persons, as well as the properties of the British Mission there. So, this meant for me that I got the British Ambassador's Land Rover, complete with his driver, who picked me up at home every morning. I was probably the only junior officer in all of Africa who had his own car and driver. I also "liberated" the piano from the British Ambassador's residence, which was going to rack and ruin there in the tropical heat. I had it moved for safekeeping to my living room. There was a British War Graves Cemetery and a British Council Library filled with termite bait. We finally liquidated the library because it was being consumed by termites. Substantively, this additional assignment meant that I handled all of Britain's consular interests throughout Somalia. I guess the Embassy also handled British political interests, but this was done at a higher, political level. I had all sorts of interesting cases: shipwrecked sailors from the Maldive Islands who washed up on the beach in Somalia and had to be repatriated to the Maldives. Temporarily, we set up a tent camp for them. This was particularly memorable. In fact, I've just written it up for THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL. It will be in the next issue coming out next week. I'm not sure how much this... Q: I think that this is very important to give us an idea of what we were doing [in Somalia at that time]. KULICK: One Friday, I think, which was our day off--the Muslim Sabbath--I was down at our beach club, which is where we all went when we had any free time. There was, in fact, a great deal of free time because the Embassy only worked from 7:00 AM to 2:00 PM--we had the rest of the day off. I got a call from the Embassy Duty Officer saying that they had had a call from the Police or someone who reported that a British ship had been caught, violating Somali territorial waters, and had been brought into the port of Mogadishu under guard. The captain of the ship was demanding to see his consul--and that was me. So I went down to the port to the port captain's office. There, sitting before me, was the commander of the Somali Army, Gen Mohammed Siad Barre, the commander of the Somali Navy, and the captain of the port. They were grilling this hapless, British captain, who had been on his way to Aden with a cargo of potatoes for the then British garrison there. Aden was the site of a considerable guerrilla war, with the British garrison trying to control the unrest. The British left Aden a couple of years later, but it was a major problem at the time. The ship's cargo of potatoes was a major part of British Army rations at the time, I gather. The Somalis were convinced that this British ship was the advance guard of the long-anticipated British invasion of Somalia. Describing the Somalis as ethnocentric and xenophobic greatly understates their obsession with their own importance. They were absolutely convinced that there were British submarines offshore, ready to send waves of Marines onto the beaches. Why they thought that a potato-carrying ship would be the vanguard of such a force, I don't know. The British ship captain just wanted to get out of Somalia and continue on his way to Aden. Over a two-day period they grilled the captain. I don't mean that they tortured him, but they kept trying to get information out of him. I was valiantly trying to play the role of a diplomat or consul and to convince them that there was nothing sinister in all of that. He had just happened to get too close to shore. He said that, in fact, he had not been in their territorial waters. The upshot of this affair was that, over a two-day period the cargo on the ship deteriorated very rapidly in the baking, tropical sun. When they finally decided to let the ship go, the captain said that the cargo had deteriorated too far and would never make it to Aden in edible condition, so they dumped all of the potatoes on the quay in the port of Mogadishu. It turned out, quite by coincidence, that there had been a shortage of potatoes on the local market for the preceding two months. They didn't grow potatoes in Somalia, and the whole supply depended on a ship that came from Italy every two months. The total supply was not very large, because it was mostly expatriates who ate potatoes, not Somalis. On the local expatriate cocktail circuit, that was the subject of minor grumbling. We had pasta but no potatoes. When the word got out that there was a load of potatoes which had just been dumped in the port, every houseboy and market woman in town descended on the port and scooped up the potatoes. For the next week all of us expatriates gorged ourselves on potatoes, because they had to be eaten fairly quickly. The potatoes were just about rotten. I call that "The Great Mogadishu Potato Caper." This affair is illustrative of the level of pettiness that diplomatic or consular work in out of the way, provincial places like that can entail. We didn't have any really major issues with the Somalis. Q: Oh, there was the Mau-Mau issue and the Ogaden question. KULICK: No, the situation was pretty quiet. [Emperor] Haile Selassie was still well entrenched on his throne [in Ethiopia]. There were little border skirmishes from time to time, and, of course, the Somalis had asserted their claim, not only to the Ogaden area but to the northern frontier area of Kenya, which I referred to before, and to Djibouti as well, which was then known as French Somaliland. In fact, the five points on the star at the center of the Somali flag were said to represent the five segments of the Somali homeland, which had been divided up. There were the three that I just mentioned [The Ogaden, the northern frontier area of Kenya, and Djibouti], plus Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland, which were merged together in 1960 when Somalia became an independent country. Written right into their constitution was the goal of reuniting into one country the five territories represented on the star. But they were in no position to press their claims because they were much weaker, militarily, than Ethiopia--or even Kenya. At that point the Somali Army only had about 8,000 troops. It was quite small--a far cry from the 100,000 man Army they ended up with after having successfully manipulated the Americans and the Russians into arming them to the teeth. But when I was there, the Somalis were no real threat. We had no particularly controversial matters at issue between us. Our Embassy in Mogadishu, I suspect, was typical of the way most American Embassies functioned in Africa at that time. We were concentrating on helping them with economic development and keeping an eye on the Russians and the Chinese, trying to make sure that they didn't get the upper hand. The Somalis had no ideological affinity with the Russians or the Chinese at all. They were much too anarchic to be attracted to a centralized, political philosophy. They seemed to have a kind of indigenous, democratic tradition. We felt fairly good about the situation, even though the Russians were supplying the Army. In Cold War terms we were certainly at least even with the Soviets. Where it really counted, in the hearts and minds of the people, we were in a stronger position. I guess that the only real political strain--and it was significant--occurred over the 1967 Middle East War, which took place about six months after I arrived there. Q: The 1967 War was between... KULICK: The June, 1967, War... Q: Israel, Syria, and Egypt. KULICK: Even if people look at this tape 50 years from now, I'm sure that they will recognize that event. That was the major conflict which occurred when Israel took on three Arab countries [Egypt, Syria, and Jordan], thoroughly defeated them all, and conquered the Sinai area, the West Bank [of the Jordan], the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. The Somalis were not, at that point, members of the Arab League. They formally joined the League several years later. However, it was a 100% Muslim country, right on the periphery of the Middle East. It had very strong pro-Arab and anti-Israeli feelings. When the [1967] War broke out, there were several demonstrations--I think that they were fairly spontaneous--against the American Embassy, because we were seen as Israel's great protector, although we had not intervened [in the fighting] at all. It was all over before we ever had a chance or there was any need to intervene. But for a period of six or seven days we were fairly worried. If the war had gone on for much longer, this anti-Israel sentiment could well have jeopardized the American Embassy. We were "locked down" during that time. We were told to stay home and not move around town. I remember one demonstration--again, typical of the kind of "Mickey Mouse" quality of the place. In Syria they burned down and ransacked the Consulate. In Somalia the demonstrators were throwing rubber "Zoris" at the American Embassy. Q: A "Zori" is a...? KULICK: Thonged rubber sandals that everybody wore. That suggests the virulence with which they demonstrated. In short, it wasn't very serious. They were just going through the motions, I think. But in fact the government felt the need to make some kind of demonstration of loyalty to the Arab cause. In the Friday edition [equivalent of a Sunday edition in the U. S.] of the local, weekly English language paper there was a headline across the top of the [front] page that said, "Somalia to Send Troods to War." The headline said "Troods" instead of "Troops." This was in large type, I might add--I'm holding my fingers about 2 ½ inches apart. That, to me, captured the essence of the place. They huffed and puffed and came out with these ludicrous kinds of pronouncements. Fortunately, the war was over before they could get their "troods" launched. They were going to send some sort of token force, but the Israelis spared them the need to do that. I recall that one person in the expatriate, American community was actually an unmarried Jewish man from Aden who had lived in Somalia for many years. He ran the Mobil Oil operation there. I'd gotten to know him. I guess that I hadn't publicized the fact that I'd lived in Israel for a year and spoke Hebrew and so forth. I remember Max getting in touch with me and asking me whether, if the balloon went up, we would take care of him. He was widely assumed to be an Israeli spy--and probably was. We were listening to short wave radio broadcasts from Israel, following the course of the war, on a day by day basis. At the beginning, of course... Q: It looked bad. KULICK: It looked very bad. Here were the huge Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian Armies poised on the borders of Israel, ready to attack. But within 48 hours, as we listened to foreign broadcasts, things changed. The Somali Radio, of course, was picking up broadcasts out of Cairo, which were still talking about glorious, Egyptian victories. Q: They were also talking about American airplanes [allegedly] attacking [Egyptian aircraft], which was a complete fabrication. KULICK: It was a very tense period for three or four days. I remember wondering if we were going to have to be evacuated, because, of course, all of our Missions in the Arab world were shut down. Suddenly, there was a great glut of State Department Arabists on the [jobs] market [in the Foreign Service]. For years thereafter there were Arabists walking the halls [of the State Department]. I don't remember the figure, but we had 10 or 12 Embassies closed down. In fact, one of the evacuees came to Mogadishu. I don't remember what they gave him to do. There wasn't that much work to do, but [the Department] had to find places for these people. That [the 1967 War] put a strain on our relations with the Somalis for a while. But, again, they were pretty cynical about the Arabs. They knew that the Arabs really didn't give a damn about them. Their emotional commitment to the Arab cause was fairly superficial, I think. Nevertheless, the spectacle of Israel conquering all of this Arab territory and humiliating these Arab states did arouse a certain amount of passion among the [Somali] political class. However, this passed fairly quickly. I don't remember there being any long term consequences of the war. On the whole, though, it [my assignment to Somalia] was a very tranquil period. It was a good place "to learn the ropes," because I was able to take it all in in a fairly leisurely kind of way. By December, [1974], it was pretty clear that we weren't dealing with a bunch of reformers but had some really hard core, revolutionaries on our hands. At the same time the Russians were moving more deeply into Somalia, with the base that they had established at Berbera, in the northern part of Somalia along the Red Sea coast. They put a major missile-handling facility there. They built a port to service their Indian Ocean Fleet. They would bring naval missiles [into Berbera] for refurbishing, refitting, and storage. The U. S. was getting really agitated about this, particularly on the Hill [Congress]. A few, really conservative Congressmen were calling for us to cut off relations with Ethiopia and with Somalia. Satellite technology was just coming into its own. We were able to get very detailed, satellite photos of these Russian installations in Berbera. The Somalis were denying that any of this was going on, stating that this was just an agricultural equipment depot in the middle of the desert. They invited the U. S. to send a Congressional delegation to Somalia to inspect these facilities. It reminded me a little bit of the British holding a referendum in Kenya--did they really think that we were going to come over there and they were going to pull the wool over our eyes? We sent a delegation, and the delegation found exactly what it expected to find. The Somalis were furious. They said, "We invited you over here, we gave you the full run of everything, and then you came back with this outrageous report." Our delegation said that it was only reporting what it saw. Relations with Somalia were very rough. There was a lot of dialogue back and forth with the Embassy about what they were really up to--were they really Russian stooges, were they really communists, or were the Somalis cynically taking advantage of the Cold War to build up their arsenal and milk as much aid as they could out of both sides? In many ways I think it was a classic example of the differing perspectives between the post in the field and the policy makers back in Washington. The people in the Embassy in Mogadishu were much more relaxed about all of this. They said that the Somalis weren't communists. They were just manipulating us and the Russians. They said that we should keep in touch with them but not let them get us all bent out of shape. The military [in Washington] were getting really agitated about the Soviet facilities [in Somalia]. Q: This was the period when Secretary of State Kissinger was at the height of his influence. Kissinger saw everything in terms of the Cold War and an international, bipolar system. KULICK: Our dilemma was that we had put most of our eggs into the Ethiopian basket for many, many years. Ethiopia was clearly coming unglued, and we didn't really know what to do because, even though they had become very radical, they kept coming to us and continuing to ask us for more military assistance, citing the Russian buildup in Somalia. Kagnew Station was still in operation there [in Ethiopia], and the [U. S.] military was still saying that it was important. The Ethiopians were threatening to close it down unless we helped them, and the Somalis were beginning to build up to what looked like some intention of launching an offensive [against Ethiopia], taking advantage of the chaos in Ethiopia. Even though the military regime had taken over in Addis Ababa, the rebellion in Eritrea was getting really critical. That was the point at which the [Ethiopian] request for assistance to fight off the Eritrean rebels in Asmara was made. I think that by the end of 1975 it became clear that we were just not going to be able to sustain it [an enhanced military assistance program] with the Ethiopians. They would continue to try to get whatever they could out of us. But they, unlike the Somalis, really were committed revolutionaries. Sooner or later, they were going to boot us out of there [Kagnew Station]. I don't know. Things just sort of spun out of control. We didn't feel that we had an option in Somalia because the Russians were firmly ensconced there, while our base in Ethiopia was eroding. At that point the Russians began to make inroads into Ethiopia, and it looked as though they were going to take over the whole Horn of Africa. However, they hadn't really reckoned on the aggressiveness of their Somali clients. The Russians thought that they could hold this all together. They thought, in fact, that they could impose a "Pax Sovietica" on the Horn of Africa, but the Somalis weren't having any of that. They thought that the Ethiopians were really in a very weakened condition. The Somalis took advantage of their Soviet support and equipment to attack Ethiopia. At this point the Soviets, who were beginning to make real inroads into Ethiopia, told the Somalis that they couldn't do that. The Somalis replied, in effect, "Go to hell," kicked the Soviets out of Somalia, and invited the Americans in. [Laughter] So in the space of three months there was an exchange of clients, and we took the leftovers in Somalia, while the Russians moved into Ethiopia. That was after I left the desk, though. We could end this segment by my recounting how, after a year on the job I was approached by the then Special Assistant to the Director of INR...
KULICK: Well, it certainly seemed so at the time. I must say, in very idiosyncratic terms. It was not a place that anybody held up as a paragon of the way Africa should be, simply because it was different. They spoke Italian there. Where else in Africa except for Eritrea did people speak Italian? So it didn't fit into the conventional mode that we have of being a part of British or French or Portuguese colonial history. The Somalis were still a little bit ambivalent about whether they were Africans. To an American they looked like Africans, like other Africans. But those who know the region can very readily recognize a Somali Arab, even from a highland Ethiopian, much less by comparison with so-called "Negro" Africans from the southern and western part of the continent. They were all Muslims--not terribly devout, on the whole. But they had kind of a schizophrenic picture of themselves, betwixt and between the Arab world and Africa. I found them thoroughly engaging people.
They were very irreverent and very democratic, in the sense that they did not have much regard for hierarchical rank or for pretensions among politicians. There were no real social classes. That was characteristic of a nomadic society. Everyone in Somalia has a nickname because two-thirds of the people in the country are named either Mohammed or Ali or Achmad. So they have to have some other way of distinguishing among themselves. They tended to single out physical characteristics or personality characteristics, usually very negative ones. You might have a politician whose name was "Zuppo," for example, which I think means "lame" in Italian, because he dragged one leg. If a man had a broad nose, they'd call him "Flat Nose" or "Cross Eyes" or "Big Mouth." In fact, Siad Barre, who, at the time I was there, was the Army commander. In 1969 he led a coup d'etat and, for the next 22 years, was the military dictator of Somalia. He was universally known among Somalis as "Aphuain", which means "Big Mouth."
That's what they called him. I don't know whether it referred to his loquacity or just that he happened to have a large, oral aperture. To an American this was a kind of appealing, national personality characteristic. I used to contrast this with the situation in Ethiopia, which was very different. The Ethiopians are very formal, very proper, very deferential, and very polite and soft-spoken--extremely conscious of social class. They are very--what's the word? "Devious" sounds too sinister but they are very convoluted in their speech. You had to read between the lines to understand what they were saying. By contrast, the Somalis were very straightforward. They told you exactly what they thought. I mentioned Ethiopia because that was my next assignment. I was the junior officer in the Embassy [in Mogadishu] and I did a little bit of everything. As the youngest officer they tried to get me to follow student affairs, although there was no university, and it was a little hard to do that. However, I used the fact that I had worked for the National Students Association, which at that time was still known among African students as a very liberal force in the United States, as a way of kind of ingratiating myself with young people. This was on the somewhat naive assumption that they knew or cared anything about American politics or that they made those kinds of distinctions. I experienced a period of near panic in February, 1967, when I was listening to the Voice of America one morning, over my cornflakes. I heard the announcer state that the National Students Association had revealed that for the previous 20 or 25 years it had been subsidized by the Central Intelligence Agency. Of course, this caused a great brouhaha back in the U.S. for days, because it turned out to be the kind of loose thread that, when pulled, unraveled the whole skein of other ventures by the Agency. It turned out that they were subsidizing labor unions and youth and cultural organizations. They had this whole, elaborate series of international operations that they were secretly funding. It was not all as malign as it was made out to be. In a lot of areas it was simply providing funding that was not available from private sources for organizations which they felt would assist us in our world-wide cultural and political confrontation with the Soviets. It created a great scandal in the U.S. Anyhow, it turned out that, just as I had exaggerated the effect of my having played this up before, the Somalis seemed equally indifferent to the fact, later on, that it had all turned out to be an elaborate CIA operation. But that was a moment of real fright for me during the first three months of my diplomatic career. Q: What was the feeling at that time about the "Soviet threat," because this was a theme that ran through an awful lot of our African policy. In Somalia from 1966-68, when you were there, how did people view the Soviets? KULICK: The Somalis were playing the East-West game very actively. This was, perhaps, epitomized by the fact that the Somali Army was receiving training from the Soviets, while the National Police force was under the tutelage of what was then West Germany [the Federal Republic of Germany]. We used to joke about what would happen when the confrontation came. Would "our" police be able to whip "their" army? The Somalis didn't take any of this very seriously, on an ideological level. They simply saw this situation as a way of maximizing their bargaining position to obtain aid. We had quite a sizeable AID mission then. I think that there were probably 30 or 35 Americans. I don't remember what the dollar amount of the aid was, but it was not insignificant. We had a large agricultural training program in a town called Afgoy outside Mogadishu, we contributed to the police training program, and there was a certain amount of public works assistance. The Russians had a larger presence there because of their role in training the military. I should say not only the Russians, but the Chinese. I don't think that there were North Koreans there, but there was a large Chinese contingent handling grass roots projects. They built an assembly hall, a convention hall where all national rallies took place. Of course, in 1967-68 China was still totally off limits to the United States. We were not supposed to have anything to do with the Chinese there. This was still when we were fighting a rear guard action to keep Communist China out of the United Nations, when they were seen as the "Yellow Peril." I should say that this was before the Chinese Communists abandoned any real effort to proselytize or fight the Cold War. They were out there competing, both against us and against the Soviets. There was a funny little vignette here. Every two years there was a major trade fair in Mogadishu. All of the countries with which Somalia had diplomatic relations had pavilions there, displayed their wares, and had cultural displays and so forth. As it turned out, the American Pavilion was right in the center of the fairgrounds, directly facing, nose to nose, the Chinese Pavilion. They were about 20 yards apart. American Embassy officers were assigned, on a rotation basis, to work in the American Pavilion as resource people, as guides through the exposition, and so forth. I had the duty one evening--it was very quiet and there were very few people in the pavilion. I was standing at the entrance to the pavilion, looking across this open area or parade ground at the Chinese Pavilion. You could look through the entrance and see a statue of Mao Zedong, about eight feet high, brilliantly lit, with a crimson background behind it. It was very alluring to me. I was really fascinated and drawn to see what was going on in there. When my relief arrived at the American Pavilion, I very casually strolled across this open ground and went into the Chinese Pavilion. I walked around, looking at the various exhibits. It was like tasting forbidden fruit--a 16 year old kid going into a burlesque house. [Laughter] That was the feeling I had, a very exotic, tantalizing taste of the unknown. I walked around, viewing the various exhibits. As I neared the entrance, there was a table piled high with copies of Mao's "Little Red Book," the sayings of Chairman Mao. Even at the time these were kind of banal cliches with which Mao exhorted his people. But in 1967 Mao was at the zenith of his power and had the entire 600 million Chinese in his thrall, memorizing his thoughts. Actually, it was called, "The Thoughts of Chairman Mao." The sayings were rather pretentious. Anyhow, I thought what a gas it would be to pick up one of these books and have it around my office. I reached out to take a copy of the book. I felt this hand come down and stop me. I turned around, and there was a Chinese guy. He looked at me and said, "Where are you from?" I guess that they had orders just like us, to stay away from the Americans. I looked up and said, "Oh, I'm from Egypt." He said, "Oh, all right. I thought that you were an American." I said, "No, no, my name is Mustafa. I'm from the Egyptian Embassy." This was the first name I came up with. So we got into a conversation. I was, sweating bullets. You sweat there even when you're not nervous. I managed to persuade the guy, although in retrospect I don't know how that was possible. Mogadishu was a small town and people knew each other. But I think that this guy was not from the Chinese Embassy. He was from Beijing, or Peking, as it was known then. Anyhow, the amusing part of the story is that, as I worked my way out of that and left the Chinese Pavilion, a young Somali came up to me and started speaking to me in Arabic. Well, I don't know Arabic but I recognized the language. It was clear that he had overheard me, thought I was Egyptian, and wanted to practice his Arabic on me. I must say, I was much more quick-witted in those days than I am now. I very quickly said to him, in Somali, "Oh, please, since I'm in your country, I would rather speak Somali. I am learning your language. I can speak my language any time." I'd been studying Somali. But he persisted in wanting to speak Arabic. I said, "No, no, we must speak Somali." I managed to extricate myself after I had this brief, painful conversation in Somali. During the rest of the time I was in Mogadishu, I kept running into this guy on the street. He would call out to me, "Mustafa, Mustafa." I was deathly afraid that he would see me one day walking with the DCM or someone from the Embassy and have to explain. But my luck held, and it never happened. As the attentive listener will begin to perceive, I was a rather brash young Foreign Service Officer. Q: But this, of course, is some of the fun of the Foreign Service. You're allowed to be brash in a lot of places. KULICK: We had a very traditional Ambassador and DCM, and I don't think that they would have appreciated these antics if they had known about them at all. Q: Could you talk a little about your first Ambassador and DCM and how you got along with them. This was your first Embassy. How was it run? The Ambassador was Raymond Thurston. KULICK: The Ambassador was Raymond Thurston. I'm not sure how old he was at that time. He was completely white-haired, though, and very distinguished looking. He loved to have people tell him that he looked like Spencer Tracy, which, in fact, he did, to some extent. He was a fairly superficial person, I think. Well, I won't get into personalities too much. I lived right next door to the DCM. He was a fairly dour, relatively humorless person. He's still living around Washington, so I won't give you his name. Ambassador Thurston has since died. I think that they saw me as kind of brash and in need of some seasoning, fairly quickly, which is why they gave me these lousy jobs to do. As I mentioned, my first assignment was in AID for three months. The job involved basically collating statistics of one sort or other. Then I came over to work in the Economic Section of the Embassy for another three months, doing WTDRs (World Trade Directory Reports), which are sort of real "scut work" in an Embassy. People [in the U. S.] would be interested in importing from some company or exporting to it and would inquire of the State Department about the company. We would go out and do a report on the bona fides of the company. But in retrospect all of this looks much more interesting and useful than it appeared at the time. I wanted to be a political officer, I wanted to start doing political work right away. I was so young and I looked even younger, so people often took me for a Peace Corps Volunteer. In fact, I felt much more at home with the Peace Corps Volunteers than I did with other Embassy officers. But the Peace Corps Volunteers were instructed not to hang around with Embassy people for the opposite reasons. They didn't want any confusion among Somalis and wanted to make sure that the Somalis understood that the Peace Corps didn't work for the Embassy and therefore the Peace Corps Volunteers were not Embassy "agents." They were agents of the U. S. Government but they weren't there to gather intelligence. Then I did a six-month stint as consular officer, which, as it turned out, was probably the most interesting work I did while I was there. This was because, at a small post, one consular officer did everything--visa work, citizenship, and passports. In addition to that I had the rather grandiloquent title of "Officer in Charge of British Interests," because the U.S. was the "protecting power" for the U. K. [United Kingdom] in Somalia at that time. This arrangement was made about in 1964, after Somalia broke diplomatic relations with the U.K. The British, for reasons which no one has ever explained to me, had held a referendum in the northeastern province or Northern Frontier District of Kenya, as a part of preparing that country for independence. About 80 or 85% of the population of this area was composed of ethnic Somalis. The referendum was held there to see whether [the people wanted to be part of Kenya]. Somalia already claimed all of the Somali speaking areas adjacent to it. To no one's surprise the people voted overwhelmingly in favor of separating from Kenya and joining Somalia. Whereupon the British said, in effect, "Thank you very much. Kenya will get its independence in December, 1964, and the area in question will be part of Kenya." Not surprisingly, the Somalis took great exception to this. Some day I've got to find out why the British did this, because obviously they had no intention of honoring the wishes of the [Somali-speaking] residents [of the Northern Frontier District]. Anyhow, at that point the Somalis broke diplomatic relations with the British, and the U.S. became the protecting power. This meant that we took over protection of the welfare of British subjects and British Protected Persons, as well as the properties of the British Mission there. So, this meant for me that I got the British Ambassador's Land Rover, complete with his driver, who picked me up at home every morning. I was probably the only junior officer in all of Africa who had his own car and driver. I also "liberated" the piano from the British Ambassador's residence, which was going to rack and ruin there in the tropical heat. I had it moved for safekeeping to my living room. There was a British War Graves Cemetery and a British Council Library filled with termite bait. We finally liquidated the library because it was being consumed by termites. Substantively, this additional assignment meant that I handled all of Britain's consular interests throughout Somalia. I guess the Embassy also handled British political interests, but this was done at a higher, political level. I had all sorts of interesting cases: shipwrecked sailors from the Maldive Islands who washed up on the beach in Somalia and had to be repatriated to the Maldives. Temporarily, we set up a tent camp for them. This was particularly memorable. In fact, I've just written it up for THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL. It will be in the next issue coming out next week. I'm not sure how much this... Q: I think that this is very important to give us an idea of what we were doing [in Somalia at that time]. KULICK: One Friday, I think, which was our day off--the Muslim Sabbath--I was down at our beach club, which is where we all went when we had any free time. There was, in fact, a great deal of free time because the Embassy only worked from 7:00 AM to 2:00 PM--we had the rest of the day off. I got a call from the Embassy Duty Officer saying that they had had a call from the Police or someone who reported that a British ship had been caught, violating Somali territorial waters, and had been brought into the port of Mogadishu under guard. The captain of the ship was demanding to see his consul--and that was me. So I went down to the port to the port captain's office. There, sitting before me, was the commander of the Somali Army, Gen Mohammed Siad Barre, the commander of the Somali Navy, and the captain of the port. They were grilling this hapless, British captain, who had been on his way to Aden with a cargo of potatoes for the then British garrison there. Aden was the site of a considerable guerrilla war, with the British garrison trying to control the unrest. The British left Aden a couple of years later, but it was a major problem at the time. The ship's cargo of potatoes was a major part of British Army rations at the time, I gather. The Somalis were convinced that this British ship was the advance guard of the long-anticipated British invasion of Somalia. Describing the Somalis as ethnocentric and xenophobic greatly understates their obsession with their own importance. They were absolutely convinced that there were British submarines offshore, ready to send waves of Marines onto the beaches. Why they thought that a potato-carrying ship would be the vanguard of such a force, I don't know. The British ship captain just wanted to get out of Somalia and continue on his way to Aden. Over a two-day period they grilled the captain. I don't mean that they tortured him, but they kept trying to get information out of him. I was valiantly trying to play the role of a diplomat or consul and to convince them that there was nothing sinister in all of that. He had just happened to get too close to shore. He said that, in fact, he had not been in their territorial waters. The upshot of this affair was that, over a two-day period the cargo on the ship deteriorated very rapidly in the baking, tropical sun. When they finally decided to let the ship go, the captain said that the cargo had deteriorated too far and would never make it to Aden in edible condition, so they dumped all of the potatoes on the quay in the port of Mogadishu. It turned out, quite by coincidence, that there had been a shortage of potatoes on the local market for the preceding two months. They didn't grow potatoes in Somalia, and the whole supply depended on a ship that came from Italy every two months. The total supply was not very large, because it was mostly expatriates who ate potatoes, not Somalis. On the local expatriate cocktail circuit, that was the subject of minor grumbling. We had pasta but no potatoes. When the word got out that there was a load of potatoes which had just been dumped in the port, every houseboy and market woman in town descended on the port and scooped up the potatoes. For the next week all of us expatriates gorged ourselves on potatoes, because they had to be eaten fairly quickly. The potatoes were just about rotten. I call that "The Great Mogadishu Potato Caper." This affair is illustrative of the level of pettiness that diplomatic or consular work in out of the way, provincial places like that can entail. We didn't have any really major issues with the Somalis. Q: Oh, there was the Mau-Mau issue and the Ogaden question. KULICK: No, the situation was pretty quiet. [Emperor] Haile Selassie was still well entrenched on his throne [in Ethiopia]. There were little border skirmishes from time to time, and, of course, the Somalis had asserted their claim, not only to the Ogaden area but to the northern frontier area of Kenya, which I referred to before, and to Djibouti as well, which was then known as French Somaliland. In fact, the five points on the star at the center of the Somali flag were said to represent the five segments of the Somali homeland, which had been divided up. There were the three that I just mentioned [The Ogaden, the northern frontier area of Kenya, and Djibouti], plus Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland, which were merged together in 1960 when Somalia became an independent country. Written right into their constitution was the goal of reuniting into one country the five territories represented on the star. But they were in no position to press their claims because they were much weaker, militarily, than Ethiopia--or even Kenya. At that point the Somali Army only had about 8,000 troops. It was quite small--a far cry from the 100,000 man Army they ended up with after having successfully manipulated the Americans and the Russians into arming them to the teeth. But when I was there, the Somalis were no real threat. We had no particularly controversial matters at issue between us. Our Embassy in Mogadishu, I suspect, was typical of the way most American Embassies functioned in Africa at that time. We were concentrating on helping them with economic development and keeping an eye on the Russians and the Chinese, trying to make sure that they didn't get the upper hand. The Somalis had no ideological affinity with the Russians or the Chinese at all. They were much too anarchic to be attracted to a centralized, political philosophy. They seemed to have a kind of indigenous, democratic tradition. We felt fairly good about the situation, even though the Russians were supplying the Army. In Cold War terms we were certainly at least even with the Soviets. Where it really counted, in the hearts and minds of the people, we were in a stronger position. I guess that the only real political strain--and it was significant--occurred over the 1967 Middle East War, which took place about six months after I arrived there. Q: The 1967 War was between... KULICK: The June, 1967, War... Q: Israel, Syria, and Egypt. KULICK: Even if people look at this tape 50 years from now, I'm sure that they will recognize that event. That was the major conflict which occurred when Israel took on three Arab countries [Egypt, Syria, and Jordan], thoroughly defeated them all, and conquered the Sinai area, the West Bank [of the Jordan], the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. The Somalis were not, at that point, members of the Arab League. They formally joined the League several years later. However, it was a 100% Muslim country, right on the periphery of the Middle East. It had very strong pro-Arab and anti-Israeli feelings. When the [1967] War broke out, there were several demonstrations--I think that they were fairly spontaneous--against the American Embassy, because we were seen as Israel's great protector, although we had not intervened [in the fighting] at all. It was all over before we ever had a chance or there was any need to intervene. But for a period of six or seven days we were fairly worried. If the war had gone on for much longer, this anti-Israel sentiment could well have jeopardized the American Embassy. We were "locked down" during that time. We were told to stay home and not move around town. I remember one demonstration--again, typical of the kind of "Mickey Mouse" quality of the place. In Syria they burned down and ransacked the Consulate. In Somalia the demonstrators were throwing rubber "Zoris" at the American Embassy. Q: A "Zori" is a...? KULICK: Thonged rubber sandals that everybody wore. That suggests the virulence with which they demonstrated. In short, it wasn't very serious. They were just going through the motions, I think. But in fact the government felt the need to make some kind of demonstration of loyalty to the Arab cause. In the Friday edition [equivalent of a Sunday edition in the U. S.] of the local, weekly English language paper there was a headline across the top of the [front] page that said, "Somalia to Send Troods to War." The headline said "Troods" instead of "Troops." This was in large type, I might add--I'm holding my fingers about 2 ½ inches apart. That, to me, captured the essence of the place. They huffed and puffed and came out with these ludicrous kinds of pronouncements. Fortunately, the war was over before they could get their "troods" launched. They were going to send some sort of token force, but the Israelis spared them the need to do that. I recall that one person in the expatriate, American community was actually an unmarried Jewish man from Aden who had lived in Somalia for many years. He ran the Mobil Oil operation there. I'd gotten to know him. I guess that I hadn't publicized the fact that I'd lived in Israel for a year and spoke Hebrew and so forth. I remember Max getting in touch with me and asking me whether, if the balloon went up, we would take care of him. He was widely assumed to be an Israeli spy--and probably was. We were listening to short wave radio broadcasts from Israel, following the course of the war, on a day by day basis. At the beginning, of course... Q: It looked bad. KULICK: It looked very bad. Here were the huge Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian Armies poised on the borders of Israel, ready to attack. But within 48 hours, as we listened to foreign broadcasts, things changed. The Somali Radio, of course, was picking up broadcasts out of Cairo, which were still talking about glorious, Egyptian victories. Q: They were also talking about American airplanes [allegedly] attacking [Egyptian aircraft], which was a complete fabrication. KULICK: It was a very tense period for three or four days. I remember wondering if we were going to have to be evacuated, because, of course, all of our Missions in the Arab world were shut down. Suddenly, there was a great glut of State Department Arabists on the [jobs] market [in the Foreign Service]. For years thereafter there were Arabists walking the halls [of the State Department]. I don't remember the figure, but we had 10 or 12 Embassies closed down. In fact, one of the evacuees came to Mogadishu. I don't remember what they gave him to do. There wasn't that much work to do, but [the Department] had to find places for these people. That [the 1967 War] put a strain on our relations with the Somalis for a while. But, again, they were pretty cynical about the Arabs. They knew that the Arabs really didn't give a damn about them. Their emotional commitment to the Arab cause was fairly superficial, I think. Nevertheless, the spectacle of Israel conquering all of this Arab territory and humiliating these Arab states did arouse a certain amount of passion among the [Somali] political class. However, this passed fairly quickly. I don't remember there being any long term consequences of the war. On the whole, though, it [my assignment to Somalia] was a very tranquil period. It was a good place "to learn the ropes," because I was able to take it all in in a fairly leisurely kind of way. By December, [1974], it was pretty clear that we weren't dealing with a bunch of reformers but had some really hard core, revolutionaries on our hands. At the same time the Russians were moving more deeply into Somalia, with the base that they had established at Berbera, in the northern part of Somalia along the Red Sea coast. They put a major missile-handling facility there. They built a port to service their Indian Ocean Fleet. They would bring naval missiles [into Berbera] for refurbishing, refitting, and storage. The U. S. was getting really agitated about this, particularly on the Hill [Congress]. A few, really conservative Congressmen were calling for us to cut off relations with Ethiopia and with Somalia. Satellite technology was just coming into its own. We were able to get very detailed, satellite photos of these Russian installations in Berbera. The Somalis were denying that any of this was going on, stating that this was just an agricultural equipment depot in the middle of the desert. They invited the U. S. to send a Congressional delegation to Somalia to inspect these facilities. It reminded me a little bit of the British holding a referendum in Kenya--did they really think that we were going to come over there and they were going to pull the wool over our eyes? We sent a delegation, and the delegation found exactly what it expected to find. The Somalis were furious. They said, "We invited you over here, we gave you the full run of everything, and then you came back with this outrageous report." Our delegation said that it was only reporting what it saw. Relations with Somalia were very rough. There was a lot of dialogue back and forth with the Embassy about what they were really up to--were they really Russian stooges, were they really communists, or were the Somalis cynically taking advantage of the Cold War to build up their arsenal and milk as much aid as they could out of both sides? In many ways I think it was a classic example of the differing perspectives between the post in the field and the policy makers back in Washington. The people in the Embassy in Mogadishu were much more relaxed about all of this. They said that the Somalis weren't communists. They were just manipulating us and the Russians. They said that we should keep in touch with them but not let them get us all bent out of shape. The military [in Washington] were getting really agitated about the Soviet facilities [in Somalia]. Q: This was the period when Secretary of State Kissinger was at the height of his influence. Kissinger saw everything in terms of the Cold War and an international, bipolar system. KULICK: Our dilemma was that we had put most of our eggs into the Ethiopian basket for many, many years. Ethiopia was clearly coming unglued, and we didn't really know what to do because, even though they had become very radical, they kept coming to us and continuing to ask us for more military assistance, citing the Russian buildup in Somalia. Kagnew Station was still in operation there [in Ethiopia], and the [U. S.] military was still saying that it was important. The Ethiopians were threatening to close it down unless we helped them, and the Somalis were beginning to build up to what looked like some intention of launching an offensive [against Ethiopia], taking advantage of the chaos in Ethiopia. Even though the military regime had taken over in Addis Ababa, the rebellion in Eritrea was getting really critical. That was the point at which the [Ethiopian] request for assistance to fight off the Eritrean rebels in Asmara was made. I think that by the end of 1975 it became clear that we were just not going to be able to sustain it [an enhanced military assistance program] with the Ethiopians. They would continue to try to get whatever they could out of us. But they, unlike the Somalis, really were committed revolutionaries. Sooner or later, they were going to boot us out of there [Kagnew Station]. I don't know. Things just sort of spun out of control. We didn't feel that we had an option in Somalia because the Russians were firmly ensconced there, while our base in Ethiopia was eroding. At that point the Russians began to make inroads into Ethiopia, and it looked as though they were going to take over the whole Horn of Africa. However, they hadn't really reckoned on the aggressiveness of their Somali clients. The Russians thought that they could hold this all together. They thought, in fact, that they could impose a "Pax Sovietica" on the Horn of Africa, but the Somalis weren't having any of that. They thought that the Ethiopians were really in a very weakened condition. The Somalis took advantage of their Soviet support and equipment to attack Ethiopia. At this point the Soviets, who were beginning to make real inroads into Ethiopia, told the Somalis that they couldn't do that. The Somalis replied, in effect, "Go to hell," kicked the Soviets out of Somalia, and invited the Americans in. [Laughter] So in the space of three months there was an exchange of clients, and we took the leftovers in Somalia, while the Russians moved into Ethiopia. That was after I left the desk, though. We could end this segment by my recounting how, after a year on the job I was approached by the then Special Assistant to the Director of INR...
