COMMENT
Thank you, Senator Helms
By Muhammad Cohen
When I was a 25-year-old smartass, Jesse Helms, who died last week, gave me a
lesson in how Washington and the world really work. I never did get to thank
him.
One late freshman year night in the dorms, a pal from across the hall lamented,
"Majoring in history doesn't qualify you for anything but taking the Foreign
Service test." It was the first time I ever heard of the Foreign Service.
Four years later, I was an underemployed history graduate bringing my pair of
No 2 pencils to New York's 26 Federal Plaza
on a Saturday morning in December to sit for the four-hour test. I passed that
phase and was invited to Washington for the full day of in-box testing,
role-playing simulations and questioning by a panel of three Foreign Service
veterans. I only remember being asked for the name of an artist who embodied
American values and mumbling "Bob Dylan".
Nevertheless, several months later, after blood tests and a security check
including close questioning on whether I'd ever had sex with animals
(intentionally or not), I received a letter inviting me to join the 5th Junior
Officer Training Class of the US International Communications Agency (ICA) and
tell America's story to the world through information and cultural exchange
programs. My father was thrilled to see me join "the diplomatic corpse", and he
convinced me to kill the story I'm about to tell after I gave it to the
Washington Post in 1982.
My 10 months of training in Washington seemed mainly designed to test tolerance
for boredom and absurdity. It began with a stream of lectures from ICA pen
pushers my classmates dubbed "midgets in government". They told the same joke
that they were ICA, not CIA, before paddling us through the agency's
bureaucratic alphabet soup. Then we joined with the State Department's JOT
class to hear from Foggy Bottom's MIGs. The joint session concluded with a
retreat to the West Virginia conference center - where they secreted Vice
President Dick Cheney and his staff in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. I
can only hope Cheney's entourage committed more alcohol-fueled antics and
rapidly regretted (or regrettably rapid) sex acts than we JOTs managed.
The highlight of the training was competition for our first assignments, a
practice posting to get our feet wet. With a class of 19 JOTs and a list of 25
possible assignment destinations, we had 19 first choices. Two people wanted
Paris, but everyone else had a different dream destination, from Abidjan to
Zagreb. Finding future assignments would not prove so easy.
I chose Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for two reasons. First, it was
coffee-producing country, and there were no rum-producing options. Second, it
was someplace I wouldn't be able to see on my own in three weeks with a
thousand bucks and a Eurailpass. As final gesture of training absurdity (before
yielding to operational inanity), I spent six months learning French to go to a
country where they speak Swahili.
At first, I loved Dar es Salaam. The boss, a Foreign Service guru who'd served
in India and Nepal, had a couple of specific assignments for me to ease the
boredom of being the fourth guy in a three-person office. The boss, let's call
him Bill, was also an outdoorsy type from the Rockies who taught me snorkeling
and took me along on family safaris. My first night around the campfire in a
game park, before retiring to my pup tent, I asked about the growling that
seemed just yards away.
"Oh, that's a lion," Bill said casually.
I thought very carefully about how to phrase the next question. "Does that
sound mean that the lion is unhappy ... that he wants something?"
"I think it means the lion just had something," Bill responded. His wife
smacked him.
But the sage left. His successor was older, on his first USICA assignment after
working elsewhere in government. "You remind me of my son," he told me one day.
"We've never gotten along." That was my cue to get serious about finding
another assignment. The USICA bid list had dozens of jobs in my categories, but
apparently there were scores of applicants for each. For weeks, I kept coming
up empty.
Then came El Salvador.
Back in 1981, the newly minted Ronald Reagan administration was looking for
communists under every bed and found some in Nicaragua. Secretary of state
Alexander Haig, the retired general and former Richard Nixon chief of staff,
led the charge, accusing its left-wing government of using Cuban and Angolan
forces to assist a peasant revolt against the military government in
neighboring El Salvador.
The US offered military assistance to El Salvador against the rebels. It also
backed Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua's government. I thought
the policy of facilitating and encouraging killings - both sides found unarmed
civilians and clergy particularly tempting targets - was beneath Washington,
though students of Latin American history might disagree. I thought the US
should be trying to ease the conflict, not escalate it.
After US evidence of poison gas use by Nicaragua was dismissed by scientists as
a rise in the pollen count, Haig and company seemed to back off El Salvador,
making it look safe for a bid. No sooner had I sent the cable (yes, still
diplomatic cables in those days) than Haig started talking crazy again about
the Contras and commies, and I got a cable congratulating me on my assignment
to El Salvador's capital San Salvador.
I told my Foreign Service personnel officer - called a career counselor - that
I didn't want the assignment and would rather stay in Tanzania. But he said my
assignment in Tanzania was over and I had to leave, unless I wanted just quit
then and there. If I knew then what I knew now, I would have quit, but instead
I went back to DC.
With Vietnam still fresh in the institutional memory, part of our training
covered what a Foreign Service Officer should do when you disagree with the
government policies you are assigned to execute. The answer was shut up and do
your job or quit. I wasn't going to do the former if it meant being directly
complicit in a policy that encouraged all sides to roll up the civilian body
count. But after logging just 12 months overseas, I wasn't going to just quit
either. And after nearly two years of training me with little return, I didn't
expect the US Information Agency (USIA - renamed under Reagan) would want let
me go.
My personnel officer confirmed that disagreeing with US policy wouldn't get the
assignment changed. He suggested saying I was afraid to go to a war zone. The
senior officer I tried that on called me a coward, adding that as a single man
I should be ashamed of my fear when fellow officers and their families were at
the post, and put it all in memo. I finally realized whose side my career
counselor was on. Meanwhile, I was conjugating Spanish verbs and realizing
there was no way USIA would let me out of this assignment. With conventional
appeals exhausted, I turned to Senator Helms.
A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms manned the
anti-communist hardline in Central America. If he knew that an opponent of
those policies - a possible ComSymp (diplomatic jargon for communist
sympathizer) who happened to be a New Yorker, a Jew and an Ivy Leaguer - was
ticketed for El Salvador, I hoped Helms would ignore rules insulating the
Foreign Service from political interference and get my assignment canceled.
To bait the hook, I wrote Helms an anonymous letter about myself. "If the
decisive battle against communism in our hemisphere is underway in El Salvador,
I believe we must dispatch our best troops, and Mr Cohen is not among them," my
fictional Foreign Service colleague warned Helms, exaggerating lowlights from
my brief but already colorful career to prove it. I wrote the note on State
Department stationery with a State Department typewriter, wore gloves to avoid
fingerprints, and got a friend to sign it "FSO" with a government pen.
I mailed the letter Friday morning. On Tuesday afternoon, my career counselor
called during Spanish class to say my assignment to El Salvador had been
canceled. I thought I'd won, but in 1982 Washington, 25-year-old smartasses
didn't beat Jesse Helms.
I guessed right that if Helms barked, USIA would jump. But I thought Helms'
meddling would provoke backlash within the agency. Helms' Neanderthal views
included fierce criticism of USIA's mission to win hearts and minds overseas,
perhaps because Helms assumed all hearts and minds were as closed as his own.
Despite his Capitol Hill muscle, Helms was still a buffoon, an ignorant bigot
and bully opposed to everything beyond his Christian crusade against communism
and North Carolina tobacco. I thought USIA might surreptitiously embrace me as
the enemy of its enemy and bundle me off to refuge in a low-profile tropical
oceanfront capital beyond Helms' radar.
But USIA relished its chance to kowtow to Helms at the expense of a junior
colleague, while denying Helms had anything to do with it. My new assignment
was a basement annex in downtown Washington with other USIA misfits, led by a
boss who sat in the dark quoting Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
My career counselor indicated that, due to my "political problem", my
non-person status would extend roughly until hell froze over. When USIA
solicited for officers to take leaves of absence, my application - I had an
offer to study American literature at Stanford - was denied. I took the hint
and the scholarship and quit USIA. I won my battle of El Salvador but Helms won
the war, driving out a diplomat whose views differed from his own and
eventually abolishing USIA.
It's appropriate that Helms died on the Fourth of July. Bits of our Founding
Fathers' highest aspirations died every minute Helms wielded political power.
They keep dying in the hyper-partisan, dishonest, insular, intolerant
Washington Helms helped create.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America's story to the world
as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com),
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
high finance and cheap lingerie.
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