FS Interviews: Gerald Loftus

This is the another installment in this series, in which I’m asking FSOs two questions. 1. Please share your best FS story or greatest FS achievement. 2. What is the biggest foreign policy challenge the U.S. faces? Gerald Loftus, retired Foreign Service Officer and blogger at Avuncular American, provided fascinating answers to both questions.

1. They always say that consular officers have the best stories, and in my own experience, several forays into the consular world confirm that. Especially if human relations are high on your priority list. My “proudest achievement” dates back to the early ’80s, when as Deputy Principal Officer I was also Consul in Alexandria, Egypt. Alas, the Consulate General is no more, a victim of the early ’90s James Baker sacrifice of a slew of constituent posts in key regions of the world to make way for new US embassies in the former Soviet Republics. At least there’s still a cultural center. But I digress.

A letter arrived at my office, addressed to the US Embassy in Cairo but with a return address in Alexandria. The writer, an American citizen in Alexandria, had no idea there was a US Consulate in her city. At the time, it was the second largest city in Africa, Cairo being the first. And why should she know? She was a young mother with several little boys, and she was sequestered in an apartment in a foreign city.

Here’s the back story: my Amcit - let’s call her “Lisa al-Siyasi” - had met a charming Saudi student at college in the States, gotten married, and had several children. Things hadn’t worked out - he was rich, she wasn’t, but there were probably more important incompatibilities - and they got divorced. Mr. al-Siyasi returned to Saudi Arabia, and sometimes vacationed at his parents’ penthouse on the Mediterranean in Alexandria. Some years later, he cajoled Lisa into a summertime visit for her and the kids to the exotic Middle East. She took up his invitation for what in his mind was a one-way trip back to the bosom of his family.

That’s about as much as I learned from Lisa’s letter, plus this: she desperately wanted to escape. But she had no money, and her ex-husband kept her and the kids under virtual house arrest.

The only thing I could think of was to write her a letter on Consulate stationery, “convoking” her to the US Consulate. The ruse worked: an appointment was made, and her ex-husband even brought her to my office. Luckily, while he was busy looking up information in the Commercial section, Lisa and I had a few minutes to discuss her situation and get crucial information on her status and her family back in the States. Visit over, she was returned to her gilded cage.
Working with the State Department and the Embassy in Cairo, we established contact with Lisa’s family in the States. They really didn’t have much money, but they were able to scrape together enough funds to buy tickets for Lisa and her boys to return home. But how to arrange the “great escape?”

Mr. al-Siyasi and his rich-Saudi-playboy lifestyle was the key. Lisa and I were able to talk on the phone (a working phone in Egypt in those days was a rarity) while Mr. al-S. was sleeping well into lunchtime, working off his late nights and hard-partying. We cooked up a plan that centered on his being out of commission during the morning hours.
With key assistance from the Levantine manager of the local TWA office, and from an Alexandrian taxi service that we knew well, we procured tickets and arranged for an early morning pickup. Lisa and the boys were able to slip out of the apartment and were whisked off to Cairo while Mr. al-S. got his beauty sleep.

The part of the plan that caused us the most heartburn was the airline schedule: flights from Cairo to Europe and beyond had already left by the time our taxi man delivered Lisa and family to the airport hotel. Her tickets - issued under a variation of the name “al-Siyasi” - were for a flight leaving Cairo the next morning. We’d just have to sweat it out for another 24 hours.

In the meantime, back in Alexandria, Mr. al-S. woke up around noon to find his ex-wife and children gone. I was not surprised, therefore, to find him at the Consulate soon thereafter. I took the precaution of asking one of the Consulate’s US Marine Security Guards to hang out in my office in civvies, but with a nightstick handy in case things got physical.

Whether it was the Marine’s presence, or Saudi stoicism, I’ll never know, but the meeting passed calmly enough. I feigned ignorance of Lisa’s whereabouts, and he went off. But I knew that wasn’t the end of the story.
Next day, Cairo airport. Lisa and boys show up at the TWA counter, and Mr. al-Siyasi is there. And he starts shouting in Arabic, “this woman is stealing my children!” to the gathering crowd. Lisa, who had feared this very outcome, was mortified.

Now, readers in the US Embassy circuit will recognize the term “expediter,” those indispensable fixers who shepherd travelers through the complexities of customs, immigration, and security with minimal fuss and delay. We had arranged for such a man to help Lisa and the boys at the airport that day. But this man was not your garden-variety expediter. He was a retired Egyptian Army brigadier general, and his response to the shouting Mr. al-Siyasi?

“This Saudi is threatening this American lady,” he told the Egyptian security guards present. I should note that in Egypt - home of the Pyramids, center of Arabic-language culture - there is a certain resentment of wealthy Gulf Arabs - but most especially Saudis - who flaunt their riches and their lack of culture and treat Egyptians like poor cousins, or much worse.

“This Saudi…” - well, that was more than sufficient to trigger the appropriate response, and as the sputtering Saudi was being dragged away, Lisa and boys were able to continue their check-in and their trip to freedom.

So ends my story, which remains my proudest achievement, and was accomplished in the years before US adoption of the Hague Abduction Convention, which might have complicated things. And we all had Mr. al-Siyasi to thank for having abducted his ex-wife and kids in a country where Saudis are loathed. It’s not always as “easy” for Americans in similar situations.

2. Others will say it’s brokering a Middle East Peace, solving climate change and resolving energy dependence, or defeating obscurantist terrorist groups. All these are important, vitally so. But I say the biggest challenge is self-perception. Is the United States “the indispensable nation” as Madeleine Albright (and President Clinton) liked to say, or the Reagan/Winthrop “shining city on the hill?”

While I think it’s good to aspire to shining images and to try to be as indispensable as possible, what I think the U.S. needs is a dose of humility. Not the kind that George W. Bush preached and didn’t practice: “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us; if we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us,” said he during the 2000 campaign. Sounded like Field of Dreams.

More like Field of Nightmares, but we’re rid of him, if not his legacy. So if he gave humility a bad rep, how can we describe what is a worthy stance for a great country suffering from a case of post-Bush reality?

How about “normal country?” Hey U.S. - be normal! Normal countries have ups and downs, and we’re dealing with the downs right now. But like manic-depressives, we should
be wary of going from a self-perception of shining indispensability to morose has-been-ness in the space of a couple of months.

Other countries will still call for “US Leadership,” and we should be happy to oblige, as long as it’s not just a more polite version of “with us or against us.” You can lead by example, and probably should. There’s nothing worse than “do as I say…”

From my days at NATO in the mid-nineties (and it really hasn’t changed), I knew that everyone knows that the US was the first among consensual equals. We pay the most into the Alliance, and our defense establishment dwarfs all the others combined. But it was bad form to ever remind Allies of that. It was a given. I remember a Big Four (US, UK, France, Germany) ambassador reminding a smaller country’s ambassador of their relatively meager contribution to the Alliance’s budgets. Boy did that go over badly. No need to rub things in, or to play “my GDP, my population” is bigger than…

So a little dose of normality - or accepting that the US, while big, rich, and powerful, does not have all the solutions - is a bigger challenge than might seem evident. It means admitting that others might have better approaches, for example. Learning from other countries’ experience in everything from micro-finance (how about a Grameen Bank approach to sub-prime repossessions in Florida?) to alternative energy (Germany and Denmark could teach us a thing or two about wind power).

Normalcy - hasn’t sounded good since Warren Harding mangled the word “normality” - but it might be a way for the U.S. to navigate what is a very abnormal situation in the world.

Tagged as: Day-to-day Diplomacy, Hegemony, Interview