Washington, D.C., 2006
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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
SIDNEY FRIEDLAND
Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy
Initial interview date: April 1, 1993
Copyright 1998 ADST
Q: Could you give me a little about your background? Where you grew up, were educated, all that?
FRIEDLAND: I was born and reared in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was born the day FDR was elected — November 8, 1932. I went to local schools. My father was in the soda water bottling business. We were moderately well-to-do. I went to local high schools in Milwaukee, then went to the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee for two years, studying English, then transferred to the University of Wisconsin in Madison for my junior and senior years — majored in history at that point. I graduated in January 1955.
Q: Did you get any feel for — Wisconsin was a hotbed of Progressivism or whatever it was — those were the McCarthy days.
FRIEDLAND: In Milwaukee, of course, it was not much — that was a commuting school. Madison was a whole different thing. Remember, the Korean War was going on. This was McCarthy time. Indeed, I remember going to the Student Union between classes and watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV at the time. This was the Adlai Stevenson campaign — I was active in that. It was as radical as it ever was, at least up to that point.
Q: Did you run into Larry Eagleburger at that time?
FRIEDLAND: I think we're a couple of years apart — I think he may be a year or two younger than I, but I did know Larry there. We had a tremendous influx — still, at this point in the early '50s — of Second World War vets, and the campus was much more centralized that it is now, so that we had an enormous student body at that time — something like 30,000. I would say at least 20% were veterans. So the students pretty much went into their own groups and one circulated with various groups. I had been on the college newspaper in Milwaukee. When I transferred to Madison, I got involved in the group that was bringing in outside speakers to address the Student Union — for example, one thing I was responsible for was the visit of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. way back when — he was a college professor at Harvard at that point.
Q: He had written The Age of Jackson — if you studied history I'm sure you read The Age of Jackson.
FRIEDLAND: Oh, yes. I had to feel him out, in the first place get in touch with his agent. I arranged the whole thing, met him at the airport, that whole bit, which was very fascinating. But at this point I was still not interested in the Foreign Service. The Foreign Service was still not big in the mid-West, at least not on my campus. It took other things to form that. What happened was that the draft was still on — this was Korea time — and I had been given student deferments by my draft board.What happened then was a series of misadventures — being under the impression that my draft board intended to draft me after I graduated, which would be in January of 1955 — in November of 1954, I went to the draft board and I volunteered to be drafted in March 1955. Let me graduate, give me a few months to goof off, and then go in and get my obligation over, get my GI Bill. During Christmas vacation — I had already signed my papers with the draft board — Eisenhower announced that the draft would be ending as of the 1st of January, and that the GI Bill would be ending for people who entered voluntary service after the 1st of January. I contacted my draft board, I was unable to withdraw my application. I had already signed the papers, had been given a report date, and to add insult to injury, when I got back to school to finish my last month before graduation, my advisor in the History Department called me to tell me — being a Princeton grad — that he had a Woodrow Wilson to dispose of and would I be interested?
So I went in. But when I went in, unforeseen things began to happen. First of all, I did my basic training at Ft. Leavenworth, Missouri. The first I'd ever been in an airplane, first time I'd ever spent any time out of the immediate mid-West. As it happened, a levy came through from the Army Intelligence Center at Ft. Holabird, Baltimore — they wanted five German speakers. Well, coming from Milwaukee, I had taken German in high school and college, so they called us up. They wanted five and actually there was only two. They yanked us out and instead of assigning us at the end of our basic training to some administrative command — which is what most college grads got — there were very few coming in — they assigned us to Baltimore. We went to Baltimore, found out this was CIC — Counter Intelligence Corps — sent us through the nine-week intelligence course, and sent us to European CIC headquarters at Stuttgart, and there we were! Stuttgart, Germany.
Suddenly, in Stuttgart, Germany, in the Counter Intelligence Corp, while there were several hundred people who went over, at this point, and not all of them were German speakers, they called out the German speakers, put us in civilian clothes, housed us in safe houses, in the city, I spent about two months, no actually, a year, at headquarters in Stuttgart, running a safe house. Which was neat because it meant just living in the safe house.
Q: Could you explain what a safe house is?
FRIEDLAND: A safe house is where other special agents, not us, but the real spooky types, would meet their contacts. This was a house that was completely free from bugs, it was examined, swept, all of that sort of thing, and it was on the local economy. It was just the neatest thing! All our sole duties basically aside from various routine office tasks, were to maintain this safe house! We were documented as civilian employees of the army! Ultimately, we were moved, some of us, and we were in civilian clothes, we were given an allowance, to buy civilian clothes, and at one point, we were given a car, between the two of us who lived at the safe house, and after a year, in Stuttgart, we were moved to another safe house in Mannheim, and ultimately to headquarters in Heidelberg, where we lived in a bachelor's office quarters. While we were in Stuttgart, two important things happened, one, this was the time of the Hungarian Uprising...
Q: Yes, October '56, I was over in Frankfurt as a vice-counsel.
FRIEDLAND: Oh really! Well, at one point, the German speakers again were pulled out and we were told that we had to get ready to go to Vienna, and interview Germans speaking Hungarians, and really just try to assist the Embassy. It was over before we were able to move. The thing that brought me into contact with the foreign service was the fact that in 1956, the Refugee Relief Act was to expire...
Q: January 1st, 1957, I was a refugee relief officer.
FRIEDLAND: You might have gotten some of my cases, because what happened was that at Stuttgart, there was a backlog of cases, thousands of cases and the act was due to expire within a matter of months. I don't know if this was German wide or if this was just the Stuttgart area, but at any rate, the State Department went to DOD and said, Hey look, do you have any German speakers that you can spare us? To do the preliminaries...
Q: It was a highly politically charged thing, because prior to the time when they were coming around it was moving at a very leisurely rate, and then all of a sudden, because the Act was almost designed not to bring people in, I think the original impetus was to do something for the Italians. But then, some Congressional critics started saying that they were not bringing people in, and this whole investigation thing was one of the major hangups. All of a sudden, the word came from Washington, you've got to start issuing.
FRIEDLAND: So now, forty years later...
Q: Thirty-five years, I'm finding out.
FRIEDLAND: At any rate, this is what lead to it, and here again, we were pulled up, sent to an office in the consulate, given, well we had cars by this point, brand new 1956 opal cadets, we were particularly interested in the civilian clothes, we were ready and we were already in civilian clothes, we had civilian documentation, as civilian employees of the government, and we were given a weekly sheaf of cases, a map, and told to go out Monday morning, come back Friday afternoon, with the filled-out questionnaire. As having talked to the various applicants. Which is what we did. I made one mistake, having spent a lot of time in that Stuttgart area, getting to know it, I was able to complete my weeks worth of cases by Wednesday afternoon, and I came in with the cases, and I was told your instructions were to be back here Friday afternoon. You will not disobey your instructions again. And I didn't.
But at any rate, that first of all, filled me in on the fact that there were American Consulates, got a vague idea of what they did, and thought possibly doing that type of thing, or other types of things with the State Department upon my departure.
Q: Well, it also must have given you a wonderful feel for the history of particularly Eastern Europe, through the Soviet Union, because I think for all of us, it was a crash course in the ethnic problems, because World War II stirred up all these which in 1993, we are seeing some of the fall out. Didn't it?
FRIEDLAND: Yes indeed. Particularly Stuttgart was the center of Russian refugees from Eastern Europe. Most of the people that I spoke to in the interviews that I did were indeed, actually, most of them were Volksdeutsche, from Eastern Europe.
Q: Poland, Armenia, Russia, that sort of thing...
FRIEDLAND: But, it just got me interested in that whole area of the world, and it also made me quite familiar with spoken German.
Q: Well, what were you all looking for when you were doing these interviews?
FRIEDLAND: Basically, we were not looking for any intellectual knowledge or entertainment or anything of that nature. It was interesting human, what would we say, there was a term for this when I was writing for the newspaper, in high school I was an editor of my high school newspaper, and I went into that, in fact I had thought of journalism as a career, but it was human interest type stuff, and what these people had seen or experienced during the second World War and of course they were very voluble about it, not all of which was true, but, it was fascinating, really fascinating.
Q: Did you find out a little about how to get into the foreign service?
FRIEDLAND: Not so much that, it was a combination, first I learned about the Foreign Service, as a possible career choice. Then, what happened was that a college classmate, a girlfriend of mine, of course did not go on to the Army. She stayed in Wisconsin, to do graduate school, and she ultimately decided to join the foreign service. We were writing, and she told me about the written exam, and then the oral exam, and she was accepted, and came in. So I filed this away, at this point. I was ninety percent certain that I intended to go back to graduate school, get my masters, probably my Ph.D. and go into college teaching European History. In undergrad, I majored in English, but I intended, after I got back, to do a master's in German History. This whole Foreign Service thing, I learned about through this girl who ultimately did become a FSO, was totally ultimately frustrated being a woman and she was a historian, and was very good at it.
I'm trying to remember what her foreign language was, she was Scandinavian, from Wisconsin or Minnesota, and I believe she was fluent in one of the Scandinavian languages. Her first assignment was as a counselor officer in Bermuda, then she was assigned as admin officer and quit. She had gone into an office in the department which was a liaison with the Department of Agriculture or Agricultural Attach� program, and she found that in Agriculture, as I since learned doing international organizations, it's a very old-fashioned, hide-bound kind of organization, but they were not hung up about women, and women had gotten quite high positions over there. About 1957, she was offered or possibly instigated the creation of a job which seemed, not in their Foreign Service, she wasn't all that keen about going abroad again, but, a job involving foreign affairs, at the Department of Agriculture where she remains today, if she has not retired.
Q: What is her name?
FRIEDLAND: Her name is Joanne Holquist. You know Joanne?
Q: No, I think I ran across her name one time.
FRIEDLAND: A big, blonde, heavy-boned Swedish or Norwegian gal. From northern Wisconsin.
Q: But then you got interested...
FRIEDLAND: I learned about the Foreign Service this way, and I learned from her about the exam, but at this point, I still was not thinking about the foreign service as a career. But, at any rate, what happened was I had a relatively interesting but uneventful two years, went through my military service, finished up in February of 1957, and in time had corresponded with the University, but by this point, of course, there was no GI Bill, I was on my own. Anyway, I couldn't consider an Eastern, well because I simply didn't have the wherewithal. So I wrote back in, and in the meantime, my professor who had awarded or had offered me the Woodrow Wilson had gone. Transferred some place else. So I was just starting to grow up, and I decided to go back to Wisconsin, they have a top history department, excellent history department, and do German history, European history under Chester Esan who at this point, was a grand old man in American history, and that's what I recall now, no, not American, that was Merle Curti, that was the grand old man, Chester Esan was my advisor, and I worked under him, this would be German history, and he wrote Europe By the Mid-Twentieth Century, something in this nature, but it was across the country, standard text. Wow, I thought that was pretty good.
But I didn't start until September, and this was March, so I had time on my hands, and I got in contact with Joanne, again who was in Washington, and she advised me how I went about taking the exam. I figured, what the hell, you know, only thing it would cost me is a trip to Madison. So I took it, and I passed, and this was in June of 1957, then in September of '57, I started classes. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Esan would be gone for the second half of that academic year, but anyway, he was there for the first half. But the guy who was going to take his place was a German emigre by the name of George Mosley. Are you familiar with pre-Hitler German history?
Q: A little, not very
FRIEDLAND: Well, Mosley Senior, Papa Mosey, Professor George's Dad, was the owner of the Bernientzeitung. The New York Times of Germany, and this was his son. That got me very interested, in pre-Hitler Germany. I had gotten an interest while I was over there, but of course at that point my interest was more in the Second World War. The immediate pre-Hitler Germany, lead to the Weimar Republic became very interesting to me. So I then started my thesis, on the socialist-communist revolutions in Bavaria, following the end of the first World War. Utterly fascinating. One of my seminar members ultimately stole it and wrote the major text book out of it. We were both together in this seminar for George Fossey, and I then became immersed in the world of the graduate student and the academic world press. It was a very different thing than what I had imagined to be as an undergraduate, and boy, I saw these guys really stealing each other's stuff, backstabbing, and this was the University of Wisconsin, one of the top five History Departments in the country, progressive and liberal, it was crazy, and I wondered is this what I really want to do? Then I got a letter that the oral examination was scheduled in Chicago in December, would I want to take it? I took it. This was the old three-man exam and the guy who was giving it was Angus Ward...
Q: Very famous guy, Ambassador to Afghanistan, but he counsels the general in Mukden, and was in custody in China for about a year. I have an interview with Elden Erickson, who was his stenographer, and was with Angus Ward.
FRIEDLAND: Anyway, he was the Chairman of the Board, and I didn't know what to prepare for, I'd been reading the New York Times, and Time Magazine, and a funny thing happened. I had gotten through my entire undergraduate career taking one course of basic economics, Economics 101, and I had bumped into a friend who had taken the oral exam a year before, and I said, 'What the hell should I be studying? I've got to take it next week?' He said just general stuff, and I said, what kind of questions are they going to ask? Well, he said, do you know what the gross national product of the US for last year? And I figured out something, but the figures were totally foreign, so that night, I went up and I got the proper definition and the numbers, wouldn't you know it, they asked me that?! And I got it right!
Anyway, I went up to the old customs house in Chicago, and took it where they still give the examination to this day. And I passed. They told me on the spot. Assuming that I passed the medical and the security bar, would you like to come on? I figured that I could probably have the Master's done the following June, so why don't you take me in August? And a few weeks later, I got all of this in writing and one thing led to another, and I didn't think that I would enjoy the academic life as a career, but I must say, I enjoyed being a grad student. Particularly at the University of Wisconsin. But, one thing led to another, and I didn't finish, so I called up the registrar and they were pretty snotty, they said, Well, okay, the next class after that is November 15th, and if you are not available for that one, we are going to drop you to the bottom of the list. And I said, well, I'll be there. At this point, I really did not want to become a college professor, and the Foreign Service looked very interesting, and I'd work with the State Department, before, in a matter of speaking, I had a friend in Washington, and what the hell! So, I'll be there. I got all of the course work out of the way, and I did all of my 3x5 cards for my thesis, but I never really got started on it, by the time November 15th rolled around. So that's when I started, November 13th, 15th, something like that.
Q: So, you came in November of '57. Could you give us a little feel for what the class was like, the type of people that were coming in, and also maybe your outlook towards the role of the United States in the world and what you were going to do about it?
FRIEDLAND: The class itself was quite a cross section in the sense of geographic origin of people. Otherwise, by in large, very WASP, totally male, except for two women, one was a young college grad, just out of undergraduate school, and the other was the executive assistant to the President of Columbia, and if I'm not mistaken, she had a Ph.D. or she was very close to having a Ph.D. Interestingly, both of them ultimately married FSOs, one of them married a classmate. Other than that, of course, not a single black, but a very wide assortment of people, one I remember now was a bee-keeper from Idaho, it looked like they were going on a kick, reacting to charges that they were too Ivy.
Q: I came in at '55, and at that time, they wanted massive infusion of Main Street.
FRIEDLAND: Well, I suspect that the bee-keeper was, and I must say it was kind of strange, because he was totally out of place. As one might have expected it to be. Why he actually went after this career, I really don't know. But whatever it was, he did not last a year. We had a few Ivy's, a number of ultimately big names, Tom Enders was in that class, Marshall Wilding, Felix Bloch...
Q: Felix Bloch is well known today as an alleged spy...
FRIEDLAND: The one and only FSO, I believe...
Q: Yes, got caught in Poland, it was strictly a girl trap type thing, and so it really didn't count too much.
FRIEDLAND: I don't think at this point, now remember at this point, John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State, Christian Herter was the number 2, and Korea was over, Vietnam hadn't really started for us, and the Cold War was at it's peak years, and this was post-Hungary, post-Suez, and we were going to make the world safe for democracy in a sense, and thwart the Russian Emissaries.
Q: No relations with the Chinese...
FRIEDLAND: No, nothing like that, not with East Germany, or anything of that nature, it was very interesting. But of course then, we were entering our new careers at this point, and I received quite a jolt first off because one of the first things we did was we were tested for language abilities, and I had previously passed the written German exam, and was looking toward breezing through the oral, but I didn't breeze through my oral, I spoke absolutely fluently, by my reckoning, not always a 100% grammatically, I mean I was not a native speaker, but I was as fluent in the sense that I would be talking with you, a German speaker, in Germany, like we are talking now.
I was absolutely thunderstruck, and she said, you know she as most of the other German language instructors were from Berlin, and they had a theatrical radio history or language teacher, and she said I don't know if you are aware of it, but you must of learned your spoken German in Werdinberg, which is the Stuttgart area, which is where I did. She said that on a German stage, this is what the German equivalent of hill-billies speak. I really don't feel that I could pass you because you talk with this sort of back-woodsy dialect, and I said, look, I'm totally fluent, and she said that the accent was really not what a government official should be speaking. So here we are, I think hill-billy would be a bit too strong, it's more what comics would use, almost like a Brooklyor something like that. But it is not standard high German, and she said that unless I could improve my dialect, my accent, I don't think I can give you a three.
So, I was really very upset, but of course, then we got another blow, here we were all coming in to the Foreign Service, to go out and do battle with the enemy, and the world out there. I would say a minimum of three quarters of us were given Washington assignments our first year. Two year Washington assignments, and this was at the point were INR, the bureau of Intelligence and Research, was still a huge operation in the State Department, I understand it ultimately went over to the CIA, when they opened up in Langley, which would have been '61, '62. At that point, There was a major State Department Intelligence apparatus. Ultimately, the vast majority of us in my class of about 32 or 33 people, wound up in this huge intelligence operation, doing things like filling out 3x5 cards for biographic files, calling thand something was mentioned about the Soviet Ambassador, we'd pull out a 3x5 card. If you were fluent in German, you would translate that item, a Soviet Ambassador to UN in Switzerland, formerly was Ambassador in such-and-such and is rumored to be a candidate member of the Politburo, and pop that into a 3x5.
Q: Fascinating, two years, how awful, but, obviously nobody was really thinking about using the �lan of young people to get them out into the world.
FRIEDLAND: Exactly, and it was happening to all of us, we had one fellow in the class who came from a German �migr� family, professorial family, the guy had done graduate work there, he was totally bilingual, he had all sorts of contacts, but the same thing happened to him. He was in one of these cubicles in INR doing this kind of thing, it was talent wasted like you couldn't believe. I was lucky, actually, I mean, in the sense that I had a more interesting job than most, although not to start with. Let me interject a point, because I was put back on language probation, they, as a matter of course, after I finished my A100 basic course, they sent me to a six weeks language program, and I said, Wait, with my German it is kind of silly to spend, actually, it was not six weeks, it was a four month German course, and anybody who was not fluent, or did not have a 3.3 rating, in a world language had to go to this four month course. I told them that I was once much more fluent than a 2 plus, I could get back to my fluency in German with an assignment to a German speaking place within a month or two, since all it involves is sort of unlearning what some people might consider undesirable pronunciation. Why don't you let me take French, it would be useful to have both French and German, so I took French, they bought it and there you go.
They also had us all take the consular course because obviously, our first foreign posting, whenever that may come, certainly no sooner than two years in, would be a consular post. They put me in a liaison office with CIA, because both of us had duplicating offices in our intelligence operation, CIA had their Hungarian desk officer, we had our intelligence desk officer for Hungary, and their was a fair amount of interchange between the two, but it was very formal, and any time a CIA analyst wanted to talk to a State Department counterpart they had to go through the liaison office, appointments were set up, and I was one of two or three officers to work in that capacity.
We had our contacts, I had an opposite number at the CIA, and it was done by areas, Europe and Eastern Europe, particularly being my major area, and that was probably the busiest section in the office. I guess CIA liked me because what then happened was that there was an office in INR that concerned publications procurement overseas and there were in 1959, five publications procurement officers at Embassies in Moscow, Berlin, Hong Kong, possibly Rio, Mexico City, Embassies or Cairo. these were regular foreign service officer positions, part of INR, and basically the orders came from CIA, so they needed a liaison person to interface with CIA, get their requests, put them in State Department teams, so to speak, send them out, follow up, once the things came back, to make sure they got over to Langley, well, not Langley back then. They chose me to do that, so that's what I did for 14 or 15 months of that tour.
Q: You finally got out in 1961?
FRIEDLAND: I finally got out the week after JFK's inauguration, and of course my first assignment, here I was with this central European background, language training, and my first overseas assignment was to English speaking Canada as a consular officer in Toronto. When I got the assignment, I noted that on the same list, there were a couple people going to Montreal, and Quebec, and I went to the personnel people and said, You are assigning me to a consular post in Canada, okay, but there is a choice evidently between English speaking Canada and French speaking Canada, and you just gave me a four month language course, why don't you send me to French-speaking Canada? I was told in so many words that they didn't take that into consideration at the time, and had we known, we would have but it is too late now, the orders are cut there is no way of changing this, so I spent the next two years issuing visas in what at that time was the second or third largest visa issuing post in the world.
Q: But no particular fee, you were just a transit point for other places.
FRIEDLAND: Really and truly, here I was really hoping I was a political officer, I was hoping that maybe I could use some of my academic, linguistic whatever, and of course that wasn't the case. I could have been sent to issue visas in Munich, that would have really been me, but that would have possibly been too logical, but I didn't know what criteria they used at that point, but at any rate, there was no input from the officers that I recall, but as it happened, it proved interesting in a number of ways. Although when I got up there it was really quite bizarre. We had a personnel situation that was very strange.
The principal officer was a man by the name of Bob Memminger, and this is where I learned what happens to a person who is on the wrong side of a policy decision, or people who are at the wrong place at the wrong time. Bob Memminger up until 1965 was the Baghdad Pact, the guy responsible for the Baghdad Pact, and when, in the summer of 1958, I was at the fountain in the center of the University at Madison, and the Iraqi students were going crazy, yelling and screaming, having an absolute ball, and Bob Memminger was held responsible for all of this, and Bob's next assignment was in Toronto, taking advantage of his great expertise. Memminger was a nice, pleasant guy, but had two problems, his wife and his son. His was wild, and would drink anything she could get her hands on. He was a handsome guy, and had been a stage actor, very courtly gentleman, tall with white hair from South Carolina, the model of a distinguished American Ambassador. She looked 75, wore her grey hair in a bun, flat soled shoes, shapeless garments, red nosed, and you could not imagine any connection between these two people, other than the fact that they were married, and he would leave town any weekend that he could possible leave town, and the vice-counsels were assigned baby-sitting duty, each of us would be assigned for the weekend to the residence, to make sure that the old lady didn't get her hands on liquor.
There was a roster, and the total postings at the consul general at this point, something like 12 FSO 7's or 8's on their first overseas assignment. This was one of the world great visa mills. So, every time a new person came they were put on the roster, and I was put on the roster but I never got to do it because their were 13 ahead of me when I arrived. He was gone within 13 years. And remember when I said that I left when Kennedy was inaugurated? Kennedy's first foreign visit was to Canada, per tradition, and this was the big visit where he injured his back planting a tree. This was a whirlwind new administration, and in Ottawa, Livingston Merchant was the Ambassador at this point, and he yanked in all the consulate's generals from across Canada to serve as his aids to put on the visit and to generate publicity etc. Memminger was away often in Ottawa, visiting the Ambassador. Also having been on the stage and in public relations before, the Ambassador relied heavily on his judgement. The big publicity was that Kennedy hurt his back, but the visit went very well, and one of the reasons that it went well was that Memminger put virtually all of his time and effort into it, and as a result, the two days before Kennedy arrived, he had a heart attack.
Medevacs back to the states, never had a chance to shake hands with Kennedy, after all this work, and was medically discharged, and retired. The other problem was Memminger's son, Tito. He was approximately 20 years old, took after his mother rather than his father, not a very nice looking kid, unable to get into any college or university that his father approved of, and therefore was living at home. He spent his time down at the consulate general propositioning the sweet young things that we had working there in abundance, and causing all sorts of problems. He'd pull diplomatic immunity in terms of parking, when he was picked up for under age drinking, probably now he would be accused of assaulting these women but in those days they would do that. We heaved quite a sigh of relief when Tito, well, what happened was that when his father was Medevaced, and it was determined that he was going retire, his wife and son followed. They ultimately left. In the meantime things were happening with regards to the visa business, and as you recall, the Christmas Eve before Kennedy's inauguration, Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista government in Cuba. Also you may recall that one of Jack Kennedy's best friends was George Smathers from Florida. The question was as soon as Kennedy, no wait a second, I am a year off...
Q: Well, in very late '58, no, '59...
FRIEDLAND: Okay, '59, the visa law at that point said that anybody who enters the United States from contiguous territory, on a tourist visa, or any visa other than an immigrant visa must go back to their contiguous home country to get an immigrant visa, their status cannot be adjusted in the United States. The law does not envisage contiguous territory in communist, well you know and of course the day after Fidel takes over, the prosperous type folks started fleeing, and they all flood to the United States where they all have back accounts, relatives or whatever. By 1961, Bay of Pigs time, there are already hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Cuban refugees in the United States now they all came in as refugees. Bay of Pigs happened, it failed, and it is obvious that the US and Cuba are not going to get together, and what are we going to do with all the at least a million Cuban refugees? It would seem obvious that what you would do, they are all in the States, why don't you amend the law saying in the case of Cuba, people's status can be adjusted, and they don't have to go back to contiguous territory.
Nope, Smathers doesn't like that because his buddies are lawyers, immigration lawyers in Miami. And JFK is also his buddy, and what happens ultimately, is that the law is not changed, and Cuban immigrants in the United States refugee or any other non- permanent standing must leave the US to get permanent residence. A lot of these people don't have any money, medical doctors are swabbing halls to work. We were advised that Smathers did not want this changed. Also there are lots of immigration lawyers in New York City, and New York is also JFK territory, so what they did was got Canada to agree if you Americans agree to take these people back even if you don't issue them a visa, let them come up to Canada, and you take them up at your consulates in Canada.
The entire United States was divided up into areas assigned to aid an American consulate in Canada with New York City going to Montreal, maritime to Quebec, Florida and the South to Toronto, Chicago to Windsor. Closed down Niagara Falls, before I got there, but Windsor was still going strong. California to Vancouver, and it went on this way for years. As a result, you had to have Vice-Consuls and actually it would have been a good post to send vice-counsels if you were going to send out Vice-Consuls for their first post, it would be great for Spanish-speaking FSO's. Not one Spanish speaking junior officer visa Vice-Consul was dispatched. But, somehow we were able to locate a Cuban refugee in Toronto, a lovely young girl and we were able to put her on the payroll, and she served as a interpreter, and ultimately married my successor, Ray Balen.
Plus we had the largest resident American citizen community outside of the US There were 25,000 on the books, and probably at least double that not on the books, who just blended in. I have another special memory of Toronto in that when I got my assignment, my parents were in Florida for the winter, and the people in the next room at their hotel were from Toronto, and so they mentioned me to them, and they said, “How old is your son?” Same age as our some, and here is his name, have him get in touch. As it turns out, I did. I got up there, and he is a very wealthy young bachelor who is in the magazine subscription business, but as an executive. Marvelous bachelor pad, just rolling in money, and he had a black book of all of the interesting young beauties in town, so he started to fix me up. Ultimately, I met my wife and was married up there.
My assignment stretched to one month less three years, and our first daughter was born three weeks before we left, and for most people, Toronto was an absolute bore, but for me it turned out to be fascinating. And my father-in-law was the personnel manager of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and I got an entre into all sorts of local music, arts, whatever surfaced there. I met Seiji Ozawa, who spent five years in Toronto at my in-law's house. A number of world famous artists, all sorts of people, it was absolutely fascinating. And here we had gone up there as sort of an exile, but it really turned out to be fascinating. Also university circles, Marshall MacLuhan, I was at his house, he was on the staff at the University of Toronto. It was fascinating.
Q: Why don't we cover the time that you were in the executive secretariat for a year? Then we'll come back to what you were doing in IO, this would be '66, '67, the June War plus Vietnam. What were you doing there?
FRIEDLAND: Basically I was on a team headed by a senior watch officer, I was a junior watch officer, there were three junior watch officers, a senior, rep, which was a Pentagon person, who is on duty with the team, and one other more senior person, perhaps the team chief. We manned the department during off hours, we were on during regular hours too, there was a three term rotation, you are on basically three days, from midnight to eight, the next three days from eight 'till four, the next three days from four 'till midnight, and then you are off for three, but then at midnight on the third, you are back on. So you're working on this constantly rotating schedule, and basically what you do is get copies of all incoming cables, all communications traffic to the department, and you keep the principles alert.
You have to decide who to alert, in any given unusual situation. You have to stay abreast yourself of what was going on anywhere, there is only a few of you so you you can't have a Middle East expert or a Far East expert or an Eastern European person, you just have to have knowledge in general, and the senior has to decide what is important enough to notify people at home, during off hours. The three day stretch when you are on, you are working from eight to four is supposed to alert you to all the nuances because you are there, and you ask the desk if they are expecting anything coming up tonight? If so, who do we notify, what level do we go to, also bring things to the attention of other foreign affairs agents. Pentagon, CIA, they maintain a similar thing, and of course the White House situation room. It was the Sit room in the White House and our own principles that we notified. We dealt with all the major players in the State Department.When I came on it was basically Vietnam, that was the major item going on, and the White House gets everything we got. We'd be back and forth with them on the phone each night, discussing what information each of us had, Saigon 1557 about this and that, monks gonna burn themselves tonight, what's happening, but then again the whole thing in the Spring of '67, building up, Nasser was getting out of Yemen, and bringing back his troops, the blockading the Gulf o, and the liberty thing was going on at the same time. Any time something blows, sometimes in advance of the actual blow, they set up a task force. We had a Mid-East task force set up to my recollection, before the war broke out itself. Interestingly, my senior watch, a Jamaican, later an Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and a colleague and I could see that this was coming. We both worked for Jim so, the evening session, when we finish up at midnight, we'd always used to go to a local bar, on Pennsylvania Avenue which no longer exists, and have a few beers before we went home.
One night we were talking to Jim, and I asked him what was going to happen, it looks like Nasser is going to attack, and Jordan and Syria, look like they are going to join in, a real massacre. Oh no, Jim said the Israelis will mop them up in 5 days. This can't be! The newspapers, everything...! Five days said Jim, it will be all over, and the Arabs will all be defeated in five days. This was around April, now, Jim either left before the war broke out, they put him as officer in May, and he was not there in the op center when the war broke out. A week later, he came by, stuck his head in, and we'd been on for 24 hour shifts, and he said, Damn, I was off by one day.
Q: Yes, because it was called the Six Day War.
FRIEDLAND: In the op center we were getting calls from Hussein, Hussein was on the phone, “Call the Israelis off, Johnson! Make them stop.” I heard him, I mean really! It was incredible. That was probably the wildest week I spent in my life.
Q: I'm sure, well then why don't we stop at this point and pick up in '67ish, when you went back to IO doing atomic energy matters by on the Washington side.
FRIEDLAND: As I mentioned before, Memminger left Toronto shortly before the Canadian visit of President Kennedy, in the Spring of 1961, and was succeeded by the former director of INR named W. Park Armstrong Jr. Evidently, Armstrong had been as the director of INR had previous dealings with Rusk during the Truman administration when Rusk was Assistant Secretary for far Eastern Affairs. He had been in the late '60's, well, his reputation was as the loyal turkey. No one wanted to have anything to do with him in the Department.
Q: You say a turkey is basically someone who is not very bright.
FRIEDLAND: Well, someone who easily messes up simple tasks, generally had the reputation of being very senior, but no one wanted to have anything to do with him. After his term was up as Director of INR, he was made Deputy Chief of Mission to Madrid, his Ambassador was I believe Lodge, at any rate the Ambassador quickly took a disliking to Armstrong and told Armstrong, we learned from people who knew him, to come in once every two weeks for his paycheck, and not to be seen around the Embassy in the interim.
Armstrong was an activist, but uncontrollable. When Rusk came back as Secretary of State in 1961, Armstrong called him and on the basis of Armstrong's perceived friendship with Rusk, asked him to please give him his own post. The rumor has it that Rusk consulted far and wide through various colleagues as to where to put a senior person with Mr. Armstrong's background, in a place where he could cause least possible bilateral damage, to a friendly country, and ultimately it was decided to send him to Toronto as Consul General. Mr. Armstrong immediately started causing various problems. The summer of 1961, was a Canadian election where the current Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker was running for re-election and under Memminger, junior officers were very much brought into the process, the political reporting process, each of us was assigned a various election district in the Province of Ontario, we reported regularly, had staff meetings on what was happening, what was going on, and remember, this was a post consisting of mostly, over a dozen junior officers, all of whom were political officers, all of whom were on their first assignments. We all loved this, and it was a neat gesture on his part, knowing what the situation was.
As soon as Armstrong took over, this stopped, and Armstrong was a Princeton grad, one of the 13 junior officers was a Princeton grad, and once Armstrong had arrived, he removed all of us except for the Princeton man from the political reporting desk, and subsequently did all of it himself, giving a few tidbits to the junior officers. This needless to say, caused some ill feeling among the junior officers. Then, within the next year, I had met and married my wife, and the Mr. Armstrong attended our wedding. My wife, who by this point, became an American citizen at the Federal District Court in Buffalo, the first session after our marriage, in the meantime, she graduated from University and had gotten a job as an editor with McGraw Hill Publishing Company in Toronto.
She was still a Canadian citizen at this point, and as regulations required at the time, we went to the Consul General for permission for her to take employment on the local economy, which he granted. Shortly afterwards, a junior officer and his wife arrived at the post, they had been married a number of years, and had no children, and at previous posts, she had worked on the local economy. They arrived at post, and she started looking for a job, and somebody brought it to her attention that she should get permission from the Consul General, and the last such case he granted permission with no hesitation. They did, and he turned them down, flat. Said it would not promote the proper image of a State Department official whose wife was working in the local economy. They mentioned my wife, and he said well, she was a Canadian at the time, and she was born here, a local resident, etc., but of course they were very upset and refused to back down, and that lead to more problems at the post. Park Armstrong, who was a rather unpleasant and disagreeable person, saw very little of the consulate staff at all, his wife died suddenly.
Within a month, he had bought a new wardrobe, a new T-Bird, Thunderbird sports car, and started courting rich young widows whom he had met in the course of his duties. Within two months after his wife's death, married a very wealthy 37 years old Canadian widow. A lovely woman, who by virtue of a Foreign Service regulation was supposed to become an American citizen under laws in effect at that point, at the earliest possible opportunity after the marriage occurred, which was virtually instantaneous since we were 63 miles from the Federal Court in Buffalo, NY. Also, given the regulation that he established at post about wives working, she would have to give up seats on various Boards of Directors, which she held and which were very lucrative, well, in fact she would have if she had taken up American citizenship, under laws in Canada, also she should have left under regulations promoted by her husband, and she did neither. Moral problems at this point were terrible, so inspectors came to the post, and Armstrong retired from the foreign service within 4 months of the inspector's visit, and last I heard, he was living in retirement in Toronto with his rich young wife.
Q: You left there in 1964, is that right?
FRIEDLAND: Yes, well actually, we left just about Christmas time of '63.
Q: And then you went to where?
FRIEDLAND: Vienna
Q: What were you doing there?
FRIEDLAND: They finally got me assigned to a German-speaking post and this was kind of odd because my normal assignment was up in June in 1963, a normal two-year assignment, slightly added to round out an assignment year. I was told through the grapevine in February, March of '63, that we were going to be sent, for there was a junior political slot being created at the Embassy in Vienna. I was still on language probation! I got a 2+ in French, and I got a 2+ in German. So Personnel wanted to get me assigned to a German speaking post. They had me tentatively assigned, and I said that I had a two month diplomatic clause in my apartment, what happened? I said this is all but certain it's a new post but you are slated into it, and you have no indication that they are going to turn this post down. So I gave notice.Needless to say, I got a chagrined call because no orders had come through and I started calling down there, and they said, gee, we are awfully sorry, they refused to create that new position, we're still looking for a German-speaking post for you, but we don't have anything, and I said look, I've got to move out of my apartment in June, and they said to make any arrangements that you have to, or at least get a place for two months. The assignment cycle starts in September, we'll have a place for you by then. I said, Look, my wife is pregnant, she is going to have the baby the first week of November, do something! All we could get was a two month sublease from a couple of professors who were going away for the summer, and it was right downtown, near the consulate, one was an English professor, one was an English professor, they had an enormous apartment which was wall to wall bookcases in every room, and any book that you have ever wanted to read, fiction, non-fiction, anything was there. But then we had to find another place, because we were told in August that a real post would be becoming vacant in Vienna in February, and we had the baby in Toronto. So it was worth it.
We rented a house, a very strange procedure, we rented the house from September to Christmas, furnished, and we found a gorgeous house within a dollar of the housing clause, the only problem was that we were to deliver the telephone bill unopened, to the landlady, and she would tell us how much we owed. Fine, we moved in, and we noticed police cars would start to come by, every other night, slow down, move on, and then there were other cars that would slow down and then speed up again and then we were getting calls. So we called up the landlady and she said don't worry about it. Then one time the telephone bill and the gas bill came all at once and I opened the phone bill, and there were hundreds of dollars of calls coming out of Streetsville, the Sing Sing of Ontario. So we sicced my mother-in-law, who has a good nose for this sort of thing, and as it turns out, the house belongs to the numbers king of Toronto who is serving four month jail term at Streetsville. And there we are, and we had the best protection of anyone on the street!
The baby was born in mid-November, we spent my home leave in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in January and early February where the temperature hovered near 15 below zero, with a month old colicky child. And arrived in Vienna in February of 1962.
Q: What was your job there?
FRIEDLAND: This was an awful job, I was not at the Embassy, I was with the mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was a five person post, headed up by a non-resident ambassador who was a world famous Atomic scientist. Henry D. Smythe, who was one of the inventors of the Atomic bomb. We had quarters outside the Embassy near to the secretariat of the IAEA. In those days it was a whole different operation. Back in the early '60s, we, the US of A. were the prime salesmen of Atomic power. Not polluting, cheap, the answer to all your power prayers, and all of you poor countries without coal, oil or whatever, just buy one of these and Westinghouse makes real good ones, and your power problems will come to an end. The only thing is that we want you to sign on to this nice agreement which we are in the process of drafting to show us that you won't try to make bombs out of these things. And that's basically what we did in Vienna foe two years. Absolutely fascinating.
Q: Did you get rid of your accent?
FRIEDLAND: Two months after my arrival in Vienna, we had Frankfurt send down a language instructor and my accent-free German was not quite accent-free, it had sort of shifted over to a Viennese accent. There are 22 districts in Vienna, each one of which has a recognizable accent, and I was able, by the time I left there two years later, to distinguish them.
Q: As you worked on this atomic selling business, were there countries that were concerned with, particularly India and Israel. Was this a problem at that time? South Africa? Were any of those on our horizon at the time?
FRIEDLAND: Yes, India was. Although I may be confusing things a bit, because to leapfrog slightly ahead, after I finished up at the mission in Vienna, in the Spring of 1966, I spent the year in the executive secretariat as a watch officer, and upon completion of that assignment, I was made desk officer in the International Organizations Office, for the IAEA. So I spent '67-'69, as the desk officer for my old outfit, and I was back and forth between Washington and Vienna which means that I was occupied for two, two year periods given my wobbling memory that I've developed in old age, I may jump from one to the other.
Q: It's sort of within the time period.
FRIEDLAND: The main thing was the Soviet Union, there were really three nuclear powers, the US the Soviet Union, and China, and of course we were vigorously excluding China from the IAEA. With Russia we did not have great relations, this was Cold War, although I must say, within the Atomic Energy community, our relations were not bad because we did not allow China or anyone else to acquire the bomb. Plus it turns out that the Soviet delegation, whose name escapes me at this point, was an atomic scientist, as was ours, and both were very internationally well known. There was a shared scientific outlook and that sort of thing.
I remember India being particularly difficult. In fact, it is what lead to the Non-Proliferation treaty. Indians swore up and down that they only wanted to use this for peaceful purposes. Well, that means reactors, and what else can you use these for besides power? We intend to create new harbors and a big area of coastline because we are going to put in a device to create a new port. And where are you going to put these things? Oh, we've got lot's of coastline, don't worry. You're not going to put them in your pockets are you? Oh, no, that would be a bomb!
Q: What were you doing actually on this?
FRIEDLAND: Actually, I did almost all of the non-substantive stuff, I was a junior officer in a five-man mission, the resident rep was the chief basically, and he was a State Department bureaucrat, when I arrived there, and this fellow was succeeded by an atomic energy commissioner administrative, there was the chief scientific officer, who was a foreign service scientific type, there were a few of those, then the chief nuclear officer who was an Atomic Energy Commission International person, then there was a political officer, who was an IO type, and then there was me, and I was technically the junior political officer, but I was also the junior officer, so I was the admin officer, I signed the chauffeur's time cards, I got PX permits for people, I paid the rent, from housing for people, I did all sorts of stuff. Picked up the Ambassador when he flew in, made all of his arrangements. I was a gofer basically. I also did political reporting when we had to do various conferences, like most UN organizations these things work through conferences. Board of Directors and Governors that met three times a year, then a big general conference of all 150 member states once a year. I was with a real pro, this was one of the few areas of the department where women went anyplace was IO, and my boss, she gave me any political work that I had, whereas the resident rep was a state admin type gave me the most of the rest that I did.
She was my real mentor because up to this point, I had been in the Foreign Service for almost six years, as a political officer, and I never had any political work, really, whatsoever. She was one of the pros and her name was Betty Goff, and she was in San Francisco in 1945, drafted the original UN Charter, one of the drafting people. It is not the best way to learn political reporting because basically she knew all the actors, her main activities were to keep China and East Germany out of any UN organization and anytime there would be a situation which was meant to lead to that, the admission of China, East Germany, Betty would be sent off, she was damage control or the damage prevention officer, and it came up in the UNGA, she'd fly off to the UNGA and lead the forces, and draft the speeches.
She was one to close to half a dozen women political officers in IO and that was basically the only place that they were. But these women had come into the department during the early forties, while the men were off fighting. Women were brought in where they hadn't been before, and after the war was over, you don't throw them out, although a number of them were thrown out, but the best ones got to stay. The main place they congregated were in IO.
Q: We really left you off about 1968, where you were working in IO, what were you doing at IO.
FRIEDLAND: Well, specifically, I was the desk officer for the International Atomic Energy Agency, in the Bureau of International Organization, and this was the agency that I had served with on a US mission tfrom '64 to '66 so that gave me the chance to keep in touch with the organization to return to Vienna once or twice a year to attend the conferences and it was fascinating.
Q: What were the issues that you found yourself dealing with?
FRIEDLAND: This was the Non-Proliferation Treaty for the most part, also, the mundane stuff of a desk officer, basically the money. Preparing Congressional budget presentations, accompanying principles up to the Hill when they discussed the budget of that particular organization. I spent a lot of time on the budget, also following the everyday activities of the 6 permanent members of the Board of Governors, of the organization, it was constant preparation. There were two board meetings a year, and a general conference ever. There were constant meetings on position papers, interagency meetings, meetings going on throughout the year.
Backstopping the organization, it needed certain equipment, typewriters, this kind of thing, and my duty was to go after the administrative people. Technical conferences, I had to prepare US delegates for technical conferences all year round. I would brief the delegates who would come through Washington, and I would brief them on political issues, aspects on issues that they would be handling. Some were experts, they did not go as delegates of the US Government, but nonetheless, we expected them to keep government policy in mind and I would brief these people before they would go out. That was basically the size of it.
Q: Did you get an impression at that time, about the urgency the Johnson Administration was giving to the nonproliferation business at the time?
FRIEDLAND: Oh yes, more than that, it would be hard for me to say, it was a very high priority, and this was one area, specifically notable because we and the Soviets were working together. One of the few areas. Now that I think about it, we had a sort of group of 7 type of informal organization that met during the conferences and in advance and I had contacts in various Embassies. The British Embassy, the French, German, Canadian, whatever. Basically a group of seven, except for the Japanese, I don't recall them having any nuclear attach� here. I distinctly remember the 1965 general conference which was the 20th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, we held the general conference in Japan, in Tokyo, at the government's invitation, and of course the Japanese were naturally very interested. Nonetheless, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was the main item of concern during that time.
Q: Did you get any feedback at all from the Defense Department or from a practice point of view, or was this not really their bailiwick?
FRIEDLAND: No, the main point of interaction was with the Atomic Energy Commission, what is now the Nuclear Regulatory Agency or parts thereof. The AEC, back in those days was a big outfit, and they had an international affairs division whose main activity was watching over the IAEA, both directly and through the State Department, and interestingly, as it turned out, a number of the more senior officials of the international division of the AEC outfit wound up in the State Department in what was then the Office of Scientific Affairs, but has since become OES, a bureau of Oceans, Environment and Scientific Affairs.
Q: You left there in '69, and what happened then?
FRIEDLAND: During our stay in Vienna, we had spent a summer vacation on the Dalmatian Coast, and we became very taken with the Yugoslavians, and I was due for a US assignment, and what happened was that I decided that I wanted to serve there, put in a bit which included 9 months of language training, was selected, and was assigned to Belgrade effective the summer of 1970 to be proceeded by 9 months of Serbian language training, starting in August of 1969.
Q: As somebody who went through that in '61, '62 — who was teaching you and what were you getting from the language training, any brainwashing or any feel for the country?
FRIEDLAND: The instructor was a fellow named Janko Jankovic, who was in his mid-to-late-70's. At the time, he had not been in Yugoslavia, since having been captured in an original German invasion in '41, and taken to Northern Germany and spent the war in a prisoner of war camp, accordingly, all of the language training that we got, was basically an inter-war Serbian. We had no vocabulary really of post-1945 Yugoslavia. Plus, I learned later, that Mr. Jankovic was from a cultural village 40 or 50 miles out of Belgrade, the village was Sabac, and we were all coming out of the Foreign Service Institute Yugoslav Language Course were totally identifiable within the first sentence we spoke because of this very prominent Sabac accent which we were trained in. However, about half way through, they introduced a new instructor by the name of Milosevic. Father Milosevic, who was a Serbian Orthodox Priest, and had a congregation in Wheaton, Maryland, finally given the fact that Mr. Jankovic was in increasingly poor health, decided to train a successor. I believe Milosevic was the minister of the congregation Jankovic attended. So he came, and he was much more up to date, and he was a native Belgrader, so our accent was somewhat improved.
The problem with the language course was basically that it was utterly too long. I started with the 5th week of the course, and I was the only one that stayed through to the bitter end until June of 1970. I was rated either at 2+ or 3, which was reasonably fluent, but I had no practice out on the street, and different accents, all of this kind of thing. It seemed to me that after the first 5 months after the course, I really wasn't making that much progress, plus, after, the first 6 or 7 months, I was the only person left in the class, the others had all gone off early or had gotten recruited in one sort or another, and being with this old ailing man, he'd fall asleep in the afternoon, and you really couldn't learn in that situation. But, I stayed until the bitter end, and in July of 1970 we went off to Belgrade.
Q: What were you doing there?
FRIEDLAND: This was interesting — I wound up in a very touchy situation. The year before I left for Belgrade, Tom Enders had gone to Belgrade as Deputy Chief of Mission, The Ambassador there, William Leonhart, was totally paranoid, as well as being an alcoholic thirty-second degree. Immediately, he sensed that upon the arrival of Enders, that Enders was out to get him, oust him as Ambassador, get him sent back, and take over himself. Enders I don't think had that in mind, although he is a very ambitious man, very active, and is considered both a towering intellect who doesn't try to hide it very easily.
Unfortunately for me, Enders and I come into the Foreign Service in the same class, the A-100 class, and so in his paranoia, Leonhart, assumed that Enders was packing the Embassy with supporters of his, and that my assignment to Belgrade, I'd never had any previous Eastern European experience, was part of Ender's efforts to get supporters in there, although very interestingly, after A-100 class ended, our paths diverged, we never served at the same posts again. I would occasionally see him in the halls, and he remembered who I was, but I never had any relationship with him whatsoever, professional, social, personal. I was assigned to Belgrade in the economics office, but back in those days, you could be an account officer in one tour, political officer in the next, and this was my next job.
I arrived at post and was told that I would be assigned as clerk officer, and as it turned out, the political counselor was a fellow named Clayton Mudd...
Q: Who had been the desk officer in my day...
FRIEDLAND: Oh really? He was as thick as thieves with the Ambassador aligned against Enders. Leonhart put me under Mudd's thumb, so they could keep track of me, so I didn't do things on Ender's behalf. We couldn't have done that in the Economics section, because the head of the Economics section was new as well. Ray Albright, who came over from Treasury, an external affairs person, an international affairs person. So, I got over there, I had just been promoted that summer to a Class 4 officer.
Q: About equivalent to a major...
FRIEDLAND: I had had three promotions in the past 5 years, and I was doing very well, but between '66 and '70 I had three promotions. So I got there and I was told I would be in the political section rather than the economic section which was preferable, because I was a political officer, and I really didn't know much about economics. Things seemed to be going very well, then I remember I was invited over to a reception at the Ambassador's and I had been in the Foreign Service for something like 11 years, and I had never served in an Embassy — the Consulate in Toronto, in Vienna at a mission, to an international organization, but I had never served at a traditional Embassy. This was in some sense new to me.
This was a reception for a number of senior Yugoslav government officials, one of my duties was to stand next to the Ambassador in a reception line, and I was told to make sure that the Ambassador had a little table behind him, and that his glass was constantly replenished with Scotch. I did. He was sipping on it constantly, and by the time the reception had gone through, he was really quite smashed. Then this was a sit down dinner, and I sat at a small round table. After the dinner was over we retired to a screening room, and the movie screen was wheeled in, and the lights were darkened, and the movie Brigadoon came on. As the movie went on, and as soon as a musical number came on, a voice came out of the dark singing along with the words. A drunken voice, and I'll never forget hearing the drunken, singing voice! The Yugoslav guests were just sort of sitting there with their mouths hanging open! As soon as the lights came on, the Yugoslavs made a beeline for the door, and the house was cleared out in 5 minutes.
There were all sorts of American officers, but he asked me, the Ambassador and the new Consul General to stay behind. He was literally totally drunk, out of his mind. He kept us going until two o'clock in the morning constantly, and his wife was with him. We called her Pidge, so he turns around and said, “Pidge, get me another Scotch! You know why I call her Pidge? Because when I first met her she had really big breasts and I said, 'You look like a pigeon.'" This was really very embarrassing, and it went on until two o'clock in the morning.
I mentioned to some of my colleagues at the office, and they said that that was one of the better performances, he falls down sometimes. One of my friends in the Economics section said he was down in Skopje with Leonhart, and they had a reception at Hotel Macedonia, in Skopje, and he did this on several occasions.
Q: I was there and stayed with Larry Eagleburger down there on a tour just before the earthquake, then I spent three weeks in a military hospital during the earthquake.
FRIEDLAND: This friend of mine went down there with the Ambassador, and he was in a reception line, just shaking hands and getting the person's name, and then passing the name on to the Ambassador. He got a name he remembered and leaned over to whisper it to the Ambassador and the Ambassador was not there, he had passed out.
Q: You are an officer of the government of the US, here is an Ambassador causing all sorts of awful problems, I would think that this would be the sort of thing that one way or the other, the inspector general would be tipped off to this, come out, and bring somebody back for rehabilitation or something like this. He'd been an Ambassador to Tanzania before that. How did this happen?
FRIEDLAND: I really don't know, all I can say is that by the time I had got there, Enders had left post, he had been recalled to preside over a promotion panel, and he was gone for the entire time that I was there. He may have mentioned it, and I think that he probably did mention it, we did have inspectors come out in June, and Leonhart was yanked out of there, approximately 2 or 3 weeks later. A week before the visit of Marshall Tito to the US, Mac Toon was sent in immediately, and Mac Toon accompanied him. I don't know how long Leonhart was there before, I mean his claim to fame was that he predicted as a junior officer in 1948, and put on paper, with his signature that Tito and Stalin would fallout, and that Tito would leave the Soviet Bloc. The fact that he did turn out right, made his fortune in the foreign service. He must have been there close to two years.
Q: In this uncomfortable situation, how did they use you?
FRIEDLAND: They used me as the junior of a three man political section, with Mudd as a political counselor, Byron Ward as a political officer, and me being a junior political officer, although by this point, I was a class four officer. I wasn't aware that this was a class six position, because I wasn't told.
Q: I was chief of the counselor's section, I would get a young officer, first tour usually, maybe second, have a year with me, and a year with the political section.
FRIEDLAND: Exactly, and that's what ultimately happened. I was used to do routine political stuff, a party meeting, etc. I was introduced around, I'd made foreign office contacts, journalist contacts, I proposed to go out, I checked the files, and no one in the political section had gone out since Skopje in '63. So I proposed to make a tour of the capitals of the republics in our district. Which meant Sarajevo, and Skopje, Titograd was a bit out of the way, so I did that at a different time. So I went, and I met the Prime Minister of the Republic of Bosnia, and I became a good friend of his staff aide, and I got the Chef de Cabinet one of these leader grants, and ultimately, the Prime Minister became the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, and very tragically was killed in an airplane crash, along with his Chef de Cabinet. This happened a number of years later. I was the first one to do this in years, and I sent in all of the reporting on this. All things considered, things went well until my efficiency report came, I was told I was doing a good job, making all of the right contacts, and I was blasted. It was reviewed by the Ambassador, and Leonhart got Enders transferred out after he did his promotion board presiding, he was told to come back to Belgrade to clean out his house, was given an hour to come to the Embassy and clean out his desk and files. He gave a goodbye party as his house, and left, and nobody ever saw him again.
Q: He went to Cambodia.
FRIEDLAND: Exactly, and that was it for Tom Enders. We got a new DCM, Johnson, but he didn't come in until April or May, or something of that nature. Mudd wrote my efficiency report and the Ambassador reviewed it, and it was terrible, and I had never gotten a bad report. I told him, I was flabbergasted, If you thought that I was doing such a terrible job, why didn't you say so? Well he said, I intimated, obviously you have never served in an Embassy before, you don't know what stuff is like here, so here I was, and back in those days, there were no dissent channels, this was '70, '71. What could I do? I wrote that I thought that I did a better job than Mr. Mudd suggested in the report, and I am sorry that I committed errors, this sort of thing. The Ambassador said that these matters had been fully discussed with Mr. Friedland, he was aware of his shortcomings, and I suggest that he make greater effort to improve, signed by him. So in June we get the inspectors, the inspector that inspected the political section, was either an A-100 buddy or a buddy of Leonhart, and he used the efficiency report written by Mudd as his report on me. What particularly galled me when I saw it later was that either Leonhart or Mudd had told me to schedule a reception for the inspectors, and so we did, and the inspector, I found out later criticized something on the reception, can't remember what it was, didn't like the food, or something, but I got criticized for that. One thing turned out though, and they criticized the Embassy for misusing me, in putting a Class 4 officer in a Class 6 position, they had a Class 5 officer as head of the consulate, which was either a 5 or 4 position, so I was a 4 at this point, and there was a five in it, and they decided to switch the two of us. I went down to become head of the Consular section, and the Consul went up to take my political job. I spent the second year in that position, and it was a whole different thing.
Q: I thought it was the best job in the Foreign Service.
FRIEDLAND: It was a fantastic job. We had marvelous local help, by and large, and second of all, this was the first time that I was the chief of anything and it was wonderful managerial experience, I had two vice-consuls working for me, an American secretary, besides the local staff, our own section of the Embassy. I was part of the country team, and went into the country team meetings, every week. And Leonhart was on his way out, Toon was on his way in, Toon was just a whole different thing, this guy was really fascinating to work for. I reported to the DCM, Dick Johnson, who was just a very nice, efficient, good manager, a nice guy, and as nice a boss as you could ever want. After I retired, I bumped into him, and he wrote me a marvelous report, and the report that I got from Mudd put me in the lower 5% and I was given notice that I had to improve or I was going to be out on my ass which was devastating, especially after 3 promotions in 5 years, and then suddenly to be put in the bottom 5, I had never been in a position like that and I didn't know how to cope.
Q: In the Consular's section, what were the visa pressures or protection of welfare problems?
FRIEDLAND: The way we did it, I had to have that tour in Toronto, so I was familiar with Consular work. I had the two vice-consuls do all the visa stuff, and I handled the welfare. We had Mr. Montage, who was there for 20 or 30 years, and he was a great assistant in dealing with local police. We had kids killed in accidents in Bosnia, stuff like that, it wasn't just Zagreb that had a lot of welfare protection stuff, we had stuff too. I remember Montenegro, we had a women who lost her husband, keeled over and died, in someplace in Montenegro, and I had to come get her, put her on the plane with her husband's coffin. It was fascinating. I did a social security trip through Bosnia and Montenegro, I went to some of these little towns, Zenica, Zvornik with these pensioners to see if they were still alive, through the whole consular district, and Johnson gave me a super report. I still did not get another promotion for ten years until 1980. It didn't do me in, within that year.
Q: Malcolm Toon is one of the major figures in the period as far as being an Ambassador, how did he operate from your perspective? Being in an Eastern European post at the time?
FRIEDLAND: This guy was considered a god by everybody at the Embassy, nobody ever second guessed him and Mudd was a sycophant, he could get along with Leonhart, he could get along very easily with Toon, because he never gave his boss any trouble. So there was no problem there, and he was very good, and he dealt with Tito, man to man, There were no go-betweens, his first or second week, he flew with Tito to a State Visit. I didn't mention, we got Nixon on a Presidential visit the year before Tito was paying back a Nixon visit, which was really something to get involved in.
Q: What was your impression of how the Nixon visit went?
FRIEDLAND: I think it went very well. What was particularly sort of awesome was the resources. The cost to the American taxpayer, the way these things were going on. The high tech stuff, the advance parties, backup limos, I had never seen anything quite like this before. We went around with the backup team, we had these communications facilities where we could be sitting in a conference room in he Embassy and talking to the advance team in Washington like we are talking now, this was 1970, just putting through a phone call back in those days was amazing. Then the first team came out and we were assigned our different events, and my event was the arrival of the President at the Royal Palace, which Tito used as a reception area for Heads of State, the White Palace.
I was given a part and I was also given the dinner that Nixon was hosting for Tito, and I was advised by a member of the advance team that every morsel of food was prepared in the White House kitchen and flown over in a US Government jet that consisted of the dinner and the Strolling Strings who would play at the dinner. The Strolling Strings being a Nixon specialty, and would stroll through the dining room while they ate. I never participated in something of this magnitude before. Kissinger was of course the head of the NSC at the time, and Rogers was Secretary of State, a cast of close to a hundred, and it was simply amazing, and I took my advance team counterpart to the Palace for a march through, where the President would enter, and had to present these scenarios. 'The limousine will pull up to the doorway, you will enter, turn right where you will be met by Chief of Protocol, etc. You will be seated next to so and so, who is the minister of whatever.' This is what you sort of think of when you serve at an Embassy. Here I had been in the Foreign Service for 12 years at this point.
Q: I have never had one!
FRIEDLAND: It went well, and of course there had to be a return visit, so the fall '71 was set, and was the immediate precipitation for the recall of Ambassador Leonhart.Toon has served in the Soviet Union, Poland and in Czechoslovakia, he had known all of the Slavic languages, but was trying to keep up his Russian, and he had a country team meeting to report on his visit to Tito, and this was another thing that he did, and he was so good at it, he'd see Tito, or something important, he would call a country team meeting and immediately report it to all the heads of section. How does this seem compared to what you've been hearing Mr. Economic Counselor, Tito told me this, what have your contacts been telling you, is he bullshitting me or what? He called us in the first time after his return, and he said that Tito is fluent in Russian, he spent five years in Russia, his wife was Russian, and I'm fluent in Russian, so we spoke Russian. Here we were, the two of us together on a flight from Washington, to Houston, NASA, and he said, “Mr. Ambassador, we get along very well, in Russian, you are the US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, my native language is Serbo-Croatian, you really ought to learn Serbo-Croatian.” And he said, “Look, I am a Sovietist, I served in Eastern Europe, and one thing I have learned serving in Moscow, Warsaw and Prague is that you begin mixing up the languages, and pretty soon, you are speaking petty-slav, you lose your edge in any one of these languages, having had this problem already in Polish and Czech, I was convinced that I was not going to learn Serbian to further mess up my Russian”. And then he said to us that Tito told me that I had better learn Serbian and I'll expect to be here another two years at least, so I'd better learn Serbian, so he started taking lessons. But I know how he feels
Q: I have taken both Russian and Serbian, and I can't, now that I've been away from it for so long, that they move together.
FRIEDLAND: When I came back, I was tested at 4/4 in Serbian, I was really pretty good at it, then, I went 8 years without ever have spoken a word, and then in 1980, I spent a week in Skopje, on a US delegation in a Science Committee, and it was terrible. I was not understood by the people in hotels, restaurants, street, whatever, I tried, however, my boss, who had served in Warsaw and was very fluent in Polish was getting by with his Polish. He said he was using his petty slav, he had also had some Czech or something along the way, and I hadn't had another Slavic language.
Toon did ultimately learned Serbian and whether it damaged his Russian somewhere along the way, I don't know. Such a pro.
Q: How was the Vietnam War playing that you were picking up there? We were beginning to pull out, but we were doing a lot of nasty stuff, bombing and all of that.
FRIEDLAND: It was not a big thing. The Yugoslavs were pro-Hanoi. We'd bomb Haiphong harbor and they would enter routine protests. They would make routine statements at various meetings that others made, but there was no pressure, no demonstrations that I recall, very small part of our overall relations. They were pretty cool about it.
Q: You left Belgrade in 1972, the summer of '72,
FRIEDLAND: I had gotten an assignment. My old bureau, International Organization had asked for me back, this time to take over a different agency, a set of agencies, and I accepted that, and returned to Washington to assume a position as the desk officer for Communications agencies, there were two, one was the International Telecommunications Union, and the other was the Universal Postal Union. We were members of the board on both of those organizations, so I did pretty much for those what I did when I was the Desk Officer for the International....
Q: This was '72-'75?
FRIEDLAND: Yes.
Q: What were the major issues we dealt with, because these were things that seemed to work.
FRIEDLAND: First of all, these were, from what I found, among the most interesting of the UN agencies, because both of them pre-date the UN and the League of Nations, 19th Century organizations. They were the first of the Universal Agencies with the ITU, which was initially set up to control telegraph services, something like 1869, and it antedates the UN, quite a number of things were very different with other U.N. agencies, if you compare the two. One of them being that it did not have a charter, it had which wrote a charter that would only be in force until the next conference. It was a practical agency, it controlled, the ITU, the frequency bands and it worked through technical conferences, this even more so than the IAEA.
I dealt very closely with the EB, Economic Bureau, which had a telecommunications office, which did nothing but ITU, because this had great practical impact on the commercial broadcasting industry, television, telephone, it was a mechanism through which telephone rates were set. The same in the case of the Universal Postal Union, what would we charge X country for handling its mail to the United States? What would we pay them for handling our mail in their country, although shortly after Iraq, I served in Geneva in the mission, from '75-'78, and shortly after, my arrival there, we went off the board of directors, antedating the UN, League of Nation's system, the UPU had a requirement that the total rotation, well in the UN system, there are a number of permanent seats, and in virtually every other UN organization, we are on the quorum membership of the governing body, always on the board. On the UPU, we were not always on the board, maybe 10 years out of every 15, we had to rotate, and this was the period which we were off, which made the job a little more interesting, in a way, because, I had to keep up with what was going on by allies that were on the board, the UK, or Germany, or France or whatever, but it was basically the UK. When there was a board meeting, which there was three times a year, I would get my instructions from Washington, and then my British co-chairman of a Western contact group, basically a G-7, have to try to make our point.
Q: The period from '72 -'78, because we were both in Washington and Geneva, essentially dealing with the same matters, what were the major issues or concerns?
FRIEDLAND: It was a pretty benign time, we were getting out of Indochina, and it was not a major concern, China had gotten into the UN, I think in '72, our major concerns, up until the time China and East Germany got into the UN system was keeping them out, and those were the basic political issues, and keeping extraneous political issues outside the UN.
Q: Were you under pressure fighting with the Soviets over frequencies for political purposes rather than commercial purposes?
FRIEDLAND: Not really. ITU was one of the only organizations that allowed membership by companies, so there would be a frequency conference and the US delegation would have members in the industry there, RCA, General Electric, and happily, this was good because it gave us a very nice way of handling receptions during general conferences, because we would get money. Whereas, if we'd go to AT&T an. One thing we had to do is get hold of this because we had a large potential for wild cannons.
We had to try and keep close control of these delegations, which would sometimes be hated by businessmen, and some of these guys were totally out of favor with US policies, a major part of the job. I was often put into the middleman situation because the delegation would consist basically of government people, regulators, and the representatives of the industries that they regulate, there was a lot of static and tension, but I was a political person, but I was not a communications person, so I was in the position where both sides trusted me. Although it got to the point where I was having trouble with my boss, Carl Gripp, a political officer and my associate for one year was Mike, the fellow who was US consul General in the Congo during the riots and he had people killed. Mike Hoyt. Boy, just to talk to him just about the Congo. He was my colleague and I was told that the two communications agencies were mine, I would be the IO rep at meetings and all of this. Gripp would take the Transportation Agency, a KO in Montreal, and INCO maritime organization. So, we would handle our own agencies and he would monitor, but I would be the US rep at the conferences. Cliff was a consummate bureaucrat. He was the head of a two-man office. So the first thing he started doing once we came on board — we came on at the same time — was establish a third position. What he planned to do was have the new person take charge of the maritime and transportation agencies, and then he would do the conference representation, whatever — only he didn't put it to me that way. He said that he would take over the maritime and the transportation agencies. In other words, he'd go to the conferences but the 3rd person would do all the scut work, writing the position papers, the Congressional budget presentations and whatever. Once he got the third person, and it was Mike Hoyt, and Mike Hoyt was amenable to this. But then I was told after Hoyt came on that, Friedland, you won't be going to any meetings any more. You'll be doing the papers and I'll be going to the meetings. I said, But that's not the way my job description. This was with one year to go, the third year of a three year tour. I said, I'm sorry, I can't agree, and if you want, I'll go to the Desk. He said, Well, it's not necessary.
Q: The Deputy Assistant Secretary...
FRIEDLAND: He said, If you feel you have to do that, do it. I did it. And my job description was unchanged. There were further ramifications to this because I had been scheduled to go to Geneva on my next assignment to replace the person in the Embassy who was responsible for these two organizations, which was at that time known as the Telecommunications Attach�. It was interesting that Gr _, my boss, was in the running to go to Geneva as the Political Counselor, although there was some talk of abolishing the job because the main thing the Political counselor did in Geneva was to keep China and Eat Germany out of all these various international organizations. Then we recognized them. So there wasn't all that much for the Political Counselor to do.
But at any rate, Gthen left me alone for my last year. I did the same thing I had done for the two previous years, and then ultimately did go to Geneva to take that position. Ultimately, Gwent to Geneva, too. Couldn't keep busy. Wasn't enough to do. He left me alone but he started going after — they had an officer there that was the person on the spot responsible, the resident US rep to these various organizations, because there's quite a few of them — the ILO, WHO — fairly meaty UN organizations there, and we had an attach� to perform duties for most of these organizations. One thing I remember, looking ahead, is that Gr tried to — he claimed political reporting duties for the specialized agencies, for all of them, and insisted on attending meetings, on his own reports. He had tried to do this without consulting the resident reps themselves. And one day the representative to the World Health Organization, who's a HEW person, former Marine, caught him trying to back-channel some message about his agency. When Gr came into his office to explain, this ex-Marine colonel said, I don't want to see you around WHO, I don't want to see you mention WHO in anything you send out of this mission, I don't want to see you in my office any more. And with that, he got up, grabbed the guy by the scruff of his neck and the back of his pants, and threw him out of his office. At any rate, those were very good times, really, to be both the Desk Officer and the rep in Geneva.
Q: You left in '78 and you went where?
FRIEDLAND: Back to Washington again. After Yugoslavia was washed out. At this point, there was a career decision that had to be made, and possibly was made badly. Let me mention another problem we had. At this point, and this was a problem that all of the residents had — one other thing, during this time, we had a change of Administration while I was in Geneva. Carter was elected in '76, and we had political ambassadors in Geneva, and this led to three ambassadors in a three-year period, two Republicans and one Democrat. Another thing it indicated to me was a creeping politicization of lower-level Washington jobs. Once Carter came in, my desk officer, a Class 4 position, was assigned to a political appointee who was a black woman. She knew beans about the UN, and she had evidently majored in Foreign Affairs as an undergraduate and she liked foreign affairs. Her mentor was put into a fairly powerful position in the White House — she was a graduate student, as I recall, and they called her up and said, I don't have anything in the White House for you, but what would you like in the new Administration.
And the next thing she knew, or I knew, I got a call from the Department, high up, that they were taking this woman on and she was going to be my desk officer. Well, she went to the conferences. As far as my instructions went, I assume her boss, who was Gr 's successor, had a part to play in that, or that most of the tasks went to the Economics Bureau, just bypassed. Then, she went elsewhere after one year and she was succeeded by the worst FSO, the most poorly qualified FSO I have ever come across in thirty-plus years in the business. He was terrible. He would write my instructions — particularly in a UPU situation, it was important because in the case of the IGU it had to go through various clearance procedures, and there was oversight, so that nothing egregious came off.But mistaken information might come — I couldn't always rely on their statistics — that might be off a little bit, but it was particularly important in thbecause we were not on the Council, we had to co-chair an allies meeting with the Brits, and the Brits send over a person from London, a Foreign Officer person, because they could hop on a plane and be there in an hour or two. And that person was very well versed, a career person in the Foreign Office who had handled thfor years. I had to rely on information, on instructions that came from the Department. Now, you can send stuff in and suggest that my instructions tell me to do this. But you get a dodo that can't read or can't absorb — I would get instructions that were totally different, that were wrong. That was the worst thing. I'd be given facts and the facts were wrong, and the person who sat next to me, the Brit, had those facts right down cold — you know — that was very uncomfortable. Interestingly, I made my views known, both to his superior and to the Inspector, and this guy ultimately was sent to the only US observation post north of the Arctic Circle. Did you know we had a job at NATO — there's a US Political Advisor position at a NATO base in Norway, north of the Arctic Circle, which is reserved for folks like that.
Q: Oh, God!
FRIEDLAND: The guy was incompetent, totally incompetent. And at one point the Department sent him — he would go to a delegate and reveal fall-back positions — can you imagine!
Q: He'd go to a non-American and tell them...if we don't win this one, we'll ask for this.
FRIEDLAND: Or, on another occasion — he only came to one conference while I was there, because after it was over, I called back and said, I don't want this guy on any US delegation. Within a one-week conference he did that, and then with the Soviet delegate, he gave him his views on slave labor in the Soviet Union.
Q: Yes.
FRIEDLAND: I mean, Jesus Christ! This fellow had no concept of what that was...I didn't say anything that wasn't true. This is what I got! Another thing is that, one of my major jobs as the US Resident Rep was to get Americans in Secretariat positions, “qualified” Americans for positions. There was, after the Second World War, some sort of vague formula which corresponded to one's contribution to the organization, so if your contribution was 10%, you had maybe 10% of the jobs. Thing is, after the mid-60s, all sorts of newly independent countries were coming in and a separate .0001% was set up for these countries so they would pay something, but of course they all wanted jobs. And when you are paying .000011% of the budget, that doesn't entitle you to many jobs. So someone who is paying 10% of the budget isn't going to get 10% of the jobs. So every job was important to them. What I found was that agencies or companies — in one case the State Department — was trying to dump people. You have a personnel problem, you can't can them, it's pretty hard to transfer them because he's getting to be known as a difficult person — ahah! Geneva! Once he's there, they forget about him.
We got a series of personnel disasters, people who were sent off to Geneva to work on the Secretariats of international organizations for just those purposes. And what was facing me when I got there was that the twenty-year Deputy Director General for Administration, an American, was retiring. And Washington set a very great store on replacing him with an American. We can't get Director -General, but if we have to settle for second-best, the Deputy Director for Administration knows everything, knows where all the money is buried, all the skeletons — this guy was very good, really quite an international civil servant. We wanted to succeed him, so who was the person we sent to succeed him? A personnel problem. So I go to the Secretary-General and say, Hey, we've got a really neat candidate! Hah! I know about your neat candidates. You really sent us a great one last time!
And then what happens, I finally had to get the guy out, and I had to pressure the Department to either find him another job in Washington or get his agency to take him back, which they didn't want to do. A lot of time was spent on that kind of thing. Then, of course, other countries sent candidates — this is my particular situation in the IGU, but almost all the other international organizations worked that way, with these nationality questions and governments providing candidates for positions. For senior positions, you've got to really present good people — not somebody's brother-in-law or a personnel problem. So what the Department started doing then was sending these six different candidates. Why six? Let them make the decision, because Britain has one candidate, the Germans have one candidate, the Chinese have one candidate — you don't leave that decision to the Secretariat. You make the decision which is the best one. Then I will go with and make the pitch for our one super candidate.
One of the candidates was a senior State Department official — one step before retirement, you know, get himself a cushy UN job. That kind of thing. No United Nations experience. Did not have French. I went over the list and said, Hey, this guy who happened to be Admin Counselor in Tehran: #1, he's bilingual in French; #2, he's had a UN assignment, knows the system. Let's nominate that guy. Well, they let me do their job for them of choosing the candidate. I went with him and I got him for that position. A French Canadian — three generations in New England. Totally bilingual in French. And he was as American as apple pie. Totally at home in a French culture. He was absolutely great.
Q: Then you went to the Canadian Desk, '78 to '80?
FRIEDLAND: What happened is that I was offered a job as the Environmental Trans-Boundary Pollution Officer in the Canadian Desk which is a five-person operation. There was the Director, Deputy Director, Economics Officer, and one was the Trans-Boundary Environmental stuff. They offered me the job, having served in Canada, having Canadian-born spouse. So I took it. About a month before I was to leave, I got a call from Personnel. The person that they had selected as Consul General in Zagreb had just gone out of the picture, and would I be interested. Well! Yes, I'd be very interested. Only one problem. We had two kids, one was just starting high school and one was in the sixth grade. So, given the school situation in Zagreb, that meant our oldest child would have had to spend her high school years at a boarding school someplace, and in Zagreb there was an “international school” that was run by three elderly British ladies married to Yugoslavs, and that went up to eighth grade. My wife is a certified high school teacher and she was not about to have our kids in that. She said, If you want to go you go, but the kids and I go back to Washington.
Q: So you went to the Canadian Desk?
FRIEDLAND: I turned down the Zagreb offer. The Canadian Desk was as active a job as I had ever had. Constantly on the go. Environmental affairs were developing into the great — as much of a major item in US-Canadian relations as anything that we had ever had.
Q: Was this a real issue or was it a way the Canadians were looking to beat us on the head?
FRIEDLAND: Exactly. You know about Canadian affairs., obviously.
Q: I pick up a lot, but Canadians are probably the toughest negotiators, and they love to stick it ...
FRIEDLAND: You have to remember, Americans take Canada for granted. It's up there, they're nice people, they drive the same cars we do, their towns look like ours, they smoke different cigarettes but they eat hamburgers...whereas, as far as Canada is concerned, the US is the greatest factor in Canadian life. You have got to live with everything Uncle Sam does. But Uncle Sam ignores you. So, as a matter of fact, my first week or two, when I got to that desk in July and I started the day I got back — there was no leave. I arrived in Washington on Saturday night, I was told to be at National Airport noon Sunday and you will meet a man with a red beard, and he was a tall man and his beard was as red as they come, and I found myself — the day before I was in Geneva, the next evening I was talking to my in-laws in Toronto, and that was on the way out to Regina, Saskatchewan. I spent the next week — it was that kind of thing.
Basically, our relations with Canada on environmental affairs were very curious in that it was the US, believe it or not, that was trying to get some action while it was the Canadians who were polluting their own atmosphere like crazy, and a lot of it was coming across the border hitting us. By this point, 1978, we had very strict emission controls, from factories, power plants, whatever. And indeed, any new coal-burning facility built in the US after 1972 had to have a scrubber to take most of the crap out of the air. Canada had no controls, no enforceable control. There was not one scrubber in all of Canada, but yet, the Canadians could yell at us and get the sympathy of their own population, and we wouldn't even yell back because nobody at any senior level was interested in this. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys, and they were beating us over the head and we weren't answering. It was very frustrating.
In Canada, most Americans, most FS officers are not aware, that the Federal government has much less power and control over daily life than the provinces. The province in many ways still ranks supreme in Canada. Here again, we were walking on eggs. In the US, anything that goes over a state line is a Federal responsibility. We have the EPA, we have this, that and the other thing. States have their own environmental offices — they have different laws, but anything that crosses a state line in the US is a Federal responsibility. So there is a site in the US government where there is responsibility for this stuff.
In Canada, virtually everything, particularly then, everything was fought over. We go only go with the facts. So that any time we asked them, for example — 95% of the Canadian population lives within a hundred miles of the US border — any time they set up a power plant, it perchance has to be, not always, within a hundred miles of the border. So that anything that might fall on their people will fall on our people, too. At that point, and as far as I know still, what actually comes out of the stack, regulating it, is actually the responsibility of the Parliament. So we could go to the Feds and say, Hey, Saskatchewan is building this new power plant two miles north of the US border and there's no scrubber. Well — we'll have to check with the province — our mandate doesn't carry to this. All right, well, we want to talk to the province. No, no, you can't talk to the province, you can talk to us. Okay, how about we talk to the province with you there, the three of us all sitting around a table?
That was my very first meeting, in July of '78, to fly to the Province of Saskatchewan, Regina, and find out what the hell they would do. Also, in Canada, there was no Freedom of Information Act, there was no Bill of Rights, there was no public hearing procedure, so we learned in Regina that Saskatchewan Power was just going ahead, building this huge — in the US they don't come this big — huge power plant because it's right on a sea of soft coal. The thing is, the way the border is drawn out there, their major population centers are a hundred miles north of the border. The plant is two miles north of the border. You have a normal prevailing north-easterly wind. So that stuff will pour across on North Dakota and their people are safely sitting north of that and won't get any. So because they won't get any, they figure, why hold a public hearing? We had this happen all the time.
Q: You were there for two years. Were you able to get any response?
FRIEDLAND: Oh, we had meetings galore. We had the Governor of Montana there. We were not able to get anything until after I left, when Canada proclaimed some country-wide controls. But during the whole two years — unh-unh. Then, the way we came out on the Canadian side was that Uncle Sam is trying to bully us, when, in fact, every generating device before 1972 was close to the border, how can they dictate that, when in fact, we had controls since '72, tightly-controlled, and they had no controls. Of course, we could have made the point, but there's a couple of things — when you spend enough time on Canadian things, you get to know that the more you know, the more different the two countries are. One thing that you might think is that Canada has a decent press. Canada has a terrible press. The public daily newspapers are a disgrace.
First of all, the only good people are Brits. Number two, they are press agents for their government. Anything American that does not meet their preconception, does not get — Ontario Hydro was putting up the largest coal-fired power plant in the Western Hemisphere on the shore of Lake Erie, due north of Erie, Pennsylvania — forty miles from Buffalo — this was to be completed in 1982. Not one scrubber, burn soft coal from Pennsylvania. It turns out that Ontario Hydro owned huge chunks of coal mines in Pennsylvania, and simply puts it on boats and ships it up across to Ontario. I called in a number of newspaper people and said, Hey, what about this? You guys want to hear your major utility is going to put up a power plant, the biggest the Western Hemisphere, with no pollution controls. Not a word ever appeared in any Canadian paper. Not a word.
That's the nature of the press. One time, they were so worried about that at the Embassy. I was up for a conference and they scheduled a backgrounder for me to give to the Ottawa correspondents of the Canadian press, the national press, and they had released a report about a week before which contained all sorts of erroneous stuff, so I was there to correct the erroneous stuff. So I gave a backgrounder — one paper carried it.
The paper broke the backgrounder rules by saying 'a State Department official who was in Ottawa for a conference' — I was the only State Department official who was in Ottawa for a conference, it had to be me, which is not the way a backgrounder is supposed to be. Then it took my statements and interposed them with stuff in the Canadian paper which gave the impression in certain cases that I agreed with what the Canadians said against what was thought to be our policy. And then, on other issues, misquoted, said I had said X when I didn't say X — I said something else. At any rate, that put such a gloss on things that the Foreign Office called the Canadian Embassy here and asked them to call the State Department and have me reprimanded because of the backgrounder that I gave. My boss called back the Canadian Embassy and told them to go to hell, he's obviously been misquoted, we've got his statement here if you'd like it, want to publicize it, we'd be happy to give it out.
Then, Canadian politicians routinely bat us over the head any time they are having trouble internally. During this point, the biggest problem we had was with Ontario. Ontario had a Conservative government that was being threatened by Liberals, and therefore, they would blame us for thing that the Liberals were after — there was an upcoming election. The Liberals would say, Under the Conservative government, we've got very weak pollution controls. The Conservative government would respond by saying, Well, our pollution controls are probably the best we can get by spending what we can spend, but the US is much worse, and they go on after Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is polluting the hell out of us... . Most of which was not true.
We had another problem in that Canadians are Canadians. American scientists are scientists. So we would get a scientific delegation together and we'd be, say, arguing the relative pollution of City X in Canada vs. City Y across the river in the US. The Americans would have our position papers, they would know what our positions were, they would know our fall-back positions — if we can't get this, we can at least try to settle for that. Canadians were invariably Canadian government employees, most of ours were — some were contractors — in Canada they were all government employees, they were all briefed to a fare-thee-well on their government's position, they were given all sorts of pep talks, whatever — you are Canadians, Americans are out to get us, anything you can learn about what they plan to bring up at the meeting, please let the Foreign Office know. Well, our Americans, scientists, would go out for drinks, dinner with Canadian scientists, and they would blab everything away. They had no feeling of being Americans vs. foreigners in a bilateral negotiation. I would talk to them, whoever may have headed up the delegation would talk to them, but it was very difficult because they knew everything. I was one man on the five-man Canadian desk which handling Canadian affairs. My counterpart in Ottawa was an office director with a staff of four officers under him. We had these bilateral meetings, and they are prepared with briefing books and all that sort of thing that we simply couldn't match. This was a very difficult situation. It was fascinating. It was totally fascinating.
Q: Why don't we stop at this point, I think. One more session should finish this up.
* * *
Continued on July 9, 1993
Q: The last time, we left the Canadian Desk and environmental issues. I've got you '80-'82 going to OES, the Office of ...
FRIEDLAND: The Office of Oceans, Environment and Science.
Q: You were dealing with science exchanges.
FRIEDLAND: Yes, indeed. I was responsible for all of our European science exchange programs except for the Soviet Union which was handled by another person, and Spain, which interestingly was handled with Latin America. Our two big ones were Poland and Yugoslavia.
Q: This is '80-'82. You cover the Reagan transfer. We'll talk about what you were doing, but how did the arrival in '81 of the Reagan team, which at that time was vehemently anti-Communist and all, hit you — or were Yugoslavia and Poland considered good things?
FRIEDLAND: No. It hit us like a ton of bricks. Immediately prior to the coming into power of the Reagan regime, this bureau was being transformed by Tom Pickering who had just come in, maybe in '79, as the new Assistant Secretary, and Tom was gathering friends and colleagues from his entire previous Foreign Service career in order to thoroughly professionalize the bureau which had for many years been thought of as, #1, a dumping ground for defeated politicians of whatever previous administration, and #2, of scientists who were out of favor with their original agencies and were sent over to the State Department in exile.
What Pickering was doing was gathering people from all over the government that he had worked with during his previous assignments, so I was brought into the bureau by Pierre Chastal who happened to be the Office Director who was aware of my Eastern European experience, my prior science experience in the international organization bureau, and I joined it and it looked like this bureau was really going places. Then came the change of administration. Pickering was taken out of there, made Ambassador to - possibly El Salvador, I can't remember — but at any rate he was ousted or kicked upstairs in order to make room for a new Assistant Secretary plus a Deputy Assistant Secretary.
Now, the Deputy Assistant Secretary under Pickering was a senior government official — Norm Terrell — from NASA or something like that, but he had started out as a FSO and gone over to GS — his family didn't want to live abroad any more, whatever. But he had a firm grounding in foreign affairs, FS, the whole bit. His place was taken by a politician, a Republican politician who had gotten the job only because he was husband of a woman that the Reagan Administration had put in charge of OPM, Connie Horner. This guy's name was Charles Horner, who was out Deputy Assistant Secretary. Charles Horner was a young fellow like about 35. He was “a Jackson Democrat” when means he was a neo-sort of-right wing Democrat...
Q: You're talking about Scoop Jackson of Washington state...ardently opposed to the Soviet Union and strongly pro-Israel
FRIEDLAND: Exactly. At any rate, Horner, as far as we could figure out, had worked only as a Hill staffer. He had never done any other sort of work. He was totally unfamiliar with the science policies and we had to reinvent the wheel as far as he was concerned. One of the big problems, of course, was with Yugoslavia, because he had no real concept of Yugoslavia as a non-Warsaw Pact country. They were Commies like the rest of them were Commies.
As a result, the second half of my two-year assignment on this job was primarily to get get stuff past Horner. We were running these two programs — one, the Polish program was $5,000,000 a year, and with PL 480 money — agricultural surplus, sales in local currency during the '50s and '60s, and both Yugoslavia and Poland — in both countries we had fairly large amounts of this local currency still remaining, and we had many years before decided to spend this money by using it to finance scientific research programs in the two countries. Nonetheless, it still required authorization by Congress. The money was in zlotys or in dinars, but to spend it we had to get a budget to Congress. Of course, when we went in for reauthorizations every year, Horner — the Deputy Assistant Secretary, whoever it might be — had to go up to the Hill to justify. Even though we weren't increasing, we were just reauthorizing. And of course Mr. Horner, given his past history, was extremely reluctant and he had been a recipient of these briefings on the Hill previously, and was aware of what a well-prepared questioner could do to a non-terribly-well prepared or assured presenter. At any rate, I spent incredible amounts of time briefing him before his appearances on the Hill. I think he was asked one or two questions.
Q: This had become so routine by that time.
FRIEDLAND: Exactly.
Q: Going back, as far as you saw, how did Tom Pickering view these various exchanges that you were charged with.
FRIEDLAND: He was very much in favor of them, expansion if possible. He was very much of a positive actor on these things. The entire scientific program — he was a master of all the bureaucratic techniques involved in these things, and he was able to increase the size of the bureau, the power of the bureau. Remember, this was environment, the big thing was environment and science, and the Carter Administration were big fans. I worked on the environmental part in my previous assignment, so Pickering was moving with great alacrity here, to increase the scientific cooperation, to increase environmental consciousness, — throughout the bureau.
Q: What were the particular programs we were doing in Poland and Yugoslavia?
FRIEDLAND: Basically, what we were doing was scientific research projects. In the United States, a lot of these projects were not doable. One reason was human subjects. None of the agencies in the US were allowed to do experiments on human beings, whereas the scientific communities in both Poland and Yugoslavia were under no such restraints, and of course, given the system, all the hospitals and whatever were state-controlled, and all of this stuff was very easy for them to do and impossible for us.
Q: Wasn't there some sort of oversight, somebody from Congress or someone concerned coming and saying, What are you doing? Or was this sort of slipped under the rug here?
FRIEDLAND: There may have been prior to my watch, but during the two years I spent on this there was no oversight in the sense of the human factor. There was money oversight, and even in the State Department building I had to deal rigorously with the Comptroller's Office, particularly because of this PL 480 usage. There was for a long time an accountant in the Comptroller's Office who did nothing but that and he was very sharp — he retired after 40 years of service just about the same time I transferred out of that office. There was vigorous control monetarily, but subject-wise, it was basically under the control of the participating agencies, of which there were twelve. Twelve US government agencies were involved in this program, including HEW — our biggest customer was NIH, but Agriculture, Energy ...
Q: So you were more or less the filterer, the administrator, and you didn't sit down and say, Gee, I think we ought to do something about tube steel, or something like that?
FRIEDLAND: No. What would happen is that we would meet periodically. The way the actual operations worked is that I, or my boss, would chair a US committee for each of these two programs, and we'd meet several times a year. In each of the countries, Yugoslavia and Poland, there was a corresponding committee. Of course, very much complicated in Yugoslavia by the ethnic concerns.
Q: So you had to make sure that Macedonia and Croatia...
FRIEDLAND: Put it this way, the Yugoslavs had to make sure — every year we met — we met alternate years on the Polish Program, one year in Warsaw and one year in Washington. In Yugoslavia, we met twice a year, once in Washington and in the same year another meeting in Yugoslavia where the sites rotated. In my years, once was in Macedonia, the other was in Sarajevo. The projects generally came from the US side and they would be submitted, worked out because each agency had a certain percentage of the pot — a pragmatic sort of compromise — and the projects came from the US and were executed in Poland or Yugoslavia. There was a lot of back-and-forthing. I would travel overseas with the US delegations, I would head the US delegations, I would speak for them and present the new proposals with scripts drafted by members of the twelve-person delegation.
Q: Could you play a little game of Compare-and-Contrast between the Reagan Administration and — who took Tom Pickering's place, by the way?
FRIEDLAND: I can't remember — a politician. It changed overnight, it was a seismic-type change from actively pursuing environmental cooperation, activism, whatever, you went to the opposite end of the pendulum, and as a result, we were pulling in our horns that whole period. Indeed, this is one reason I left, because at the end of my two-year term, they wanted me to stay on and offered me a better job, but the way things were going during that first year led me to believe that, #1, the bureau was declining in importance and influence, and #2, the subject matter of the bureau was of little and diminishing interest to the Administration.
Q: So you left there in 1982 and moved to —
FRIEDLAND: I moved to the counter-terrorism business.
Q: This was big in the Reagan Era. You were there from '82 to '85.
FRIEDLAND: '82 - '85. May I just say that one of the jobs was in the office, not in my particular branch — mine dealt with the scientific cooperation programs all over the world, and my specific area was Eastern Europe, all of Europe. While I was there we had a visit by the French Science Minister who was a very senior official, young fellow but very senior in the Mitterrand regime — his name was Chevigne. Not only was he in my bailiwick, but there was a French Science Attach� here who was a contact of mine, and the French Desk got involved. We had a fantastic meeting with the French Science Minister who was seen at the highest levels here, and the Science Advisor in the President's Office, which is where I met Ollie North, because that was all in that same wing. Met him for the first time and then got more involved with him.
Let me say, this was one operation. The French do this thing with such class. At the end of the visit, which went very well, and it just happened that I spoke French, which normally the person in that job would not do. The Minister took to lunch the three working-level people — the French Desk Officer, me, our counterpart at the Embassy — not the Science Officer — I was told later on that he ran an three-man, what would you call it...
Q: Intellectual espionage...
FRIEDLAND: Intellectual espionage. Chevigne took three of the worker bees out to lunch at the Cosmos Club. That was just so nicely done. But here the whole idea of scientific cooperation and whatever seemed to have a very low priority with the Reagan Administration.
Just before I left, though, they asked me to stay, and they gave me a trip to Paris. We had a US representative to the OECD in Paris, which is a club of the 27 most industrialized, prosperous countries in the world, and this covered both economic and scientific developments, and also served to assist developing countries with advice, whatever. The Science Bureau had a post at the Mission in Paris whereby there was a US rep at the OES and this office picked that person. They asked me to stay. I would be the person in the bureau in Washington responsible for backstopping that representative, and then when current incumbent left two years hence, I would go over to Paris in that job.
Normally, I would have done it. I love Paris. But I was approaching my twenty years limit and I felt that given the attitude of the Administration and the way it applied to traditional Foreign Service attitudes about promotion and bureau backing, I had no career potential by staying there. But they did send me to Paris for two weeks and it was absolutely marvelous. I happened to be a personal friend of the person who was the US rep and it was just incredible. But, in the mean time, this terrorism had been particularly directed against US diplomats, growing throughout the world during this period. Particularly after 1979 with the US/Iraq/Iran, the hostages — an increasing amount of terrorism directed at US interests but particularly US embassies.
Indeed, this overlapped, because — I had been slated for a job in the International Organization Bureau, as the US rep to UNESCO in Paris, and I went off to collect my daughter from college the week that the assignments board was meeting and I came back to get a little note on my desk saying, We're sorry that assignment washed out. Because Jeane Kirkpatrick, the newly-named US representative to the UN in New York had a staff assistant she wanted to reward, and she convinced the new politician head of IO, International Organization Bureau, to give that job to her staff assistant, rather than to me, an old IO hand. So I did not have an ongoing assignment in May where I was supposed to go in July. So they kept me on at the Science Bureau, and asked me to fill in on this job.
In the mean time, an entry-classmate of mine — we entered the FS together back in '58 — had been given the job of setting up an office that would train foreign officials who were in charge of providing security to US diplomatic installations overseas, in the latest humane efforts to provide protection. Since all of our posts overseas are at the mercy of and are protected by local government authorities. We've got Marines, but the Marines are generally a token force. There's no way a contingent of six Marines is going to protect and American Embassy from a howling mob of ten thousand anti-American demonstrators. It's all got to be done by the local authorities. So my friend, Ed Marks, Ambassador Ed Marks, was appointed to a new position. He had to find a Deputy, get some mid-level FS or GS types, secretarial staff, budget staff, the whole thing. He approached me that summer and I just accepted that job, because there was a huge expansion of the State Department office for combating terrorism, which had been just taken over by Ambassador Bob Sayer who had been last Ambassador to Brazil, and previously Ambassador to a whole string of Latin and Central American countries.
This looked like it might have high visibility, probably improve my possibilities for promotion, so I accepted that job. The catch was that there was no funding for the operation, and it was up to the bureau, or the Office for combating terrorism, to support the State Department's request. The State Department had put into its budget a request for funding for this whole operation, a request for $5,000,000 to start up, with a notification to Congress that as countries are signed up and as we sign up training agencies, the money would increase. But Congress was very positive generally about providing security for our personnel overseas.
I signed up and immediately after, I accompanied my boss to subcommittee hearings for the budget and Congress. What was usual in those days, and is usual today, the budget went into force October 1, but the hearings were still after October 1. The State Department was operating on a continuing resolution, but I was assured that Congress was behind us and it was just a question of this one silly little subcommittee that had to pass on it. The subcommittee chairman was Clarence Long. Well, Clarence Long had a long history with the State Department-AID program Public Safety in Central and Latin America, and he was particularly seized by a case which occurred in 1973, when part of this world-wide public safety program was sending US police officials overseas to assist host governments putting down “Communist” or insurgent operations.
In 1973, there was a program in force in Uruguay to help the government put down the Tupamaro revolutionary movement. We had sent down a policeman from the State of Indiana — God knows why from Indiana or whatever — named Dan Mitrione to assist the government in rooting out these “terrorists.” To make a long story short, Dan was kidnaped by the terrorists, tortured, killed, after about a month, two months, of pretty miserable existence as a hostage.
This set up a reaction in Congress and this was also in the waning days of the Nixon Administration. This reaction in Congress was that US money was being used to finance undemocratic or anti-democratic governments, repressive governments, in putting down — some may be terrorists but others were legitimate opposition. There was a tremendous reaction to this. After the 1976 election, where the Democrats came to power, many of these programs, most of them, were canceled, put out of business. The new Democratic government did not want to be associated with helping repressive regimes with US money and professional advice in putting down opposition movements.
Clarence Long was a veteran of this fight, and Clarence Long was the Chairman of one of the subcommittees that had to pass our appropriation. Clarence Long had been lied to by the State Department on previous occasions — he was always well-ready to document and there was no question about it — and he put the kibosh on the whole thing. He refused to let our appropriation out of his subcommittee, and there we were. The promised appropriation did not appear in the State Department budget. So I had left this job after my trip to Paris for an activity that didn't exist. Here I was.
Of course, the Department was ready to back it up after a year, and so what we spent the next year doing — still, we had money, through reprogramming of other funds to pay my boss's salary, to pay my salary, and we started setting up the office. We hired a real crackerjack budget person. We didn't have a program but we had the office. We started drafting programs. We started contacting prospective participants in foreign governments. All this without Congressional authorization. We did all sorts of interesting things.
To speed things up a bit, a year hence, Clarence Long had been defeated by Helen Bentley in his Baltimore Congressional District and was no longer around. Clement Zablocki who was head of the House Foreign Relations Committee which had to pass on the thing — this was like four weeks before his untimely demise — made this program his and put it through single-handedly. We had never had a problem in the Senate. It was the House. The program was funded. In the meantime, we had the office together, we got the program together, and we immediately started going on.
We divided the work up among my boss, the Director, myself, the Deputy. Basically, he did all foreign trips to line up all the foreign participants. What I did was line up the US trainers. We were able to get the FBI to do the first group, which was Costa Rica. The FBI simply did it as a pilot project — they were not able to give it any sort of long-term commitment. What they did is suggest that we deal with other Federal agencies, such as the Marshall Service, Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms Bureau, but they said the best source in the US at this type of training would not be Federal so much as it would be cities.
For example, if a hostage situation — as far as brute force is concerned, every government can throw troops at it, but how do you deal with a hostage situation — how do you deal with a mob? It's cities in the US that have this responsibility, cities and counties, but it is a local jurisdiction. So, for example, New York City has a marvelous hostage negotiation team, one of the best in the country. They control mobs all the time and they're very good at it, particularly when it comes to protecting foreign missions. They have almost as many foreign missions as Washington...
Q: ...loaded with exile groups...
FRIEDLAND: Exactly. Nobody better. The good thing about our program is that virtually every team back in 1983-1984, virtually every police department was strapped for cash, and here we were with money! We had five million bucks in Federal funds to dole out. Also, we happened to have, I was able to get, a fellow by the name of David Epstein as my assistant. David Epstein was a professional police officer and he was, among other things, formerly Chief of Police in a number of towns, most recent of which was Augusta, Georgia.
One of the main places where Federal law enforcement officials are trained is a place called the Federal Law Enforcement Center in Brunswick, Georgia, and this was a training outfit. Even the state security office sent their new agents for a ten-week training course at FLEC. And FLEC had a long reputation of being very good at this sort of thing, and having good hostage negotiation and whatever. That, of course, a Federal agency, and after the Reagan Administration came in, they threw out the long-time apolitical administrator of FLEC and inserted a Republican political defeated for election, a District Attorney at NYC or something like that.
There were four Deputy Directors at FLEC. One of them was David Epstein. Epstein was responsible for the hostage negotiation. Only he was totally unable to get along personally with the new director, and he was looking for a job. We through our various sources heard about this and we were able to hire him, first on probation. This guy knew virtually every police chief in the United States. He was a senior official in the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which is a very big, nation-wide operation, with international headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. I hired him, and he was our liaison with police officials all through the US. He lined up programs and by the time I left in 1985, there was a really good program — we already had almost forty countries signed up. Twenty of them had already sent classes through.
The procedure was that we, my boss and I, would work up, in cooperation with geographic bureaus and desks, potential client states. Then my boss would be sent over there, appointments made for him to meet with senior official level of the government, propose the program, propose the government get together a senior delegation of security people, diplomats, whatever, maybe an 8-10 person delegation. We would then bring those people to the US. If it was a developing country, we'd pay the whole freight. It would be a two week trip. They'd spend a week in Washington — general anti-terrorism — for senior officials. This was not nuts-and-bolts stuff. Then, the second week, a tour of our training facilities, which we would match up with that country's particular situation.
For example, there was an airline hostage negotiation thing. Most countries had absolutely not the slightest idea of what would happen if a plane was hijacked and sent to their capital. They didn't know what to do. We had particular expertise in this thing. For example, the Tampa airport had a marvelous system that had dealt with Cuban hijackings many times — both to and from — whatever. They were very pleased that we had money to reimburse them. We got a plane, a 20-passenger plane from, I think, the FAA — the Director's plane. When he wasn't using it, we could rent it. With FAA pilots. And they would take us all over the country — did not rely on commercial. So we took one group, I remember, to Chicago. Chicago also has a very good hostage negotiation thing. They've also got quite a few foreign consulates there. They're familiar with all sorts of things like the Armenian problem. They were very hospitable to foreign groups. They were always able to come up with foreign language-speaking officers. We brought an Egyptian delegation — they had Arabic-speaking police officers, hostage negotiators. So we'd fly them out to Chicago, spend a day or two. We'd fly them to the Tampa airport, spend a day or two there.We got the program started, and by and large, it was very good. We got very good feedback from the participants — I don't think there has been an incident, or any sort of major incident, in any of the countries which has participated.
Q: The obvious question is, the events in Lebanon — did they intrude? I can't remember if the TWA hijacking occurred — in Athens, ended up in Lebanon — and American was killed ...
FRIEDLAND: That all happened on my watch.
Q: You had the hostages — getting involved in the negotiations — it was a mess.
FRIEDLAND: It was a mess, but none of the places — I remember there was a spate of them in '84-'85 when I was on duty, but of course we were not that part of the shop that dealt with those happenings. We were the training. There were other operations that did in fact deal directly with the post and, indeed, we often sent people from the office to the post when these things were happening. I got involved as a member of task forces that would be running during these things. But of course, it did heighten the public awareness and it made the Congress and the Department totally amenable to anything we could do in this field.
Q: Because of obvious sensitivities and well-deserved sensitivities, did you find yourself and your office having to monitor very closely to make sure that you weren't getting any — I don't mean in the pejorative term — politically incorrect response on the part of police — well, you get something and bash the hell out of them, and that type of thing?
FRIEDLAND: The thing is, part of our tactics in getting this thing through Congress in the first place — because Clarence Long was not alone — there were other Congressmen and Senators who were there during the old days of the public safety program and one of the main emphases was the assurance that the trainees would be trained in “humane” methods, and we made that a strong priority. We lined up local police forces all over the country. One of the favorites was Los Angeles. As a matter of fact, Los Angeles County. But Los Angeles has, right through the middle of this program, undergone the Olympic Games of 1984, and they had a major anti-terrorism — all sorts of threats and possibilities of violent anti-US activity at the Olympics. Absolutely nothing happened, and a large part of the credit was given to the Los Angeles City and County police. Their training programs were very strongly in demand.
You can't control who they send, other than, we did have, now that I think of it — I left this operation eight years ago and there are some things I've forgotten. On certain occasions, whereby some of the participating countries did want to put people on their delegation who had a reputation for being thugs or brutal beaters and whatever, and we — generally this would be caught by the post, and if the post couldn't talk the host government out of submitting these people, they would submit it with a recommendation, We would not try to single out a person. What we would do is engage the post and say, Discreetly inform your host government that we're not going to approve a delegation which includes X and Y, and if you really want this training, you'll include other people than X and Y. It was a problem on occasion, but generally we did not approach governments that were considered oppressive.
One problem we had during this whole period was Central America — El Salvador, Guatemala, and the reverse side, of course, was Nicaragua which was beyond the pale. But Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras — we ultimately included them, we ultimately gave their people training, after first clearing it informally with Congress. Of course, this was on everybody's mind at this point. Congress had cut off funding for anti-Nicaraguan activities, for pro-Contra activities. The main justification, as far as the State Department was concerned, was that this teaches them humane methods.
If you don't send them through these courses, they just beat the shit out of them, you know. Here we teach them interrogation techniques, humane ways of doing things — they don't know any better than kicking somebody in the balls. We also combined it, in the Central American case, with judicial help. Most of these countries evidently had courts that were just totally beholden to the governments, totally not independent. And one reason they were not independent was because, although in their constitutions they're supposed to be independent, but they never had been other than dependent. So we had this legal program — justice — we didn't operate that, it was run by the legal advisor's office, I believe. But training them how to establish independent legal systems, this sort of thing. To the extent that they work, I really don't know. We didn't start in that area until after I left.
Q: You left in 1985 and to '88 you were the Board of Examiners? What were you doing?
FRIEDLAND: I was administering the oral examination to candidates for FSO positions that had successfully passed the written examination. That was basis, and I did that for the entire period. I also spent a one-year stint as administrator of the State Department Affirmative Action mid-level hiring program. I also recruited at college campuses — maybe three dozen different college campuses all across the country.
Q: Let me ask you a couple of sort of general questions. What was your impression of the oral examination? This thing keeps changing — in '85-'88, how was it run and what was your impression of it and the candidates?
FRIEDLAND: Basically, the system had been in place since 1978, and it was a different system than most of us had come in under. Back in the old days, there was a panel of three FSOs. After you passed the written, they grilled you for about an hour, and then they would tell you on the spot whether you had passed or flunked, and generally set the date that they expected to offer you a job. In 1978, as a result of various complaints, the examination was totally reformulated. It was an all-day affair, the candidates were processed in batches of six or so, for a whole day.The new procedure, first of all, gave the examiners — there were four rather than three — an opportunity to view the candidates with English comprehension, drafting ability, all this kind of thing, which you were simply not able to test under the old system. There were two written exercises. There were something like six or seven exercises during the course of the day. At one point, there were two examiners on one candidate, oral exam proper which lasted an hour. At another point, there were two exercises that involved the candidate being part of a group, a country team, we called it. This was to satisfy the complaint under the old examination that you had no ability to see how this person could work in a group.
As a result, we were getting people that simply couldn't function in a group, prima donnas and all this kind of thing. So there had to be an exercise to be able to sort of gauge a person's reaction to being part of a group. I think, in the way it was done, it worked out quite well. Indeed, we were able in a number of cases to weed out people who were absolutely dazzling on their own, but simply were like a fish out of water in a group, just rode rough-shod over the group, that sort of thing. It was good in that sense. So we were able to judge the writing ability. We asked the basic questions in the oral that they asked before, and there were four examiners, each graded them, and we were able to arrive at consensus.
The problem was, one of the exercises had to be graded by the Educational Testing Service, which grades all of our written stuff including the written examination in the first place. It took six weeks for them to grade, because it wasn't just checked boxes. It was write-in answers and whatever. As a result, we were unable to give the candidates a Yes or No on the day they came in for that whole day operation. This was also tempered by the fact that security — a security background investigation and a medical exam were required before we could even give anybody an offer. The security background investigation generally took between six and twelve months.
So that at best, we could not give a person an actual job, we couldn't even tell them whether they had passed or flunked for at least six weeks, and we couldn't give them a job offer for six to twelve months later. Of course, we were losing all those people. Particularly, in the late ''80s when I was doing this, it was a boom time in the economy and virtually every college grad went off to a job, and by God, we couldn't put in an offer. They had to be incredibly motivated for the Foreign Service in order to sit around and wait for a job offer that might never materialize. So it was not an optimum system, but still, it was a system that everybody was, by that point, very comfortable with, that worked, survived various court challenges except a gender one — but this was not a gender thing. There was not much pressure to change.
Towards the end of the '80s, evidently there had been complaints that the candidate examining system was yielding up mediocre people. You didn't get obvious dodos, but you didn't get any shining starts. These were all sort of average and the only way we were going to change that was to change the whole exam process, so that at the very minimum, you could tell the person that they passed or flunked, the day they took the examination. Because they were just sending the wrong signals. This happened after I left. A new director came on board — the previous directors were awfully nice people, but they were not original thinkers. They were administering a program that had been going on for years and years, and they did well at it, but they were not innovative. What happened then is you got a fellow who was appointed as an examiner. Young, Sr., who was an innovative thinker. His predecessor, actually, was good enough to realize that this guy was an innovative thinker, that he indeed was coming up with ideas that were really good, that he himself was leaving.
This guy was jumped over several more senior people and made director of the Board of Examiners. Immediately got approval of his changes, and put them into effect, and they were in place within a year or two, which is extremely — with the State Department bureaucracy. The main changes are that you can tell the person — we're doing the same thing as before — the one exam that had to be sent away is self-grading, you can grade it on the spot, and you can tell the person on the spot that they passed or flunked, you can tell them whether it was a high pass and likely to get a job offer, or whether it was a low pass and you're probably not, try to up your scores. He was also able to deal with DS bureaucracy to the point where it's giving priority to passers in the personnel background investigation, and hopefully process these things within a matter a weeks rather than a matter of months. Just gives us access to a higher level of candidate.
Q: What was your impression of the candidates?
FRIEDLAND: We had a very different bunch of candidates than when we came in, Stu. Mostly when we came in, it was kids with a Bachelor's degree, people who had served in the military and were just getting out, and it was graduate students. One thing we had very few of was women — two in my class of thirty.
Q: My class of twenty-nine — none.
FRIEDLAND: No couples, of course. Very few married people, as a matter of fact. The candidates that we get now are quite different. The average age is older. These are people, in some cases, who have careers, who are changing careers — forty-year old burnt-out college teachers, administrators who've been in X industry but want to get out of that, want to get into government for one reason or another. There is no upper age limit any more — the actual age limit is sixty. That is the only absolute limit we have. We will actually even accept a candidate who is fifty-nine and a half, and we have had candidates that old. There is no mandatory retirement any more, so that the whole candidate mix is a lot different. I'm trying to think — particularly the passing candidates — we still get the kids who are college seniors — not many of them do well, simply because, first of all, they don't write as well any more. A lot of these kids really can't write, can't write at all.
Q: When I came in, there was a three and a half day exam and it was almost all written. We knew how to write. We didn't like it but you knew how to write.
FRIEDLAND: But then, I, who came in two years after you did — there was no written exam at all. I guess, by this point, they figured they could assume that anybody who got past the written exam could write and perhaps they had some reason for believing that. But what's happened in the interim period is that these kids have dis-learned, or whatever. They are not taught how to write anymore, and it was really incredible to see some of these people.
Of course, the problem now is that drafting abilities — you're running into political correctness problems here. Very often, minorities can't write. You can get some of these people who are absolutely brilliant but — I remember, particularly a Black student whom I interviewed and then later read the written stuff, and you would hardly think it was the same person. Hispanics are a particular problem. For some reason, if they were brought up with Spanish as their first language, they'll never — I really can't say that — but it seemed that they really could not master English. Nonetheless, we were under pressure to pass minorities, and generally, if they were borderline, we'd pass the borderline, and if they were above borderline, they'd get sky-high grades.
Q: Obviously, you were cooking the books.
FRIEDLAND: Yes. The numbers were skewed. Women were judged on a different scale from men, numbers-wise.
Q: Trying to give them a better chance.
FRIEDLAND: Yes. Although, the last year I was there, which would have been in 1988, something like 56 women passed for every 50 men, so it was the other way around at this point. Of course, the problem is, there are differences, and quite often, men who would do average on subject matter, would do very well on the oral exam. Whereas, women, who were marvelous on the subject matter, they tend to be mousy during the oral examination — they were not assertive — so what do you do in a situation like that? They're obviously very bright people, but because of cultural — gender — one of the problems that was interesting that we had were women examiners. Women examiners tended to be very active, authoritative types of people in the first place, and they would penalize mousy women.
Q: I gave for a year, in '74, the oral exam in the old one, and when there was a woman being examined, we always made sure we had a woman on the panel — it was true then, the women were tougher on the women. So, I made it — why can't you. This would be true of the Blacks — if you had a Black who'd made it — we were making all sorts of allowances, trying to — we could read the political writing on the wall, and were trying. Obviously, there is a problem, particularly writing, because writing is so important in our business.
FRIEDLAND: Another thing that has been changed — up until 1978, you got the candidates' bio. You knew where that candidate was coming from, what that candidate's background was. From 1978 to 1988, you were not given the candidate's bio — it was purposely withheld from you. The person who briefed the candidates on the day of the oral assessment was told to inform them they were not to make anything known about their background and whatever to the examiners. That would free us from any biases. I mean — obviously, it didn't work. Plus it denied the examiner any candidate's background which would have been useful to know. Was this person a Peace Corps person who's spent four years overseas in a developing country? This kind of thing. We had no way.
Q: When I gave it under the old system, if we knew somebody had been, say, a Peace Corps worker, we'd ask them about the country to find out whether they were culturally sensitive. If somebody had a background in economics, we'd ask harder economics questions. Or if they were a arts major, we'd ask questions there. If they were pretty weak where their strengths were...this would send all sorts of signals to us. It wasn't as though we were trying to dump them. I think we were more impressed by someone coming out of Appalachia who was maybe floundering a bit on some of the things, but really very strong in others, as opposed to somebody who had grown up in the Boston area and gone to all the right schools. This is just the type of prejudice they claimed we had, but actually, it was working in the candidate's favor.
FRIEDLAND: Indeed. And this, of course, was totally taken away from us under this new regime, and was restored in 1988-1989 when they went into the new examination.
Q: You were doing the EEO side. Could you just talk, sort of to finish up this thing, a bit about — I've always been concerned about my dealings with EEO, this Equal Employment Opportunity. Every time we were trying to get mid-career people — we were doing this when I was there back in '74, and it seemed like all our candidates were coming out of EEO offices from other government agencies, that we were just shifting around and they weren't a very impressive crew.
FRIEDLAND: Our problem was that, given the fact that we were hiring at the FSO 3 level...
Q: ...in those days about the equivalent of a Major in military rank.
FRIEDLAND: Correct. What was happening was that we weren't particularly — it was for women and minorities — we were getting good people. That wasn't the problem. The problem was, we were sending them, if they passed, we were sending them to dead-end careers, because they came in as a 3, they came in bypassing the normal examination procedure, and there is not a promotion board that you could ever conceive of that would promote them, even if they were water-walkers, over people that had come in at the bottom and had learned their skills by working their way up. So what we were doing, and we really couldn't tell them that, was assuring them that they would forever be at the same grade level. They would never ever be promoted. This is not a GS procedure, this is not a promotion procedure which is used in other government agencies. It is the whole up-or-out business and a number of them wound up by getting selected out, even where in specific cases they would have been better off where they were in the first place. We were doing them a disservice by even running this program the way it was run.
I was — shall we say — joined in this view later by one of the Black EEO officers who happened to be serving as an examiner at the point, and who, in 1978, helped draft this thing. He was aghast at the way it had worked out. It was almost like they were doing people favors by flunking them. We had a number of examiners, particularly female, black examiners, who were hotshots where they came from in their agency or their company, and we were getting people in high wage jobs in the private sector who wanted to live abroad — it was that kind of thing. They were throwing, what in some cases they had worked on for years, they were throwing it away, thinking they were coming into a new career, but in point of fact, were just buying themselves a rough and possibly early selection out. It was tragic, in a way, tragic.
Because most of the people that had the gumption to go after these things — this was not something that was advertised in every government recruiting office or something like that. You really had to go after it. In probably the majority of cases, these were really good people and they were doing themselves a disservice. But of course, you couldn't tell them. In some cases, it really wound up tragically. We had a case of one woman who filed constant grievances, because she felt she had been given assurances of regular promotions or whatever and that didn't happen. She would just take umbrage at any little thing. It was very sad.
Q: Then you retired in 1988.
FRIEDLAND: I retired involuntarily. I was, in fact, selected out because I was not promoted to the CC within the 20-year period.
Q: Looking at this, the problem is the jobs.
FRIEDLAND: Yes, indeed.
Q: The Board of Examiners is all very nice but it is at best what the Italians would call a parenthesis in one's career. It doesn't go anywhere, and also, having also been away from regular desks and terrorism...
FRIEDLAND: Indeed. And out of geographic bureau in science. Basically, looking back, I chose the wrong offices to work in, I chose the wrong jobs. I loved it while it happened.
Q: As a practical measure, I find in these oral histories, as one goes through them, you realize there's more to life — that you enjoy it, that you accomplish some things, and from our talk, obviously you did.
FRIEDLAND: I had a ball. Yes. I wouldn't have done it — even if I'd known the end result, I would not have turned down a single job that I took. I had only marvelous posts. I had great jobs. There's not a 100% great job, but I had jobs that I think, probably, were more interesting than most of the bureau jobs I could have had that would have guaranteed promotions. So that, all in all, it was great. I've been very lucky, because when it happened, it was very unfortunate, and I felt it financially. I had a younger child that was a junior in an Ivy, and I was down to my pension — you know, no aid or anything like that. I was lucky in that — first of all, I got a job with a contractor, which tided me through the tuition period that first year. Then I got picked up, a year after, with the CDR — the Freedom of Information Office, and I've been working there ever since, and that is just the best of all possible worlds, in that I'm retired and collecting a pension, but then working half a year makes the difference between my pension and my last pay. So, in a sense, I'm earning what I would be earning if I had not left when I did, and working five or six months to do it.
Q: Thank you very much.
End of interview