The Tallest Gun In Foggy Bottom
Keisling, Phil
The Tallest Gun In Foggy Bottom by Phil Keising When Henry Kissinger finally issued the order to begin the bombing, in many ways it was just what Tom Enders had been waiting for. The time was...
...And he always made absolutely sure his bridges to me were in first-class repair...
...but something was missing...
...for Tom Enders, it had salvaged a career...
...Latin America usually has been regarded as the %ha cha beat,’” says a former assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, “a place where second-rate people usually went-and stayed .” ’ Enders is visibly steeped in this Europhile tradition...
...What makes the elitism and thearrogance so significant is that they not only didn’t hurt Enders, but actually helped him...
...So for Kissinger and Haig it made sense not to punish Enders, but to promote him...
...This has not been the legacy Tom Enders has tried to leave...
...But it paid such handsome dividends-which was the whole point...
...Behind him stretches another legacy: of victims who crossed his path...
...Within the year Swank would find his once-promising career in ruins because of his doubts...
...Two people who say their careers were sabotaged by Enders refused to discuss it further because they still work in the government...
...Phil Keislingisan ediior of The WashingtonMonthly...
...One of Enders’s main tasks was to fashion a way to breakOPEC‘s power...
...of discredited policies he embraced...
...His boss, ambassador Emory Toby” Swank, was not enthusiastic about carrying out the order...
...In April 1973 two investigators for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James Lowenstein and Richard Moose, arrived to determine the embassy’s role in the bombing campaign...
...Such are the questions debated with urgencyover cocktailsand at diplomatic receptions, pondered as one jets back and forth across the Atlantic...
...In an August 20 speech in San Francisco he criticized the “violent extremism” of both the right and the left and called for a withdrawal of all foreign military advisors from the region...
...Sayinga young officer doesn’t suffer those he considers to be foolsisjust the thing a lot of superiors want to hear...
...Since the early 1950s the best way to establish the truly unassailable position within state department ranks has been to gain a reputation as a strong anticommunist...
...Endersjoined the foreign service in I958 and his rise through its ranks was extraordinarily fast...
...to enlist the Shah in moderating prices, because the Saudis were unwilling to stand alone...
...But Enders still lacked an essential foreign service chit: overseas experience at a high level...
...there’s nothing the guy has fought and bled for that is really important...
...possibly even the undersecretaryship...
...The appointment was held up for five months in the Senate by Jesse Helms, who has never cottoned much to the “striped pants” fraternity from which Enders comes...
...There’s the subordinate who follows his boss’s lead, and the subordinate who not only does what is sensible to get ahead, but does it with special elan...
...He took German lessons and promoted rumors of his impending assignment as West German ambassador, though the posting never came...
...Enders was now Kissinger’s bright young protege, at age 42 soon to become an assistant secretary of state, ajob that traditionally went tomenadecade his senior...
...But when Enders asked why Nicaragua felt compelled to increase the size of its army, and Interior Minister Manuel D’Escoto had replied, “The United States,” Enders made light ofit...
...1 was astonished he could become such a loyalist...
...Any suggestion that, say, Mexico’s economic policies are of greater-or even close to equal-relevance to real U.S...
...In an important sense, Cambodia was Haig’s war, for he assumed much of the daytoday responsibility for insuring it was conducted according to the White House’s wishes...
...subservient to Cuba and the Soviet Union,” while providing massive amounts of U.S...
...Since George Shultz replaced Haig in June, Enders has taken a more conciliatory approach towards Central America, at least in his public pronouncements...
...in late 1971 Leonhart was recalled from Yugoslavia and reassigned as deputy commandant of the Army War College, a post usually reserved for those officers on the verge of retirement...
...All Talk, No Walk As assistant secretary for economic affairs, Enders enthusiastically embraced another policy that took an admittedly bad situation and turned it into adisaster...
...Enders said it with a smile, as ajoke, and it was certainly true-Nicaragua’s 25,000-man army and seven-plane air force would be no match for the United States...
...The right kind of foreign service officer is someone who will test his assumptions against the evidence of the world, who will constantly ask himself whether American policies are working-and to what end...
...The bombing campaign also produced casualties of a different sort...
...To represent your bureau, your department, your government in whatever manner the “policy” indicates is standard behavior for a foreign service officer...
...Enders was rewarded for his loyalty...
...weaponry, thereby becoming our strategic linchpin in the region...
...for him, too, it would bea testing ground...
...Few wanted the job-which is a major reason Enders took it...
...Among such respectables, the truly important foreign policy issues have centered not on the developing world, but on Europe...
...So he felt he would have to go to a place that wasn’t very comfortable, where it would be perceived he wasn’t ducking anything...
...Roger Morris, a former foreign service officer who resigned as Kissinger’s aide after the Cambodian invasion, recalls, “You’d always hear stories about bright young officers who’d crossed the boss and ended up stamping passports...
...The charming villages, the skiing at Gstaad, the art museums, the music, the dance, the international film festivals, the diplomatic receptions-among most foreign service officers, Europe traditionally has been the stuff ideal careers were made of...
...Enders was not about towait...
...New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg managed toget to Neak Luong -despite Enders’s efforts to stop him-and found I37 dead and 268 wounded...
...For his refusal to toe the administration line, Akins was forced out of the foreign service by Kissinger...
...We’re 100 times bigger than youare, he reportedly said...
...It wasn’t enough to be anticommunist...
...Although he could speak Italian, French, German, and some Swedish, he could not speak Spanish...
...A prestigious European ambassadorship, certainly...
...He hadn’t been implicated in the Panama Canal “giveaway...
...The assistant secretaryship is where the state department bureaucracy and the political world usually intersect, and as the highest-ranking foreign service officer with responsibility for all of Latin America, Enders is in an enviable position...
...To admirers he is flexible and resourceful...
...To admit Lon No1 was so deeply disliked by his own people would have suggested a fundamental failure in the American policy that hitched its success to his...
...Haig soon was recommending Enders to his own superiors as his “favorite” member of the embassy staff...
...in early August a B52 missed its target by six miles and bombed the village of Neak Luong...
...Enders is arrogant in a studied manner...
...Cambodia transformed Enders finally from a good soldier to a great one...
...He retired from the foreign service in 1975...
...And there have been brief periods when Latin America has received sympathetic attention: The Kennedy administration started the Alliance for Progress and Jimmy Carter had the good sense to relinquish control of that hated symbol of Yankee imperialism, the Panama Canal...
...How strong is NATO...
...For American foreign policy, Cambodia had proved a disaster...
...On his frequent trips to PhnomPenh, Haigfound Enders far more to his liking than the quiet, mildmannered Swank...
...In an oration delivered to his Yale classmates in 1953, five years before hejoined the foreign service, Enders looked forward to “a cold war kind of world with its grinding, unromantic success of a thousand crises, which can be solved no other way than one by one...
...Accordingly, the administration’s aggressive policy on Latin America dovetailed nicely with Enders’s need to reassert the toughness and anticommunism that had served him so well in the past...
...ambassador to Yugoslavia, William Leonhart, resembled Enders in some respects: he was brilliant, arrogant, and also ambitious...
...Enders is a man who also is widely feared...
...Though the Senate Foreign Relations Committee formally rebuked Enders for “grossly misleading” its investigators, it approved his nomination, unwilling to repudiate Kissinger, who was then at the height of his popularity...
...Ofcourse, when the natives became restless, we’would send in the marines...
...He seemed not to care a whit about American culture-but if Andre Malraux happened to come to town he’d find a way to see him.“ The disconnection from American values-the elitism-is common in the foreign service, but especially pronounced in Enders’s case...
...Conservative or liberal, these Atlanticists share the assumption that the East-West conflict in Europe is of paramount importance...
...It was a serious charge, pitting the word of one party against the other, forcing the department to choose sides...
...Kissinger’s 1973 declaration of “peace with honor” for Vietnam also unilaterally declared a de facto cease fire in Cambodia between Premier Lon No1 and Khmer Rouge guerrillas...
...Under Haig, Enders was a leading spokesman for the administration’s policy of portraying Nicaragua as a “totalitarian, militarized state...
...Foggy Bottom Shakedown Tom Enders makes no secret of his ambitions...
...But the foreign service and its officers usually have shown little interest in this part of the world...
...And 1 would tell him to stoop over, not just physically, but metaphorically...
...The U.S...
...you had to prove it overandover...
...Later it was discovered those instructions had been drafted by Enders himself...
...But there are good soldiers and then there are...
...As for Foa, Enders later had her expelled from Cambodia, calling her reports “tendentious...
...But Enders clearly wanted more...
...A lot of the bombs seemed to fall on civilians...
...Perhaps the best example came during Enders’s only trip to Nicaragua, in August 198 1. According to one Nicaraguan diplomat, he surprised the Sandinistas with how well prepared and conciliatory he was...
...He could write magnificently...
...On this international stage, Latin America has been little more than a sideshow...
...On one occasion hundreds of villagers in a funeral procession were obliterated...
...Just a whiff of evenhandedness in reports of communist activity might be enough to raise eyebrows and derail the best-laid of career plans...
...In 1971 Leonhart arranged for his recall to Washington...
...to his many detractors his manner inspires deep distrust...
...His concern proved prophetic, of course...
...But the arrangement also gave Enders some power over them...
...The Cambodian intellectuals were not ideal servants, she said, because “they don’t know how to work the appliances and they break them...
...embassy in Cambodia...
...As Swank recalls, “He felt his career had suffered a lot and he needed to salvage it...
...Having that larger purpose doesn’t require one to prefer baseball to Malraux, but itdoesrequirea grounding in certain democratic values-values that in the past have attracted other countries to our side...
...The true extent of the ambition and what it does to his behavior is clearest on examining how he applies those formidable bureaucratic skills...
...That in itself is not bad, for the state department is no stranger to parochialism...
...And it was Enders-the “can-do bombardier,” as William Shawcross portrayed him in his book, Sideshow-who instructed the air force just where many of those bombs would fall...
...And that Enders did...
...interests is traditionally greeted in these circles with dismissive stares...
...By the time Nixon was elected, even those colleagues who had felt patronized by Enders assumed he was destined for important things...
...In 1953 he graduated from Yale College, at the top of a class that included Lowell Weicker and Edwin Meese 111...
...In April 1974 Enders returned to Washington as Kissinger’s nominee for assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs...
...Tensions got so high that junior officers remember Enders and Leonhart shouting at each other at staff meetings...
...A former superior of Enders, after praising his considerable talents observes, “You look back to his career and you realize Tom has never been associated with any great cause...
...He didn’t get his first choice of jobs-assistant secretary for European affairs -but he was more than happy with the interAmerican affairs post...
...it has been personal as well...
...BackinWashington he was recommended to CobySwank, thenew ambassador to Cambodia...
...in 1976 he was on his way to Ottawa as ambassador to Canada, one of the cushiest posts open to a foreign service officer...
...Enders’s lack of experience in Latin America was also a plus with Helms and other hard-line conservatives...
...Yet for all.this, Kaplan was disturbed by Enders: “There seemed no place in America where Tom was comfortable other than Georgetown...
...That the combination has worked so successfully-that Tom Enders has come sofar-reveals much about the values that shape America’s foreign policy establishment, and also suggests why the policies that it embraces so often fail...
...It sided with Enders...
...Tom Enders, his six feet, eight inches making him loom all the larger, possesses thoseskills...
...Almost from the start the two wereat odds, not over policy issues but over turf: who could give what orders to subordinates, what prerogatives Enders had when Leonhart was out of the country...
...Some people I knew in similar jams took seven or eight years to get back on the career track...
...and of a system that has protected and rewarded him-and will probably continue to do so...
...What is the meaning of the latest power shift in the Soviet Politburo...
...A reporter explains that Enders is surprisingly candid in off-the-record interviews...
...he was an indefatigable worker who would never shy away from even the scut work...
...Friends and Enemies Thomas Ostrom Enders was born in 1931 to a wealthy and conservative Hartford, Connecticut banking family, the namesake of a greatgrandfather who’d been president of Aetna Life Insurance Company...
...Heis also fortunate enough to have beliefs, namely a stern anticommunism, that just happen to complement his bureaucratic abilities...
...But next to Enders’s enthusiasm for directing the bombing and the cover-up, Swank was,found sorely wanting by Kissinger...
...Someone else had crossed him and paid the price...
...Fortunately for Enders, this anticommunist view came naturally...
...The time was February 1973 and Enders was then the second in command at the U.S...
...the country he got was Yugoslavia...
...Hired guns are nothing new in the state department, a place full of diplomats who view theirjobs in a lawyerly way...
...ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Akins, objected to this strategy, saying the combination of veiled military threats against Saudi Arabia and the refusal to restrain the Shah risked turning the Saudis into hardliners-and forcing oil prices even higher...
...Of all the people in the foreign service of his generation that I knew, he was the brightest of the lot...
...Those in the foreign service know how important such a recall-and the inevitable bad efficiency report-can be for a rapidly rising career...
...His arrival in Phnom Penh in late 1971 came on the heels of his abrupt recall from Yugoslavia, and Enders already was the subject of much speculation among his fellow foreignservice officers...
...But before Enders settled into his new job, Bill Leonhart would become the first in a series of casualties Enders would leave behind him over the next decade...
...Without it, hisjourney to Phnom Penh, not to mention his performance there, is inconceivable, as is his appointment to hiscurrent post...
...The U.S...
...Hedid it under the watchful eye of Kissinger and Alexander Haig, without letting his own boss, Secretary of State William Rogers, know of his role...
...But therewasincomprehension among the Sandinistas, as if Endersdid not realize it was this very attitude his hosts most resented...
...In 1979 he became ambassador to the European Economic Community in Brussels, a post where his economic knowledge was particularly useful...
...Enders was doing their dirty work, much as Haigwasdoing Kissinger’s by handling the wiretapping of reporters and his aides...
...In the ensuing years spiraling OPEC prices would bring the world to the brink of economic depression...
...But by 1971, Indochina had become a burial ground for careers...
...Leonhart got the message and ultimately left for the CIA...
...He was determined to do absolutely nothing that might alienate him from his superiors...
...So he began seeking an assignment as a deputy chief of mission (the number two post in an embassy...
...The election of Ronald Reagan brought Haig to the state department-and a dramatic change in Enders’s fortunes...
...militaryaid to the rightwing government of El Salvador, which presides over a monthly death toll from political violence of300 to600people,mostat thehandsoftheright...
...Playing this intimidation game-“suck up, kick down,” as one foreign service officerdescribesithas been effective for Enders, as we’ll see...
...As much as Enders’s performance infuriated reporters and congressional investigators and reflected poorly on Swank, it was ofgreat comfort to Kissinger and Haig...
...This was his first major ambassadorship...
...The time for that probably passed 20years ago, though the idea is an important one...
...But even Enders’s penchant for hard work and his ability to assimilate large amounts of information cannot fully compensate for a basic ignorance about the region, an ignorance that reveals itself in small but disturbing ways...
...These have not been the kinds ofquestionsEnders has pursued in his career, well aware that the answers to them can often prove inconvenient, as John Paton Davies discovered...
...if his superiors needed a scapegoat, he was the logical choice...
...The 1973 OPECoilembargo had increased the world price of oil four-fold, triggering an international recession...
...He did it even though it meant lying to reporters and congressionalinvestigators...
...His appointment to the inter-American affairs post not only was unexpected, but was also a rebuke, calculated or not, to the state department’s Latin American specialists...
...In 1966, Enders landed a choice assignment as a special assistant to the undersecretary for political affairs...
...Soon after that, when Enders went up to Capitol Hill to describe CIA covert-action plans against Nicaragua, the comment took on a different, more menacing, meaning...
...In the next seven months, the U.S...
...far more probable is that some day he will become the undersecretary of state for political affairs, the third highest post in the state department and the zenith for a career officer...
...The resulting state department purge ruined the careers of brilliant foreign service officers like John Paton Davies, whose prophetic cables were not appreciated until many years later...
...in the tradition of Kissinger, heflattersjournalists by making them think he shares some of their skepticism about government policies...
...The FSOs in mainland China in 1949 who perceived the fatal weaknesses of Chiang Kai-shek and reported thosefindings to Washington were believed by many conservatives to have been complicit in Chiang’s fall to the Communists...
...Here Kissinger and Enders reversed Teddy Roosevelt’s famous dictum: For all their toughsounding talk, they were unwilling to apply the big stick to OPEC-bold actionat home tocut oil demand, such as gas rationing, and strong pressure on the major advocate of drastically higher oil prices, the Shah of Iran...
...How to stay enough on the offensive that the arrogance doesn’t come back to haunt you...
...Those unfamiliar with Cambodia may recognize Thomas Enders in another, more contemporary guise-as the Reagan administration’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs...
...They wondered if he’d gone too far, if his arrogant and supercilious manner had finally caught up with him...
...dropped 250,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia-nearly twice the tonnage that rained down on Japan during all of World War 11...
...The Wrong Stuff A friend who has known Enders since college offers this: “If Tom wanted to be a great man, perhaps someday a great secretary of state, I would suggest to him that he first take a year off, travel around the world, wear scruffy clothes, and never once talk to a government official...
...But it also can be dangerous...
...Most ofall, hedidit becauseofwhatitmeantfor Tom Enders...
...This Enders did in 1972 when a fellow embassy official in Phnom Penh, Bill Harben, determined that the reelection victory of Cambodian Premier Lon No1 had been stolen...
...The “Can-Do Bombardier” Cambodia gave Enders a powerful new patron, who would not only revive his career after Yugoslavia but help him again a decade later: Alexander Haig...
...The reason such a posture has been so well-advised for an ambitious foreign service officer dates back 30 years to the “Who Lost China...
...He is responsible for explaining administration policy to congressmen, journalists, and even heads of state, and for trying to win their support or neutralize their opposition...
...shortly after, the two listened in on a cheap transistor radio owned by UP1 correspondent Sylvana Foa and overheard embassy personnel radioing specific instructions to B-52 pilots...
...Before Cambodia he had been considered a potential ambassador to the Soviet Union...
...Five years before, officers schemed to get Southeast Asia postings, hoping their talents might be spotted by the likes of a McGeorge Bundy or Walt Rostow...
...When the Khmer Rouge kept fighting, the United States began the most intense aerial bombardment inits history...
...Baseball, poker-he had absolutely no interest in any of it...
...Accordingly, Enders instead told Washington the election was a “step forward for Cambodian democracy...
...Of the more than 40 people in and out of the state department who were interviewed for this story, all but a handful insisted on no attribution...
...only to protect American troops in South Vietnam...
...Enders told them it was minimal...
...George Kaplan, his immediatesuperior from 1963 to 1965 when the two worked in the Bureau of European Affairs, recalls that Enders’s talents were “exceptional...
...He is very much in the mainstream of the American foreign policy establishment: a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a man who would feel much more at home with a Dean Acheson or a George Ball (one of his old bosses) than a Jesse Helms...
...Enders later described the Canadian assignment as “the best job of my life” for Muclean’s magazine, which recalled with some awe that Enders had “royally entertained” more than 2,500 people in one year...
...Soon after Enders’s recall, stories began circulating in state department ranks that Leonhart had made improper advances to Enders’s wife in Belgrade...
...a former ambassador to a Latin American country notes, “If he doesn’t think you’re important, his eyes glaze over at the wrong moments...
...This preference for Europe has not been just ideological...
...What happened in Yugoslavia is crucial to understanding Enders’s subsequent career...
...Saudi Arabia, correctly foreseeing the world economic chaos that drastic increases risked, urged the U.S...
...A new secretary, a new policy-it’s all the same to Enders...
...The example of Davies and the other “China Hands” was very fresh in the minds of FSOs of Tom Enders’s generation...
...When he returned to Washington in 1973 he was assigned as political advisor to the North Atlantic Fleet, in Norfolk, Virginia-another notorious dead-end job...
...He can control the kind of information his superiors receive and define the various policy options that are available to them...
...And there was yet another victim-Swank himself...
...intervention in the entire region...
...It recalled for them not just the 1919-1933 marine occupation of Nicaragua, but a century of U.S...
...We could crush you...
...Could his once-promising career ever recover...
...How toavoid retribution...
...Though Jimmy Carter botched it, this was what his human rights policy was all aboutconvincing other nations that our concern for these values didn’t stop at our borders and that we would risk offending our ostensible friends to promote them...
...That extra effort, so often the ingredient of high-level success, usually entails very specific skills-brilliance, ingratiation, a taste for pitched warfare over turf, and a willingness to step over a lot of prone bodies to get to the front of the line...
...Though no foreign service officer has ever become secretary of state, Enders has confided to many his hope of becoming the first...
...Enders had becomea co-conspirator, which made him vulnerable...
...It was a conservative, traditional class, one member recalls: “Yale was a real success factory...
...It wasn’t just his willingness to adhere to the theology-and it was a theology in Cambodia, you either were on board or you weren’t-but his apparent enthusiasm for it,” says a man who calls himself a friend but who was disturbed by Enders’s role...
...When he left Cambodia three years later, there was no doubt about the answer...
...A former European ambassador who visited him in Brussels recalls that whenever Enders planned to make a speech “he’d send it first back to Washington for clearance, even if he was giving it to some obscure institute in Nice and the speech wouldn’t even be reported in the Monte Carlo Journal...
...Enders came to the job largely ignorant of the region, the first assistant secretary in several decades without prior experience in Latin America...
...great soldiers...
...That was the right idea, and one didn’t have to be as crass as Joe McCarthy to stake out such a position...
...Ten years later, Sally Quinn would show another side of it in The Washington Post, drawing a devastating portrait of theeffortsofEnders’s wife, Gaetana, to place Cambodian refugees as maids in Georgetown...
...He did it even though it meant breakingone American law that forbade embassy officialsfrom giving military adviceand another that authorized bombing...
...I don’t think any of US were taught values that might have prompted us to scuttle a career for any moral reason...
...for now, he was only too happy to let his eager subordinate handle the details...
...And he kept his bridges in full repair with his superiors in Washington...
...Haig, after all, was plagued with similar demons...
...It was an extraordinary job for a diplomat, but one Enders performed with enthusiasm...
...Never in recent memory has Enders’s post been so prominent in the news, thanks largely to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s decision to draw the line against what he called “SovietCuban adventurism” in Latin America, particularly in Nicaragua and El Salvador...
...Enders’s arrogance finally betrayed him...
...After all, what he said about the episode could make them appear in history as villains-or heroes...
...Enders instead has found it far safer to confine his intellectual energies and fighting instincts to climbing the hierarchy and defending the chosen policies, rather than articulating a larger purpose for American foreign policy that goes beyond a rudimentary distaste for communism...
...debate...
...That is unlikely...
...A colleague who watched him closely with Haig recalls that Enders “never disagreed with him in front of the staff-but wasn’t shy about criticizing the boss when he was gone...
...So it was safer to overlook those things inconsistent with the prevailingorthodoxy...
...Indeed, Enders has always prided himself on being a sophisticated anticommunist...
...Nonetheless, the challenge from the right wing must have given Enders some reason for pause, in much the same way as those who survived the “Who Lost China” debate must have felt chastened, even if their records as cold warriors were, like Enders’s, unassailable...
...But here the rigid anticommunist credentials, built up over many years, came in handy...
...But vastly increased oil revenues were part of Kissinger’s grand strategy to allow the Shah to buy large amounts of sophisticated U.S...
...A good efficiency report always should say something negative,” Kaplan says...
...When the investigators confronted Enders, he told them “special instructions” from Washington restricted what he could divulge...
...At the peak of the bombardment, 80 B-52s flew in from Thailand daily, each dropping 25 tons of explosives that “boxed” an area two miles long by half a mile wide...
Vol. 14 • November 1982 • No. 9
