Three Embassies, Four Wars: A Personal Memoir

Copyright © 2017 by Ronald E. Neumann.

Original interview by David Reuther, Copyright ©2012 by ADST

ISBN:                Softcover                978-1-5434-5405-5

                          eBook                      978-1-5434-5406-2

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Rev. date: 11/06/2017

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Dedication

To Elaine, who was with me in good times and bad, in spirit when not permitted to be present in person, who both understood and shared my sense of duty, and whose love always sustained me. And to our children, Brian and Helen, whose love for their often busy father is a great source of strength.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Author’s Note

1   Childhood, Education, Marriage, Vietnam, and Entering the Foreign Service (1944–1970)

2   Early Training, Senegal, and the Gambia (1970–1973)

3   Farsi Training and Tabriz, Iran (1973–1976)

4   Southern Affairs, Middle East Staff Assistant, and Jordan Desk Officer (1976–1981)

5   DCM in Yemen (1981–1983)

6   Deputy Director for the Arabian Peninsula, Arabic Training, and DCM in the United Arab Emirates (1983–1990)

7   The National War College, Iraq Task Force, Director of Iraq and Iranian Affairs (1990–1994)

8   Ambassador to Algeria (1994–1997)

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9   Deputy Assistant Secretary; North Africa and Arabian Peninsula (1997–2000)

10   Security Problems and Ambassador to Bahrain (2000–2004)

11   Baghdad (2004–2005)

12   Ambassador to Afghanistan (2005–2007)

13   Epilogue

Appendix   What I learned

Foreword

Looking back on his career in the U.S. Foreign Service, Ambassador Ronald Neumann offered this reflection for those younger officers who get too wound up about what their next assignments are going to be: I’ve never forgotten how little we understand about what the future holds.

Neumann speaks from experience, as his personal memoir Three Embassies, Four Wars attests. Little could he imagine when he joined the Foreign Service in 1970 that his diplomatic journey would begin with Senegal, the Gambia, and Iran; continue mid-career with stints in Washington, Yemen and the United Arab Republic; and culminate with three ambassadorial postings — in Algeria, Bahrain and Afghanistan — plus a senior position in Baghdad during the second Gulf War. His career was, he says, a great ride. That is an understatement worthy of a seasoned diplomat.

Three Embassies, Four Wars, expanded from his Foreign Affairs Oral History, is intended to provide insight into the process of diplomacy. It does this and much more and can be appreciated on many levels.

It is a primer for future Foreign Service practitioners of diplomacy, including the nuts and bolts of moving up the State Department’s promotional ladder – from desk officer to ambassador – and learning how to handle oneself within the Washington interagency process (a superior once described Neumann as having bureaucratic blood lust – it was meant as a compliment).

Neumann’s memoir also provides valuable lessons and insights into representing the United States in one of the most volatile and consequential regions of the world – the Mideast and North Africa. His accounts of his wartime assignments to Iraq and Afghanistan add important historical ‘pieces to the puzzle’ to the U.S. interventions in those countries, including what went right and what did not.

Finally, throughout his memoir, Neumann serves up multiple ‘lessons learned’ for those aspiring to a diplomatic career or just plain interested in knowing what diplomats actually do. Here’s one that should be at the top of that list.

Neumann was asked by State in 2004 if he would be willing to cut short his assignment as ambassador to Bahrain to go help out in Baghdad. His response was: I thought it was a non-question. If you are asked to do something like that, that’s part of your duty as a Foreign Service officer. You go do it. I needed to bear my share, since others were going.

Ronald Neumann would just do it for thirty-seven years before he retired from the Foreign Service in 2007. It was a great ride for him, one that he shared throughout with his wife Elaine. The United States was the beneficiary of their exemplary service.

KARL F. INDERFURTH

Former assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs

and former U.S. representative for special political affairs

to the United Nations

Author’s Note

This book is expanded from the Foreign Affairs Oral History program interview conducted in Washington, D.C., from 2010 to 2012 by David Reuther under the auspices of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. It was updated and expanded in 2016. Although I have added a short epilogue, I did not attempt to rewrite portions of the interview that reflect views and situations as they appeared in 2012. This expanded version is based on recollections and memories—both mine and my wife’s—supplemented by my career-long habit of writing a substantive letter to my family about once a week. The extensive files that resulted permitted me to look more closely than memory would have permitted at events covered here, particularly in Bahrain and Algeria. In those sections I have drawn particularly from letters written close to the event. This has helped make the timeline more accurate and the account more honest. The same was true of my book on my time in Afghanistan, The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan. In this case, as in the earlier book, I alone am responsible for all errors.

1

Childhood, Education, Marriage, Vietnam, and Entering the Foreign Service (1944–1970)

Q. David Reuther: Let’s talk about some of your background. Where were you born?

Neumann: I was born in Washington, D.C., on September 30, 1944, while my father was in the Army during World War II. When the war came he couldn’t volunteer because he wasn’t a citizen, but he could be drafted as an alien resident, a green card holder. He therefore volunteered and was drafted. Initially, he was an interpreter in a prisoner-of-war camp in Colorado. He told me once that he was sent there because they were going to have German prisoners, and as a native of Austria he was a German speaker. However, the day before they got the prisoners, they were told they were getting Italians instead of Germans. He had a little Italian, so he became the sole interpreter in the camp. He eventually went overseas, to England, switched to OSS (Office of Strategic Services), and went into Europe.

Perhaps I should add a bit more about his background. My father grew up in Vienna. His father was a bank clerk, and his father and mother, although originally Jewish, had become atheists and socialists. My father later converted to Catholicism, and, at some point, my grandparents became Protestants.

In any event, my father was ardently anti-Nazi, and when Hitler occupied Austria, he was imprisoned for a year in concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald. My mother’s family was American since the Mayflower. My parents met the year before the German occupation of Austria at a summer program in Geneva. Because of their engagement, my father was able to get a visa to the States after he was released from prison. You can read about this period in a short autobiography that ADST put on line (http://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Neumann-Robert-G1.pdf).

After finishing his PhD and getting married, my father became a professor in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. My mother finished teaching his courses when he went into the Army. My mother then went to work in Washington, D.C., which is why I was born at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, while my father was overseas. It’s interesting how history sometimes returns, as my son was born when I was in Vietnam, although not in Walter Reed.

After the war my parents returned to Oshkosh. I have no recollection of Wisconsin, as we left when I was three years old. The only thing I know about Wisconsin is that I still have two of my father’s pipes that were made in Oshkosh, so that, as of this date, I know I’m smoking a pipe that’s at least sixty-eight years old.

Q: So where mainly did you grow up?

I grew up in California, where my father taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I was kind of a nerd, although I liked hiking and camping. We also spent some time abroad. We traveled in the summers and then twice when I was growing up, we lived abroad for a year when my father was teaching, once on a Fulbright scholarship and the second time on a different fellowship. When I was five, going on six, we lived in Paris. When I was nine and ten, a time of which I have more memory, we had a split year, the first half in Bordeaux, the second half in Strasbourg. Because we were going to be split, my mother decided to home-school me using the Calvert system. I remember that they sent us a box that included not only the instruction manual and the books, but the paper, pencils, erasers and everything we needed. We were totally self-contained with that box, including instructions telling my mother what to do. It was actually probably the best year I had in grammar school.

In Bordeaux in 1954, we lived in a house that was right on the street. One of the oddities was that we actually had an icebox; not a figure of speech, but a refrigerator where the iceman came every few days with a pair of tongs and big block of ice and stuck it in the top of the icebox. The house was heated by the stove in the kitchen that heated the radiators. I think one of the neatest memories of that time was that the house was right on the street; you opened the window and you could touch a passerby on the sidewalk. In those days in France, a man would come down the street with a pushcart selling fresh bread. So class always had a recess in midmorning when the bread seller came by. We would buy a warm baguette and devour it.

The second semester, we went to Strasbourg. Housing was very short because a lot of the damage of World War II hadn’t yet been repaired. That worked out pretty well because we ended up renting the ground floor of a seventeenth-century chateau outside of town. The owners lived upstairs, and we had the ground floor. Originally a fort, but badly situated on low ground, the fort was taken and burned in various wars until it became a residence rather than a fortification. It still had about half a moat and ten acres of fields. It was a wonderful place for a kid. But it was also a real throwback to living in a different, older time because there was no central heating. Rooms were heated with beautiful porcelain stoves in the corner of each room, and the stoves had a little door that you could put the coal in and another door down below to take the ash out. The stoves each had a door out in the hallway. When the chateau was built, people had lots of servants, so they would come along in the hallway and put coal in from there without bothering those in the rooms. We had no servants except a maid. I used to go down to the coal cellar to get coal and bring it up. One result of heating that way was that we only heated the rooms we were in. We never used the dining room except for a party, because it was too much trouble to heat the room just for a meal.

I remember also that in that house there was no refrigerator, but there was a cold room. It was an interior room, and it had big broad shelves to keep the fruits and vegetables cool and chicken wire around the outside to keep rats or mice from getting into the food. It all sounds strange in the twenty-first century, but it was a wonderful life for a ten-year-old. I could go running all around the hills, and there were some old fortifications of the Maginot Line collapsing into the forest where I could find a bunker or two to prowl in. Great stuff as a kid.

Q: Did you have siblings?

I had a sister named Marcia when I was very young, but she died less than two years after birth and I have no recollection of her. I have one brother, Gregory. He’s seven years younger, so he was only three, and I did most of my exploring alone.

In addition to the two years we lived abroad, my father was often teaching in Europe in the summer. For those years, we’d go to Europe together as a family, and then my father would teach while my mother would take my brother and me traveling until we would all get together at the end of the summer. There were several visits in Switzerland. I remember at one point we went to Brittany and took a bicycle trip for several days. My mother had our limited baggage on the back of her bike, and I had my brother on the back of mine. He must have been about seven.

Q: You actually started off with quite a bit of international experience.

Yes. At UCLA, my father, as I understood, was instrumental in starting the first diplomat-in-residence program as well as an international affairs center. The result was that we always had foreigners, academics, and Foreign Service officers wandering through the house.

However, except for two years of primary school, all my education was in the States. I went to Venice High School in Los Angeles, and then I went to the University of California at Riverside (UCR). By that time, I was dating Elaine, my future wife. Her first name is really Margaret. However, since her mother’s name was Margaret, the family always called her by her middle name, Elaine. We started dating in our senior year at Venice High School. When I went to Europe the summer after graduation, I was excited about climbing the Matterhorn but was already writing many letters back and hoping our relationship would last. Thus when I selected a university, I wanted to go away from home, but I didn’t want to go so far away that I couldn’t get home for many weekend dates. I also wanted not to be at UCLA because I knew too many of the professors there who’d known me since I was a small child. You know, when you’re eighteen you like being on your own. So I went off to Riverside, which was a good school. It was then fairly new as a general campus of the University of California, with excellent teachers, and it was away from home.

However, being away only worked to a certain extent because the first year I was at UCR, a new vice chancellor came from the Political Science Department of UCLA, where my father was teaching. The next year we got a new chancellor, and he came from the Political Science Department at UCLA. I remember that I thought I should go call on him because he was somebody who’d been a particular friend of my parents. I went to see the secretary. This was in my sophomore year. I was really getting into this Mr. Neumann adult in college business. I told the secretary that I’d like to pay a courtesy call on the chancellor, but it didn’t really matter when, any time he had time. She said, Well, let me check with him.

She disappeared into his office. I’m standing there enjoying being Mr. Neumann and I hear this booming voice come out of the other room, Come in, Ronnie. I knew right then my theory of getting away from UCLA wasn’t working.

Q: Now, you started in 1962, so you were a freshman during the time of the changes from the 1950s to the tumult of the 1960s all wrapped up in the presidential election and Kennedy coming on board. And you would have felt that sort of stuff and were a freshman when Kennedy was assassinated.

Yes. I was driving into a gas station right below the university to have my ‘56 Chevy looked at for some reason. I remember that’s where I was when I heard the news that he’d been killed. I suppose everybody in my generation can tell you where they were when they heard that news.

Q: Did that influence your career choice?

Not really. I had made up my mind to join the Foreign Service in the tenth grade. I was clearly outwardly directed. I made up my mind early and stuck to it.

Q: You decided by the tenth grade that you wanted to be in the Foreign Service. Does this affect things that you’re starting to read or pay attention to?

It’s hard to say. I always had an interest in the world. I was a history major, rather than political science. I argued at the time that history was as good or better a preparation for the Foreign Service as political science, but that was essentially sophistry because I wanted to study history. However, over the years I’ve decided that I was accidentally correct. History is a better background for the diplomatic profession than political science. I think it gives more perspective, and political science has become so quantitative that it increasingly downplays the human element on which real political decisions often turn.

Q: Were you interested in any particular countries’ history or history of a time?

My BA in history was divided between seventeenth-century Europe and the westernward expansion. At Riverside an honors degree in the History Department required a thesis for the BA. I actually did mine on how violent the cowboys really were. That was a lot of fun. I went to the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka and read all the surviving newspapers from the boomtowns. I read all the memoirs that cowboys wrote in the ‘20s and ‘30s, when being a cowboy suddenly became so popular that writing a memoir paid. Some of them were real whoppers, but some were pretty accurate. I produced my honors thesis and later I turned it into a book but couldn’t find a publisher. That was some years later, and it seemed that it wasn’t academic enough to be a scholarly publication nor quite popular enough for the popular press, so it never saw the light of day.

Q: Well, what was your conclusion?

Cowboys were a great deal less violent than movies depict. Perhaps because there was no law, no external restraint against violent reactions, people were more respectful and careful of each other. But when things broke down, then of course there was fighting. On the other hand, there are a number of ideas that have come down that are pure myths.

One is the idea of the fair fight. There was a code of a fair fight, but it meant that if somebody had said he was trying to kill another person, the other person was entitled to shoot on sight, whether it was back or front. The fast draw on the street was a very rare occurrence. Face-to-face gunfights did happen occasionally. I read about one where there were two folks shooting at each other in a room full of smoke and dodging around a potbellied stove as they tried to get shots at each other and finally crawling around the floor to see legs because the room was full of powder smoke.

But the popular picture of a gunfight in the movies is wacky. In movies, they always use smokeless powder. Actually, up through the 1880s, most people were still shooting black powder, and it had a lot of smoke. Secondly, very few people died on the scene of a gunfight. Most of them died of infection later because when one got shot, there were several layers of dirty clothes carried into the wound, and medicine was primitive. There was violence, but not nearly with the kind of brutality of the movies, where I think in many cases they’ve really converted urban gang warfare backwards into Western legend.

Q: So you graduated in ‘66?

Yes, I graduated in 1966. I had taken the Foreign Service exam, and I had not passed it the first time. This was a great shock to my ego. I decided that since I was going to have to wait another year, I would stay in school. UCR didn’t have a thesis requirement for the master’s in Political Science, so I was able to complete my MA in a year. I also got married in 1966, before my BA. For the graduate year, I got a partial scholarship to stay at UCR. I spent the summer working as a gardener at the University. Elaine worked. Additionally, I received some money from my father for help in editing a revision of his textbook on European and Comparative Government. After he ceased being a professor and became a diplomat, he lacked time for the work. Thus we funded our first year of married life.

I passed the written Foreign Service exam the second time. As a result of this experience, I often tell aspiring Foreign Service officers not to get discouraged if they don’t pass the first time.

The oral exam was very different then from what it is now, much less structured. I remember one question they asked me concerned something about which I happened to know quite a bit. I deliberately gave an answer that sounded a little bit wild because I was trying to draw them into asking me a follow-up so I could wow them with my knowledge. But the ploy failed, because they just moved on to the next question. I guess I had a certain maneuvering streak in me, even at that age.

Anyway, it was some time in 1967 that I actually passed the exam.

Q: And they didn’t offer you a job right away or…

No, getting in the Foreign Service was slow then. There was even a year or two where there were no new Foreign Service classes. That didn’t matter, though, because by that time I had decided to enlist in the Army. Remember, the formative influence on my college years was the Vietnam War, which was progressively roiling campuses in the middle ‘60s. I was a supporter of the intervention. I don’t feel that strongly about it now, but I did then. That was definitely a minority viewpoint on any campus of the University of California. Riverside was not nearly as vocal as UCLA or Berkley. We weren’t having riots and mobs. But supporting the war was very much a minority viewpoint. When President Johnson decided to add more troops, I decided to put my money where my mouth was and volunteer.

First I tried to enlist in the Marines. They wouldn’t take me as an officer because my eyes were bad. Then I volunteered for the Army. They also told me my eyes were bad, but perhaps they needed people more, because they gave me an almost automatic waiver. Either service would have taken me as a soldier, but I wanted to be an officer. However, while the Army gave me a waiver, it was only for noncombat arms, so I was signed up for the Transportation Corps. That wasn’t really what I wanted. I wrote a long letter to the Surgeon General’s office; I don’t know how long it was, but it seemed long at the time, and I explained that I hiked, and I was a rock climber, and I fenced, and Teddy Roosevelt took seven pairs of spare glasses to Cuba, and since I could do all this, would they please give me a second waiver so I could go fight. My mother thought the letter was hysterically funny. Eventually the Army gave me a second waiver.

When I went into the Army, I fully expected that I would have to extend my enlistment by at least another six months to keep a paycheck until there was a Foreign Service class. However, State had a procedure of essentially freezing eligibility if one went into the military, so I didn’t have to retake the exam.

Q: So graduating with a master’s, ‘67, you’ve passed the Foreign Service exam, enlisted in the Army…

Actually, I went to Afghanistan. I had a three and a half month delay on my enlistment. My father had become ambassador to Afghanistan in 1967. He was a political appointee, a Republican who had supported Johnson against Goldwater. His appointment was suggested to Johnson by a former Republican senator from California, Thomas Kuchel, and then Dad was nominated by Johnson. Subsequently, he went on to stay in Afghanistan under Nixon and go to Morocco as ambassador under Ford. He was out during the Carter years. Then he went to Saudi Arabia under Reagan. Thus he was a political appointee who served four presidents in three ambassadorships, and under two parties. Of course that was all in the future. In 1967 he had just gone off to Afghanistan. We had three and a half months to spare before I had to report to duty, with no money; and my parents were willing to buy the tickets. Besides, Afghanistan sounded exotic. So my wife and I headed for Afghanistan.

Q: What was Afghanistan like in those days?

It was just beginning development. It was a friendly place. Occasionally, there were areas where people were cautioned not to go because of banditry. But Elaine and I traveled all over that country, sometimes with my parents, sometimes not. At one point we flew to Kandahar, which is very violent now, and we then found that the flight back had been canceled. We wanted to be back to Kabul, I think for the Queen’s birthday party at the magnificent old British embassy. Somebody had a car that they needed to get back to Kabul, and I just borrowed the car and drove it back to Kabul with my wife. Nobody thought anything of that.

We went with an AID (Agency for International Development) geologist and his Afghan counterpart and drove all the way across the center of Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul. We stayed at the hot springs at Obeh. There was a row of small rooms with marble tubs. The mineral water came out of a hole in the side of the rock when a rag stopper was pulled out of a hole. I put the rag in as a stopper at the bottom of the tub, and that was great until the water got up to the top of the tub. Then I realized that if I pulled the stopper out of the bottom, it was all going to empty, and if I didn’t, it was going to overflow the tub. As I pondered this dilemma, and the water began overflowing, I noticed that there was a drain channel that ran along the side of the marble tub, and that was the way it was supposed to be. As I remember it now, the trip crossed thirty-six passes and seven river fords, in a five-day trip, with all dirt roads. We camped at the beautiful lakes of Band-e Amir, and we visited Bamyan, where the Buddhist statues were. We really saw a lot of Afghanistan.

I went with a hunting party of private Americans up into the northeast, into what’s called the Wakhan corridor. That’s the little panhandle of Afghanistan carved out by British and Russian diplomacy in the nineteenth century. I went with a group that was going to hunt Marco Polo sheep, which have horns that do a full curl and a half. I guess being the ambassador’s son helped because I was invited to go, although I just went with a camera. It was a long trip. We went first by road northeast through Faizabad and out to the end of the road to a place called Qala Panja. There was a strange little wood house built in this barren countryside that had been shipped up there for the king. That was the end of the road. The next day we were to ride horses, but sometime in midmorning we got donkeys. The Afghans told us, Put all your baggage on the donkeys and the horses will be along later, so we did. I watched with some consternation as all my goods went off on these donkeys. It was some hours before horses showed up. Then we moved along so smartly that we passed the donkeys. We were well up a valley ahead of them when night came and the temperature suddenly dropped. We ended all wrapped up in sweaty horse blankets until the donkeys showed up with our coats and sleeping bags. We went on the next day by horse over a 13,000-foot pass and then changed the baggage from donkeys to yaks.

The cavalcade got very large because in Afghanistan, when you rent the animal, the man who owns it goes along too. Hence you increase the number of people in the traveling party for each riding or pack animal hired. By the time we had gotten all our horses and donkeys, our party had grown to thirty-odd.

We went over one high pass. It was a thirteen-hour day in the saddle. We had to finish because most of the horse owners don’t have any kind of sleeping bags. At that altitude, they had to get down into the valley to the stone huts of the shepherd’s camp where the sheep spend the summer. We did that, and we traded the horses the next day for yaks that we rode up into the hunting area. We base-camped at around 13,000 feet and hunted up to about 15,000. It was fantastic country. The mountains rise up to 22,000 feet. I remember at one point, we were riding across a slope that was three or four thousand feet long. We felt like ants moving on the face of the earth. We hunted in stark, treeless terrain where tiny blue or green lakes of