Dates: Jan. 9, Apr. 7, Aug. 25, 1992; Feb 17, May 27, 1993

Interviewer: Charles Stuart Kennedy

Q: Today is January 9, 1992. This is an interview with Ambassador Bruce Laingen on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. Bruce, I wonder if you could give me a little about your background --where you came from, your education, etc.

Amb. Laingen: I was a farm boy from Minnesota growing up on a farm in southern Minnesota. I am often asked why I joined the Foreign Service and I give the answer that we couldn't all be farmers. I had some brothers and I began to look beyond that. I went to school at St. Olaf college in Minnesota. It was a liberal arts school in that part of the country. I served in the Navy in World War II and then took a Masters degree in International Relations at the University of Minnesota in 1949.

Q: What did you do in the Navy? Where did you serve?

Amb. Laingen: I was a V-12 Apprentice Seaman at the University of Dubuque, Iowa, in 1943.

Q: V-12 meaning a reserve program for 12 weeks which turned you into an officer, or something like that?

Amb. Laingen: Not quite. It was a program that picked up people at mid-term in their college career and sent them off to another college for six months. In my case it was to the University of Dubuque and from there I went to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. I am one of the early male graduates from Wellesley College. The Supply Corps in the United States Navy had a branch of the Harvard Business School there and that was why I was at Wellesley. I spent another six months there as a Midshipman and then was commissioned as an officer in the Naval Supply Corps. I served in the Pacific in World War II with amphibious forces in the Philippine campaigns.

Q: After the end of World War II, what attracted you towards foreign affairs?

Amb. Laingen: Like I said, I decided we couldn't all be farmers so I had to look beyond the farm. My real attraction, I suppose, to the outside world started with the United States Navy in World War II in the Philippines. I came back from the Philippines and left the Navy in 1946. I did a Masters degree at the University of Minnesota in International Relations and during that time spent a summer in Sweden as a student in a student summer program at the University.

During the process of looking beyond the farm, joining the Navy and serving in the Philippines and that session in Sweden, I thought the Foreign Service looked rather attractive. The outside world looked very attractive. Indeed, I took my first Foreign Service exam while I was a student in Sweden in 1947. I took it in Helsinki, repeating it later a second time in St. Paul.

Q: Was it the good old three and a half day exam?

Amb. Laingen: Three and a half days, yes. I failed the language (Spanish) three times before I joined the Foreign Service. I had to take the Foreign Service exam twice.

Q: You joined the State Department first before joining the Foreign Service, didn't you?

Amb. Laingen: When I came to town in 1949 from Minnesota, half way through my Foreign Service exam process, waiting to complete it and looking for a job in Washington, I found a job in INR as a research analyst for Scandinavia for the better part of a year, before the exam process was completed. I joined the Foreign Service in late 1950.

Q: Looking at INR in those days. The Cold War was just really beginning to crank up. There was the 1948 Czechoslovak business, the Korean War started in 1950. What was our interest in Scandinavia? Did you feel that Scandinavia was sort of a backwater?

Amb. Laingen: Oh, it certainly was a backwater, and yet it was one of those areas that the government felt, given our experience in World War II, that we got into that affair without adequate knowledge, background information and data about the world out there. So they began these complicated and very extensive research projects of every country on earth. I was working in that program in INR. I forget now exactly what the name of it was.

Q: National Intelligence Studies.

Amb. Laingen: Yes, NIS. So I wrote extensively for the better part of a year on Scandinavia...the Swedish judicial system, the Danish judicial system, etc...contributing to what was destined to become a very massive program. Volume after volume of National Intelligence Studies which presumably would equip us better as a country were we ever to get involved again in a major fracas. As you said, that always loomed on the horizon, increasingly so as we got into the Korean affair.

Q: You came into the Foreign Service when?

Amb. Laingen: I came into the Foreign Service in November, 1950. At that time the military government program in Germany was still in existence, run largely in terms of out reach in the districts...

Q: We had the Kreis Officers Program then.

Amb. Laingen: Yes, the Kreis Officer Program. The State Department was taking over some of the responsibilities of local government in Germany from the Army and I was a member of the Kreis Resident Officer class that began in November, 1950. Therefore I didn't take whatever the basic course was at the time...perhaps it was called the A-100 course even then. I took instead a somewhat modified course because it was destined to lead us to become Kreis Resident Officers ...KROs. We were a class, I think, of 32. We went through the course which was an intense program of German language study and to some degree a look at German culture, etc.

I went off to Germany in the spring of 1951. The entire class bundled aboard the former French and now defunct French liner Decross. This class of 32 officers, most of whom were married, I was not, occupied most of the first class quarters on that ship. It was nine days, nine leisurely days to party, to prepare, if you will. I had on board my green Chevrolet convertible, as did others. We got to Le Harve, off loaded and drove to our posts, beginning with a program in Frankfurt, Germany, at the headquarters of the military government. What was it called, I have forgotten?

Q: HICOM.

Amb. Laingen: Yes, the High Commission in Frankfurt. From there we were farmed out to our assignments for the next two years. At that point, for reasons that I suppose I will never fully understand, some of us were diverted to other programs...I never became a KRO. I think I would have made a rather lousy Gauleiter. Most of my colleagues did become what we joking called Gauleiters; i.e. the Nazi term for those district governors.

Q: Gauleiter being district leaders under the Third Reich.

Amb. Laingen: Exactly, that is what they were called then. Gau was a local district and the leiter was leader in that area.

I was diverted from the program to the Displaced Persons Program and went off to Hamburg, Germany and served two years operating out of the Consulate General there in the British zone, not the American zone. I spent the first year issuing visas virtually non stop to the end of the Displaced Persons Program.

Q: I wonder if you could give a little picture of the Displaced Persons Program? How you operated, your decisions, what were the...?

Amb. Laingen: The Displaced Persons Program was a special program designed to facilitate entry into the United States of those qualified peoples displaced in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as a consequence of the war and particularly as a consequence of the Soviet advance across eastern European countries and into Germany. I forget the numbers but it was a very large program. It included people from places like the Ukraine, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. A lot of them came from the Baltic states. I have often thought, as I watched in the past 18 months here in Washington, D.C. the demonstrations by Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians demanding that the Soviets get out of their countries, that among those people were some I probably gave visas to. Or, if not to them, I gave visas to their parents.

It was a very liberal program in the sense that the requirements were not all that stringent. There was a screening process, particularly effecting their political orientation, health and other considerations. We operated out of Hamburg in what were called displaced persons camps-- many of them being former German military barracks, which was the case for us outside of Hamburg in a place called Wentorf. It was a half hour drive east of Hamburg.

We issued visas almost around the clock. The last day of the program which was December 31, 1952 we issued visas until midnight.

I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed meeting and talking with...and in most instances it was complete families, who benefitted under this program and went to the United States and are now part of the large Ukrainian, Polish, Estonian and Yugoslav communities.

I mention Yugoslavs because it seemed to me that everybody leaving from that area was headed for Libertyville, Indiana. For some reason that seems to be where they found the most sponsors. All of the families and individuals had to have sponsors under the program, as you know better than I, as a consular officer.

Then when that program ended, I left that displaced persons camp and worked full time at the Consulate General in Hamburg under the ethnic German program. This was another program designed to facilitate relief and entry into the United States of those qualified of ethnic Germans who had lived in the Soviet Union areas and had fled as the German army retreated to the West.

Q: The Volksdeutsch program.

Amb. Laingen: Yes, many of those, who had fled the advancing Soviet Army and found refuge in Western Germany and elsewhere. This program was designed specifically for them. That program operated, for me, out of the Consulate General in Hamburg. I enjoyed Hamburg as a first post, because it was and is a very impressive city with a lot of spirit. Happily in World War II, even though it suffered as much bombing, perhaps, as any city in Germany, the core of the city was not so badly damaged, so it didn't lose its face. It lost much of the port area of the city and much of the suburban housing, residential area, but the part of the city around those magnificent lakes, the Inner and Outer Alster, was not that badly damaged. The Germans with their remarkable perseverance and dedication and hard work by 1951-53 had restored much of the core of that city to its original splendor.

Q: We had seized the Nazi Party documents, the Berlin Document Center and all, was it a difficult problem for you to find out...were we refusing a lot of people with tainted pasts or was this much of a problem?

Amb. Laingen: I think it was pretty much a pro forma exercise frankly. I can't say. Both the Ethnic German Program and the Displaced Persons Program involved a great deal of background analysis and checking by legions of people. We had access to that thing and when files came to us there was some kind of reasonably final conclusion required by us in a personal interview that we gave each person...reasonable conclusion that these people were not security risks. I think by and large that was a pro forma exercise.

Q: I was doing it with the Refuge Relief Act about two years later, and it was more or less the same thing. And yet, 30 odd years later I get a call from our own Department of Justice asking if I had issued a visa to so-and-so who was accused of being implicated in the concentration camp atrocities, or something like that.

Amb. Laingen: I never had that experience. I never had any challenge. I never had any reason to think that those to whom I gave visas were any kind of security risk or had any background of that kind. It wasn't a perfect program by any means. By and large, I believe myself, that this country is a lot richer because of an enormous influx of people that were caught up in that tragedy and we are stronger because of it.

Q: And it continues to be. This is our secret weapon.

Amb. Laingen: Yes, it is.

Q: You left Hamburg and by this time did you feel that the Foreign Service was for you?

Amb. Laingen: I am part of that generation that when they made a decision to join the Foreign Service, that was it. It was a life time commitment. It didn't enter our minds that we would consider anything else, or leave it. We were so damned happy to be in it. Exceedingly proud. I think then, and I trust still today, that when you pass the Foreign Service examination you have joined a very elite...and I have no hesitation in using that term...service. Proud to be a part of it. Here I was, a farm boy from Minnesota who, if you will, in my view at least, made it and joined that kind of group. Not a part of the Eastern Seaboard Establishment, but a part of the isolationist Middle West, and I was very proud of that too. I felt very fortunate, myself, in my first assignment to have had a tour of that kind in Germany. It was unusual because it wasn't repeated thereafter in the same way. It was still sort of war time Europe, rebuilding Europe. A consular assignment, which I have said ever since, is one of the best training assignments you can conceivably have for a Foreign Service career. The Foreign Service is fundamentally a service of dealing with people and you certainly get a lot of experience in dealing with people in their strengths and weaknesses when you are a consular officer.

Q: And also cleaning up after a war was a tremendous history lesson, if nothing else, for everyone who went through this experience.

Amb. Laingen: Just to watch and see Europe begin to rebuild. I had had exposure to Europe, and to Germany specifically, three years before as a student in Sweden during that program in Minnesota. At the end of the program I travelled through Western Germany, Belgium, Holland and England and saw...that was only two years after the war...the enormous destruction and tremendous task that those countries faced in rebuilding. By 1953 when I left Germany it was remarkable how much progress had been made. To have been a part of that, to have watched it, was a fascinating experience. I was very fortunate, I think, in my first assignment in the Foreign Service.

Q: When you move to your second assignment...this was to become sort of a theme that was going to be running through out your career, the Iranian theme...

Amb. Laingen: Stu, that was a quirk.

Q: I was going to ask how that came about?

Amb. Laingen: I was assigned as a junior Foreign Service officer and then and now I believe that you go where you are assigned, particularly in your second tour. You don't expect to dictate that.

Q: You don't negotiate.

Amb. Laingen: You don't negotiate that. If you do and succeed you are exceedingly fortunate.

I got my assignment in Hamburg in the middle of 1953 to go as a consular officer in Kobe, Japan. I looked at my orders Kobe, Japan and said, "Well, why not? That sounds exciting. I'll go there." I had never been to Japan but near it in the Philippines in World War II. I sent off my effects to Japan--still unmarried at that time so I didn't have much of personal effects. I got on the liner America at Bremerhaven. Had another splendid return home as we were able to do in those days traveling American liners in first class. I did my consultations in Washington and went on homeleave to my farm family in Minnesota.

Five days short of going to Kobe, Japan, I got a telephone call at that farm in Minnesota from the Department of State saying, "You are not going to Kobe; you are going to Tehran." And I went to Tehran.

My orders were changed because I was, if you will, accessible, available, dispensable as a single officer. The Embassy in Tehran was building up after the overthrow of the Mossadegh regime and the restoration of the Shah to his throne at that critical juncture in Iran's postwar history. The Embassy under Ambassador Loy Henderson felt it needed greater staff. I and several other officers, two of them in particular, who were also single, travelled on the same plane arriving in Tehran that summer in August. This was my first exposure to Tehran by a quirk of fate.

Q: To get a little feel of the situation, a single officer was considered a much more moveable commodity and in effect was, particularly in those days. There was a real differentiation made between single and married officers. A single officer could be put somewhere where a married one would find it a little more difficult.

Amb. Laingen: Yes. I think that was true. I still think that is sensible and practical. Certainly at that point all of us felt strongly that we were a disciplined Service, that we were subject to orders, particularly as junior officers. We went and were expected to go where the Service needed us. I was fascinated. I looked at the map. I had never been to Tehran before. My farm family was certainly fascinated to know that I was going to that distant place. I remember at the time looking at the list of posts that we had in Tehran at that time, including several consulates and consulates general. One of them on the map was Meshed. Of course I didn't know how to pronounce it and said, "meshed." Eventually I served there.

Q: You arrived there when?

Amb. Laingen: It must have been in August, 1953.

Q: This is a very interesting time. What was the political situation at the time of your arrival?

Amb. Laingen: I got there I suppose within weeks, at most a couple of months, after the rather tumultuous events surrounding the collapse of the Mossadegh regime and the seizure of power by Zahedi.

Q: He was a general.

Amb. Laingen: General Zahedi was in power--with certainly the support, and in the view of a great many people, the active involvement of the CIA in facilitating the overthrow of the Mossadegh regime, the return of the Shah from Rome where he had fled several weeks before that, and the beginning of a very different relationship between Iran and the United States. The larger picture, of course, involved Iran's rather difficult postwar history involving the Soviet occupation of a province of Iran, Azerbaijan. And our active involvement at that time through the United Nations and seeing the Soviets eventually forced to withdraw their presence, and more significantly, their influence. It was a time, also, affected by the oil nationalization program that had been carried out by the Mossadegh regime and the difficult relationship that then ensued,particularly between the Iranians and the British, but since we were a major participant in terms of oil, involving us as well.

Loy Henderson was our Ambassador at the time. Herbert Hoover, Jr. was a frequent visitor to Tehran at that time, leading the American side in discussions relating to the oil nationalization issue.

Q: He was Under Secretary?

Amb. Laingen: Yes. He was designated to deal particularly with this nationalization process and turmoil involving American, Dutch, British and other oil companies that ensued thereafter.

I was a junior officer assigned to the economic section. I served under an ambassador whom I will always regard as one of the giants of American postwar diplomatic practice. That was Loy Henderson. He had his critics as well, but I will never be among them, at least in respect to the way he treated junior officers in the Foreign Service. I was a lowly FSO-6. That was the lowest rank at that time. I was on my second tour. I had a strong sense of respect, having been a naval officer before that, for authority, and I certainly felt it towards the Ambassador at that point in a large and growing Embassy.

It was a very large and powerful Embassy in Tehran at that time. And yet, Loy Henderson was the kind of Ambassador who was capable of reaching down to the lowest ranks of his staff and showing respect and regard for them in allowing them to participate as backbenchers, if you will, in his staff meetings. I wasn't an active participant in those meetings, but I was allowed to sit in on them and listen as other officers were. I thought that was a real credit to him and certainly a contribution to my capacity to serve effectively there as a junior officer in the economic section.

Q: One does have the feeling in interviews, that Henderson more than anybody else did look upon the Foreign Service as a Service and had a regard for the training and assignment of junior officer looking ahead to the future of the Service.

Amb. Laingen: He did. I had a high regard and respect for him. He had a wife who was one of the dragons of the Foreign Service as we used to call a wife who threw her weight around a little bit. But that didn't trouble me too much because I was a junior officer without a spouse and therefore was quite prepared to be used, if you will, and she certainly used junior officers in a protocol sense.

Q: To give a little feel for this, how would she do this?

Amb. Laingen: The Embassy in Tehran then, as it is now, is located in a large compound...27 acres...then on the outskirts of the city, today in the heart of the city. An Embassy presence, a foreign presence, an American presence loomed very large in those days, so there was a good deal of social life in that city in the diplomatic corps. Outside power, foreign political influence was sort of concentrated in the American Embassy and the British Embassy. So Ambassador Henderson did a great deal of entertaining with political purposes in mind. That required, as it does today, I think, the active participation of the staff in support of an Ambassador who does that kind of diplomatic representation. Mrs. Henderson had no hesitation of ordering us around as junior officers to be here, there, in the protocol line, ready to translate, ready to pick up at her command a personage from the receiving line and take him off somewhere to the buffet table or get him into the conversation. She was very tough on that and expected me and other officers and their wives to be available at her whim. Not only at those parties, but sometimes at other more limited circumstances in the Residence to

be there, to be helpful. As I said, I was single, and assumed that was sort of natural in the Foreign Service. Others who had been their longer, not least spouses, began to chafe at that, did chafe at that, although much less then than they do today. But there were plenty of people in that Embassy who were restive with that. There was irritation at times contributing to this image of ambassadors' wives who were known as dragons.

Q: What was your economic job?

Amb. Laingen: I suppose I wrote one of the most definitive studies of the Iranian cement industry that was ever produced. I recall it was a 20 page despatch. I wasn't an expert on cement, but it was one of my assignments early on when I first got there to do a report on that in a despatch. In those days all reporting didn't come in by cable as it does today. Much of the reporting in any depth went in by despatch by pouch.

I had a variety of assignments as a junior officer in that section. Most of it focused not so much on oil but on other Iranian small industry. Most of the time it was an assignment under an economic counselor who used us as sort of errand boys to go off and do specific things.

Q: Who was the Economic Counselor?

Amb. Laingen: A man named Bill Bray, who is since deceased. I did not know him after that tour.

Q: What was your impression...here you were a junior officer for the first time in this area...of the Shah?

Amb. Laingen: Our impression was that we were on an upward roll. Things could only get better. The Mossadegh regime was behind us. We had a regime in place under General Zahedi which was very responsive to American interests. An oil settlement was eventually worked out. It was a very optimistic period in terms of American interests in that part of the world. The Shah was still, at that point, rather a young monarch and in view, I think, of most of the rest of us, susceptible to American interests. Malleable, if you will, in terms of insuring that policies of his government and of Zahedi under him, would be responsive to American concerns and interests. The United States was a very large player in Tehran at that time. It was the player.

Q: This was the time that the American and the British views were beginning to diverge, at least it is my impression of this, getting it a little bit later in Saudi Arabia. That we were going along with the idea that as long as the oil was coming out and a sufficient profit was coming through it didn't have to be a complete American monopoly. It could certainly be in the hands of the local regimes. The British still had a strong proprietary feel about it. At least that was my impression where I was in Saudi Arabia. How did you see it?

Amb. Laingen: I think it was a period of decline for the British paramountcy in Iran. From that point on they had to share their political presence in Tehran and in the area generally with us in ways that they never had to do before; they had to share with American oil companies in ways that were not the case before.

Q: Were you getting emanations from your British colleagues about this?

Amb. Laingen: I didn't personally sense it much at my level. Our relationships were very cordial, very good, very close. The British, I suppose not least in the atmosphere of diplomacy were circumspect to how they reacted to us. I did not sense that kind of conflict at my level.

Q: How about your contacts with the Iranians? Were they the professional, upper class Iranians?

Amb. Laingen: We had a lot of contact with the Iranians, but largely with the upper class--the westernized, English speaking element. I was not a Farsi speaker. I and others assigned at that time immediately began Farsi training. My Farsi competence never evolved to the point where I could carry on much of a political dialogue. It was largely kitchen Farsi, but it gave me enough to suggest to the Iranians that I was interested and fascinated by their language and culture and was prepared to learn a little bit. Most of our contacts were those who were the product of an intense Embassy representation program with upper class Iranians. I didn't talk with many rank and file Iranians. I saw a great many, of course. Tehran then, too, was a big city. We travelled around in it with ease and without any concern, including the bazaars.

It was a fascinating time, particularly for a single officer available to go do your thing and travel a great deal. We travelled a lot around Tehran and other cities on both personal and representational trips. I also served, as did others in the Embassy, particularly single officers, as discussion group leaders in the Iran-America Society, the bi-national center that was beginning to grow at that time and would eventually, by the time I served in Tehran the second time, become one of the largest in the world.

I remember in those discussion groups, where I would meet rank-and-file ordinary Iranians who came to these discussion groups to strengthen their English capability, getting into a lot of discussions of political issues at the time. I remember how impressed I was, and I have recently been rereading some of my letters written at that time, of how despite the Embassy's conviction, the official American line that the Shah was in good shape, that his regime was responsive to the interests of the Iranians and was doing well in terms of winning support of the Iranian people, that this wasn't necessarily totally true. Many of these young people were critical of that regime in ways that at the time the embassy did not fully comprehend.

Q: Did Ambassador Henderson or the political counselor make any effort to sort of tap...the fact that you had these junior officers out there...a good place to take a temperature reading of what's happening?

Amb. Laingen: Oh sure. I think they did. Not only Henderson, but the political counselor, the DCM. We were encouraged to get out there and report. But I think a lot of it got lost. A lot of it wasn't listened to. We didn't want to listen to it. When I say "we" I mean the American government beginning in Washington and extending out to the field. It was a time when so much confidence and hope and conviction surrounded the return of the Shah and the belief that this was a trend responsive to Iran's own needs. We didn't listen much to what we were hearing. It didn't register very strongly, looking back on it now.

Q: What was your impression about this post-Mossadegh feeling toward the Mossadegh government, both within the Embassy and also from the people you were talking to?

Amb. Laingen: He was a populist and a great orator. Looking back on it today, I think one must conclude that we were not very perceptive at the time. You see in Tehran you can get a crowd for almost anything at any time. By the time I got to Tehran, several weeks after the overthrow of the Mossadegh regime, the crowds were on the streets shouting their praises of Zahedi and the Shah. Looking back on it I think I too was overly awed by that apparent support of the mass for the return of the Shah and an end to what seemed a pro-Soviet, leftist leaning, Mossadegh regime. We brought ourselves to believe that that regime was out of line, out of touch with Iran's larger interests and the interests of the rank-and-file in the streets.

We were wrong. At least history tells us we were wrong if events since that time is any indication of that. As I indicated before, looking back on it and on what I wrote at the time, I was hearing different signals from at least those young people in the Iran-America Society. But I apparently didn't listen sufficiently, it didn't register strong enough. The total effect of that in terms of reporting to the Ambassador and up through the ranks wasn't having enough effect.

I would have to reread the files, I was not a political reporter at that time, to find out how much of this we were reporting to Washington. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a good deal of reporting of this other view on the part of some people that the Shah and Zahedi were also out of sync with a lot of their people, but as often is the case, reporting of that kind isn't carefully read in Washington.

Q: Even if it is, what do you do about it? This could be true of almost every country.

Amb. Laingen: Right. The later revolution, of course, I can speak volumes on.

Q: We will go into that later. Part of this is by the year 1992 we have seen the dissolution of the Soviet Union so looking for people who are looking at this period at a later time, what was the feeling there of the Soviet threat and internal communism?

Amb. Laingen: The threat loomed large. The Soviet Union was the big bear to the north. And, of course, it was. It had been a big bear for the Iranians in Czarist times. The Iranians and Russians had fought wars. Iran had lost territory, its integrity was often threatened. There was the Azerbaijan affair after World War II. It was the height of the period of concern worldwide on the part of the United States for the Soviet threat. The beginning of serious Soviet threat in the aftermath of the Truman Doctrine, the Korean concerns and all of that. And, of course, the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc were immediately there to the north. It was close at hand. It wasn't far away. So there was a lot of concern about that and, not least, the concern, in the largest strategic sense, of Soviet access to the warm waters of the Gulf to the south and control over the oil of that region. There was a big concern at that time.

I don't recall dealing with any Soviet diplomats at the time. We had very little contact with them. The Ambassador saw them, senior officers saw them I think at diplomatic functions. They were not far away physically in that city. Tehran is a city that has a very large diplomatic presence, not least a physical presence. The big powers in Tehran have large compounds reflecting the roles that they have played politically in that country. The Soviet compound in the city of Tehran is an enormous place and smack dab in the middle of the city, always was there. The British compound is even larger. Both of them have not only downtown compounds but separate compounds in the upper suburbs of the city where it is cool and they can go in the summer.

I mention these because the physical presence of these embassies in itself is a very interesting indicator of political history when outside powers have intruded upon Iran, both geographically, on the part of the Soviet Union and the Russians before them, and the British, and politically by the Russians, the British and by us. Eventually, serving in Meshed, as I did for about five months as the acting consul in that city up near the Soviet border, I felt and sensed the Soviet Union even closer because the only reason for that little post being in Meshed at that point near the Afghanistan and Soviet border was a listening post, intelligencewise vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the Soviet threat. The results of the Soviet threat implicit in the body politic of Iran through the Tudeh Party, which is the Communist Party of Iran. It is still extant, although illegal today under the revolution. At that time it had a very active presence, but also illegal at that point. Nonetheless, a very large threat in itself.

Q: When you engaged Iranians, particularly the younger people, in political discussions, did they all go under the assumption that the United States put the Shah back in and gave you a wink about the CIA really doing all this? Was this sort of accepted among those young English students?

Amb. Laingen: We didn't hear much about that. It was an accepted fact, as you said, that the Shah was back on the throne and the official line was that the mass of Tehran had come to the conclusion that Mossadegh was wrong and that popular sentiment and political powers within Iran itself had restored the Shah to his throne. The role of the CIA was not very well known at that time. There may have been an assumption on the part of a lot of Iranians, saying it was there, but that didn't really become, I don't think, a large factor in Iranian thinking about the United States until later.

There was a great deal of enthusiasm it seemed and I think a lot of it was genuine popular enthusiasm that with the Shah restored to his throne there was a different and hopeful direction in Tehran. And, of course, the United States also benefitted from the fact that among a lot of Iranians the United States was a "good" outside power compared to the Soviets and the British.

During earlier years, in contrast to the physical intrusion on the part of the Soviets and the British, the Americans had been there in humanitarian terms, in education and philanthropy, in hospitals and schools. Much of it done through the extensive work of American missionaries, religious missions. Although these missions were designed to convert people to Christianity, most of them, I think, recognized that they weren't going to be converting many people, but they were very active in education and medicine. And I think even today Iranians remember the United States best because of our presence and contributions in those private ways. There were streets named in memory of missionaries who had been active in education. There were still schools in 1953, '54, and '55 when I was there, run by them. And hospitals run by them. This sentiment that America had been active in those fields was very strong among a lot of Iranians. It overshadowed the suspicion or anger, if you will, to the extent that it was there, about American intelligence activities messing around in the politics of Tehran.

Q: Did you feel that the Shah, when he came back...his secret police was really operating heavily at that time or was it still a sort of honeymoon period?

Amb. Laingen: It was very much a honeymoon period for the Shah. It was an upward roll on the part of all concerned.

Q: You didn't feel that the secret police was a major factor?

Amb. Laingen: No, that didn't begin really until later. That sort of presence and feel of the secret police, didn't exist at that time.

Q: What about the Iranian as a political animal? How did you see him or her at that time?

Amb. Laingen: The Iranian was not much of a political animal. There wasn't much politics in Iran in terms of a majlis, parliament, that was of any power. It was seen dominated by a military regime under General Zahedi and the Shah. There wasn't much politics to be seen. There were all kinds of feeling on the part of the average Iranian that the real politics were in the embassies of the big powers. They were the ones who were running things. There was that belief, that acceptance, that sentiment, on the part of most people--and yes, the elite as well. They seemed prepared to live with it. On the part of the mass, if they thought about it at all, sort of an assumption that that was a given. It had always been that way in the recent history of Iran.

This also relates to the escape goat syndrome that looms so large in the Iranian psyche. A product of historical experience. As I said, foreign powers had always been intruding in modern times in Iran...the Russians, the British. That was largely to be accepted as a given. And when things went wrong, Iranians would point to them as being responsible much more then they would examine themselves. That is what I mean by the escape goat syndrome. They would look to others as being responsible for their ills, not surprisingly perhaps, given the way outsiders have intruded on them in their history.

The point, however, is that that scape goat syndrome is so considerable, or was then and still is, as to cloud the vision of Iranians about what they need to do themselves to clean up their own act.

Q: This does run through some other countries. Greece has it, the Middle East,...

Amb. Laingen: The American factor in Greece is a very strong and powerful one. Not surprising given the Greek presence here. But the foreign presence virtually behind every tree in Tehran is a powerful influence.

Q: These huge foreign compounds at a certain point become a real detriment don't they because they are much more of a symbol than an ordinary embassy which is just a nice looking building.

Amb. Laingen: Detriment to whom?

Q: The power owning it.

Amb. Laingen: Well, I feel that way. I hope and pray that when we resume relations with Iran, which we will someday, that by that time our compound will have burned down and we will be forced to go to smaller quarters somewhere. When we bought that compound in Tehran in the forties and built a chancery building...which, by the way, we called "Henderson High" because it was red brick and architecturally unattractive, not unlike a suburban American high school...it was still part of the syndrome that a foreign diplomatic presence had to be big--and we were big then in terms of numbers too. It's true that we did build it on the outskirts of the city at that time. This was at least a gesture towards some degree of awareness of Iranian sensitivities. But by the time of the revolution in 1979, of course, it had been absorbed into a much larger city and was smack in the middle of that larger city. It is a detriment, I think, in today's world, because it is a kind of red flag to politically sensitive Iranians.

Q: You had an assignment from 1954-55 for about four or five months in Meshed?

Amb. Laingen: Five months in Meshed.

Q: As a listening post. This is one of these terms that is used again and again. But you as a young officer going up there, how does one run a listening post? What do you do?

Amb. Laingen: Well, we didn't do much, frankly. We let the CIA presence do most of the listening. We were a very small post, but we had a CIA presence and that was its real function. I was there to preside over a very small consulate for a short period of time. We had, I think, five Americans at that post. It no longer exists. I was there periodically to report to Tehran, which then was rather distant. There was no airline. There was occasional air traffic in a DC-3. No railroad connection. There were no paved roads to Meshed. It was a two day drive, at least, to get there.

It was a distant outpost of American influence and presence in Iran as well as being a listening post. As consul, I was that "presence". We regarded that kind of presence in the outback as important in our larger political interests in Iran. So I reported also my impressions of that place to Tehran. About how we were seen and regarded there. We were well regarded, at least by the establishment. There was little indication on the part of the rank-and-file in that place that there was any political concern about the United States--the people of that city being largely religious oriented...there is a major religious shrine there that preoccupied the Iranians. Much of that is still true today.

Looking back on it I think my presence was inconsequential. This was evident in the fact that at one point the lock of my safe...I had a large safe...jammed. We had a one-time pad in terms of reporting classified information and I couldn't get to it and report any intelligence even if I wanted to. It took about five weeks before I could get the damned safe open with the help of a security officer coming up from Tehran. I guess American interests still survived despite the fact that for five weeks there was no "listening" that I know of nor any reporting from Meshed.

Q: Were you picking up that the Soviets were mucking around there at all?

Amb. Laingen: I would assume they were. I never sensed that, however. We didn't see them. There was no Soviet diplomatic presence. The British were no longer there. They had a consulate general complex that was very splendid, but closed because of the consequence of the oil nationalization program and not reopened. The only consular presence were the Americans, the Afghans, the Indians and the Pakistanis. A very active consular social set. I am convinced that I picked up my hepatitis, which I suffered from there for some weeks, by eating things at the Afghan Consulate General on their national day which I probably should not have.

I traveled occasionally with my agency presence outside of Meshed, along the Soviet border, to observe--he presumably doing his own observing with his own contacts among tribal elements in those areas. We did not have, that I know of, any of the intelligence listening capability that we had developed by 1979 when they were very important in terms of watching Soviet satellite capability from listening posts in that part of Iran. That didn't exist at that time.

It was listening in terms of recruiting agents...agents in terms of reporting capability, I suppose, in large part, and observing visually.

Q: Would you walk by the local religious shrines and see if the people were jumping up and down?

Amb. Laingen: We did, but they weren't jumping up and down politically at that time. It was a very quiet place during my time there. There certainly weren't any anti-Shah disturbances. This was in the short term aftermath of the Mossadegh overthrow and nobody was going to put his neck on the line too far in terms of major disturbances against the regime. That is a very conservative corner of Iran anyway where liberal elements were not very strong. It is a major religious center. It is a very prosperous area of Iran and always has been because of its agricultural strength. That, I think, also left it a much less politically active corner than for example Isfahan and Shiraz and cities like that in the south.

Q: Which were also religious centers but...

Amb. Laingen: Much less so.

Q: On the religious side, did you have any contact with religious leaders?

Amb. Laingen: Oh, very little. I don't recall at the time at least in my contacts, observation and experience, that the clerical community was playing any serious role at all. They certainly were not a threat. There were the senior clerical leaders that the Shah was beginning to attempt to recruit, to win over, if you will. I don't recall ever meeting the senior religious figure in Meshed, except as I dealt with the civilian governor general who in Meshed is also the overseerer of the shrine and in that sense a kind of religious leader himself. I saw a lot of him. Talked a lot with him. We had a very good social relationship. A very dignified individual. But I don't recall ever talking with a cleric directly. Islam was not seen in those days as a large political factor.

Q: You are a farm boy from Minnesota who probably hasn't had much exposure to Islam and you are put there. Were you given any sensitivity courses?

Amb. Laingen: No. I was not given any sensitivity training in terms of the role of Islam in Iran. I don't recall that any of us had that. I don't recall that we thought much about it. Most of us thought about it simply in the context of an appreciation that they were Muslims. We didn't think much about the distinction between Shiite Islam and Sunni Islam--as that affects the way in which the clerics play a political role under Shia Islam. Frankly, about the only thought we had for Islam at the time was a respect for it. We knew that we could not go into the shrine in Meshed as non-Muslims, as Christians, because that would have been seen as intrusion of the worst kind. We respected that. We didn't think much about it politically. It was not seen and felt a political force.

We respected it not least because in Meshed at the time there had been an incident just before I got there where the daughter of the AID director...we had a large AID program in Iran which got even larger after the Mossadegh regime was overthrown...who had put on a veil, a chador, and gone into the shrine. Someone had discovered her and there was a great tumult over that although there was no physical hurt to that person. I'm afraid our thoughts about Islam were largely devoted to photography of their magnificent mosques.

Q: Did our policy towards Israel intrude at all?

Amb. Laingen: No, not that I recall. It certainly wasn't yet a big factor politically.

Q: Having served slightly later in Saudi Arabia where Islam was so all embracing. Everything was run by religious leaders, practically. Israel was such a factor and got thrown into your face again and again. But you were somewhat insulated from this?

Amb. Laingen: Yes. I don't recall that being a subject. Let me clarify that I was an economic officer and not that active in terms of political reporting or observation. I probably should have done more than I did. But I don't recall in talking with my colleagues in conversation in that Embassy that the Israeli factor was all that large. It became one over time. Today it most assuredly is. It may have been then in ways that I did not sense.

Q: One last question on this. What about corruption? As an economic officer working on things like cement, etc., was corruption a concern?

Amb. Laingen: Sure. We shrugged our shoulders and smiled. We assumed that was part of the Iranian psyche, a characteristic of the Iranian scene, how things were done. We didn't think much about it. It was there. Baksheesh and all that was rampant in the bazaar. It was a fact, we knew it was there. As I've said, I was assigned in my first days and weeks of my tour in Tehran to the office of the AID director, the one who ran the Point Four Program in Tehran at that time, as a flunkey--mostly running errands before I went over to the Embassy and the economic section. I mention that because at that same time another relative flunkey in the office was a young Iranian called Zahedi, the son of the General who was running the place. Zahedi eventually became the last Iranian Ambassador to the Shah in this city. He and I worked together in that office. There was, I am sure, if one were to study the AID program in Iran which became increasingly large in the years that followed, you would find a lot of corruption. But I can't identify it or recall any specific instances of evidence of it at the time.

Q: Were there any events that happened while you were there?

Amb. Laingen: No. We travelled a lot in Iran to the cities of that country. It was a great time to get around that city. We enjoyed it. It was a great assignment. Not least because of an Ambassador whom we all respected. His Minister, Bill Rountree, was another senior diplomatic figure in our postwar diplomatic history. Exciting because of the politics of the time, the aftermath of the Mossadegh regime. The beginning of what became a very large and eventually disastrous American-Iranian relationship. It began in those years that I was there and culminated in the years when I served there a second time.

I came down with hepatitis, which regrettably, spoiled a lot of my time in Meshed. We had a reasonable amount of medical attention, happily, because of Presbyterian missionaries. I can't over state my own view how Presbyterian, Catholic...particularly Presbyterian in the northern segments of Iran...played such an important role in affecting Iranian views of the United States. And it is not only in that country; there are other countries, I think, that you can identify in that part of the world where that was a factor too. But it was very large in Iran because of the role those missionaries played in the beginning of effective education, not least for women, and good medical facilities. I am still of the view regarding future Iran-American relations that that sentiment is not gone--certainly not among older Iranians who still remember that good side of the United States. A powerful influence which I greatly respect and admire.

Q: In the Middle East so many missionaries did turn to education and medicine because conversion has been most ineffective.

Amb. Laingen: Even though they felt that by indulging in those fields that was one way to achieve conversion.

Q: Well, in a way it did in that it showed the good side and a residue of goodwill.

Amb. Laingen: Yes. I don't know how many the Presbyterians converted, but I suspect it would be less than fifty, and that is probably an exaggeration.

Q: You left Tehran in 1956 and came back to the State Department where you served for four years. What were you doing when you came back?

Amb. Laingen: I was assigned to the Greek Desk. Three relatively junior officers were assigned at that time to what was called GTI...Greece, Turkey and Iran. I was assigned to the Greek Desk. Another friend was assigned to the Turkish Desk and another to the Iranian Desk. Reflecting the arbitrary nature of assignments at that point, none of us had ever seen or worked in the countries to which we were assigned. I had never been to Greece. I overflew it once. I had no competence at all in Greece. I was the assistant Greek officer; assistant to an officer named Ben Wood, Charles Benedict Wood, who died this past fall. I was exceedingly fortunate to work with him because of his own competence, style and personality. He was a great guy.

I was assistant Greek Desk officer for two years and then after Wood left served as the Desk officer for Greece for the final two years of a four year stint in the Department at that time.

At that point Cyprus did not have a separate Desk. Cyprus was not that much of an issue. It did become one, however, in that time to the point where for the last two years I had an assistant who was the Cyprus Desk officer.

I was assigned back to Washington in 1955 and took the midcareer course for the last months of that year and began my Greek Desk tour in 1956. I was assigned back about the same time that the Minister of the Embassy in Tehran at the time, Bill Rountree, whom I referred to earlier, was assigned as the Assistant Secretary for NEA. At that point, NEA, as you recall, extended everywhere from East Pakistan to Capetown. There was no separate African Bureau yet.

Q: And it included Greece, Turkey and Iran.

Amb. Laingen: Yes. I mention him, as I did earlier, because I respected him and appreciated serving under him. I have been fortunate in the Foreign Service to serve with some very capable people as my chiefs. I was fortunate in a personal sense at the time because Bill Rountree as Assistant Secretary said to me one day, "Why don't you come out and meet the girl next door?" So I went out for a dinner party and met the girl next door, whom I later married.

Q: That was Penne.

Amb. Laingen: Yes, Penne.

Q: In this period of 1956-60, what were our interests in Greece, as you saw them as Desk Officer?

Amb. Laingen: We had a large AID program. It was the aftermath of the difficult period involving the postwar Greek civil war. It was a time of growing American military presence and the evolving Cyprus problem. We were heavily preoccupied with the Cyprus issue during that time. My assistant for the last two years then became in effect the Cyprus Desk Officer, Archer Blood.

I like to joke that he and I resolved the Cyprus issue in 1960 in the Zurich Agreement. The Prime Ministers of Greece and Turkey went off to Zurich, Switzerland and resolved the Cyprus issue by setting up an independent Cyprus with agreement between the two states.

Then I left in 1960 to go to Pakistan and Arch Blood left to go to East Pakistan. We like to joke that as soon as we left the Desk in 1960, things began to fall apart. The Cyprus agreement that had been reached began to fray at the edges and fell apart in the sixties.

Q: During this period both Greece and Turkey were already in NATO. What sort of feeling did you have towards the role of Greece...I come at it from a different period in the next decade, 1970-74, and the Greeks were so occupied with hating the Turks in the Cyprus situation that their NATO role was mainly to make sure they got whatever the Turks got militarily. Did you find yourself having to sit down with the Turkish Desk Officer and compare notes to make sure that the balance was equitable?

Amb. Laingen: No, it was not a large factor. We didn't focus much on it.

Q: Also it was a period of profound Greek-American preoccupation with....

Amb. Laingen: I don't think there was any particular serious problem of any kind. There was always friction because of the Turkish and Cyprus issue. We saw a lot of Greek-Americans. The problem is that we don't have many Turkish-Americans in this country, but a lot of Greek-Americans. I don't think there are any Turks in Congress, but there are Greeks. I came off that assignment with respect for the Turks as solid partners, but I had more enjoyment with the Greeks because they are fun.

[tape 2]

Q: What about Makarios and Grivas and the search for independence and Enosis? Did this mean that you were having to consult with people handling British affairs? Was this a problem?

Amb. Laingen: Yes, it was a problem, but not a serious one. We and the British consulted a lot, saw each other a lot. But I, frankly, looking back on that tour on the Greek Desk, don't recall many major issues that confronted us at the time. It was a remarkably calm time--other than the way the Cyprus problem grew and eventually led to the Zurich Agreement and was resolved. We nurtured that with them, but we were not large players in that agreement. They went off and did it themselves. I often point to that as an example of how sometimes when we step back from things these countries can do it better themselves. I put that in context in a later time in Indian-Pakistani relations when they went off after the tragedy of 1971 and came up with a similar agreement which they worked out themselves.

I have never served in Greece. I traveled in Greece as Desk Officer a couple of times and came to know then a gentleman again whom I look back on with great respect and interest named Philip W. Ireland, who died just a couple of weeks ago. He served as Consul General in Thessaloniki, Salonica, at the time I was on the Desk. He was a very strong presence, as he always was, to the point that we sometimes referred to that sector of Greece as Northern Ireland.

By the way I recall seeing a great deal of another American private presence that has been such a positive factor in relationship with that country, and that is the American farm school in Salonica. It was run then by the Landales, founded by a gentleman named House. It is still there today. I think it is a presence that has done as much for us in terms of long term respect for the United States as anything we have ever done in Greece.

Q: Same way with the American University of Beirut, Cairo and Istanbul.

Amb. Laingen: That is right. All over the place. Beirut particularly, of course. I recall that in one of the first speeches that Terry Sutherland made recently after coming back as a Beirut hostage, he said that the best way to punish these bastards who held him hostage was not to seek them out and kill them, but to rebuild the American University of Beirut. And I agree with that.

I saw something of Cyprus at the time...visiting and meeting with Makarios and coming away with enormous respect for the personal stature, power of that individual. Not someone who one could penetrate or influence very easily.

Q: I heard somebody say that a Secretary of State told you that the problem with Makarios was that Cyprus was just too small for him.

Amb. Laingen: Oh, exactly. That is a very good point. We had an American business interest in Cyprus that preoccupied our time then occasionally. That was a copper mining complex in the western part of Cyprus. We would spend a lot of time about supporting its interests, particularly as we began to worry more and more about the Turkish/Greek divide in Cyprus.

Q: One of the things that is often thrown at any capitalist country, particularly the United States, is that American industry overseas dominates us. We are out there just for further trade or the exploitation. You have a copper interest on Cyprus. Cyprus is going through a difficult period and you say you spent a lot of time on it. What would you do?

Amb. Laingen: There is a limit to what you can do, obviously. That interest has to function under the laws and practices of that sovereign country. But what we did and what you can do is to meet with these interests. The Desk Officer has to have an open door in my view in Washington for American business interests who want to come in. They are not all convinced that there is that much help they can get from a Desk. I think on the whole we see less of American business interests than we should. I think that certainly has been true historically over time as far as American diplomacy overseas. I think that is changing. An American embassy is expected to be a lot more active in terms of supporting American business overseas than it was before, unless you get into a real crunch as we did in Tehran in terms of American oil interests.

But we met with these company people when they came to town and counseled with them about our appreciation and awareness of the way British policy was affecting Cyprus at the time and the way in which the place was either going to pull itself together or wasn't. Of course it did in the large sense in that Zurich Agreement.

Q: Our role in the Zurich Agreement was....

Amb. Laingen: Bystanders. We didn't have a role in it. They went off and did it themselves. There was a lot of saying, "For God's sake you have to resolve this problem." And we have been saying that to the Greeks and the Turks ever since, with less success, now. It was Karamanlis for the Greeks and who was the Turk? It has slipped my mind.

Q: You were in the GTI in NEA, which in those days covered Africa. You represented one corner and Africa represented the other corner but things were pretty well focused on what we would call today the Middle East...we were just coming out of the Suez Canal situation. Did you feel that you were kind of on your own?

Amb. Laingen: Oh sure. We were a side play. And Africa was too. Who thought much about Africa in those days? Looking back on it I can't imagine how an assistant secretary could conceivably have coped with the bureau that large, except that there weren't that many crises in Africa in those days, I guess.

Q: Just one thing and we might call it quits. What does a Desk Officer in those days do? It sounds very impressive. You have Greece and you are the Greek Desk Officer. You never served there before and all of a sudden you have the cradle of civilization. What do you do with it?

Amb. Laingen: At that time for a junior officer, a Desk Officer assignment was a great one. I still think it is a great one.

Q: It is called a Country Director now.

Amb. Laingen: A Country Director usually extends to more than one country. That is another story. The Country Director position never evolved exactly the way it was supposed to and we had hoped it would in the early seventies. We then got into this regrettable trend of more and more Deputy Assistant Secretaries. The power that the Country Director was supposed to have was diminished because of this other strata, layer, up there that regrettably is still there in such numbers. A country desk, however, in many respects I suppose even today, still is the core, the repository of whatever intelligence and knowledge we have about a given country. It is assumed, at least, that that is where the expertise is--where people who think most about both big and particularly small issues are. That is why the person assigned there, I think, should not be someone who never served there but someone who has served there and knows the language to some degree. It is the place where...and again it depends on the country...the Desk Officer for Togo, for example, I suppose is a country that is not going to loom very large ever in American interests. But he can be consequential because he is the only one who ever thinks about Togo. On the French Desk there are a number of officers and the real expertise is divided among them. But it is an important position. Certainly an important training position, I think. In terms of the evolution of a senior officer, in political terms at least, he ought to have a desk officer assignment. I was happy to have had one at that point.

I was also very fortunate, I think, as an officer in the Foreign Service, to have had a lot of in and out assignments. I didn't stay long in the field, ever. The only extended period were the two assignments in Germany and Iran to begin with, marking a total of 4 years. Otherwise my assignments have always been in and out giving me the satisfaction of developing family connections, preserving them back here and strengthening my roots in terms of understanding my own country, which I think sometimes can be weakened if you don't have frequent assignments back in Washington. Of course, by law today the Foreign Service is expected to be on that kind of rotation. It didn't used to be.

Q: You got Greece. It is a complicated country. The politics is complicated, the people are complicated. How do you develop expertise? Did you read your way in?

Amb. Laingen: Never studied Greek. Certainly didn't do all of that.

Q: Did you have files that you could read? Did people talk to you?

Amb. Laingen: Yes, there were files I could read. Looking back on it I guess I read a lot of them in the first year or so I was assigned there. I was fortunate to have a Desk Officer supervisor...I was the assistant to a Desk Officer named Ben Wood who knew and felt, and I think understood the Greek psyche very well, having both travelled and served there. I learned a great deal from him. I had very good relations with the Greek Embassy as a Desk Officer surely should have. That's the slot with respect to a country in the Department in Washington that must work the hardest to insure that the relationship between the Department of State and that embassy in this city is good. That is his job, more than anybody else--to make sure that he has contacts there and that there is good relationship in terms of access for that ambassador to senior levels in the Department of State. Not to the point of becoming a victim of clientitis, but being mindful of the fact that that embassy, depending on the country, can be a very important player in how you carry out your job.

Sometimes they can be supporting actors in the process, and usually are. And big players, sometimes, depending on the country. Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin, for example, was a powerful player in Washington.

Anyway, I saw a good deal of the Greek Embassy at the time. The Greeks are not only political animals, but they are social animals and like to talk and party. There was a great deal of contact that I had at that time. I still look back on that experience as probably the best in terms of relationships with foreign diplomats from another country that I have ever had in this town. Because of what they are and the intensity then of the growing American-Greek relationship, a good relationship at the time. We hadn't gotten into the Colonels period, we were in an upswing in the Cyprus period, if you will. It was a good time.

I did my best to read, as a Desk Officer has to do, I think, about Greece, including, not least, classical Greece. I remember that Edith Hamilton was still alive at that time, approaching her nineties.

Q: "The Greek Way."

Amb. Laingen: Yes. I called on her in her apartment here on Massachusetts Avenue. She was a big figure in terms of how we talked about Greece at that time. We had a very active Greek Ambassador at the time. George Melas. He liked to throw his weight around town both socially and politically. The Greeks can in this town, of course, because there are so many Greeks in positions of consequence. Not only in the Greek Orthodox Church, but also in terms of American business interests and in the Congress. Anyway, Melas was a great guy. I got married during my stint on the Greek desk and there was a gift from the Greek Ambassador which I still value very much.

Q: Today is April 7, 1992. This is continuing set of interviews with Ambassador Bruce Laingen. Bruce, we are now at Karachi. You were assigned there from 1960-64. What was your assignment?

Amb. Laingen: I was a political officer. I guess I was the number two political officer, deputy to David Linebaugh.

Q: What was the situation? Obviously it was a changing one in Pakistan at the time, but when you arrived what was the situation?

Amb. Laingen: When I arrived there was no crisis. There was no Pakistani-Indian war as there was occasionally. That didn't happen until 1965, the year after I left. Karachi was still the capital although there was talk of beginning to move it north under Ayub Khan. President Ayub was the President. He had his basic democracy movement underway, which was an attempt on the part of that Pakistani leader in the never ending effort on the part of Pakistanis to try to put some kind of democratic processes of government in place. So unsuccessful by contrast to India. In the aftermath of partition, India, I think all of us would agree, has set a rather enviable record in the developing world for reasonably effective processes of participatory government with elections that work. Pakistan, in 1960 when I arrived, had not achieved that objective or process, and frankly hasn't achieved it since. But we had a president in place, Ayub Khan, who had been a general, as so often is the case. He had put his approach to democracy in place which he called basic democracy. It didn't work very effectively.

I always remember the arrival in Karachi...the Pan American round the world flights landed in Karachi and Delhi in the middle of the night. We landed that night not at the civilian airport but the military airport for some reason. I will always remember the drive into that city having never observed that degree of mass humanity, miserable humanity, as I did then. Seeing sleeping bodies on every street corner and driving into town through slums, particularly around one section that we remember as "breathless corner" because the smell was so offensive. It was difficult arriving in the middle of a hot night and beginning a tour of four years in a city that I found then and still find today in the subcontinent singularly unattractive. It has no character. It was a city then teeming with refugees, and is still teeming, from partition and this was 13 years after partition. Masses of people living in squalor and poverty. But it was also a city and assignment that was interesting despite the singular unattractiveness of the city itself. There was nothing appealing about Karachi for an American family in terms of family relationships except the beach on the Arabian Sea. We would go there a lot. But professionally it was an interesting tour because Pakistan in those days was deep into its problems with India. My particular assignment was mainly to report on Pakistan-Indian relations.

Q: Did you ever bat around with your colleagues why India seemed, with this multicultural society, to be able to develop a type of democracy and Pakistan which was less multicultural didn't seem to be able to cut the mustard?

Amb. Laingen: I don't have a good answer to that. I am not sure there is a good answer to that. Part of it, I suppose, lies in the heavy military tradition of that section of the subcontinent. The Pushtuns and other ethnic tribal groups had under the British been very strong in military tradition, with and for the British. Perhaps it was less so in India. That was one contributing reason. I suppose another has to be the fact of leadership. The Nehrus had a different approach generally speaking to government and rule than these Pakistanis who tended to be, except for the first couple of years under inadequate civilian leadership, more inclined to the military approach...authoritarian, hardhanded, forceful leadership at the center.

Perhaps also the fact that Pakistan then, and still is, rather fractious in its composition. Tribal groups up against the Afghan border, Baluchis in Baluchistan, Pushtuns, and Sindhis down in the south. But then you can say the same thing about India.

Q: How did you go about your work? How does somebody in a fascinating and important situation go to work? We are talking about the 1960s.

Amb. Laingen: Well, this was my first assignment as a political reporting officer. I don't know if I was more effective than anybody else. I don't know if we were all that effective. We went about our business making contacts with as many people as we could. We had a problem in one sense of a divided country. Pakistan then was still made up of West Pakistan and East Pakistan. We had a Consulate General in Dacca, but you still needed, if you were going to have any kind of effective reporting to get over to East Pakistan once in a while. I had a very effective leadership in a couple of very good Ambassadors...Bill Rountree and later Walter McConaughy...who were experienced leaders and kept good tabs on the rest of us. I did not speak Urdu. In fact looking back on it we had very limited capacity in that language. Fortunately at that time, and still today, English is a very common language particularly in the upper levels of Pakistan.

We lived in a suburb of Karachi called the Public Employees Cooperative Housing Society...PECHS. We did a good deal of entertaining. Representation was still looked on then, down through the ranks, as something terribly important. We put a heavy burden on our wives and family in that process. Knowing where I have been and knowing where the Foreign Service has been and looking back on it, if I were to begin that tour over again today, I would do a lot less of routine representation and regret all that burden on my family because I think the product of that effort was rather limited.

We had good contacts in the Foreign Ministry. There was no problem of access. For that matter no problem of access; we had contacts with all levels of society despite some sensitivity on the part of the regime...Karachi was still the capital of the country and without a very actively functioning democracy, despite the claim to basic democracy on the part of Ayub Khan, and despite their sensitivity at times about contacts with the opposition.

We had at that time also an active diplomatic corps. There was a large Indian Embassy in Karachi. A good segment of our work was contacts with other representatives of the diplomatic corps, particularly with the Indians, to get their point of view there in Karachi of their problems with Pakistan.

Q: Could you discuss how we viewed from the Embassy at that time the ongoing Indo-Pak problem?

Amb. Laingen: You are right in calling it ongoing. It had been ongoing at that point ever since partition, 13 plus years earlier, and it was certainly in full speed at that point building the tensions that would eventually lead to war in 1965 between the Pakistanis and the Indians. As an embassy there and in Delhi, I think we were guilty of clientitis. I think both embassies too often got supportive of one's own embassy and critical of our opposite number. We didn't have enough interchange between the two embassies despite efforts on occasion to have exchange visits. Groups would come up from Delhi and we would go down to Delhi. We didn't have enough of that. Tensions weren't always at a high pitch. They didn't really develop into the kind of situation that contributed to war until the time I was leaving.

Those years were also marked by two major events involving the Kennedy administration. The first, the visit of Jackie Kennedy, and the second, of course, the assassination of President Kennedy. The first involving the visit of Jackie Kennedy saw her come in dimensions that made it essentially a state visit, both to India and to Pakistan. She came, of course, in good part because of the personal relationships between Ambassador Galbraith in Delhi and the Kennedy family. There was a sensitivity on the part of the Pakistanis at that point, again in the context of their larger problems with India, that she was going to go only to Delhi. The Pakistanis raised a good deal of concern about that and eventually a Pakistan segment was added to the visit. I think the Pakistanis always felt then and thereafter that they were just a tag on in the Kennedy administration. There was a good deal of concern among Pakistanis that would surface once in a while over the Galbraith relationship with the Kennedys. They felt Galbraith being in Delhi would work to their disadvantage.

Q: For the record, John Kenneth Galbraith was a Harvard professor, an economist of tremendous note, with an ego of tremendous note, too.

Amb. Laingen: And a personal friend of President Kennedy.

Q: Here you had Galbraith who had made a name for himself as seeing India as his particular playground. Were you almost geared up to rebut his telegrams, etc.?

Amb. Laingen: Yes, there was too much of that. Looking back on it I remember there was that sort of feeling in our minds, that he had this, they had this...a larger country, of course, and Pakistan has always had that problem in dealing with the impact of the subcontinent in Washington. Delhi was the big player, yet there was the other side of the coin that Washington also saw Pakistan more as a military ally, strategic ally, and that played in our favor. That was a concern that Galbraith and others had in Delhi. Some of this changed to some degree in 1962 with the Chinese invasion of segments of Kashmir and Ladack. But that too raised more concern on the part of the Pakistanis, particularly the military types, when that for a time added a kind of military component to the relationship between Washington and Delhi.

Q: We sent in some fighters and gave them airlifts, etc.

Amb. Laingen: Yes. The Pakistanis were nervous about that. We watched Delhi's reporting very closely. There were times, frankly, when we wondered if we were seeing all of their reporting. But I think the people in Delhi also had the same sentiment. It was regrettable. It developed a kind of competition between the two embassies for impact and favor, if you will.

Q: I suspect that remains to some extent.

Amb. Laingen: It is probably inevitable. Particularly at a time of shifting strategic relationships, as we are experiencing now in the aftermath of the Cold War.

But to go back to the Jackie Kennedy visit, it did have the dimensions of a state visit with political implications. Galbraith, of course, did everything he could to make a success of that visit. Since the Pakistan segment of it followed the Indian one, the Pakistanis were determined to outdo the Indians, both in the enthusiasm they could arose for her, and the splendor that accompanied the visit.

It was a splendid visit in Pakistan, as I am sure it was in Delhi. All kinds of trappings. I was the escort officer for Jackie Kennedy in her travel throughout the country. I was not the control officer, that was Linebaugh, the political counselor, but I was the designated escort officer, so I travelled with her and saw directly how much the Pakistanis worked that visit to build favor in Washington.

Ayub Khan was the President. He had the command of the military at his fingertips and he used it to great advantage. I forget now whether the Ayub visit to Washington followed or preceded that. There was during the time I was there the visit of President Ayub to Washington when there was the celebrated first time effort on the part of a President to use Mount Vernon as the locale for a very splendid state dinner...the lawns of Mount Vernon. Ayub Khan was transported up and down the Potomac by boat with Kennedy.

During the time I was there President Kennedy was assassinated. I, like everybody else at that time, will always remember where one was at that particular time. I will never forget the sentiments, the concerned feelings we had when that momentous news arrived, particularly the way that Ambassador McConaughy at the time immediately called the Embassy officers together in the conference room for a moment of silence. It was a very heavy burden that we all felt had happened.

Then we were strengthened by the tremendous outpouring of sympathy and empathy on the part of the Pakistanis from the ground up.

Q: I was in Yugoslavia, a communist country, and again it was overwhelming. It was a world event.

Amb. Laingen: Genuine sympathetic outpouring and regret and concern. I think it was special for the Pakistanis, and for the Indians too, I am sure because Jackie had been there just the year before.

Q: In your reporting were you able to get to military officers to talk to them?

Amb. Laingen: Oh, sure. We had good contact, especially with the military. We probably saw too much of them, because it was in a sense a military regime under Ayub despite his pretenses of democracy. There was plenty of contact with them. The military attachés had even deeper and stronger contacts. It was a very close military relationship at that time. CENTO was still in existence.

I don't recall a presidential visit but I certainly remember Vice President Johnson's visit.

Q: How did that go?

Amb. Laingen: Oh, it went over in the usual Johnson fashion, with a good deal of people-to-people contact on his part. Lady Bird was along. I was the escort to Lady Bird at that point. I seemed to be escort for the wives at that time. I came to appreciate what a magnificent lady Lady Bird Johnson is. I also came to appreciate watching Lyndon Johnson. What a towering ego that man had. How he expected all to pay due respect to that ego as he proceeded through that visit.

I will never forget the arrival of Lyndon Johnson at the Karachi airport. Any such official visitor of that stature always produces cars and confusion and a great deal of hustle and bustle, but this one was Lyndon Johnson at his best, or his worst, if you will. The trip from the airport into Karachi, which was a rather long one, must have been very similar to the retreat from Bull Run. The confusion and chaos of that motorcade...Lyndon Johnson stopping, ordering his motorcade to a halt and everyone then competing for place in that line...the diplomats, the chiefs of mission, ordered out to the airport to be a part of all this. So not having that much patience with all this stopping, some of them tried to get ahead of the motorcade by going around it.

But it was on one of his stops of that motorcade that Lyndon Johnson found the camel driver, whose name slips my mind at the moment.

Q: He became a very famous camel driver.

Amb. Laingen: He was a camel driver and Lyndon Johnson asked him the name of his camel. This guy said, "Camel, of course, Sahib." And that was the end of that effort to establish the name of the beast. But it was at that point that Lyndon Johnson said to this character, "Come and visit me in Washington." And, of course, he eventually did. The camel driver became celebrated in Washington because of the sort of grass roots eloquence of this fellow, apparently in his contacts with the Vice President and President here, and with the press. It came through as sensible eloquence. And a dispute continued for years thereafter as to whether these were actually his words or was it a very clever interpreter adding substance and color to words that were not all that eloquent.

Q: What about the opposition? Was Bhutto a figure at that point and part of the public opposition?

Amb. Laingen: Yes. Bhutto was a figure and beginning to give us trouble. He didn't really become as large a player then as he would be in the years that followed. He was very young, energetic. I didn't see him. I never had any contact with him. The Ambassador did and I think the political counselor on occasion saw him. We had good contacts with the opposition despite some degree of sensitivity that seems always there in a quasi-military regime about such contacts. Part of that involved getting over to Dacca in East Pakistan and seeing people like Surriwaddy who was a major player in East Pakistan. I got over there on a couple of occasions.

In those days I recall you didn't fly direct from Karachi to Dacca, which would have been an overflight of India; you had to go all the way down around the tip of India, past Colombo and then up again, because of the sensitivity of the Indians involving Pakistani overflight of their country. So we travelled by Pakistani Airlines but by a circuitous route.

Once Secretary Rusk came on a trip and because of the nature of his visit and with the military aircraft we were able to fly directly.

The Embassy was then in Karachi, but the issue that affected us certainly in a logistic sense was the fact that it moved eventually to Rawalpindi as a temporary capital on its way to the capital being built in Islamabad. The American government and the Indian government and the Vatican did not have sufficient foresight to appreciate that was going to happen, so each of those three countries built a magnificent new embassy in Karachi while I was there. When I first got there we were in temporary quarters, which was very difficult. Eventually we built this new chancery, which President Ayub helped dedicate.

But by the time it was finished, President Ayub already had made the decision to move the capital to the north, so that chancery became one of the largest consulates general in the Foreign Service at that time.

Since the move to the north took place in 1963, we set up a branch embassy, if you will, in Rawalpindi, actually with the residence in the Hill Station in Murray as the process of building in Islamabad took place. That was part of the excitement of the personnel in the community at that time, watching that process take place. We had great pride in that new chancery, because it really is quite an attractive and handsome place.

Q: That was at the height of our building embassies abroad to display all the best of American architecture and building techniques.

Amb. Laingen: And the best encompassing openness, glass.

Q: This was before we turned into fortresses with reason.

Amb. Laingen: Exactly.

Q: How would you describe both William Rountree and Walter McConaughy as ambassadors...their style, outlook on the situation, etc.?

Amb. Laingen: Well, they were two different personalities, but I guess I would have to conclude that they essentially ran the Embassy in an essentially similar pattern. They were firm, strong leaders. I think each of them probably looking back gave about the same degree of freedom of movement to their officers, staff in their contacts. I think McConaughy, because he came later in the time I was there and during the time that some of the political problems surrounding Ayub and his stature in the country were greater, so I think McConaughy was a little more nervous about contacts with the opposition than Rountree was. Rountree was a kind of family friend for me and my family because it was through Rountree that I had met my wife, having come back from an assignment in Tehran at about the same time that he did. He became Assistant Secretary and I became Desk Officer for Greece. He invited me over to meet the girl next door and she eventually became my wife. I don't say this to suggest that I had a special pole or influence with Rountree. Perhaps it was there. I think there was a little sensitivity on the part of my colleagues that I had some kind of special relationship, but I did not feel that and I don't think Rountree used it or allowed me to use it in any special way.

They were both essentially strong careerists who lead their Embassies in similar fashion. I don't recall any special difference in the way they led that Embassy.

Q: Did you have the feeling as a political reporter that CIA or the military intelligence side was weighing in too heavily? This would seem like a place that they might.

Amb. Laingen: No. I don't recall looking back on it that I had any particular concern on that. Perhaps the political counselor, my chief, did in ways that I didn't sense or appreciate. But I recall having a very good relationship with the people down the end of the hall. The military attachés were very active, of course, because the regime was still essentially a military one, military traditions being as strong as they were and always have been in Pakistan. We had an alliance relationship with Pakistan with ups and downs, but on the whole the relationship was very close.

Just a word on reporting. In those days we still did airgrams. Some of our most eloquent reporting, possibly little read, was done by despatches. It was also the time that the WEEKA was developed. It was a weekly report to Washington done by airgram. For a good deal of that time I had responsibility for collecting and editing that weekly report to Washington.

Q: I might mention for the record that the airgram was designed to save on transmitting expenses and was designed to look like a telegram but was actually sent by pouch. The idea being that back in Washington nobody ever looked at anything that wasn't a telegram because it wasn't urgent, so this was an interim measure. Later on everything was sent by cable.

What about the Soviet threat there?

Amb. Laingen: Looking back on it, I don't have any particular feel for that. It was there. This was during Khrushchev's time. Our focus was so much on the India-Pakistan relationship. At the same time there was the alliance relationship we had with the Pakistanis essentially because of the Soviet threat. But, it was not my particular focus of reporting and I don't recall any particular incident or aspect at that time that looms all that large today in my memory. It was just a given.

Q: What about Afghanistan? Was there any concern of the great game being played by the Soviets in Afghanistan?

Amb. Laingen: It was being played up there, but I didn't get directly involved in it until a later assignment in Kabul. Again, looking back on it I recall Afghanistan figuring largely not in the context of the great game eventually between us and the Soviets, but rather in Afghanistan's difficulties with Pakistan over Pushtunistan. That is essentially unresolved, still today, border issue between Afghanistan and Pakistan which we generally refer to as Pushtunistan because it is that area of the Pushtun tribes on both sides of the border.

The British in their time resolved this by something called the Durand Line, which became the international border but it was not always fully accepted by either side, certainly not by the Afghans, certainly not by the Pushtuns up in Kabul. That controversy, a very old and historic one, was very much alive at that time. Very much a subject of reporting from the Kabul Embassy.

Looking back on it it, occupied much too much of the time of those reporting on it from Kabul, but I guess it loomed very large up there.

There were border incidents all the time, small ones, but they did not involve any serious conflict.

Q: As a political officer and you were reporting on Indo-Pakistan conflict, how did you feel when you were doing this? Was there any role that the United States was going to play in any of this, or was this just keeping everybody informed?

Amb. Laingen: Well, we tried to play a large role, of course; the Kashmir issue was at the heart of India-Pakistan relationships, as it is so forcibly today. For the first time, I think, since partition, today in 1992, American tourists and other tourists are not going up into Kashmir because of armed conflict between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir. Then we were very much involved in that controversy; constantly looking for ways to try to contribute to a resolution of it. Both then and during my tour back in Washington during the three years that followed my assignment to Karachi the Kashmir issue was a front burner issue. Today, looking back on it and considering it, I have to conclude that it must be, probably will be, one of those forever unresolvable issues on the international scene. It has been active since the conflict there in 1948 that saw UN observers put in place who are still there today almost fifty years later. A plebiscite was directed by the United Nations at that time; the Indians refused to implement it and that still is a demand on the part of the Pakistanis.

I recall then and the three years that followed on the Desk in Washington, how much we involved ourselves in that issue, to the point of getting out and having maps all over the place; even drawing lines as to how to divide Kashmir. One of the big ideas at that time was that the only way to resolve it was to partition it with the line going right through the capital of Sirinagae. Looking back on it I am reminded how futile all of that was. How difficult it is sometimes for any outside power to go in and make any reasonable kind of contribution in situations that amount to civil war with all the emotions that go with such crises.

Q: Why were we doing this?

Amb. Laingen: Because Kashmir was the core of the problem between the Pakistanis and the Indians. That concern in our view was turning the Pakistanis, in particular, away from the larger issues we saw, and that was the Soviet threat up there to the north.

Q: Did you feel that the Pakistanis and the Indians were in a way toying with us or encouraging us to get involved, or were they accepting the fact that we would weigh in with something?

Amb. Laingen: Well, the Pakistanis expected us to be involved. As they saw it they were the weaker power and given our special relationship with the Pakistanis they felt that we should be in there putting pressure on the Indians to resolve it, of course to the favor of the Pakistanis. We were under constant reminders from the Pakistanis that we weren't doing enough to resolve that problem.

Q: You left there in 1964, is that right?

Amb. Laingen: I left in 1964 when things were beginning to hot up considerably between the two countries. It didn't break into war until some time in 1965. I went back to Washington to become Office Director for Pakistan and Afghanistan Affairs...called PAF.

Q: Was there a reason for this division? Was it that they couldn't have one person wearing the India and Pakistan hat because of the conflicts between the embassies? I would have thought there would have been an Indo-Pak Desk.

Amb. Laingen: So far as I know that never has been because of the sensitivity between the two countries. It was then and still is rather a big issue. Today, of course, it has evolved to the point where Mr. Solarz and others in Congress feel it should be a separate bureau and it is about to become one. I forget who was my counterpart on the India side at that point. We were separate and distinct. But there was an Office of South Asian Affairs that supervised both offices. It was headed during most of the time I was there by Turner Cameron and his deputy, Carol Laise. Their job in part was to try at times to mediate between the two desks.

Q: You did have this war in 1965, about a year after you got there, and you were representing Pakistan. Just to give a feel to somebody who is not aware of how the State Department works, what happens to a desk officer when their country is at war with somebody else?

Amb. Laingen: I suppose, it should, and I think it probably does bring out the best in us. Fighting brings out some appreciation between and among us that our real interest here is the American interest and not our particular clientitis toward one of the two countries. I think you come up against an appreciation that, damn it, both sides are wrong, carrying their dispute to actual conflict. Having said that, I think there still is a natural tendency on the part of a desk to be more understanding and more assertive in trying to convey to your superiors why the Pakistanis, in my case, behaved the way they did. Sometimes that is seen, I guess, as clientitis to an excessive degree. I don't know that I was guilty of it or my counterpart was guilty of it; I just think it was there. It was a relatively short war. At this point I don't remember much of the details.

Q: What brought it about?

Amb. Laingen: Border clashes, aggravated, as always, by Kashmir. The clashes were along the main border, not primarily at that time up in Kashmir...mostly along the border in Sind in Pakistan. I honestly don't remember who mediated, who brought that conflict to an end. I have a mental block right there. I will have to look at my record of the time.

Q: As this thing was moving up towards a war, were we trying to do anything? Did this happen suddenly or were you able to see it building up and try to do something?

Amb. Laingen: Yes, we tried to do something, but there is a limit to the capacity of any country, whatever the closeness of our relationship to prevent their doing what we saw was stupid to carry this thing to conflict. The armies were then in large numbers up against each other on the border, and they still are regrettably excessively so. They are their own worst enemies, the two of them, and they have carried it to war two or three times.

That period in Washington for me on the Desk, doesn't loom very large in my mind, despite that war. It ended but it wasn't resolved. There was a cease fire which eventually became permanent. But it was simply a prelude to a much large war that was to begin in 1971.

Q: That was the one over Bangladesh.

Amb. Laingen: The creation of East Pakistan.

Q: When Galbraith left he was replaced by Chester Bowles, who was another big gun in the Democratic establishment. Did you feel that he was sort of overpowering the issue from your vantage point?

Amb. Laingen: I don't know if I would use the word overpowering with respect to Chester Bowles. That term doesn't fit. He was not as big a man physically as Galbraith. He was a more sensitive man. In that respect I think there was the concern of those of us working on the Pakistan side that he was even closer to the Indians and closer to having some impact in Washington than even Galbraith had. Both of them were political appointees. Pakistan had career ambassadors. That was not lost on the Pakistani leadership, that the White House was sending political appointees to Delhi and career types to Pakistan. Nor was it lost on us and we worked on it. It was in our mind somewhere all of the time that the Indians had a somewhat stronger voice in Washington.

Q: Of course, when you are talking about political appointees you are talking about high caliber as far as their impact and all. There are political appointees and political appointees. These were very top drawer political appointees who were very close to the President rather than someone who was getting a pay off for party support.

Amb. Laingen: That's right. There are different varieties of political appointees, with different impacts in the process. India has had some big names.

Q: You left the Desk and had a little hiatus in the War College from 1967-68.

Amb. Laingen: I feel very strongly about senior training for the Foreign Service and I have a special feel for the War College, I guess because of the time I spent there. But I think the Senior Seminar is better in some respects because of the emphasis it places on the domestic scene.

Q: I had a magnificent year myself in Senior Seminar.

Amb. Laingen: I was critical of our curriculum at the War College...not publicly critical, but I sensed when I was at the War College for that year that the focus was excessively on our relationships abroad and the strategic situation abroad and not enough on problems at home. I was never reminded of that so forcibly and visibly as I was the night that I returned to Washington in the Spring of 1968 from the traditional overseas trip that War College students take...in my case to the Far East. I returned to Washington late in the evening on a Spring night in 1968, the night after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I saw Washington burning as we returned home. I was forcibly reminded of how much the domestic scene impacts on our capacity to project our power and influence and stature abroad. I will always remember that scene as we arrived back in Washington.

Q: I remember going up Wisconsin Avenue to the white suburbs, which essentially it was, and seeing members of the 22nd Airborne in flak jackets patrolling the streets. This was an incredible sight.

Amb. Laingen: I always remember the War College with favor, as I did when I was back as vice president, because I think particularly during the years of the Cold War the more opportunity that Foreign Service Officers had to know their military counterparts the better. They loomed large and the need to understand how the military think and work was critical. Just as it is important for them to know the Foreign Service. I think political officers in the Cold War period were always deficient in a pol/mil sense. A War College assignment strengthens that weakness, if you will.

Also, it is always reassuring, I think, as a student at the War College to see in the top notch of the military how capable they are. The selection process for the War College is very good, producing the very best of the military as students.

Q: How did you find the Foreign Service Officer was viewed by the military? At this time the Vietnam war was really cranking up as far as American participation was concerned.

Amb. Laingen: Basically with respect and appreciation. I think the military always leaves the War College at the

end of a year there with a new and favorable appreciation for their diplomatic colleagues. I think that is mutual on both sides. Looking back on that particular time when the Vietnam war was going, it was the State Department representatives who were generally the hawks, and the military tended to be more the doves. It was the bombing pause period in 1968. I was not a hawk; I was always quite concerned with the trends in Vietnam and always grateful throughout that period that I was not a French speaking officer so that reduced the chances of my being assigned to Vietnam. I would not have wanted to be assigned to that issue.

Brent Scowcroft was a classmate at that time.

Q: He was later and is today National Security Advisor.

Amb. Laingen: That is correct. It is a remarkable opportunity for both the military and the civilian students because during the years that follow when you go on with your professional careers you run into these people and usually they are in significant places of influence that greatly strengthen your capacity to carry out your own work. In my case, Brent Scowcroft; we know where he went. Another became Commandant of the Marines; one became Chief of Naval Personnel; one became head of NSA. These were very useful contacts later for both sides, I think, in bureaucratic Washington. I am very high on the War College, prejudiced as I am because of an assignment there. But I think it is a very good opportunity for both sides to know each other a little better.

When I go back to the Senior Seminar, where you include the military, the focus is so much more on the domestic scene. It is a big advantage for the Foreign Service. We don't know our own country well enough.

Q: I know I spent a year doing that and you got a feel for the pulse of city government, for example.

Amb. Laingen: I envy you, I never got that assignment. Some people get both, but that is rare.

Q: Well, then off you went...you couldn't get yourself off the subcontinent...to Kabul for 1968-71. How did that assignment come about and what did you do?

Amb. Laingen: Looking back on it, it was the most rewarding Foreign Service assignment I ever had. It was a Deputy Chief of Mission slot and that always, I think, is one of the better Foreign Service assignments. Not better than being the chief of mission, but a training ground for becoming a chief of mission. In many posts you have opportunities of being chargé, not unlike being chief of mission.

I was there, again under a political Ambassador, Robert Neumann, an active Republican who in time, and I think today, regards himself as a kind of professional Foreign Service Officer.

Q: He served in at least three different countries.

Amb. Laingen: Later on he became Ambassador to Morocco after a long stint in Kabul where he wore out three DCMs and then he was in Saudi Arabia briefly. I have a high regard for Ambassador Neumann. His leadership was very effective in Kabul at that time. The regime in power was still a monarchy, King Zahir. The problems that confront Afghanistan today were there then, but very much in the background and the king was safely in command.

I remember that leadership of Neumann also not least because Mrs. Neumann was for us a classic, latter day example of the Foreign Service senior wife who played the role strongly and expected the rest of the staff and wives to support that role. Not as a dragon. I would not call her one of the dragons of the Foreign Service. Not at all. She is too much a human being, too warm and personable to be called that. But certainly someone as the senior wife who expected and assumed that the rest of the wives would play their part in projecting American values, influence and presence in that country.

My wife sometimes chafed under her, as the second wife, and looking back on it I suppose she would have rather played some different role, but I better let her speak to that. But it was a given under Neumann that the wives would play these roles.

Q: What was Ambassador Neumann's background and how did he operate?

Amb. Laingen: Well, he came out of academia primarily, the University of Southern California at Berkeley. He has an academic streak to him, therefore, in the sense that he tends to examine all issues in great depth to develop as much perspective and understanding as possible. He came from a political background too, but not an active political role. I think, if anything, Mrs. Neumann was a little more of that than he at that time. He ran a tight ship in the sense that he was clearly in command and personally involved in most issues and expected to be fully informed. He ran, I thought, a very effective country team operation.

And incidentally, he introduced there what I think is a useful device and which I used in Malta when I was ambassador there, and that is the idea of a wives country team. He would call in periodically the senior wives of the country team and brief them in a depth that they otherwise would not have of problems confronting the United States at that point in its relationship with Afghanistan. After all, wives as we all know in the Foreign Service, traditionally at dinners and so on sit next to prime ministers and foreign ministers and are expected to carry on some kind of conversation with them. Too often it tends to be about children and family and not much beyond that, but this was a recognition on the part of Ambassador Neumann that wives ought to be a little bit better informed than that and to be able to respond intelligently in such conversations. It is a very useful device. Maybe other ambassadors have done it, probably more than I know. It was the first time that I experienced it.

The country team worked very effectively there, as I think a country team must. He drew on it heavily. He expected the senior officers to operate as a team, keeping everybody informed, including, I think as much as possible the CIA intelligence components and the military components. He had very close relationships with the king, which mattered a great deal at that point. He also had some relationships with Daud who eventually seized power.

Q: Daud at that time was...?

Amb. Laingen: He was a cousin of the king, out of power, but in the background. He was there and Neumann carefully, with the acquiescence of the king, kept up that relationship. It was important, looking down the road when Daud took power.

At that point we had access, the military attaché did, to a DC-3. So we travelled a good deal around the country and that was very helpful because transportation in Afghanistan wasn't always easy. We were players in the "great game"...the great game being that historical term applied to the time when the British in Imperial India competed with Czarist Russia for influence in this buffer region of Afghanistan. After World War II we inherited that role in a sense. We became the players, with the Soviets on the other side. We, with large aid programs, were the big players to try to keep Soviet influence manageable. We assumed after a decision in the mid-fifties in the Dulles period that we would not be a military player against the Soviets in that region.

We did maintain a military relationship through training programs which were carefully tended, but the main competition was in the economic area. Very large aid programs, relatively for the size of the country. And a large Peace Corps program in Afghanistan at that time. I am one of those who in the early sixties when the Peace Corps came into place, and I confess it today, was very skeptical about its role.

Q: I think this is true. I certainly was. I thought a bunch of do-gooders wandering around making trouble.

Amb. Laingen: But I changed my view, as most of us have, I think, and today I have a high regard for the Peace Corps. Above all because of the way it strengthens young Americans to play more effective roles in their own society when they come back home. Not that they accomplish all that much in a tangible sense on the ground in these countries--although English speaking programs were a large component of that in Afghanistan and I think was certainly helpful.

But the economic competition between us and the Soviets, going back to my comment about transportation and communication, saw us and the Soviets build this remarkable network of roads in Afghanistan. We built between us a great, country wide, circular concrete and asphalt highway. Where our aid program stopped, the Soviet program would pick up either immediately or a few blocks on the other side of the town. That eventually saw the Soviets with a big advantage when they invaded militarily in later years. But we did put in place a rather remarkable highway system.

We also helped build in the early period with Afghanistan a great hydroelectric and irrigation facility down in the southwest part of the country--the Helmand Valley, and I would love to go back today to see how it has progressed in terms of the big emphasis we put on irrigation and prospects at that time of agricultural development.

We had a visit in Kabul while I was there from Secretary Rogers. It went very well. And a more celebrated visit from Vice President Agnew, then still in office. But he was already a target of a good deal of criticism at home, and it was evident in Kabul by Peace Corps members demonstrating against his being there. One of my tasks as they demonstrated outside the Chancery was to go out there as the Deputy Chief of Mission and try to reason with these young Peace Corps volunteers to keep their protests civil while the Vice President was in the city. Whatever you may feel about Vice President Agnew's later activities, as a visiting dignity which he was during that visit, he played his role beautifully. He followed his script. He then was an attractive, strong figure and he came across very well with the Afghans.

Q: How does one report political happenings in a place like Afghanistan? Or does one?

Amb. Laingen: Oh yes. Political officers always find things to report. In those days you were still expected to do a lot of reporting, particularly conversations with influential or potentially influential figures. We did a lot of reporting, of course, as we sensed their attitudes towards us and the Soviet Union. We did a lot of reporting on the Pushtunistan issue. Again the problems between Afghanistan and Pakistan were there all the time. We did a lot of travel. Afghanistan is the kind of country that inevitably compels political officers and economic officers to get out there and look because it is such an exciting landscape. There are long distances between cities and interesting places to go to. So we did a lot of "trip reporting" at that time.

Certainly there wasn't political reporting in terms of daily reports of a parliamentary debate because that sort of thing didn't exist of any consequence. It was mainly the kinds of direct relationships that you were able to develop with the Afghans at all levels. Sometimes you were left with contacts with people in the streets and the bazaars who were in your view at the time possibly reflective of trends in that country.

It was during that time that we were beginning to try to find ways to deal with the Chinese and the Communist system. It was before Nixon went off to China. But it was the beginning of what later saw working contacts in Warsaw between us and the Chinese. That had ripples in places like Kabul because there was a Chinese Embassy there. Neumann was the type of Ambassador who took risks sometimes and had contacts. Quietly he got authorization in that sort of far corner for contacts that I think the Department concluded wouldn't have some worldwide effect. And possibly what Neumann was carefully reporting from Kabul at the time of his careful contacts with the Chinese had some contribution to that larger relationship.

Q: How about with the Soviets? Did you have much contact with the Soviets?

Amb. Laingen: We saw them socially. A very large diplomatic compound in the country. They had a much larger military relationship than we had. We did not go to their compound daily or anything like that; we didn't have that close a relationship. But we saw them. We invited them to our home. I think it was in Kabul that I saw the movie "The Russians Are Coming."

Q: It was a comedy.

Amb. Laingen: Yes, a comedy about a Russian submarine landing on Nantucket. I recall that somebody showed that film to some of our contacts in the Soviet Embassy and they were both amused and some times indignant, depending on how a character was projected. Their stupidity was projected, but our stupidity was projected equally, so we both had fun with that.

Our main contacts were with...there were two large components of contact, one was the aid program where political officers got involved too because it was a reporting area. The other was the Foreign Ministry where most of the action was taking place at that time.

Q: A country like Afghanistan always seems so remote, particularly with a monarchy. How interested were they in our affairs and sophisticated in dealing with us?

Amb. Laingen: Let's face it, it was a very thin upper crust that was interested in talking with us and felt that they could talk with us. Our contacts and relationships were essentially with them. They were very interested. Some of them had been to the United States, most of them had not. The degree of understanding and awareness of the United States was pretty limited at that time. We used USIA rather effectively with documentaries, etc. for carefully invited Afghan audiences. I don't recall that I was ever invited to an average Afghan's home. That just wasn't done. The Afghans are very hospitable people. You see them out in the villages and that sort of thing and they will take you to tea, but rarely will they take you to their homes. That is private domain and just didn't happen. So most of the Afghans that we had contact with were from this rather limited upper segment who accepted our invitations and came to our homes.

They are very attractive people. They are essentially friendly, deeply hospitable within their limitations, strong willed, very independent minded. If you can establish a friendship with them it lasts, but if you cross them in any way they can be very tough in their response. As we have seen historically in a larger sense, the British have crossed them and had trouble in their day as players in the great game and the Russians certainly came to that appreciation later.

By the way I should add that the Afghans wanted us there essentially during that time as a balance to this overwhelming Soviet presence. That undergirded everything there. We were welcome for that reason above all.

Q: Did you see any of the underlined divisions that cropped up about eight years later between supporters of Communism and the various tribal nationalist groups that are fighting a war that goes on today?

Amb. Laingen: Oh, these tribal conflicts were there but not burning at that time. The sensitivities, particularly in the Pushtun area, were there. The conflict between the Pushtuns and some of the tribal elements to the north were there but not hot. The Communists were really quite inconsequential at that time, the Khalq.

Q: Khalq being?

Amb. Laingen: The Communist Party. We had minimal contacts with that group. Probably should have had more. They didn't loom very large. The king and his crowd seemed to be rather firmly in charge and it didn't require of us, as we sensed it, contact. They weren't very visible. They were very weak. They weren't a segment in what passed for a parliament. Frankly much of the way in which things began to break later came as a surprise to me. I didn't sense that degree of difficulty waiting in the wings.

Q: Is there anything else we should mention about Afghanistan?

Amb. Laingen: I mentioned that we had these visits. As I said at the outset I guess it is my favorite Foreign Service post, not least because the excitement of the place, the way we played this kind of great game role there, the way we were welcomed by the Afghans for that reason, the way the Afghans, I think, as a general rule were fascinated by the United States, a distant place that they knew little of, excited by evidence of us when it appeared like the visit of the Vice President, etc. It was also a place which was on the high road at that time for hippies from Istanbul to Tehran to Meshed to Kabul to Kathmandu and Delhi.

Q: Explain who the hippies were.

Amb. Laingen: Young Americans out on the drug road, or out on adventure and getting into trouble too often than not. So we had those who came through and we had our consular cases because of that. It was an exciting place also for families. We were a large American community in a hardship post and that kind of situation in a hardship post, as you know, usually means rather high morale because you are thrown in on yourself. With effective leadership at the top, which we had with the Neumanns, the American community was a cohesive group that had a lot of fun together. A lot of community activity because social relationships with Afghans at any depth were not easy, as I mentioned.

The AID community was very large; the Peace Corps was very large. There was limited American business and limited, but important, military role. It meant for me, being the Deputy Chief of Mission, responsibility for a lot of the management of all of that; it was a very exciting job. I enjoyed it very much and learned a lot from it.

I also during that time in Afghanistan had a brief exposure to Iran in the sense that it was there. Iranians tend to look down on Afghans as hillbillies. We put it this way: the Iranians look at Afghanistan as their Appalachia, their hill people. Afghans speak a dialect of Persian. Some people say it is more pure than Farsi. They call it Dari. That relationship was interesting to watch but not then of much consequence. I just mention it in this instance.

I had an opportunity at one point in 1971 to drive from Kabul over the splendid roads that we had built with the Soviets all the way to Meshed where I had served as acting consul for those five months back in 1954. I was fascinated to go back about 17 years later and see how much the city had changed from the time I was there and to be impressed that the Shah's modernization program in Tehran was being felt in provincial cities as well. The Shah's modernization effort was not just something that was evident in the capital city, but the provincial cities were also feeling this. I mention this simply because many of us were watching Iran from distant vantage points during this time of the Shah's modernization drive and were frankly impressed with what he was accomplishing. That clouded our vision all the way up to the last days of the Shah.

Q: Going back to the Americans who got into trouble. These are young people. I am an old consular hand and I am sure Afghan prisons are not very comfortable for anyone, particularly an American. How did we handle people? Were they getting arrested for drugs?

Amb. Laingen: Rarely. I don't recall that there were more than one or two cases during the time I was there where they were actually put into prison. The Afghans usually cooperated with us. We moved them on and got them out of the country. We had the kind of relationship with the Afghans at that upper level that permitted us, generally speaking, to dispose of the issues rather quickly.

Q: This is about the only way you can deal with this there.

Amb. Laingen: The Turks put them in prison and then you have an awful problem. A young man named Winant, a celebrated case of a young American and his Swedish girl companion had travelled through Afghanistan earlier, years before in the early fifties when Kabul was really an isolated place. He just simply disappeared. He was the nephew of Ambassador Winant in London.

Q: Peter Winant, I think, was his name.

Amb. Laingen: He and his companion were traveling through on a bus and disappeared and were never seen again. A tragic case.

Q: We have talked about the consular side and basically you kind of work things out in a country such as that. Both sides wanted to get them out of the country as quickly as possible.

Amb. Laingen: Yes. I don't recall that we had any lasting consular issue involving an individual at that time.

Q: You left Afghanistan in 1971 after a three year tour and came back to Washington where you were Director of Pakistani Affairs from 1971-73. Was this per your choice of wanting to come back or it just sort of happened?

Amb. Laingen: My assignments have sort of worked out that I would rotate from the field and back to Washington in almost every case except the first one. I didn't actively seek it, it just worked out that way. It was suggested to me that from Kabul I go at that time to Madras and be Consul General and I turned it down. I said that I didn't want to go there, partly because of the problem with schools. Our sons could have gone to school at Nathizghali in south India, but I didn't want that. So I didn't go and I am glad I didn't go, even though I would have presided in an enormous consular district with hundreds of millions of people. I think the consul general in Madras feels very mighty because of all that.

I went back to Washington and was fortunate in that respect. I feel strongly that the more a Foreign Service officer has an opportunity to know his own country's problems, the better he is equipped to serve overseas again. And I have also been fortunate myself in these in and out assignments in having married someone from Washington. I jokingly advise young Foreign Service officers if they aren't married to marry somebody from Washington. It simplifies your logistics.

Q: It certainly does. You were the Country Director for Pakistani Affairs. What was the difference between this and...

Amb. Laingen: I had Afghanistan affairs as well. The Country Director program was then in place.

Q: This meant that it was no longer the Desk Officer, but it was the Country Director.

Amb. Laingen: You didn't have Office Director, you had a Country Directors and then you had Desk Officers underneath you. Later you had Deputy Assistant Secretaries that cluttered the landscape.

Q: Let's talk about this. This just seems a layering. I was talking not long ago to Richard D. Davies who was an old Eastern Bloc hand talking about when he came in in the late forties how the Desk Officer was a major figure. That was the person who did things. But since that time they have added on a couple of more layers.

Amb. Laingen: I agree, it is layering, and particularly because the layering of the Country Director was later made even more difficult by the layering of more Deputy Assistant Secretaries, and particularly political Deputy Assistant Secretaries. So the Desk Officer soon got lost way down in the bottom, where the expertise really is, of course. It is a regrettable trend. I don't know exactly what the situation is today, but there are too many Deputy Assistant Secretaries, that is clear, and many political appointees among them.

Q: Running close to a hundred of them, or something like that.

Amb. Laingen: The Country Director position is still there, but the potential that he was supposed to have in terms of access and influence with the 6th and 7th floors has been lessened by the proliferation of Deputy Assistant Secretaries.

Q: Did you find with this new title a difference in how you operated?

Amb. Laingen: Yes. At that time it was relatively new, a Country Director role. I certainly felt I had more direct access to the upper level than I did from 1964-67 as an Office Director for Pakistan and Afghanistan Affairs. In part I suppose that was a consequence of the Pak-Indian war of