The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project WAYNE WHITE Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: April 21, 2005 Copyright 2016 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in the Philadelphia area Penn State, Abington (Ogontz campus) ROTC Graduate Teaching Assistant Marriage Entered the Foreign Service in 1973 Niamey, Niger; GSO, Consular Officer 1974-1976 Environment Sahel Drought Emergency Algerian militants AID Peace Corps Customs charges controversy Libyans Attempted coup Port au Prince, Haiti; Consular Officer 1976-1978 Baby Doc Environment Ecology Visa fraud problems Relations with government Creole US Policy Sinai Field Mission 1978-1979 United Nations Expeditionary Force Bedouin problems U2 surveillance Operations Egyptian-Israeli military cooperation Hashish smuggling 1 State Department; INR/NEA; Iraq Analyst 1979-1986 Arab-Israeli Situation Report Operational and Intelligence offices disagreements Iran-Iraq War Saddam Hussein Iraq-Soviet relations US reaction to Iran-Iraq War INR’s functions during war Saddam’s interference in war Khomeini’s war mistakes US views of Iran-Iraq War Lebanon hostage issue Israeli aid to Iranian Jews Irangate Operation Staunch US Marines in Lebanon Hafez al Assad Briefings for Saudis CIA faulty analysis US Embassy Teheran hostages Khomeini Rafsanjani Iraqi intelligence apparatus Arab aid to Iraq The Kurds Downing the Stark Iraq army use of poison gas Saddam’s aid to Lebanese Christians State Department; INR Syria Analyst 1979-1986 Lebanon Crisis Team Lebanon factional rivalry Hafez al Assad Egypt-Israel relations Syria’s military aircraft Bashar al Assad Assad power structure Baathism, Syrian and Iraqi Syrian support for terrorism Golan Heights Syrian oil Water State Department; INR, Deputy Chief, Arab-Israel Affairs 1986-1990 First and Second Palestinian Intifada 2 Palestinian workers in Israel Israeli Intelligence Resources Iraq-Syria rivalry Congressional interest Congress and CIA Pollard case Israel and Iran Jewish community State Department; INR, North Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Iraq And Iran Division 1990- US-Iraq relations Saudi financial problems Saddam Hussein’s intentions Iraq-Soviet relations Arab loans to Saddam Iraq invasion of Kuwait Iraq-Kuwait Crisis Task Force Desert Shield and Desert Storm Iraq forces on Saudi border Iraq looting of Kuwait Iraqi planes escape to Iran Iran attitude re Desert Storm Arab world Forces and reaction Kuwaiti Air Force flee to Saudi Arabia UN Resolution Mandate re War goals Saddam’s survival Shia and Kurdish insurgencies Mid East Government Intelligence sources Algeria Democratization issue Islamists North African ruling class Fundamentalism US-Algeria relations Libya Pan Am 103 disaster Omar Qadhafi Terrorist anti-US activity US pre-9/11 mistakes Khobar Towers bombing prediction Anti-US Terrorism Iran and terrorists USS Cole bombing Al Qaeda Osama bin Laden Sudan pharmaceutical factory bombing 3 Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Ahmad Chalabi Iraq National Council in London Al-Qaeda Consultations with Allies on WMD’s Consensus re Iraq’s WMD’s Spread of al Qaeda Taliban Reforming Islam Terrorist tactics and recruitment Afghanistan Iraq and Al Qaeda Tora Bora Ansar al Islam Fleeing al Qaeda cadres Bolton Affair Iraq’s nuclear capability US British cooperation President’s Daily Brief (PDF) INR’s reaction to War “drumbeat” Future of Iraq Project Baghdad Museum Restoration Plan Iraqi Ministry destruction British problems in the South INR warnings of violence “Memorandum to Holders” NIE Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Pessimistic reporting to Rumsfeld War College Iraq simulation Iraqi elections Work stress and personal health Retirement 2005 Middle East Institute; Adjunct Scholar Speaking engagements INTERVIEW Q: Today is 21 April 2005. This is an interview with Wayne White. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies, and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. You go by Wayne? WHITE: Wayne. 4 Q: All right. Well to start off with, when and where were you born? WHITE: I was born in Philadelphia January 30, 1950. Q: Okay, let’s start just to get a little feel for the family. Tell me about your father’s side of the family. What do you know about it? WHITE: Oh, like so many people, I could go on forever, but I will try to avoid that. On my father’s side, half German, half English, with just enough Irish from one ancestor to get me into St. Patrick’s Day parties. They are both amusing in the sense that the German half of the family came here in the late 19th century and set up a liquor distributing business in Philadelphia, and were quite successful. Then their business collapsed in 1920, as you can imagine it might when Prohibition came. The other half were also fairly well-to-do by, say, 1900, breaking into the white collar upper middle class through the shoe industry, but starting at the bottom and attaining ownership of a shoe business in one generation. My great grandfather apprenticed as a leather-maker in Birmingham, England, immigrating first to Camden, N.J., briefly, and then, finally, Philadelphia, where he set up a small factory. Everything apparently was just going great until something called the Great Depression came along, and that left the family shoe business in ruins. They all had to go and find real jobs. They were left with a fleet of Buicks, several nice homes in Philadelphia, and a one large vacation home on the Jersey Shore. My mother’s side of the family, is also German/English. The more interesting story was my grandfather on the German side; his father, from Stuttgart, came to the United States during the Civil War — 1863 to be exact. He was a cabin boy on ship bound for Philadelphia and then to Bombay. He jumped ship in Philadelphia, hoping to be a Union drummer boy, perhaps inspired by Franz Seigel’s poorly-led, but largely German corps in the Union Army (another “political general”). But they apparently didn’t need any more drummer boys (at least at that moment), so he ended up hanging around Philadelphia and eventually became a smith (in his case, a tad different from a regular blacksmith in that he only made wrought iron tools instead of also shoeing horses). My Grandfather in the early 20th century was apprenticed to a master stone mason and became one himself. Perhaps more lasting than what I did in government and I am now doing here in these sessions, working out of a firm in Philadelphia, between 1928 and 1940, he spent much of his time in Washington and Annapolis working on monumental architecture. He built the extension on the chapel in Annapolis, for example, which makes up most of the chapel we see today. Q: This was when? WHITE: Around 1939-1940. Q: Yeah it was. I went to the chapel in Annapolis as a kid when that was being put on. WHITE: He built both of the extensions to Bancroft Hall, the stone work that is. He was a stone mason, although that meant setting bronze windows and things like that too to 5 keep the stone work going. In the district, he built the Scottish Right Temple on 16th Street. He did much of the interior stone work on the Supreme Court building, mainly the actual court room inside. It is very beautiful. He worked a little bit on the justice Department, but that job was temporary. He built the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Building (the structure next to the Holocaust Museum), which is the most interesting of his jobs because that is the only one he did absolutely from the bottom up, which meant going to the quarry, selecting the stone, arranging for them to be brought to the job site via railroad tracks that at that time extended right up to the site, and then setting or overseeing the setting of every stone in the building. We have some pictures from that era which are quite fascinating, including engineering photos of Bancroft Hall’s wings. The most amusing story if this is not taking too much time, is when he and his boss, the company supervisor, were asked to go over and see whether they could finish the mason’s monument in old town Alexandria (the obelisk across from the train station now containing the George Washington Museum). They found the job simple enough, so his boss said, “Yeah, I think we can do it. Do you have any problem?” “No.” They then strolled into old town so his boss could get a shot of whiskey (being a hard-drinking Irishman) and found out that Virginia was still dry. That was the end of the project in Alexandria, with the job supervisor remarking: “If I can’t get a drink within three blocks of the job, we are not doing it.” Q: Well how about let’s take your mother and father. Did your father go to college? WHITE: One portion of that story is unfortunate. He was very good in sports. He lettered in high school at the time when high school was more important, and one of the best ones in Philadelphia, Simon Graz High School, lettering in basketball, soccer, and baseball. He also played minor league baseball in the days when there was something called D Ball, where you were paid per game. He was a first baseman. The University of Delaware offered him a sports scholarship. The family which was still struggling because of the failure of the shoe factory, which made him feel rather guilty about going off to college and not getting a job. This is something that I always thought was very wrong. A family should make sacrifices for their child, where this family didn’t. They encouraged him to help out, and so he went to work instead of college.