The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
AMBASSADOR HARRY JOSEPH GILMORE
Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: February 3, 2003 Copyright 2012 ADST
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Background Born and raised in Pennsylvania Carnegie Institute of Technology (Carnegie Mellon University) University of Pittsburgh Indiana University Marriage Entered the Foreign Service in 1962 A 100 Course
Ankara, Turkey: Rotation Officer/Staff Aide 1963 1964 Jupiter missiles Ambassador Raymond Hare Ismet Inonu Joint US Military Mission for Aid to Turkey (JUSMAT) Turkish US logistics Consul Elaine Smith Near East troubles Operations Cyprus US policy Embassy staff Consular issues Saudi visa laws Turkish American Society Internal travel
State Department: Foreign Service Institute (FSI); Hungarian 1964 1965 Language training
Budapest, Hungary: Consular Officer 1965 1967 Cardinal Mindszenty Janos Kadar regime
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Soviet Union presence Relations Ambassador Martin Hillenbrand Israel Economy Liberalization Arab Israel 1967 War Anti US demonstrations Government restrictions Surveillance and intimidation Environment Contacts with Hungarians Communism Visa cases (provocations) Social Security recipients Austria/Hungary relations Hungary relations with neighbors Religion Soviet Mindszenty concerns Dr. Ann Laskaris Elin O’Shaughnessy
State Department: Soviet and Eastern Europe Exchange Staff 1967 1969 Hungarian and Czech accounts Operations Scientists and Scholars exchange programs Effects of Prague Spring Relations with local Embassies Director, Boris Klosson
Moscow, Soviet Union: Assistant Cultural Officer 1969 1971 Detailed to USIA USIA Efficiency reports Operations Surveillance Relations with public Travel Scientific exchanges McKinney Russell US exchange groups Cultural nationalism Music Ambassador Jacob Beam Henry Kissinger
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United States Military Academy; Political Science Department 1971 1973 Education system “Communism; Theory and Practice” Courses of study Student body Admiral William James Crowe Vietnam War Civil Military relations in Soviet Union Army Navy rivalry Student evaluation
State Department: Yugoslav Desk Officer 1973 1975 US policy Non Alignment USIA Centers Extremists Expatriate communities in US Croatian press distortions Congressional interest FBI Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act (RICO) US/Yugoslav relations Artukovic case Trieste Ambassador Malcolm Toon Tito US/Yugoslav relations Yugoslav military
Munich, Germany: Political (Internal) Reporting Officer/Liaison 1975 1978 To Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFERL) Board of International Broadcasting “Neutron Bomb” German opposition Soviet Jewish emigration Operations Broadcasting guidelines Olympics Poland Pope John Paul II Eastern Europe Chancellor Helmut Schmidt US Policy Franz Joseph Strauss FO 104 Starfighter bribe issue
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Congressional interest Christian Social Union Forgery Christian Social Union Christian Democratic Union Hermut Kohl German politics French US military
State Department: Deputy Director, Office of Eastern European 1978 1981 And Yugoslav Affairs Country responsibilities US policy Economic reforms Personnel Polish independence Most Favored Nations treatment Restrictive emigration policies Bulgaria Family reunification Jaruzelski Soviets invade Afghanistan Tito death Yugoslavia relations
Belgrade, Yugoslavia: Deputy Chief of Mission 1981 1985 Ambassador David Anderson Post Tito leadership “Greater Serbia” Vice President George H.W. Bush visit KAL 007 shootdown Milovan Dilas Sarajevo Winter Olympics Financial difficulties Mika Planinc Ethnic divisions America Center Raymond Benson European role Serbs in Croatia Andrija Artukovic’ Leader contacts David Anderson Larry Eagleburger
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State Department; Director, Office of Central European Affairs 1985 1987 Countries Kurt Waldheim case Ambassador Ronald Lauder Austrian Jewish property Adolph Hitler Austria’s “Free Ride” Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel Career vs. Political Ambassadors Swiss Germany/Quadripartite meetings Star Wars contracts German economy La Belle disco bombing Rozanne Ridgeway Jewish reparations Return of Jewish property German Democratic Republic Warsaw Pact economic potential Soviet military production East Berlin construction East Germany (GDR) armed forces GDR economy Family reunification Berlin status Hans Dietrich Genscher German exports European Community (EC) French German relationship Aviation Berlin security Berlin airlift Soviet Berlin troops Helmut Kohl US Germany policy Kohl Reagan relationship
Berlin, Germany: US Minister and Deputy Commander of the 1987 1990 American Sector Operations Senat responsibilities and powers Embassy organization Police relationship
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Igor Machsimichev Person relations with Allies Monthly ministerial meetings Berlin status Berlin government Allies Berlin responsibilities Relation with Allies Political parties Gorbachev influence Erich Honecker Quadripartite Agreement German unification Soviet air presence Berlin Air Safety Center Intelligence presence Relations with Embassy Bonn George Vest Public safety Terrorists US Libya bombing German regional travel Egon Krenz Leipzig demonstrations Movement for change Growing demonstrations West German police Soviet police Talk Team Opening of Berlin Wall Coping with GDR citizens Emotional drams German Freedom to travel GDR elections Social Democratic Party Unification Soviets call for Tripartite meeting Ambassador Walters
Berlin, Germany: Principal Officer, US Embassy Office in Berlin 1990 1991 German states in district Consolidating East & West Berlin Missions Personnel changes Foreign Service nationals Reporting First Golf War protests
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Christa Wolf Women’s issues Lee Boem VIP visitors Difficulties of Eat/West amalgamation President George Bush Restraints on optimism East German agriculture NATO membership Germany Poland border Political Parties Nuclear weapons Chancellor Kohl Foreign Minister Gernscher Gorbachev NATO Defense guarantee Lander governments East German industry Stasi (Security) files Gauk Commission Unification euphoria
Army War College: Deputy Commander for International Affairs 1991 1992 Student body International Fellows Program Operations Evaluation
Hiatus in Senate Hearings due to change in Administration 1992 1993 Study of Armenian language Senator Sarbanes Hearings
United States Ambassador to Armenia 1993 1995 Armenia’s emergency humanitarian needs Armenian history American Armenian community Azerbaijan dispute Nagorno Karabakh conflict Closed borders Land locked Armenia Security Shortages US humanitarian aid Winter Warmth program
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Educated populace President Levon Ter Petrossian Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs) Medical problems USAID Embassy building Regional history Turkey Armenia relations Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission Armenian Struggle for the Armed Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (ASALA) Armenia Russia relations Minsk Group Cease Fire (1994) Possibilities of conflict resolution Minsk Group, CSCE American envoys for dispute resolution Regional US ambassadors’ meetings Regional oil exploration Karabakh settlement issue Azerbaijanis Religion Chechens American Armenian Political Organizations Armenian friends in US Congress American University of Armenia Armenian diaspora Western noted Armenians
State Department: Foreign Service Institute (FSI); Dean 1995 1997 of Area Studies/Dean of School of Professional and Area Studies (name change) Merger Senior Seminar Evaluation
Retirement: 1997 State Department; Caucasus Area Studies Lecturing
INTERVIEW
[Note: This interview was not edited by Ambassador Gilmore]
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Q: This is a Foreign Affairs Oral History Program interview with Harry Joseph Gilmore. This interview is being conducted under the auspices of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. I’m Stu Kennedy. Harry and I are old friends. Harry, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? Can you tell me something about your family on both sides?
GILMORE: Yes. I was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania on November the 16th, 1937. McKeesport was where the nearest hospital was to my hometown which was Clairton, which was the coking center for all of Carnegie Illinois, then U.S. Steel, and still remains the coking center, by the way. Yes, coke, the byproduct of soft coal, being used to smelt steel.
Q: Let’s start first on your father’s side. Where do the Gilmores come from? Tell me something about the Gilmore family and how they got to there, and your father.
GILMORE: My father’s family was neatly split between English and Welsh ancestry on his father’s side and German ancestry on his mother’s side. In fact, his mother was the only member of her family – she was the youngest – born in the United States. The rest were born in Germany in a place we’re not entirely sure of because nobody kept records. We think it may have been somewhere in the Black Forest, or between the Black Forest and the French border, somewhere. On my father’s side, his father was a riverboat carpenter, and in that family there were a number of riverboat captains. Pittsburgh, of course, is the junction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny Rivers, and river boating and riverboat building was in the family tradition on that side. Otherwise they were basically mill hands and miners.
Q: What did your father do? Where did he go to school?
GILMORE: My father lost his dad when he was very young; he was born to a family seven of whom survived. So, he went to high school, barely, working actually from junior high on. Never got to go to college, although he was very well self taught, in terms of self education. He was a riverboat hand, then a striker, and then an engineer, on the old coal fire paddle wheelers. Then shortly after he and my mother got married and they began to raise a family, she persuaded him to come off the river. So he then did basically insurance work and some management of retail sales, in particular janitor supply sales. And he changed jobs several times in that general category and ended up as the representative of a fairly stylish, what they called Memorial Park Cemetery, selling grave plots and vaults and collecting bad bills. He worked all of his life.
Q: And your mother, what’s her family background?
GILMORE: My mother’s maiden name was Hall, Elizabeth M. Hall. That was a misnomer because her father, Harry Hall, was actually conceived out of wedlock and Hall was the name of the person who subsequently married his mother. Hall sounds English,
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and he was raised by an English father and a German mother. But actually, he was largely German. Weisgerber was one of the family names, and some English ancestry. My grandfather on that side was the one I knew best and he was a very powerful influence in my own life. In fact, in some ways, he and my father were equally my male role models. He had been a miner. He went to the mines when he was in sixth grade, pulled out of school at 12 years old; worked in the mines until his 20s. He then came to work for Carnegie Illinois Steel in Clairton, and worked himself up to being the head foreman for repairs and maintenance. He retired as that, and then took a job for a year as a stationary engineer. He got his stationary engineering license just by taking a test. Although his name was Hall, he was more conscious by far of his German heritage. My maternal grandmother, another powerful influence, was basically Scots Irish, and perhaps some German ancestry. We’re not sure of that latter, but basically Scots, Scots Irish, Etta Thompson Hall. In many ways, they were second parents. I spent as much time in their household as a young child before I went to school, I think, as I did at home.
Q: Did your mother go through high school?
GILMORE: She did. She went through the commercial class, was one of the top students. She worked for a short time, but then married my father. She didn’t work again until the family was raised, and then had a very nice career. She was an executive secretary in several places, including for a large construction corporation where she was the top executive secretary. Later in life she out earned my dad.
Q: Yes, well. Where did you grow up?
GILMORE: Clairton, Pennsylvania. My parents stayed there until well after I graduated from high school.
Q: Well, tell me about, particularly as a kid, I guess we’re talking about the early ‘40s, what was Clairton like?
GILMORE: It was what we called a mill town. We didn’t call it the factory, we called it the mill. The steel mill and the coke works. And then there was a huge chemical byproduct of coke complex there. A chemical plant called Pennsylvania Industrial Chemical Corporation that employed virtually everybody in the town, directly or indirectly, although some people were still miners. It’s a very interesting town. Considerable numbers of outside workers were brought in to work in the mills and the mines. For example, a large Black population from Alabama had been brought up, probably by the First World War. So the town had a substantial Black population then. Now it’s a majority Black population. A very substantial Italian population, most brought to work in the mines, a combination of Neapolitan and Sicilian Italians. I grew up on the edge of the Sicilian Italian neighborhood and had many friends in it and consider that a kind of important part of my upbringing. Also, a number of Eastern European Americans: Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, particularly Slovaks, the Poles, a few Ukrainians. So it was an ethnically mixed town.
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The political leadership of the town stayed in Irish or German or Scots Irish American hands until pretty late in the game. It was a very interesting town, politically. I did a paper on it once in college. It was a safe Republican town as long as it was a company town, which meant a lot of the housing had been built by Carnegie Illinois Steel. And the minute there were labor unions Philip Murray unionized the steelworkers it flipped. Then it was a safe Democrat town for most of the rest of its history, except for one reform administration run by a friend of mine, which must have been in the ‘60s. But politically a very interesting town. Now, a town that, except for its coke works, would totally be in the rust belt, partly in the rust belt, anyhow.
Q: Did you have a congressional representative for a long time from there?
GILMORE: We had several representatives. The person who is still active in Congress who comes from an area much like my own hometown and kind of speaks for it, although he doesn’t represent my hometown directly, is Representative John Murtha, from Pennsylvania. He’s from the Johnstown area. The reason I go to him is he’s the person I would say represents well the kind of thinking. It regularly went to Democrats for president, but it was not a soft on defense town. It was a town that sent more than its share of people to all the wars. It was also a town where an occasional non Democrat would do well. Eisenhower did well in one of the campaigns. So did Stevenson in the area. It was an interesting town in that George Wallace came north one time during a Democratic Party primary. He didn’t win, but scored a substantial minority of the votes.
Q: Wallace being at that time a very strong segregationist. During the ‘40s, how did the Black community and the Italian community, others, it would strike me that this would not be a very good mix.
GILMORE: It later became a very volatile mixture. In fact, I believe it must have been about 1970 or ’71, if you looked at the Time Magazine of that period, there was a substantially well known racial clash in the high school. But let me go back to the ‘40s. I was one of the first children who went to a school from first through twelfth grades with African American students. So I have a different attitude. My family was by and large pretty prejudiced. Not my brother or myself, however, because we went to school with some very poor, in terms of material well being, African American friends. We went with them from first through twelfth grades. Some of them were very good athletes. We knew them well, we knew each other by first name. Later, though, the mix got kind of more volatile. By the late 1960s into the 1971 72 timeframe. What happened then was the police force in the town was integrated, and the town looked like it was making progress. I believe there was an African American on the city council. Some African Americans by that time had already gone through college. Not many. Most of them, by the way, didn’t come back to the town. But there was already differentiation in terms of who had what jobs in the mill, which was the big employer.
What happened was a fight over interracial dating in the high school. Some black
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athletes, very good athletes... By the way, my hometown was very well known for football.
Q: Well, Pennsylvania, of course, a coal mining area, really was a great breeding ground for football players.
GILMORE: Yes, and my senior year, for example, my high school was in the Western Pennsylvania Inter Athletic Association League, I think WPIAA was the acronym. We were the champions in our division of all western Pennsylvania. But in any case, some African American fellows had dated some white girls, all by consent, no coercion there, and apparently some African American girls jumped the white girls, who were dating some African American guys, in the ladies room. It spilled out into the hall, and it became quite a clash and then some white guys and some black guys got into it. The police came, and the police force, which had been integrated for some time by then, split itself and lost control. They had to bring in the county police, Allegheny County, and I think even the state police. They subdued the fight after some difficulty. The school was closed for several days and then opened with police supervision at the county level, because the city couldn’t do it. But that symbolized what was happening.
What was happening was the more enterprising white Americans and African Americans were leaving town, many of them with football scholarships. Our high school team, for example my senior year, more than two dozen fellows won football scholarships. Those people would leave and what was left was a declining steel industry, more competition for jobs, and also what was happening on the national level, the civil rights movement, etc., all reflecting on the population of the town. Sadly, the employment base had eroded significantly enough, particularly shortly after I graduated, from about 1950, there was a major steel strike in the end of the summer of ’55 or ’57, I don’t member the exact year. After that, the steel mills were in decline, jobs were hard to come by, new jobs, there was competition for jobs, suburban flight. The families that had been sort of the upper middle class left, and what was left were the poorer folks, the folks who were first generation, the Italian Americans, the Eastern European Americans, the African Americans, who had been there longer, but who were even further down the socio economic totem pole. So it was a tough time, but it was after me, basically.
Q: But for you, let’s first look at grammar school. How did you take to school?
GILMORE: Pretty well after the first grade. I didn’t want to go to first grade, I remember that. I remember my uncle would walk me to school and my mother would say I couldn’t come home. Once I got through that I was always a good student and that was prized at home, being a good student. You got rewards for it, and also if you didn’t do well, when the 6 week report card came out and you didn’t do well, you didn’t get so many privileges for a while. And also my dad, particularly, my mother too, but particularly my dad sat with you if you were doing poorly in spelling or arithmetic or whatever.
Q: So somebody was watching over you.
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GILMORE: Yes, it was made clear to me by my parents and my maternal grandparents too, that they hoped, in fact expected, that I would go to college.
Q: What about reading? Did you turn into a reader early on? Or did that come later?
GILMORE: I would say I became a pretty heavy reader by junior high school. I was always quick at language and had no trouble. But I don’t remember reading as much until about then. Although, I was read to, particularly by my mother. My mother had a very good command my father too, for people without high school had a very good command of the language.
Q: I think something is often forgotten about that generation and other generations. They were self taught and they might not have had quite the same official education, but often, I mean my parents are the same way. They absorbed...they worked at it.
GILMORE: Yes, exactly. My mother belonged to the Book of the Month Club, I remember. We got Reader’s Digest. People scoff at that now, but it’s a great teacher’s guide, particularly if you are self taught as a reader. My mother read to us. She read the Bible, she read stories. In fact, I still have the collection of the nine volumes of children’s stories that she ordered from some book club. My father was home less. He worked long hours, but it was clear that reading and learning were respected in the household. My grandfather, who as I said went to the mines in sixth grade, went and got himself a high school degree in his 40s. He read Time Magazine and later Newsweek until the end of his life. He loved to speak about foreign affairs, international affairs, and politics. He’d been a Republican until Herbert Hoover and he became a very avid anti Hooverite, which made him basically a Democrat. And he and my father always talked politics, so I grew up in an environment of lots of discussion about national politics and foreign affairs.
Q: What about religion? Did religion play much of a role?
GILMORE: Yes. My father was Presbyterian, my mother was Methodist, and they ended up going to the Presbyterian Church. It was an essential part of my upbringing. I can’t remember when I didn’t go to Sunday School. That was expected. And my father was quite a good singer. He had some voice lessons later in his life. He was quite a good singer, and I was given piano lessons earlier than most and I accompanied him, including when he was a choir director. I was the organist at his church when I was in high school. That was a small Presbyterian Church, so I was steeped in church music, mostly the Presbyterian variety, until I went to college. One of the ways I got through college was I played organ in a rather large Methodist church in a neighboring town for $100 dollars or so a month, which was not small money then.
Q: That’s not small money at all.
GILMORE: It helped pay all my incidentals and some of my tuition. I grew up with the
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church and music.
Q: Was there a division in your town between the Protestants and the Catholics?
GILMORE: There was and there wasn’t. It was pretty strict in many ways. For example, it wasn’t every day that you would see a Protestant and a Catholic go steady as we used to say, and then get married.
Q: No.
GILMORE: It happened occasionally. My brother did it. It was a little bit of a mold breaker for our family, but basically you couldn’t help but have very good relations across the lines because of the schools. A couple of my friends are priests. One of my very good friends is a priest; in fact, he was the President of Duquesne University, which is a Catholic affiliated university in Pittsburgh, and we were in the high school band together. A very important institution in my upbringing, by the way; I met my wife there, but also we had a very good marching band and also being in the concert band.
Q: What did you play?
GILMORE: I played piccolo and flute. Several of my very close friends became priests. I lived right on the edge of the Sicilian American community, which was of course heavily Catholic. All those friends were Catholic. The funny thing is, we didn’t, in those days, go much to each other’s churches. Maybe for a wedding, but then in later times my mother’s sister married a Catholic fellow, a Slovak American. Swell fellow, very religious Catholic. So, we quickly broke the barriers down and in the present generation, three of my four grandchildren are Catholic. I’m very comfortable about it. What I’m saying is that in the hometown it was slow. There were clergymen on both sides of the Catholic Protestant divide who preached against too much contact. I knew a lot of those clergymen from being an organist.
Q: In a way, that generation...one above yours...was really the last generation to have...to carry on the old tradition. Whatever it was, World War II, the Great Depression, or what have you, broke things down.
GILMORE: Right. And there was one very special thing in my family that played a very subtle role later. My father’s mother, the one who I said was the only one in her family not born in Germany, had left home at 16 to be married. They were a good Catholic family. They threw her out because she married my grandfather who was not a Catholic. So, she joined his church, which happened to be the Presbyterian Church. Had she felt strongly about it, he would have joined the Catholic Church because he was kind of not much of a religious person. She never said much, but later in life, it became very apparent that we were already...we already had a Catholic grandma. She was a special person, and it was A okay for part of the family to be Catholic and part of the family to be Protestant. That didn’t help, though, when the first Protestant Catholic marriage occurred, my
14 brother and his wife. There were some misgivings on both sides, but my brother and his wife are both extremely strong willed and they basically said, “Hey. We’re going to do this and we want your blessing, and that’s it.” But we were kind of pioneers in that sense in that generation.
Q: In high school... were there any subjects that particularly appealed to you?
GILMORE: I was always very good in English and English Literature and History. Those were the subjects that I excelled in. I was decent at math, and decent at science. Not an avid student of science. I think I would be now if I went back. I studied Latin for two years, instead of a modern foreign language, and I was pretty good at that for the amount of time I spent on it. I had a good aptitude for that. Those were the subjects.
Q: Looking back at your elementary school and high school, were there any books that were of particular importance to you that opened your eyes or attracted you or anything like that?
GILMORE: As long as I can remember, I was particularly attracted to poetry. I remember that more than any specific book, although I remember liking the Shakespeare plays we read in my sophomore, junior, and senior years. We read one play in depth each year. We read Hamlet, Macbeth, and I think it was Julius Caesar. Those three. But poetry, Walt Whitman and Frost particularly. I didn’t read all of Frost’s works or all of Leaves of Grass, but I remember being influenced by those early on. And also Edna Saint Vincent Millay, whom my mother liked. And a whole series of minor American poets. But early on it was poetry.
Q: Yes, I was very influenced by Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body.
GILMORE: I remember that well.
Q: It was a great look at the Civil War.
GILMORE: It is, and I remember Stephen Vincent Benét and I remember also Carl Sandburg, as a young fellow. I don’t appreciate him quite as much as an older person, but he was an important influence. And I even at one point thought I would try to write some verse like the two of them, Sandburg and Whitman. It didn’t amount to much, but I did have a strong interest in poetry. And then later, novels, British novels particularly. As I went into college, the book I kept coming back to, and I read early, and helped me go in my career, was Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s book.
Q: Which was based on the Communist rule in... it was Czechoslovakia wasn’t it?
GILMORE: It was based on the Soviet Union. Bukharin, Nikolai Bukharin, the great young intellectual who was one of Lenin’s closest confidants, but on the opposite side of the fence from Stalin and was purged. I remember that is one of the things that took me
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toward Russian studies in college. But I have to say that in high school the biggest interest I had was music. I was one of the pianists for the high school chorus, which was a pretty good chorus. I was in the band. I did a lot of vocal accompaniment. It so happens my wife, who was a year younger, was the star soprano, in fact won the state forensics three years running, as a sophomore, junior, and senior. I was her accompanist. There was an outstanding bass. I was his accompanist. There was a flutist who went on to become a music degree holder. I was his accompanist. So I began to do a lot of music. In fact, I was kind of split between music and academics in high school, and probably spent more time on music than I, in retrospect, maybe should have. But it took me to music school first. That’s where I went to college first, for music.
Q: At the time, going up to about ’55, you graduated from high school in ’55.
GILMORE: Right.
Q: How about the Cold War, international affairs? It sounds like you were in a valley in western Pennsylvania; did the outside world intrude much?
GILMORE: It did a couple of times. I remember in ninth grade civics class, it was a question of whether Truman would run again. And then Eisenhower subsequently ran. I remember we had a straw poll in the civics class as to whether Truman should run again. That might have been when Truman first ran on his own. That was probably more likely it. I remember speaking up for Truman. My father was a great admirer of Truman. He was way ahead of his time. My father used to say, “This guy has guts, and he takes real decisions, and he’s got an agenda both domestically and in foreign policy, and he’s a leader.” I remember speaking out for Truman. I guess, I can’t remember whether that was Truman/Dewey. No, that would have been, I think that would have been when Truman didn’t run again.
Q: Must have been the election of ’52.
GILMORE: Yes. That’s what I’m trying to...as I count it up, it would be the election of ’52. That was my first real memory of politics. I remember the two Eisenhower/Stevenson campaigns, following them very closely. Stevenson was pretty popular in my hometown, in the valley and in Allegheny County, which is greater Pittsburgh. But not as popular by the second time, particularly because he was considered a bit of an intellectual, a bit of an egghead. Yes, egghead was the term that was used.
Eisenhower was admired even though there were some people that thought Eisenhower didn’t know enough about domestic issues, particularly bread and butter issues. But I remember having friends with whom I talked politics all the time, friends who were more pro Ike; I was sort of pro Stevenson, although not passionately. But I remember those times being heavily involved in following the campaigns. My father and grandfather wouldn’t let the papers and then TV rest during the campaign periods. So, as we ate dinner together, we always discussed politics.
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Q: In ’55, you are graduating from high school. Where did you go?
GILMORE: I went to Carnegie...what they call Carnegie Mellon University now, but then called Carnegie Institute of Technology, which had not only a wonderful engineering school, but it had a fine arts school of quality. The best fine arts school in the area. I went as a piano major, and I went thinking that I was going to make a living doing concert work and teaching. Particularly as an accompanist. I was a better than average pianist and a very good accompanist because I’d done so much of it. So I went there for two years, did very, very well, but only stayed two years because it was clear to me by the second year that I wanted to do something broader than music. By then I had the foreign affairs bug. Bitten.
Q: How did you catch that?
GILMORE: I caught it reading about Russia, the Soviet Union, reading about Russian history, 19th century Russia, reading about George Kennan. I think there was a 5 hour a week history course, an all year history course, which was required of sophomores in the fine arts school. I had a particularly gifted teacher named Norman Dawes, a Massachusetts boy, New England fellow, particularly good teacher. He was an inspiration. He not only taught history well, but he related it to foreign affairs, current events, and I believe that was another important influence. I realized that though I was doing well in music, very well, in fact. I think I made better grades in music school in terms of grade point average than I did even, subsequently, in regular university. But I decided it was too confining, to do music night and day and all the time. It was too much.
Q: Yes, once you really launch in that path, there’s only one field.
GILMORE: Right. And I was good, very talented in some ways, but as a steel town boy, I hadn’t had lessons, although my parents paid for good lessons in high school. I hadn’t had the background. The really star pianists, by the time they are 18, can play four or five concertos, and they know a huge sonata repertoire. I was behind in that, although in two years of intensive study I was making good progress in catching up. It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to be a Rudolf Serkin of my generation. A combination of things then led me to then apply to the University of Pittsburgh and transfer, which I did after two years.
Q: So, you were there ’57 to ’60...
GILMORE: I graduated in ’60. I lost one year of coursework, maybe a year and more from transferring from fine arts to liberal arts, because many of my fine arts courses, Solfeggio and Harmony, and Music Theory, didn’t transfer.
Q: How did you find, while you were in music, the music crowd? In other words, the people you would be working with. Music is one thing, but the people you would be
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associating with for the rest of your life. What was your impression of that at the time?
GILMORE: Well, it was interesting. Many of the students were more devoted and more disciplined than anything I’d seen. I liked them, but in a way found them sometimes pretty one sided. But the professors...it was a different story. My piano teacher for two years was a New York Jew, dear man, Leonard Eisner, who had been the accompanist for Lauritz Melchior when he toured the country doing solo work, and had also done some other solo piano work as a young person. He had a Carnegie Hall debut and that sort of thing, although not well known. We became close, and through him I got both a good foundation in piano and a good foundation in Holocaust history through his family. He influenced me deeply. To make extra money, I was the music librarian for the music school, which brought me into contact with the concert master of the Pittsburgh Symphony, who was our orchestra conductor. And then I became his rehearsal pianist when he played the Glazunov and Beethoven violin concertos with the symphony. I would rehearse with him on the piano. Also, by the way, Samuel Fabi, was of Russian Jewish origin. I was heavily influenced by these people in a positive way, and developed a deep admiration for the values that these fellows represented. Study, music, hard work, thrift, and also I became aware of modern European history in another dimension...basically from the dimension of the Jews who had been kicked out of Europe and who had been murdered.
Q: You were hitting the results of the wave that had been meant to get out of Germany, which was such a plus to American cultural life, and sort of devastated German cultural life.
GILMORE: Exactly.
Q: Germany hasn’t even come close to recovering.
GILMORE: Right. It was fascinating. I got to know the Pittsburgh Symphony principal players, who were our teachers at the music school at Carnegie Mellon. So, for example, the trombone teacher would be the first chair trombonist; the oboe teacher was the principal oboist. Many of them were Jews, just like you said, right out of the German tradition, had come to the States as refugees. They were very talented. One was also a Czech, he’d also been thrown up by the events of WWII. So I got in touch with him. Also, my theory teacher, my Harmony 1 and Harmony 2 teacher, was a Russian émigré, a minor composer of some note, Nikolai Lopatnikoff. Wonderful man, excellent teacher. He was a fan of George Kennan. It’s a peculiar story, but his influence on me was not only music, but also in learning about Russia. The more I got into Russia and the Soviet Union, the more I got really interested. So, one of the reasons I left Carnegie Mellon was also to study Russian, which I did at the University of Pittsburgh. I transferred to the University of Pittsburgh after two years. They didn’t have a lot of a Russian program, but I spent two years studying Russian there.
Q: How did you find your time studying at the University of Pittsburgh? The Cathedral of
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Learning I believe it was called, was in a skyscraper....
GILMORE: Right, it had a lot of cute nicknames. One of them was the “Tower of Ignorance,” and somebody’s “last erection,” I don’t remember who that was... [laughter]
But in any case, it was very interesting. I could only do one year close to campus. When I transferred it was too late to get into a dormitory, so I rented a house from a couple that lived maybe about a mile from the school. I spent three years there, getting my undergraduate degree. I spent the last two years as what we used to call, “a streetcar student,” except I went in a car pool from home. I didn’t spend as much time on campus as would have been ideal, because I lived off campus the first year, and then home. Also, my brother started college, so what limited funds my parents had became even more limited. I had to pick up weekend work, which became organist work. So, I wasn’t on campus much, although I did participate in the Glee Club one year, my first year, the year I could. Then I also participated in a kind of discussion group.
But the biggest thing that happened to me at the University of Pittsburgh was my second year there I was selected as one of the students that had some promise to go to graduate school. They had a very forward looking program for identifying people who might qualify for graduate fellowships, run by a fellow they brought in from Princeton. I believe his name was Dr. Heath. They picked me largely because I was a very good student in American History. I had some very good marks in the one year of American History I took. They focused me there on thinking maybe I could get a fellowship to go to graduate school, and I did. I got a Woodrow Wilson fellowship at the end of my senior year. So then I was able to go on, that gave me one year of grad school. I got accepted at Indiana University with some qualms, because I didn’t have...my undergraduate major turned out to be English, minor History, but I didn’t have much political science. I’d had two courses: one in American Government and one in Western European Government. They thought I was a little light, at Indiana, in history and political science. But they took me. So, Pitt proved to be a very good place for me to be for the three years, and I am still grateful to them for picking me out of this mass of students and saying, “Hey, you’ve got a shot at grad school.” Otherwise, I’m not sure I would have felt so confident about it.
Q: Grad school was not very much in the cards in those days.
GILMORE: No, and my parents had not planned on it, and had there was no money for it. My brother by that time was a junior, and my sister was coming along. It was clear my parents were going to be strapped, and they were strapped. At least this got me to Indiana University and got me into the Russian History/European Studies.
Q: Indiana, I guess today still, had this Slavic Studies program as pretty eminent.
GILMORE: Right. It was excellent. When I got there, I found I was behind in Russian so I couldn’t make the rapid progress to getting a Ph.D. Dr. Burns, who was the head of the Russian European Institute then, used to want people to be done with their coursework in
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two and a half years and starting to write their thesis. Well, I spent two years there, one on the Woodrow Wilson fellowship and then one on an assistantship. I had spent so much time studying Russian that I had the work done for my area certificate, but I didn’t have my Ph.D. work done, and by that time I took the Foreign Service exam and passed and was married. I had married my high school sweetheart just before going to Indiana. So, I didn’t finish there, although it’s interesting: I have the equivalent of more than enough coursework for a masters, plus an area certificate. When I looked at it some years later, it wouldn’t have taken me probably but one more year to get the coursework for a Ph.D. The irony was I’d applied for a National Defense Fellowship toward the end of my second year, and I was named an alternate. Meanwhile I had passed the Foreign Service exam, and I decided to join the Foreign Service. When I got to Washington, I was informed by the National Defense fellowship people that I was now on the list. But I decided not to go back and get the Ph.D., but to plunge into the Foreign Service. And I think it was the right decision.
Q: The Ph.D. is kind of fun to have, but unless you really plan to use it to teach, it doesn’t really further anything.
GILMORE: No. I would have benefited from more study, and maybe more language study, but in Pittsburgh where I grew up, people who were not stupid but not very interested in education had a nickname for Ph.D., which was always one of my views of it, sad, at the time... Piled Higher and Deeper, Ph.D. What they would say was, “If you are going to get a doctorate, be a doctor, be a dentist.” But they would say, “Don’t spend your steelworker Dad’s hard earned money by being a professional student.” Now, I’ve subsequently come light years from that, but that was always a factor too.
Q: Where were you during... you’d graduated college, from Pitt, in 1960, is that right?
GILMORE: Early, because that was the first year of the trimester. I graduated in April and went to work as a...there was a slowdown, I think a steel strike...so I went to work in an ice cream store for a few months to get ready for Indiana.
Q: At Indiana, did you get caught up in the election of 1960? This was, for many, the Nixon Kennedy thing...
GILMORE: Oh, big time.
Q: Can you talk about that?
GILMORE: Yes, I got more involved in that than I should have because I should have spent the extra time studying. I got to Bloomington, with a new bride, by the way, in August of ’60. And the Indianapolis Star was a newspaper, strongly, strongly anti Kennedy, and pro Nixon. On campus, however, you can guess where the sentiments went: they went toward Kennedy, and my family went toward Kennedy.
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I leaned toward Kennedy for a number of reasons. I had still been a church organist right up until I left for Indiana, and the Methodist preacher kind of spoke against having a Catholic in the White House, which irritated me to no end. So all that did was strengthen my resolve. But also, the Presbyterian preacher of my parents’ home church was pro Kennedy. I said, “Hey, this guy is not going to be any more in special communication with the Vatican than any other U.S. president and let’s just look at him for what he is: war hero, hard working guy who has some ideas.” In any case, I read the Indianapolis Star and the Louisville Courier Journal every morning. I remember the Courier Journal was pro Kennedy, an excellent newspaper out of Louisville...in fact the best newspaper in that part of the world in some ways. Indianapolis Star was against Kennedy. I spent a lot of time discussing the campaign with my fellow students who were by and large pro Kennedy. Of course, he squeaked out that victory...I remember we all waited up ‘til Illinois was finally registered in the Kennedy column.
Q: Did the call for public service resonate with you?
GILMORE: It did. That was one of the things...“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” And also we were still very much in a Cold War. One of my professors, John Thompson, one of my history professors and my advisor, had been a Foreign Service officer. He talked about the excitement of it and the importance of it, and the importance of being on the front lines of the Cold War as he would say. We had a number of émigrés there. We had 56 Hungarian refugees. One of them became a dear friend of mine, Charles Gati, Hungarian American, who was quite a scholar on Hungary. He had written some excellent books, including one on Imre Nagy. But in any case, getting to know these fellow students who were in the fray, so to speak, and one of the Beneš was there.
Q: From Edvard Beneš
GILMORE: And his family
Q: Right, a Czechoslovakian.
GILMORE: Right, so the Cold War was right there on campus. We also had Charles Jelavich, who was an American of Croatian origin. He was married to Barbara Jelavich who was one of the best diplomatic historians of her time, particularly as a teacher in the United States. She focused on 19th and 20th Century Balkan and European diplomatic history. So we had the Cold War every day and it was exciting.
Q: You mentioned that you got married... your high school sweetheart. What was her background?
GILMORE: She was of German and English origin. Her maiden name was Quince. Her father’s side, they were German period. Germans from Alsace Lorraine, Catholics. Her mother was a Laboric, although her mother in turn was a Mary Deutsche, Pennsylvania
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Dutch, but much earlier German. My wife was raised Methodist because her mother was Methodist. Very good singer, very talented singer, and her trajectory was clearly toward music school. She was a year younger than I was, but we stayed in touch and by the time I was finished with my senior year and she was in her junior year, we decided to get engaged. Believe it or not, our parents weren’t thrilled about the timing, but they quickly supported it, saying, “These are nice kids. Just so they don’t get too many kids too fast.”
Q: What brought you to take the Foreign Service exam?
GILMORE: I took it first at the University of Pittsburgh. I think largely because Dr. Heath and his focus on graduate school had led me to think about what I would want to specialize in. Having left Carnegie Mellon with the idea that I would be focusing more on foreign affairs...I’d heard about it and I took it, and I narrowly missed it. In those older days, they gave you five points if you’d passed the foreign language unit. I barely missed passing the foreign language test. That would have thrown me over the top. And, once I took the test, I decided I’m going to take this again, but after I have a little more study under my belt and some more language. So then I took it again in my second year at Indiana University. By that time my Russian was pretty good and I aced the Russian portion. So I passed the exam with some margin. The Russian gave me five bonus points. Once I passed it...by the way, my wife by that time was very pregnant, it was our second year at Indiana. She’d finished her degree at Duquesne subsequently...she went back for a semester while I was at Indiana. She was expecting and I didn’t get my National Defense Fellowship that I had hoped for, so I just decided to head straight for the Foreign Service. And I was lucky to do it.
Q: What year did you take the oral exam?
GILMORE: I took the oral exam in the late Spring of ’62.
Q: Do you recall any of the questions...
GILMORE: I do recall heavy questions on Civil Rights. While I was a high school student, in my home church the pastor, John Earl Meyers, became caught up in the Civil Rights Movement and in fact marched in Washington with Dr. King. He was a powerful influence on me. I had become convinced having grown up with African Americans and having very close friends who were clearly disadvantaged in my hometown...I mean there was just no other way of looking at it...I’d become interested in it. He had given me for my birthday in my senior year a membership in the NAACP. I had never solicited it. My parents, by the way, were not happy. But in any case, when I went for the oral exam, one of the examiners, the non Foreign Service person, a fellow by the name of Arthur Sylvester, who happened to be one of the senior African Americans in the Civil Service. He spotted it immediately and started asking me questions about the Civil Rights Movement. After missing one, I hit the rest out of the park. So it was a help.
The other thing I remember is being asked a question, when they saw that I was then
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working on a master’s thesis on a Russian writer by the name of Nikolay Novikov, one of the Freemasons of his time, and a moderate reformer, a very interesting fellow. They asked me about him and how that related to the later Russian Revolution. I remember that question. I also remember a question at the end of the interview when it was clear that they kind of liked me...they’d noticed on my application that I had said that I would be happy to be part of this elite Foreign Service corps. They asked me what I meant by elite. It was clear that they were wondering if I thought I’d be better than anybody else, or more smart alec, and be that kind of...leaving my upbringing behind. No, I said, it meant to me in the sense of carefully chosen. I remember that, and I went out of the room, and within 15 or 20 minutes they called me in and offered me an appointment. Of course, the other thing, they laughed and said, “Your shoes squeak, do you know that? Did you get new shoes?” Sure enough I had just bought a new pair of black shoes because I didn’t have any. And I’d bought a cheapy pair of black shoes, and apparently they’d picked that up so they knew what kind of a rube they were dealing with...[laughter]
Q: [laughter] That’s wonderful. How did your wife feel about this?
GILMORE: She was pleased enough. She had been a very good soldier because we lived in very modest surroundings. Our first child was born then in the course of my second year, after I had taken the exam. Our first son was born, and she put up with a very cramped, old apartment, and we were so clearly matched. She’s someone I’d known. I’d had my first date with her when she was in 9th grade and I was in 10th, to go to the movies. So whatever I wanted to do was all right with her, and if you’ve ever met her, she’s got a very outgoing personality and she’s a very pretty girl. So, she never had trouble with people.
Q: Was she thinking of continuing, especially because of her singing career?
GILMORE: Yes, she’d hoped to do that, and I told her I thought she could. Which turned out to be not totally accurate because I spent much of my early career in the Communist world, and that was a problem, singing outside the Embassy. That being said, in our first post in Turkey, we had a little chamber music group within the embassy, and with a couple of very good Turkish flute players from the Turkish Presidential Symphony. She was the soloist and we did some concert izing there including in the Ambassador’s residence when Arthur Fiedler visited.
Q: A very well known...
GILMORE: He was Boston Pops...
Q: Yes, the leader of the Boston Pops.
GILMORE: She then, sometimes in our career, when we finally got to Yugoslavia, she did quite a bit of singing there, but that was different. Yugoslavia was a Communist country as you well know, but other things were possible there.
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Q: Sure, you’d go to an opera there, and the lead male would be singing in Russian and the lead lady would be singing in Italian, and the chorus would be singing in Serbian.
GILMORE: Exactly. I remember that so well. Even in Moscow, where you couldn’t do a thing outside the Embassy, the British Ambassador and his wife were musicians and they had a little diplomatic chorus. When we landed there my wife quickly became the star soprano, which she was, and that got us in touch with the middle grade officers of the British Ambassador to the Soviet Union. A very distinguished fellow and his wife. And also Benjamin Britten came and we were invited to the concerts. Because of her singing, we got in some relationships that were very nice.
Q: Great that her talent was useful. You came into the Foreign Service in what year?
GILMORE: I actually entered the Service in August of ’62, but the paperwork says I came in in September, because the paperwork was always behind. Remember they offered you a reserve appointment, and then a month later when the paperwork came through… [Editor’s Note: The Foreign Service Biographic Registry notes Mr. Gilmore entered the Foreign Service under a reserve appointment in September 1962 and received his Foreign Service commission as an FSO 8 in December 1962]. So my A 100 class started in August of ’62.
Q: What was your class like? This was is your first sort of close up look at the Foreign Service.
GILMORE: It was a very interesting time. I think there were 52 of us in two sections. One headed by Chester Beaman, the other by Thomas Duffield. Two very dedicated officers. And for the first time, women officers. I think we were the first or maybe the second, but I think we were the first A100 class to have women officers. Able people. I mean obviously there were plenty of able women already then, although subsequently they had to resign when they got married, if you remember. It was terrible. But I remember that, and I remember being generally impressed with the class. Although I think the intellectual star of my class died young. A fellow named Marty Rosenberg. He, I think, served in Vietnam. There were some very able people in the class; some people that subsequently went pretty far. Desaix Anderson, Joe Lake, a couple of fellows who went on to become ambassadors. It was an exciting time. I found quickly that my wife and I were on the…shall I say…on the side of those with more modest means. We were basically eking...we had just come out of grad school. I owed a fellow graduate student a little bit of money to get my car fixed in Pittsburgh to visit family before coming in. There were some people that had a lot more comfortable financial underpinnings, shall we say.
Q: Yes. I know in my class, Class 1, actually, back in ’55... a bunch of us, as soon as we took our oath, we went traveling down to the credit union to take out a loan to get us through to the next....
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GILMORE: I was in that same category. We went very quickly, and I remember going overseas in my first post, that I had to borrow money for a tux. They said you had to have one, and we bought my wife one gown and a pair of long gloves because they said she had to have them. We didn’t even have a car. We borrowed money and bought a used Studebaker Lark, from a local optometrist. When we arrived in Turkey, we owed the credit union something like $750, which seemed like a huge amount of money...or maybe, no, it was more than that...$1500 and they made me do something I found very embarrassing. I had to ask my father in law to co sign it, which he did.
Q: Go around and get co signers, yes.
GILMORE: Do you remember those days?
Q: Yes, awful.
GILMORE: Awful.
Q: You were in Washington during the Cuban missile crisis.
GILMORE: I was indeed.
Q: For a bunch of young officers, you must have been sort of wide eyed, weren’t you?
GILMORE: Yes, I was.
Q: We’re talking about the ’62 missile crisis, which happened just about the time you came into the Foreign Service.
GILMORE: Exactly. It happened when I was in A 100, the Consular course. They had to give everybody in those days a Consular Course before going overseas, if you were assigned overseas, and almost all of us were. I remember following the crisis, being glued to the TV, when I was at home in our little rented apartment. By the way, I made a mistake and rented an apartment over in southwest Washington, DC, because I didn’t know any better and because it was cheaper. So I had to get to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), two buses each way. But in any case, I remember following it very closely and worrying with Kennedy whether we would blink before they did. I think it was Dean Rusk’s famous quote was, “We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other guy just blinked.” When I got to my first post in Ankara, of course, there was a piece of the story which I hadn’t known anything about from Washington which was Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
Q: Yes.
GILMORE: Were they put on the table, or weren’t they, and if so, how. Even though I
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was the ambassador’s aide my first ten or so months in Turkey, some of that stuff was not shared...with me anyhow. I didn’t have a need to know.
Q: How did you find the A 100? Later you got into the educational side of FSI. What was your impression of the A 100 course and all that?
GILMORE: It was tightly structured, and it was pretty clear that they weren’t making up the curriculum day by day, but I would say it was in some ways uneven. There were some very good presentations. Some of them very practical. I remember one of them was ‘How do you use an interpreter?’ I remember a fellow by the name of James Bostain, Jim Bostain...
Q: I’ve interviewed Jim.
GILMORE: Yes. I thought he did a good job, showing us how other people’s cultural backgrounds and cultural sensitivities would be different than ours. And we had some good people over from the department to talk about U.S. policy. By and large, I thought it was a good start in the service, but in some ways the best part of it was getting to know the other people coming in with you.
Q: I think one of the things, when I came in, I thought, poor little me and all these fancy people. I quickly learned that we were all about, we all had our strengths and weaknesses and I didn’t have to feel inferior.
GILMORE: No. I remember we had a discussion once about U.S. Soviet competition because it was very much on our minds. JFK wanted to go to the moon. The Sputnik had happened. And basically, one of the other A 100 participants said that the Soviet Union was going to outstrip us economically sooner or later simply because they could control the interest rate. I remember thinking to myself, “Oh my gosh. I know more than this guy. It’s very clear to me from my course in Soviet Economics at IU that they can control the interest rate all they want, but until they know what something really costs, until they have money that really reflects scarce resources and interest rates reflect scarce investment resources, they’re not going to get anywhere except in those few sectors that they throw tons of resources at.” So I remember feeling, “Hey, I might be from a more modest economic background than some of these folks, but I think I can have a career with these guys.” I remember generally liking most of the folks, generally liking them quickly, and admiring them for what they did.
Q: Had the draft been breathing down your neck at all?
GILMORE: Well, it’s interesting. I came from western Pennsylvania, where we had what we quickly called the voluntary draft. You could put your name up higher on the list if you wanted to be considered. Well there was a lot of that going on because of the steel mills either getting closed temporarily for strikes or because they were shrinking in terms of the employment opportunities they could offer. I was sent up for the Physical...after I
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graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, before I went to Indiana, and was given the 1 A designation, so I was draftable. But when they learned I had a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Indiana, I was told quietly, but they could never say it officially, “We have enough people here wanting their names to be put up on the draft, moved up, that you won’t be called while you are at school, in all probability.” And I was never called again. I kept in touch with them. Once I went into the Foreign Service, I don’t think I was ever contacted again. They knew I was in the Service, and that was it. So, I’m sad about it in a way. In many ways, I would have liked to have been in the service.
Q: It was a handy thing to have behind you, to understand...
GILMORE: How it worked.
Q: Yes. In the A 100 course, they always ask you where you would like to go. What were you...?
GILMORE: We used to call it the Soviet Bloc. I said the Soviet Union or the Soviet Bloc. Of course, their policy was not to assign anybody, so they said they would assign us, those of us who wanted to go to that part of the world, in one of the listening post countries. They called them listening posts. I was assigned originally to Izmir, Turkey, and just before I was getting ready to go my assignment was changed to Ankara, which I think was fortuitous. Of course, Turkey was a listening post, but I only some years later realized how important a listening post it really was...how many facilities we had up along the Black Sea, and the U 2 flights taking off from Incirlik, or landing at Incirlik. And basically flying RB 47s across what was then Soviet Armenia. But I was sent to Ankara as a first post on the rotational compliment.
Q: You were there from when to when?
GILMORE: I got to Ankara in the very beginning of January, the 3rd, 1963. And I came out in late July/early August of ’64 because I’d been promoted and I’d been selected for Hungarian language training at FSI.
Q: When you got to Turkey in the beginning of 1963, what was the situation in Turkey and our relations with Turkey?
GILMORE: There was some tenseness over the question of the Jupiter missiles. It was talked about but not talked about in the Embassy.
Q: Could you explain what the Jupiter missile thing was?
GILMORE: Yes, as I understand it. My memory may not be as acute as I would like it to be. When Nikita Khrushchev put the Soviet missiles into Cuba, one of the ideas was that the Jupiter missiles that we had put into Turkey—which by the way I subsequently learned that they were not terribly efficient.
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Q: They were obsolescent...we were planning to yank them out.
GILMORE: We were going to pull them. Anyhow, there was some talk about offering as part of an arrangement to get the Soviet missiles out of Cuba, to get the Jupiters out of Turkey. Apparently, from what I’ve subsequently read, Adlai Stevenson was one of those who thought that was not a bad idea. I was told, subsequently, in a formal sense that was dropped, although whether there was an understanding that we would be taking the Jupiters out anyhow was another question. I believe the answer to that, I haven’t done research, was yes.
Also there was this question of a multi demand naval, was it going to be a frigate, missile frigate. The Turks liked that idea as something that would be NATO sponsored but would give them some limited participation in nuclear deterrence. The ambassador, who was a wonderful, experienced foreign service officer, Raymond Hare, was in his fifth ambassadorship, had been director general of the service, assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, never believed it. Although, he would never say it, he was too professional to say it, but as his aide I learned that he never thought that this multi demand frigate ship idea was going anywhere. But we were working on that.
The legendary Ismet Inonu, of the Republican People’s Party, who fought in the battle against the Greeks, and I guess was a victorious general way back in the early 1920s, was the prime minister. The ambassador had very good access. We had a huge presence there. I remember as his aide just looking over the military presence the Joint U.S. Military Mission for Aid to Turkey (JUSMAT) and the Turkish U.S. logistics. I learned quietly and gradually, I covered not only logistics for forces but also covered a number of facilities for intelligence gathering.
Q: Yes, these are the ones up along the Black Sea.
GILMORE: Right.
Q: Telemetry, and listening. I used to do that a long time ago myself.
GILMORE: Really?
Q: In the Air Force.
GILMORE: It’s amazing. One of the people I became a close friend of was a fellow who came and brought the black briefcase to the ambassador once or twice or even more a week. The U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant David Hall. David couldn’t tell me what he did, but he danced around it, and I figured it out from things the ambassador said. But sitting out there, I used to watch David come in to brief the ambassador. Anyway, we had this huge presence. Our relationship was solid. We were running a huge aid mission. I think at that point we were pouring...Turkey was somewhere in the first five of the
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recipient countries for U.S. assistance. A fellow by the name of Van Dyke, a very smooth fellow, ran the aid mission which was large. One of my jobs as the ambassador’s aide was to monitor some of their traffic and brief him. And then there was a lot of instability going on in the Arab world, on which Ambassador Hare was a real expert. I remember there were coups; several times as the Ba’athists were pushing for power in Iraq and Syria. He, by the way, when I would take the cables in and try to brief him, he’d say, “Summarize them for me, Harry, summarize them.” He would know after I’d got four sentences out whether the cable was worth much, and he had a very nuanced understanding of that part of the world. Otherwise, it was an interesting time because there were status of forces issues that had to be resolved. I got a look at that for the first time because we had a large military presence. I got a look, too, at consular work. I had a rotational tour in the consular section. Also, I did my first political work there, under the tutelage of Elaine Diane Smith. A very good teacher, by the way. She’s a retired FSO and was a Turkey expert.
Let’s see, is there anything else. Oh, the thing I remember perhaps most graphically is in May of 1963, late May. I was awakened at dawn, a little before 5 a.m., by the windows in my apartment sort of flashing open with a big, huge blast. It sounded like a major explosion. It was a Turkish Air Force jet buzzing my part of town. There had been an aborted military coup. I got my wife and one child, then, out in the hall of the apartment building. I went to work and a Turkish military person stuck a machine gun through my car window as I got close to the Embassy and stopped me. I was able to very gingerly to get my diplomatic ID out and go to the Embassy and we were in the middle of an aborted takeover. The ambassador was cool as usual. The military academy, the Kara Harp Okulu, the Turks called it, had revolted. I remember that being the most dramatic political event of the time. Except that then there was a problem on Cyprus.
Q: I was going to say... Hare played a very important role on the Cyprus issue. The Turks were ready to invade.
GILMORE: Right. The more important diplomatic role that he played was even after I left, when the crisis flared again. But, basically, the Turkish...was it the 37th Army? I don’t remember the exact designation of the unit, but it was poised to go across that little piece of Mediterranean to Cyprus, if need be. There was a lot of tabloid type Turkish newspaper coverage of what were genuine atrocities against the Turkish community, particularly in Nicosia, and other parts of the island where they lived in divided cities. The Turks were ready to go. Subsequently, Ambassador Hare delivered the famous Lyndon Johnson letter, which basically said, “You can’t use any material that the United States has given as military material. Inonu used it to do what we thought he wanted to do anyhow, which was not go in. Of course, they went in subsequently. But the Cyprus crisis was...
Q: That wasn’t until 1974...
GILMORE: 1974, right. But I was no longer his aide when some of the heavier
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diplomacy had to be carried out. Hare knew exactly what was going on. He knew how much this would be a burden for U.S. Turkish relations, and how it would come back to haunt us again and again. But he knew what he had to do. He also was disappointed, but not surprised, that we didn’t have more leverage to use on the Greek side of this.
Q: Did you get any feel for the political influence of the Greeks, which, next to the Israeli lobby, is probably the strongest one in American politics in this era.
GILMORE: Right. Ambassador Hare knew quite a bit about it, because he’d been the deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, if I remember. He was careful. He was always a very circumspect fellow, particularly in any kind of public utterances. But he basically was aware of the pressures. He used to say that he wished it would be possible to deal with the Cyprus problem more on the level of statesmanship and less on the level of responding to interest groups’ pressures. And he knew exactly what he was saying there. But he considered it very much in the U.S. interests to avoid a Greek Turkish clash. And we did. That being said, I remember him thinking Archbishop Makarios, president of Cyprus at that time, was not always the most farsighted and wise leader. He was very careful with our public diplomacy, not to let us get into a position where the Greek American political advocacy groups could land on us.
Q: How did you find the atmosphere of...as sort of the junior officer and doing rotational work and all, what was your impression of how the embassy worked and your fellow officers?
GILMORE: There were some very gifted officers in the embassy. The deputy chief of mission, Robert Barnes, was very gifted. He subsequently became ambassador to Jordan. Bill Dale, the political military counselor was very hard working and experienced. The aid mission had a very interesting relationship...the economic counselor of the embassy was also the deputy aid mission director. That was an idea they had come up with to try to keep the aid mission and the embassy on the same wavelength. There was Wade Lathram. He was gifted. The administrative counselor was W. Harris Collins, a Southern fellow, rather laid back...very by the book, but also very, very competent. The public affairs officer, Les Squires, was one of the most experienced U.S. Information Service (USIS) officers. So we had a good team at the top level. Middle level was uneven. We had some stars like Robert Dillon, who subsequently became ambassador to Lebanon. And we had some funny middle appurtenances belonging to the embassy. One was the central affairs office, which Norman Ormandy – the Armour packing company heir –staffed. But by and large, there were some very competent people there. It was a good introduction to the service. I could see, and I can see better in retrospect now that I’ve had much more experience, that the relationship between the Agency presence and the State presence might not always have been smooth. Although, when I was the ambassador’s aide, the ambassador was very careful never to make any complaints to me about that, nor to use me as an aide in any aspect of that relationship.
Q: In consular work, did you get involved in consular problems, because...this was the
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beginning of the...kids getting involved with hashish and that sort of thing. Did that come up at all?
GILMORE: We were worried about that in great degree because the Turkish legal system and the Turkish officials who staffed it were very harsh with anybody found with drugs. The bigger consular problems I remember, the more difficult ones, were first, when I had not yet gone to the consular section, I was then the ambassador’s aide...an aircraft crashed on the city with some American passengers, including some dependents of Billy, the aid mission personnel. That was identifying those remains. I remember a fellow who subsequently became a career consular officer who was very good, Kenneth Keller, was the duty officer that night, and did a superb job getting us started. I remember one of the passengers might have been a dependent coming back for a holiday, and had some illegal currency on her body, which caused us a little bit of a consular problem when it was discovered, when her body was identified in the morgue. Otherwise, the bigger consular problems were related to mixed marriages, American citizens, American women who had married Turkish exchange students. They went to Turkey and sometimes wanted out because they weren’t culturally prepared to play the role vis à vis the husband’s mother, as was expected in the culture. And I remember also a couple of cases where GIs married Turkish women where there was some question about whether the Turkish women were from the right part of society in terms of...not in terms of money, but in terms of background, whether they might have done some prostitution, whether...
Q: Well, often this is a problem...
GILMORE: Those were the bigger problems. And also getting visas from the Saudi embassy for TDY (Temporary Duty) military personnel going to Saudi Arabia and having trouble with the Saudis wanting to cull out any name of any of the American military personnel who might sound Jewish, which was not something we liked. But that was another one of our jobs.
Q: How did we deal with that?
GILMORE: Well, basically, we wouldn’t tell anybody who was Jewish and who wasn’t. As far as we’re concerned, we’re all Americans. What the Saudis would do was strange things. If they saw a name that looked to them Jewish, they just wouldn’t give a visa. I remember one case, an African American guy, strapping athletic fellow, had a name that sounded Jewish to the Saudis and they wouldn’t let him in. He personally thought it was kind of funny. And he wasn’t that keen to go, but it illustrated the problem.
Q: Was there much contact, as a junior officer, with young professional Turks.
GILMORE: Not as much. My wife had some contacts with the Turkish American Society. In fact, in the last months we were there, I believe she worked on a part time project with some of the young Turkish women there. We had these contacts through my wife’s musical talent, and I was the pianist for the general music group as well, so we had
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some contact with Turkish musicians. Otherwise, not many. Part of it was, I hadn’t been given Turkish language training. Although I studied Turkish on lunch hour and became reasonably proficient in market and street Turkish, I didn’t know Turkish well enough to really carry on intellectual conversations and I really didn’t learn to read the papers. I could just read headlines. No, there wasn’t much.
As a junior officer, we had some diplomatic life and I remember having my first contacts with the Soviet Embassy there. These were very carefully supervised, and much worried about by the United States because they were worried about people trying to recruit young American diplomats...and properly so. That wasn’t a danger in my case, but it was good that there was a lot of concern. Our social life in Turkey was largely within the large American community and it was large and varied, including some military friends. This Lieutenant Hall and his wife, people like that. Occasionally I’d accompany the ambassador as his aide... my first eleven months was spent as his aide, longer than was normally the case with junior officers. When I would travel with him, I’d see more of Turkey and had more contact with Turkish society than at any other time. And that was particularly rewarding.
Q: Did you get any feel for the Islamic side of things. Or was that pretty subdued at this point?
GILMORE: It was pretty subdued. The ambassador’s hobby was Islamic architecture, and Seljuk roads, from the earlier wave of Turks. And one tour that I’d accompanied him, we flew to Istanbul and took a car and went all up into European Turkey, Eurasian Turkey. We stopped to see important bridges, mosques, particularly in Edirne, old Adrianople, where there were some wonderful mosques, and then in Babaeski and Lüleburgaz, a couple of the little cities on the way. But we didn’t really get in touch with religious officials on those trips. The ambassador would be received by the governor wherever we went. So I didn’t really have much contact at all with any religious type officials.
Q: Were you tempted to become a Turkish hand?
GILMORE: The ambassador was very kind to me and took an interest in junior officers, and of course as the former director general of the Foreign Service he had a particular interest. I told him I wanted to study, if I couldn’t go to Moscow and use my Russian, I wanted to study another Eastern European language. He said he would support that, but he said, “Would you like to study Arabic? There aren’t enough Arabists. It’s a very large Arab world. If you learn basic Arabic, you’ll have a large number of posts you could serve at.” I said, “No, I’d prefer to study an Eastern European language.” And he backed that, and I was assigned to Hungarian language training. In retrospect, I might have made a better decision, or just as good a decision, studying Arabic. I became quite interested in Turkey. But I’d had a graduate school course in Balkan History from Charles Jelavich, Balkan History in the 19th Century, which Jelavich taught really as a course that focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. And so I’d had a good look at Ottoman history which I was fascinated with. It is fascinating. Somehow, as appealing as
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that was, I thought it would be more interesting in the Balkans or in Eastern Europe. It was really East Central Europe, but behind the Iron Curtain. And the ambassador supported me.
Q: But, also at the time, Arabic was fine, Japanese was fine, but the real sex appeal was the Communist, the Balkan world, or Eastern Europe. I, at that point, was a Yugoslav hand.
GILMORE: Yes, you were before me. I remember you from that.
Q: We really felt we were in the middle of things.
GILMORE: And we were, in many ways. In spite what subsequently happened to Yugoslavia, and its loss of relevance to the United States once the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed, it was very important in those days. I was interested in Eastern Europe or I wouldn’t have picked Hungary because Hungarian was a hard language. But it turns out that it was very well taught at FSI, and I was young enough to learn languages pretty well then, so I got pretty fluent in Hungarian. Fluent enough to do consular work in Hungarian, which is no small achievement.
Q: You took Hungarian from when to when?
GILMORE: I took Hungarian from late August, the third week, whenever it started then, in 1964 until June of ’65, and then went out to Budapest in July.
Q: What were you... Sometimes, in language training, you learn a hell of a lot about the country. I must say, I took Serbian with two Serb guys, Jankovic and Popovic, and it served me very well for the rest of my career because how these people reacted, I couldn’t really believe it. The emotions and all. Were you getting this?
GILMORE: Yes, I had a wonderful teacher, an excellent language teacher. Lona Behyfie, who was the basic language teacher, and she and a linguist, Kostki, wrote the book. And later on, a second lady, Eva Essenu, who was a different kind of Hungarian, both born in Hungary, came aboard to help teach. Those two ladies, and Eva’s husband also met with us from time to time. He was a former Hungarian military officer. I learned a lot. In fact, between that and area studies, I had a pretty good feel for what I was going to get into in Hungary when I got there.
Q: Well, we’ll pick this up in 1965, I guess...
GILMORE: Yes, I got to Budapest in July of 1965.
***
Q: Harry, we are at 1965. Today is the 11th of February, 2003. What was the situation in
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Hungary in 1965, both internally, and with America?
GILMORE: The United States and Hungary still weren’t at a normal stage of diplomatic relations. Cardinal Mindszenty had sought asylum in the U.S. legation, I repeat legation, in the early days of November 1956 after the Soviet tanks had surrounded the city and were closing the ring. This had caused considerable problems between these two countries. The United States had done a lot to keep the Kadar regime as we knew it, it was Janos Kadar who had supported him and then all of a sudden turned on him and then formed a government where the Soviet forces then came back into Hungary. And we were trying to keep this government out of the UN, or out of its proper seat in the UN; that was fading. In fact, Mindszenty was still very much a factor in the U.S. legation. The Kadar regime, after a few initial years of fairly cautious internal policy, had relaxed internally. I was the visa officer and things changed. The Hungarians were letting the 1956 revolutionaries, unless they were wanted by the Hungarians for a specific crime which might have been trumped up, were letting them come back, visit, marry. I remember I had a number of immigrant visa cases of wives of Hungarian ‘56ers as we called them. The Hungarian government was starting to talk about the so called new economic mechanism, which actually went into force after I left. I left in the summer of 1967, after two years. So things were kind of slowly liberalizing internally. Hungary was very cautious on the foreign policy front, though. The Kadar regime was very careful to show its bona fides as a good ally of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, shortly before I left, sometime in I think early 1967, some months before I left, the United States and Hungary had agreed to move relations up to the level of embassy.
Q: Could you explain for somebody... legation is sort of not thrown around much any more...
GILMORE: It’s an older form of diplomatic exchange, and, basically, a legation would be headed by a minister. In fact, in Hungary, our mission was not headed by a minister. It was headed by a chargé d’affaires ad hoc, not ad interim, because that suggests that there is an ambassador to come, or a minister to come. A chargé d’affaires ad hoc. On the other hand, we sent pretty senior people for that position. Elim O’Shaughnessy was the chargé d’affaires ad hoc, until he died in Budapest during my time. And then, shortly after I left, Martin Hillenbrand became the first U.S. ambassador. We had three legations left in Eastern Europe, as I remember. Hungary, Bulgaria, and I believe the third was Romania. Hungary became the bigger problem because of Mindszenty, because of the Kadar regime and how it came to power and how it in effect collaborated with Soviet forces in crushing the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
In many ways the most interesting thing that happened during my tour of duty there was a major demonstration against the United States and Israel, particularly, in the June War, June of 1967. The Israelis were another legation in Hungary. The Hungarians and the Israelis had gotten into a pretty good pragmatic kind of relationship with a lot of interesting trade possibilities. The Israeli legation was staffed by the best group of Hungarian speakers of all the legations. All had been either born of Hungarian parents or
34 born in Hungary or in the ethnic Hungarian areas, in Slovakia or Romania. So they all spoke very well. They were very well connected and they were very close to us. But there was a huge demonstration and we got the brunt of it.
I, as the vice consul, got to play a special role. A whole number of demonstrators descended on the place and they wanted to present a petition to the legation then, now the embassy, located on Szabadsag Ter, or Freedom Square. They filled the square totally, and the general services officer, who was also the security officer, Joe Juliano. Hulano is the way we would have pronounced in Italian, but Joe Juliano and I went out to meet them. I was sent out because I spoke pretty good Hungarian. They gave us a petition demanding that Israel and the United States do X and Y to end the hostilities in the Middle East, and basically to restore the status quo before the war. We got back inside the legation, and we barely got the door closed. It was a huge sort of sculpted metal door with wrought iron sculpture, with a glass panel behind it. The minute we got back inside, whack! The embassy’s facade and the front door was hit with a fusillade of steel ball bearings and then came the poster paint and the colors and the ink. They did a Jackson Pollack painting on the front of the legation building. And we barely got inside. When we got upstairs with the petition, the legation staff was basically huddled back away from the front windows. The chargé d’affaires at that point was Richard Tims. O’Shaughnessy had died in September 1966, in office in Budapest. Tims asked me to go in and ask the Cardinal, again because I spoke reasonably decent Hungarian, if he was alright. He was sitting at his desk, which by the way was right next to the front windows, the wooden shutters were down, and there was a steady pelting of ball bearings and poster paint vials, and whatever, banging on his shutters. He said to me in his very formal Hungarian, which translates roughly as, “Lord Vice Consul, I’m enjoying this symphony of coexistence.”
Q: [laughter]
GILMORE: [laughter] I reported that and we all had a good laugh. But he didn’t leave his desk. The demonstration ended in a couple of hours...by a couple of hours it had petered out, had done some significant damage. But, in all fairness, the Hungarian police were trying to control it.
Q: It obviously had been set up originally...ball bearings, the paint...
GILMORE: Oh, it was well planned. Joe Juliano and I had just got the front door closed, and the front row of demonstrators knelt down to allow those with the huge slingshots, basically big slingshots that would send the first round of ball bearings, which then paved the way for the poster paints and the ink. But, in any case, in all fairness, our relationship with Hungary was becoming more correct and yet the presence of the cardinal was central. For example, the Hungarians would give no visas to U.S. Marine Guards from the time he was granted asylum. So, basically, all of us took turns sleeping in the building overnight. A rather nerve wracking experience because on occasion the Hungarians, who clearly knew the phone number, would do tag team phone calls asking us nasty questions like, “How many U.S. presidents were assassinated?” “How do you treat your Black
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citizens and your Native Americans?” So, it was not always a pleasant thing. That being said, it was a wonderful way to learn about Hungary, if you spoke some Hungarian. For that matter, Cardinal Mindszenty had learned a fair amount of English.
The Assistant Duty Officer had the job of walking him in the little courtyard, which we shared with the Hungarian National Bank. He, by the way, had a prison walk down pat from being in prison twice, once under the Nazis, and then longer under the Communists. But he spoke then, always when he walked, about Hungarian history, about the Communists, about his past. The assistant duty officer who got the Cardinal walk brought his dinner up on the elevator, made sure the legation was secured. At that point, the duty officer for the evening was upstairs answering the phone, making sure he sat outside the communications area, making sure that was secure. The Cardinal often asked him to do what he called work for him at night, helping translate something, if you knew Hungarian. He had a particular interest in Hungarian agriculture, which he followed avidly by reading a whole series of provincial Communist newspapers. He had a pretty sophisticated understanding of it. And, he would otherwise just want to talk. I remember he taught me some poems, very interesting poems in Hungarian. He would talk about his past, a little bit about his family, not a lot, very close to his mother. Never said a word about his father who was a folk German. Cardinal Mindszenty said he was born Pehm József, in Hungarian, the last name always comes first... József Pehm.
But in any case, it was a wonderful experience in another way. I had learned enough Hungarian...it was an excellent course at FSI in those days...I could do visa work pretty much in Hungarian and I got a look at the society, the likes of which political officers only hoped to in that day and age.
Q: Did you get any protection or welfare cases?
GILMORE: A few. We were beginning to have social security cases. We had blocks on security payments to Hungarians for a long time, but then we changed our policy. I believe it was during my time there. We were beginning to get some social security cases, although the chief of the section, Cliff Gross, kept an eye on those particularly. He was a very good boss, but above all, he was an interesting fellow. He was of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, spoke quite a bit of Hungarian when he arrived, studied assiduously while he was there. So he and Joe Ketchkamakin...Ketchkamafi in English...also an American citizen born of Hungarian parents...both spoke very, very good Hungarian, and two or three others of us spoke quite acceptable Hungarian.
So, we had out first social security cases. We had the beginnings of civil relations with the consular division of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry. It was the beginnings of it because it was very cautious for a while. The biggest problem for the consular section, in many ways, was the notification arrangements. The Hungarians required that we notify them 48 hours in advance, 72 hours in advance on the weekend, of any official travel. That was anybody coming TDY to the legation or being assigned to the legation, or any official Americans, even if they came for the Budapest fair or other activities that the
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Hungarians promoted. The consular section ran a kind of constant service with the foreign ministry. Of course, it was all reciprocal. I’m sure we required notification of them in the States. We might not have been as thorough about it. A lot of Hungary was closed to us as we had closed a lot of the United States to them. So it was a very guarded kind of relationship.
The Hungarians had uniformed officers and plain clothes officers outside the two entrances, the front entrance and the side entrance to the legation, 24 hours a day. A group of American tourists once came over, I remember, who were senior citizens. The Hungarian police jumped out of their cars and had a very good look at that group when they came back out of the legation, ostensibly because they wanted to make sure the Cardinal wasn’t being smuggled out. I remember one other time, we had been doing some equipment exchange and we had one very large crate that we had to take in the side door...It was too large for the front door. But it easily held a person. The Hungarians had quite a standoff with us. They wouldn’t let the crate come out the door until they asked us to walk the Cardinal in the courtyard. We refused to do it at their behest. But I guess they waited until the next day until they had seen him in the courtyard doing his usual walk, and let the crate out. It was a very, as I said, guarded time.
Q: Did you get any feel for the non official Hungarians. Were they able to contact you in any way? Did you get any feel for how they felt?
GILMORE: Hard. The best way to do it was to be in the consular section. You could talk to the visa applicants. It was also good, sometimes, to talk to the “56ers” as we called them, the Hungarian Americans, who had been Hungarians and come out and escaped actually at the end of the ’56 activities and revolution. They were allowed to go back and in that sense the Kadar regime had liberalized things. When they went to their home villages, or when they went to their home apartment areas in Budapest, we could get quite a bit of firsthand feedback from them. And of the course the consular applicants. We were careful, at least I was careful, not to appear to pump them, because that would have been a problem also. Our Hungarian Foreign Service National consular staff, which was excellent, was also under immense pressure to report, and we knew that. A couple of them would occasionally wink at us and give us an indication that they were particularly under pressure.
Q: I was in Belgrade during the time of the ’67 war. I can’t recall, but we had some demonstrations, but apparently they didn’t take very well, because the Serbs had particularly heard that one of the Israeli tank leaders was of Yugoslav descent, and they took great pride in this. [laughter]
GILMORE: [laughter]
Q: And it just didn’t...Yugoslavia of course was different, but did ...I was just wondering whether... The Hungarian regime was pretty hard line, I take it.
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GILMORE: It was on foreign policy, and it was cautious, but by 1965, and the two years I was there, ’65 to ’67, it was steadily relaxing internally. It was looking toward a very significant economic reform, which was very carefully prepared, apparently vetted with Soviets, vetted with Khrushchev and then with his successors. I think it actually kicked in in ’68 or ’69. I later learned when I served in Moscow that Hungary was still much more relaxed internally. There were some very good restaurants by communist standards, and some of the other diplomatic establishments, particularly the Latin Americans, some of the smaller European countries, had somewhat more leeway than we did. They were clearly watching us. We were under pretty heavy surveillance. If we walked downtown to get lunch, toward downtown, we were always followed on foot. Very discreetly. We knew from a number of our consular applicants, particularly the Hungarian Americans who had come back to visit, they were often stopped five, six blocks from the legation they were in, particularly their Hungarian relatives and hauled into a little booth and interrogated and sometimes given a really good scare.
Q: Budapest was kind of fun. I went there, to the Gellert Hotel...
GILMORE: Oh yes, and they had the wave pool there.
Q: Went to the wave pool, I got mixed up and I walked in to something...Hungarian...if you don’t have any feel for it... I walked into the women’s dressing room accidentally.
GILMORE: They’re not too uptight about that, though.
Q: No, no. But the wave machine and the pool were world famous.
GILMORE: It was, and the hotel had a good restaurant.
Q: Yes, yes... cherry soup.
GILMORE: [speaks Hungarian] they called it, “cold cherry soup.” They also had a cold apple soup. The cuisine at four or five of the Budapest restaurants, [names of restaurants] in the park, the zoo we used to call it, those were first class restaurants by simple European standards.
Q: Did you get any feel for how the populace viewed the ’56 revolt?
GILMORE: A little. The best view I got was from maybe from a babysitter. We had by then two small children, and we had a babysitter from obviously a licensed babysitting service. Her name was Mrs. Rizner, Riznernai. Occasionally, when I would drive her home after a late night babysitting, she would say guarded things, but which were very clear. She was horrified by the bloodshed and the force that the Soviet forces used to put down the ’56 revolution. She didn’t want that to happen again. She didn’t want any more Hungarians out on the street. I think her own family, her daughter and son in law, got out and were apparently in Paris. So she had a pretty sophisticated idea of what was going on
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in the West. By the way, by that time the Hungarians were giving visas to the retired, if your parents were retired, of people who had left in ’56, including people who had made their way to the United States. They were giving visas to the parents; it was a sign of some liberalization.
But in any case, it was clear to me that they wanted no more street battles. They saw that there were limitations. There was no way that they were going to be allowed to be sovereign, fully sovereign. The only other way you could sometimes hear about it was occasionally from a spouse of a Hungarian American who had come back, gotten married under the Hungarian law, applied for her to get a visa. It was always a man coming back to marry the woman who was there. Sometimes they would talk a little bit, at least one or two of them did. There were some very well educated young Hungarians making their way out. By the way, the Hungarians had an excellent educational system, still, despite the ravages of the war in ’56. And they would talk a little more, but everybody was careful. It was intimidating to come into the U.S. Legation because of the guards and the uniformed police. And the “goons,” as we called the plainclothes ones. The uniformed police at both entrances. You had to have a purpose. Occasionally we would all be reminded of it. I remember once a Seventh Day Adventist tried to walk in. Big, tall fellow, not old, but white ish hair, might have been in his fifties. The Hungarian guards grabbed him. He got inside and when he came back outside they were laying for him. They would beat the snot right out of him right in front of our building. Carried him away. We were under no illusions.
Q: How about some of the old regime types? Sort of the old families that went way back, were they apparent or were they gone?
GILMORE: There were a few, in the sciences. One, I think was called Sentago Ty. He was a well known Hungarian scientist, internationally. He was allowed to travel, by the way, by himself, not with his family, to conferences. We had one chap, one of our FSNs, Dr. Simpali. He was the head GSO (General Services Office) foreign service national; very cultured man. Very careful. I don’t know how he made his peace with the authorities outside. He was very careful, however, with us inside, not to buddy up or anything else, but always to be very precise. The regime had relaxed quite a bit by ’65, ’66, ’67, internally. It was possible, if you were not anti regime, if you bought Kadar’s slogan, “Who is not against us, is with us.” You could have a certain kind of family life and you were allowed to resume a certain kind of activity. Travel abroad, however, would be a problem if you were in any way perceived as not loyal to the regime.
I’ll give you an example of how fraternization went. My boss, Cliff Gross, and I left post at virtually the same time. We gave a joint kind of cocktail reception. The only person that came that I knew that Cliff had known was my doctor for my children, the pediatrician, Dr. Yanof Yoshtrianos. Cliff had a number of officials come from the consular section that he worked with. All very official. I don’t know, maybe one or two of his relatives, his cousins, came in. But it was that restricted.
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Q: How often places cultured like Hungary would give a little more leeway within the theater, or something like that...
GILMORE: Yes, that was true. In music for example, Budapest was pretty lively by then at the opera and the theater. Of course, very few of us knew enough Hungarian to go to the theater. My boss Cliff did, and he went a few times. There was more freedom there, yes. And there the heavier hand of ideology was not as apparent, and in fact, I would say, in their quiet way, the Hungarians had gone the long ways to relax internally in the arts. Again, nothing explicitly anti regime. But also, the other place you would see it was in a kind of, I guess it was a kind of dinner theater, which was a satirical theater...
Q: Cabaret...
GILMORE: Cabaret would be the right word for it. The Hungarians had a long tradition of that. I remember once going to that with another person who spoke Hungarian. The subject of the evening was “Kik ök: Who are ‘They’? Who are these ‘They’ people? ‘They’ want this, ‘They’ want us not to travel, ‘They’ want us not to go and be friends with the Austrians.” And it was a very clever thing, clearly poking at the Communist officials, particularly the more bureaucratic interior ministry types. That kind of stuff was going on. The other thing is...remember the famous phrase, “Goulash Communism”? That was coined basically in a roushovia, but it was particularly focused on Hungarians, of course, for whom goulash is a major dish, and Hungarians were eating pretty well. I remember one of my very close friends, who had been a ’56 Hungarian refugee, had gone to grad school with me, Charles Gati, quite a distinguished historian of Hungary, and a political scientist. I remember him saying that his father would tell him how much better life was by looking at what kind of cold cuts were available by ’65, ’66, ’67 years, that hadn’t been available earlier. So there were these signs, and if you played by the rules and were very careful, you could do better materially in Hungary than in a lot of the neighboring countries.
Q: Did you get any feel about how...all this effort put into training the next generation for being good Communists, and as soon as there is a whiff of freedom, it dissolved immediately. Did you get any feel for people saying, “Oh God, I have to go to another Communist lecture,” or something like that?
GILMORE: Yes, you could see that, and you could get that in other ways. I remember once on one of the very crowded trolley buses, I didn’t ride them often because they were so crowded... I got on a trolley bus and we packed in there like sardines. A woman was trying to make her way out and she said, “Please, why are you treating me this way? I’m a Communist.” And the whole trolley bus just broke out into a huge heehaw. They laughed, “Oh, she’s a Communist. Who is she? What does she think she is? Put her in the back.” [laughter]
Q: [laughter]
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GILMORE: Well, actually, they let her go out, let her make her way through. But they just razzed this poor lady unmercifully. But you could see that kind of thing. The Hungarian’s humor would come out in that kind of situation. Otherwise, it came out in other ways. Our consular FSNs, who were very much under pressure, but some of them had been with us a while and were allowed to stay. They would do kind of an eyebrow movement that would tell you that there was something very peculiar. I remember one of the senior FSNs who was a very able employee, maybe one of the most able I’ve ever worked with. Her name was Vivia, Olivia Gruss. Mrs. Gruss tipped me off one day when a Hungarian American, who was a doctor and made his way to medical school then, of Jewish origin, had been trapped there with his family when they came back after ’56. She tipped me off that it was amazing he’d gotten a tourist passport, and that there was a large file on him that we ought to have a look at, and that we ought to find some way to get him out. I would look quickly and check the record, and sure enough. And I did something, the like of which I lost sleep over...I gave him a tourist visa, letting Washington know as I remember that he was not going to be able to get a consular passport to immigrate, and this was the chance to get him where he could make up his mind. And he subsequently stayed permanently, adjusted status. But I remember this employee because it took real courage on her part to tip us off.
Q: Did you feel yourself under...were there provocations of people coming and claiming and asking for refuge or something like this, or just trying to find out how you’d respond?
GILMORE: Yes, we occasionally got a provocation. Or else we’d get something we didn’t know whether to judge as a provocation. I remember once a young man came in and claimed he was a pilot. He claimed he wanted to defect, and he asked for coordinates of airports in Austria and Germany. We looked at that, and we looked at that, and I happened to get him as a walk in, and we decided finally we didn’t give him any coordinates. I remember he flipped up on my desk a wallet with a lot of pictures in it, which were cockpits of various aircraft, some MIGs I guess. But we judged him to be a provocation. It may have been wrong. There were others who were more clear. But, we had a walk in routine as we often did in Communist countries, because the most interesting sorts of people would walk in and offer their services. Sometimes, we knew by then, some of our more important sources had made contact initially that way. But by and large, a couple of the provocations were pretty patent and phony and you could kind of smell it after a while.
Q: I know. It was actually before my time, because I was in Yugoslavia from ’62 to ’67 and things were pretty loose then. But prior to that, our local employees would say, well, they’d have these guys come in asking questions and saying they were trying to find out what we would do for them. And they all had on their blue shirts, which was the uniformed police shirt, and police shoes.
GILMORE: [laughter]
Q: [laughter] It’s one of those things, it would call attention to these guys.
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GILMORE: Right. Well, you know, anybody who got past our guards had to have an excuse. Of course, the clever walk ins always would have an excuse. But some got past too easily. But I must say the Hungarians didn’t do it all the time. But they did it regularly enough that we knew to keep on our toes.
Q: Were you able to get out in the country at all?
GILMORE: We did some travel. A chunk of Hungary was closed. Remember these days of closed areas, Soviet Union set the example and we closed a big chunk of the United States to them. This was pretty much the case with the Hungarians, too. We got out to Lake Balaton, the Hungarian Sea, as the Hungarians called it. And we got out to Vesprain once. And I guess we went down to Kecskemét, which is a city in one of the richer agricultural areas. But, by and large, we didn’t travel a lot. For example, I didn’t get to Hungary’s second city, which was Debrecen. I always wanted to. I believe it was an area we could travel to only with special notification, but I just didn’t get there. And the country was small enough that most of the consular business, virtually all of it, could be easily done from Budapest. We may have had some social security travel beginning during the end of my time...
Q: Because that was tremendous thing in Yugoslavia, I was doing it all the time.
GILMORE: Right. It was an amazing way to see the country.
Q: And they paid for it. Social security paid for it.
GILMORE: Right. And Yugoslavia was much more open. I didn’t get to Yugoslavia until ’81. But, my goodness...Yugoslavia by comparison with Hungary of ‘65 ’67 was a Western country.
Q: How about relations between Austria and Hungary. Had they...
GILMORE: They were very cleverly managed on both sides. The two Austrian vice consuls changed position, turned over while I was there, were two of my best contacts. One of them spoke very good Hungarian, was partly of Hungarian origin. They had a very pragmatic relationship on the trade front. And it was strictly reciprocity on the political front. Tit for tat. I remember once, the Hungarians decided all diplomatic cars had to be inspected. The Austrians I knew this from my wife’s consulate colleague slapped a diplomatic note on the Hungarians the next day after they learned of it. They said, “Alright, all Hungarian cars in Vienna have to be inspected.” Well, they negotiated something between them, so sure enough, the Austrians didn’t have to go through the onerous inspection to get their plates that the rest of us did. It was that kind of thing.
There was a fair amount of cultural back and forth between Austria and Hungary. And the Hungarian opera was good enough that you would occasionally get somebody from
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Vienna singing there, or an Austrian. The problem was money. Normally, the guest soloists were from Romania or Bulgaria, both of which have respectable operas.
Q: The Bulgarians have some great basso...
GILMORE: Yes, there is quite a good singing tradition in Bulgaria. But by and large, for the Austrians, money was a problem too. Although, travel was becoming more regularized, I remember we used to drive ourselves. All of us in the legation went out to Vienna to get supplies, and just get out from under the psychological pressure. I remember seeing at the border crossing point to Vienna by car, a Hungarian in front of us in a Wartburg, or some kind of East German, could have been a Skoda, could have been a Czech car, with a trunk being opened, and it was chock full of Hungarian peppers. I remember the Hungarian police going through pepper by pepper, seeing if anything was under them, and seeing if any of the peppers were doctored in any way. But once they got on the Austrian side, I remember they finally got through. It took us a while to get through because they had to phone back to the foreign ministry saying, “Oh, these Americans are crossing at such and such a time, etc.” But by the time we got over on the Austrian side, the Austrians just looked at the stuff and in disgust just said, “Go.” [laughter]
Subsequently, my wife Carol and I saw Hungarians selling peppers in a basket on street corners in Vienna. Obviously they get Austrian shillings and then turn around and buy something. But it was getting relaxed. The other thing is the Soviet military presence in Hungary was very carefully managed. Soviet soldiers, ordinary soldiers, were not allowed into Budapest in uniform, if at all. So you saw nothing in Budapest of the Soviet military presence, which was still quite large.
Q: How about the Soviet embassy? Were they calling the shots?
GILMORE: Well, I think, they had some pretty subtle chiefs of mission at the Soviet Embassy after the ‘56 ’57 events, and they had a pretty sophisticated arrangement, dialogue with the Hungarian government. I think also there were other channels, the party channels that were very important. Kadar would travel to Moscow, that sort of thing. So there was a fair amount of dialogue. I think maybe the more important dialogue was in party channels, and police channels. I’m sure there were security police channels, intelligence channels.
Q: How about Czechoslovakia, was there much love lost between the two would you say?
GILMORE: There was not a lot. The Hungarians, of course, hadn’t had the Slovaks under their sway in the Dual Monarchy. After the so called Ausgleich of 1867, it was divided into Austria and crown territories in Hungary. Slovakia was under the Hungarians, and the Slovaks had been pretty well under the Hungarians educationally and culturally, and there was still a pretty significant Hungarian minority in Slovakia in the upper territory. There were some tensions there, but no great love lost. Of their neighbors, the Hungarians
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had even less love for the Romanians and vice versa, where there is also a very significant Hungarian minority, one of the largest in Central Europe. The neighbor they were warmest about was Austria. They also had some warmer feelings for Yugoslavia, but that was a very tricky thing because in ’56, of course, Imre Nagy, who was subsequently executed after some trumped up charges in a secret trial, was accused of being a Titoist.
Q: Yes.
GILMORE: And, earlier, Laslo Reich, one of the Hungarian informers had been accused of being a Titoist. So, politically, that was delicate. Of course, there was a significant Hungarian minority in Yugoslavia, pretty compact. Hungary, after the Treaty of Trianon, had been shorn of a lot of its populations. The rump Hungary, as Cardinal Mindszenty used to call it, “Chunka Magarotza,” “rump Hungary,” or “truncated Hungary,” had been shorn, in his view, the Hungarian extreme nationalist view, of territories in the Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, Transylvania, Romania, the upper region, the Felgidaka of Slovakia. And even if you were in the Borginla, across Austria near the Platenzayn. But of all the neighbors, it was the Austrians I think they regarded the most kindly. There was the memory of how well the Austrians had treated the Hungarian ‘56ers when they were pushed out, when the ’56 revolution was crushed.
Q: Was there a feeling that the church had a role any more there?
GILMORE: Well, it was hard to see. You know, the Hungarians, unlike some of the other Central European countries, were not 90 some percent Catholic. There was a very significant Protestant minority, Calvinists, that was about 20 21 percent; there was a small Unitarian minority, much smaller, a couple percent. Then probably two thirds of the population was nominally Catholic. The Catholic Church was in disarray because the Hungarians would not allow the bench of bishops to be replenished while Mindszenty was in the legation. So clergy were dying off. Where you could see the church, for example, was if you went to mass on Sunday, one of the bigger churches, particularly the Matthias church…[end of tape]
We were there for the Tenth Anniversary of the ’56 Revolution, and there was the Mozart Requiem Mass, sung in the inner city church, one of the bigger churches down on the Danube. The place was packed. It was emotional. A couple of our people went, and there was standing room only in the crush. You could see that the church, at least culturally, played a very important role. The Matthias church, which is up on the Buda side, on the castle hill, was the coronation church. The Austro Hungarian emperor had to get the Hungarian crown by coming to that church. That church was always full, very well taken care of. But the clergy were very cautious about being in touch with us. It was not a cool thing for them to be in touch with American diplomats. They would have been called in and questioned, and discouraged from being in touch.
Q: What was the feeling in the embassy that you were getting about Mindszenty? Was this a plus, a minus, or...
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GILMORE: Opinions were sharply divided. There were a number of Hungarian intellectuals, including in the United States and the West, who thought that Mindszenty was out of touch. They thought that he was a representative of the older Hungary, the Hungary of the Dual Monarchy, the Hungary of emperors and kings, and some of them also thought that he had no understanding of urban problems. He was basically a country boy. Others thought he was a very important symbol. But the Hungarians were obviously very concerned that he not get outside the Legation. I’m sure, watching him in the courtyard every night, because they were very concerned about what he was up to, what he was doing. In fact, he had no real contact with the Hungarian population. He had two kinds of contact: his confessor was allowed to come every so many months, to the Legation and to confess him. That was all set up with the foreign ministry. And his mother, while she was alive, that was long after I was around, and I guess his sister, by that time it was his younger sister, was allowed to come, once or twice, I don’t remember if she was allowed to come... She came, very much a peasant woman, in her peasant costumes, with a little basket under her arm, like Little Red Riding Hood going to her grandmother. She came and brought him something to eat, and they spent two hours together. That was the extent of his connection with the outside world.
Q: What was the analysis or thinking within the embassy why the Hungarian regime just said “Go”...
GILMORE: Well, they got him out on very favorable terms. He was very reluctant to leave if truth be known, when he was finally asked to leave by the Holy Father in ’71. He was asked to make the supreme sacrifice of his life and leave. Because he said, “I’m not leaving until I get a pardon for the show trial.” Because the charges were all trumped up; it was the show trial in ’49. He was tortured; in fact his heart was permanently damaged by the torture they put him through. And among other things, he was charged with being an agent of the United States. He was charged with womanizing. He was stunned by that womanizing charge. And also didn’t like anybody to think he was an agent of the United States. In his view, he just had some of his faithful in the United States, the Hungarian community there. He had visited them I guess, after becoming cardinal, and before the Communist takeover in Hungary in ’48.
But, basically, the population didn’t say much about him, and the Hungarian FSN staff was very careful not to mention him at all. We subsequently learned though, from our own files, that the head interpreter we had, a very capable fellow and a writer, an English doctor, Dr. Barnabalo, had been used as the interpreter in part of the show trial. It was eerie to know that he was still around, although he was very capable and very cautious. He at that point was the head military translator, I believe. I take it back, maybe it could be that he was our head civilian translator at the embassy. But it was very clear to me, whatever the intellectuals said, that the regime was very worried about Mindszenty and were very concerned that he not in any way have any connections with any Hungarian movement or any group of people in Hungary proper.
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Q: Well, it’s interesting, because he was a great symbol for the Hungarians in the United States, for example, particularly the Hungarian Catholics, who used him for a fare thee well.
GILMORE: Oh, yes, and his name was wonderful. He came from a village called Csheimindszent. Mindszent in Hungarian means “all saints.” He was born József Pehm. He didn’t want that German name, particularly after World War II, and the Nazis. So he became József Mindszenty, and just the name, József Cardinal Mindszenty, just the name conjured up a Hungarian association with the church, and with the saints. He did something very unusual we learned about while I was there. His TB, which he had originally come down with during his imprisonment by the Nazis, 1944 45, flared up. It flared up pretty badly. So we had to get an X ray unit in and get him some special medical attention. And a nurse came to take care of him, an American nurse, from, I think, Belgrade. Her name was Ann Laskaris.
Q: Yes, I know Ann very well.
GILMORE: She came up to take care of him.
Q: And Dr. Linski.
GILMORE: Yes, Dr. Linski. They came up to take care of him. The interesting thing was that Ann Laskaris noticed that he wasn’t sleeping in his bed. She also noticed that he was sleeping on a leather sofa. You could see the imprint of his head and his body, and we found out why… as long as Hungary was in the situation it was in, he wasn’t going to sleep in a bed. He was going to personally do a kind of sacrifice of his body while this was the case. I mean this fellow in his way was a deep nationalist. Also above his sofa, in his office...by the way, it was the Benjamin Franklin Room, the ambassador’s office now, the biggest office in the place. In any case, above his bed was a map which had Norjamojor, Greater Hungary, with present day Hungary superimposed on it to show him every day what territories had been lopped off from historical Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon. So he was a pretty super nationalist.
Q: How was the embassy? How did you find the core of the embassy?
GILMORE: We were a pretty capable lot. Most everybody who had any political, economic, or consular work was given language training. That motivates one. Also, while the legation wasn’t known originally for its importance as a career stepping stone, by and large, the people on the staff were capable and motivated, and several of them were particularly gifted. The thing I would underline is the success of the language training. Hungarian is not a simple language. Very different. It was very learnable, but it’s quite highly inflected, and very different. It’s not an Indo European language. It was very well taught at FSI. Anybody who had some language capability and some ability to work, came away from there with enough Hungarian to do business. So, in that sense, it was a competently run place. Martin Hillenbrand, of course, the first ambassador, was a star.
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Elim O’Shaughnessy, the last chargé d’affaires ad hoc, was in his own way one of the senior observers of the communist world. He had been, I think, deputy chief of mission in Belgrade, and he always thought, and I think rightly so, that had we made it an embassy before he died, that he’d have been named ambassador. But we just couldn’t get to that point.
Q: You left there in ’67...
GILMORE: Yes, the summer of ’67, after about exactly two years.
Q: Where did you go?
GILMORE: I was assigned to the Soviet and Eastern European Exchanges Staff. I don’t know if you knew about that. It was an unusual arrangement. It was a special staff set up in the department, at that time headed by Boris Klosson, and with Deputy Arthur Wertzle who subsequently succeeded Boris. It was designed basically to handle all exchanges with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe. I inherited the Hungarian and Czech accounts there. It turned out to be a fascinating time, because I was there two years and the Prague Spring occurred while I was there. One of the places we could see the Prague Spring’s effects most directly was the number of Czech scientists and scholars who were all of a sudden able to get visas. People we hadn’t seen in the West. We used to say the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences was emptied out by the time of the actual crackdown on the Prague Spring in ’68. I guess it was August of ’68. We had tens of important Czech and Slovak academicians, scientists and scholars, in the United States, and I knew who all of them were and saw some of them. It was an interesting place to be. Also I was close to the Czech desk officer, who most of that time was Helene Batcher. I read all the cables on the Prague Spring, as we watched the developments take place, and then we watched the Soviets crack down on it. I learned subsequently that it wasn’t a very good career move. It was interesting for me, and, of course, my object had been to become an expert on the Warsaw Pact world, Russia and the Warsaw Pact. It gave me another job focused on that part of the world and I think it was by and large very good. Also, I became quite close to a couple of people in the Czech Embassy, the Czechoslovak Embassy. One of them sat in my office, a very senior fellow, after the Soviets had sent the troops in, together with the East Germans and the other units, Hungarians and Poles, and decided whether he was going to stay in the United States or not. He decided to remain a Czechoslovak, and he subsequently became a minister, as I remember, which shows that, by four or five years after the fact, the regime had relaxed somewhat. Of course nobody may have known that he was so close to staying. But, otherwise, there was not much else to say about that assignment except that it was what got me to the Soviet Union. The director of the office, Boris Klosson, suggested that I might want to go on to the Soviet Union, and suggested that I go on a reimbursable detail to USIA. So I did.
Q: So, this would be in...
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GILMORE: ’69.
Q: ’69. So, you went to Moscow for two years, assigned to the press and cultural section, which was very unusual for an FSO in those days.
GILMORE: Yes. And did not help my career, technically, initially.
Q: I would have thought it would have been really career enhancing.
GILMORE: In the long run, I think it was. I thought it was very useful. I was the assistant cultural exchanges officer in Moscow, and the first official reaction I got to my first fitness report was a letter which said, “You’ve been ranked in the lower 15 percent of your class, what has happened? You have always been ranked very near the top.” Nothing had happened. I was doing a good job, working in Russian, by the way. If you were the exchanges officer, by God you were working with Russian, and with ministries, the academy of sciences on the phone, but they couldn’t read a USIA efficiency report, I would have to say.
Q: Well, was the problem coming from the State Department side?
GILMORE: Yes.
Q: That it just didn’t...
GILMORE: They didn’t seem to understand. And I made a mistake on the report. I indicated, when you had to write your own little paragraph on the report, I said that in many ways the work I was doing, if this were an embassy in Western Europe, would have been done by FSNs. Couldn’t do that, you couldn’t have them in...
Q: Yes.
GILMORE: So what I was trying to suggest was that I had now to operate in Russian in a way that was really...
Q: It sounded like you were...
GILMORE: But I think it could have been read both ways. But I think the big problem was that the State promotion board literally could not understand the USIA terminology. I don’t think they knew what a “USINFO” was, which was a USIA channel telegraphic message, and I think they probably didn’t know what an exchanges officer was. But, subsequently, the work I did was taken over by two people. A science attaché and an exchanges officer. So what I’m saying is I did a lot of work. It was very useful.
By the way, I got to travel some, did a degree of travel. I had real contacts with the Soviets. The only people who had real contacts, other than a few people at the top of the
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mission on the political side, were the consular people and the cultural and press people. Particularly the cultural people; the press less. But to run an exchange program, I was at the ministry of higher education, with the ministry of education all the time. And I actually got to know real Soviet bureaucrats on a very regular basis. So, I thought it was great.
Q: So, having been in Hungary, how did you find getting into the heart of the Soviet empire?
GILMORE: It was quite interesting. In many ways, the Embassy in Moscow, as a whole, was under a very similar kind of surveillance from the police and the security services, so there was a comparability there. The Soviet citizens were much more cautious even than the Hungarians in being in touch with us. Except the ones that you knew obviously were licensed, that were instructed to buddy up with you, or actually in the provocation game; contacts with the population were even harder. The only exception to that was travel, and there I was lucky because I traveled. The whole press and cultural section traveled more than anyone else, because we accompanied American exchange visitors. Performing artists. I accompanied several performing arts groups. Went all over the Caucasus; went all over the Ukraine; went to St. Petersburg a couple of times. Had students one year in Rostov on Don, of all places, and we went down to see those. So, I had a first hand exposure to the Soviet Union that was as extensive as almost anybody’s during my two year tour there. So, in that sense, I even did more travel than I did in Hungary, but that was because of my work.
Q: The exchange program, in many ways, it was really a major instrument for getting the message across and getting contact.
GILMORE: I agree completely. And it was very skillfully run by Boris Klosson, who by the way then went on to Moscow to be DCM, and in many ways ran the place, not only as a DCM, but as an intellectual force.
Q: His name comes up a lot. Could you talk a bit about his background and how you saw him operate?
GILMORE: Well, I saw him in two places: as the director of Soviet Eastern European exchanges staff, and as the DCM in Moscow. He spoke very, I would say, fluent Russian, very serviceable Russian. He engaged with the Soviets; he could be alternately tough and he could be flexible and likeable, he had good contacts with them. He was a good manager. He knew the Soviets very well; you couldn’t fool him on anything that was happening. He had a good sense of humor. And he inspired loyalty from the staff. He was one of these people in that age who knew what “loyalty down” meant. When he got up to the top he cared about his people, he knew what they were doing. For example, if you were the head of the consular section during his time, you’d get a damned good efficiency report because he knew what you were doing and he knew how important it was and how tough it was. That was the kind of person he was. He subsequently got the rank of
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ambassador as an arms control negotiator. But those of us who knew him all thought he should have been ambassador at least once on his own in a country, and maybe eventually sent back to Moscow. He is one of the cases, I think, where the service didn’t do itself a big favor by not getting him into the ambassadorial ranks.
Q: Boris Klosson, what happened to him afterwards?
GILMORE: He went to do work on the SALT Delegation, and he got the rank of ambassador. That’s the last I saw of him. He may have done work as a senior inspector after that, but he had an important role in the SALT talks.
Q: Is he alive, still?
GILMORE: I believe he is dead. His son is a very distinguished Foreign Service Officer, and I believe he is now the Cyprus coordinator, Michael.
Q: By being at the embassy at the time, did you feel that you were on the “A Team”?
GILMORE: Yes, I think, had I been there in a State position, as Foreign Service Officer, I would have felt more like it. A number of my State colleagues at the embassy would come up to me and say, “Are you a foreign service officer?” I said, “Yes.” “Why are you with USIA?” “Well, I’m on reimbursable detail. I’ve done exchanges work.” And they would say, “Oh, you made a mistake. You should be working in one of the State positions.” And they would say things about USIA, some of them, that showed they didn’t know what we were doing, and they thought we had no real work to do. Which, of course, if anybody had been around exchanges or tried to run an exhibit in the Soviet Union, or run a scientific exchange, they would have known it was immensely hard work.
Q: Yes, it was so important.
GILMORE: It was crucial. If we wanted to retaliate, for example, if we wanted to lop something off because we were angry with the Soviets politically, you could stop an important high level exchange or hold it up and send a signal. It was used frequently as a kind of a political tool, the exchanges program. But only some of my colleagues realized that. By the way, my boss in Moscow, McKinney Russell, was a very distinguished USIA officer. Went to the very top of USIA.
Q: Yes, I have interviewed McKinney.
GILMORE: And a superb speaker of Russian, and student of the Soviet Union and Russia.
Q: But it really does show this cultural divide between the State Department and USIA. And I’ve come from the State Department stable, but I must say that so often the work of USIA, it got you out and meeting people if it’s the cultural side and the press, and also
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management...
GILMORE: Right. You ran a budget, a real budget, and when I got to Belgrade as DCM, that USIA experience turned out to be very valuable because we had that huge USIA presence with the American centers. You are right, and it gave me an exposure to foreign officials, for example. From then on, if I had any contact with Soviet diplomats, now Russian diplomats, I had a knowledge of their country, and more depth than most other Americans, from actually running the exchanges program, traveling around, meeting with university officials.
Q: Tell me about some of these trips that you made and groups that you shepherded around.
GILMORE: Well, for example, I went with the University of Illinois Jazz Band, which was one of the exchange programs. We took turns as escort officer. I went with them for half of their tour of the Soviet Union. They were very good jazzmen. They were grad students, and many of them were guys who had already been Army vets and were back in school. Cecil Bridgewater, for example, the trumpet player, and his wife, Dee Dee Bridgewater, are known jazz singers and musicians now. You got to see people when you went out in the boondocks, even though the Soviet security officials, including the interpreters that were sent with us, tried to keep our groups kind of isolated. They couldn’t. That kind of group was too much of a magnet. So you got a chance to see another part of Soviet society. Also, you got a chance to work with the Soviet State Concert Agency, the Gos Concert interpreters. They were all carefully chosen. You were with them three weeks in a row, every day, all day, at meals, and you got to see how the Soviet Union worked and maybe got a chance to talk to them in a little more depth.
But also, during the Nixon Brezhnev summit, I had already left the embassy in Moscow, was at the Naval Academy, my next assignment. But the reason I mention it is because I was asked to go back and escort a chamber music group, which was composed of a string quartet from New York, the New York Woodwind Quintet and a bass player. Top flight American chamber players. We played six cities during the Nixon Brezhnev summit, the three Caucasus cities, and Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. We were taken very good care of, particularly during the summit, because there was an effort to kind of promote a sense of warmth in U.S. Soviet relations, and we were lavished with attention. When we got to Moscow, for example, they relaxed it a little bit, and we suddenly were in touch with a whole series of people from the Bolshoi Orchestra meeting with our clarinetist and our oboist. Same thing in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad. So we got a chance to see more deeply into the Soviet cultural life. Also, I got to go to the three capitals of the Caucasus. I subsequently became ambassador to Armenia, and that was the one time I had been to Soviet Armenia. But this was a very interesting set of opportunities.
When I was the exchanges officer, working for USIA in Moscow, I went to Rostov on Don. We had to travel in pairs. We had three graduate students down there a couple, and then a single student. We’d never had students in Rostov before. It was a rough, tough
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Sea of Azov/Black Sea port... one of the worst crime scenes we now know. We didn’t know then, because it was covered up in the former Soviet Union, and a grim place to be. But I saw a part of the Soviet Union there, and I saw it through the eyes of the students who were actually trying to survive down there, that gave me a set of insights. My buddy who traveled with me, now dead – Robert Peck, Bob Peck – we wrote up some very good reports on that.
Q: What were the students doing there?
GILMORE: They were studying. They would be sent out to a faculty. One would be, say, maybe getting his Ph.D. in Russian Language and Literature, another would be getting his Ph.D. in History. They would be assigned to different faculties. Typically, the only places where we were assigning students were Moscow and Leningrad State Universities; they expanded that to include Rostov, but it didn’t last very long. Voronez we used that year. What I’m saying is, the insights you got were very, very special, and in a closed society like the Soviet Union, such insights were rare.
Q: But, did you, over a couple glasses of vodka, get into heart to heart talks at all?
GILMORE: I was careful, partly because of the provocations. But when you were an escort for a performing arts group, you could have a little more of that. In the first place, you were out together for two, three weeks. Usually, the head escort on the Soviet side was a fellow in his 50s, who been around, been through World War II. You did drink with some of those. I remember a fellow by the name of Druzdov, and got to know him pretty well. He was guarded and we didn’t get into party politics; we could talk about World War II. He would say positive things about Lend Lease; he would say humorous things too. The Soviets, for example, called Spam “The Second Front”, because they said “The Americans won’t open another front, they’ll just send food.” But you could have more contact and more in depth contact with Soviet officials in this way, than in the Moscow scene, where the police blanket was all over you.
Q: Did you get any feel at this time, where we were looking for particular divisions within Soviet society? There was this feeling that Soviets were all of the same thing, and later, as you found out in Armenia, but other places that really these republics were just not part of, I mean they weren’t going to be part of the Soviet empire...
GILMORE: Well, only hints. One place I got it, of all places, was in Armenia, when I was escorting the chamber music group. We got to Armenia, and as you performed in the Soviet Union for the state concert agency, you had to have your performance programs pre approved. They didn’t want any music that they didn’t know you were going to play. So we got down there, and we had three pre approved programs, and the escort from the state concert agency in Moscow said, “This is what we are going to do.” But the guy from the Armenian concert agency, said, “Wait, you are in Soviet Armenia, and we will decide, in our concert, what you guys are going to play.” So he basically just faced down the Soviet central concert agency’s tour guide.
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Another thing happened that was interesting in Georgian Armenia. They were clearly more relaxed culturally. We had a party in Georgia with new Georgian wine in that year, in kind of a buffet, and the Georgian officials were a little more relaxed and humorous. The real interesting thing was that the cathedral in Armenia, Etchmiadzin, which is the seat of the Catholicos, the universal bishop, the head of the Armenian church... we went there briefly on a Sunday morning. It was very apparent that the singing was of a very high quality. We asked why, and they said, “Well, some people from the Yerevan Opera sing at the church.” Well, that would not have happened in Moscow or in St. Petersburg. If you were an important opera star, the last place you could be singing was in a church because it would be considered beyond the pale...considered kind of an anti regime gesture. So, we saw little things like that. We could see that cultural nationalism was one way that the Armenian and Georgian republics could show their special Armenian ness or Georgian ness.
Q: Did you get any, I think of Armenian composers and all that...were you able to delve into that at all?
GILMORE: Well, several people in the group were fans of Khachaturian, and we did go to his museum, Tas Museum. But when we got into the hotels, whether they were in Baku, Tbilisi, or Yerevan, we were still under control. Once the American musicians were in the hotel for the night, if they left it would be noted. The only exception to that was with the University of Illinois Jazz Band in Leningrad. Turns out there was quite an underground jazz scene in Leningrad, and they just took our trumpet section, a couple of guys, and took them home. I didn’t know where they were for a while. In fact, one of them came back with venereal disease, which was an interesting thing. He mentioned it to me, and on our way out I had the doctor at the embassy look at him, and sure enough, it was a venereal disease. But, basically, there were just hints like that, that there was another kind of cultural and social life going on that we weren’t a part of, we at the embassy.
Q: Did you get a chance to play the piano with these groups?
GILMORE: Not really, although it helped me with the music groups that I knew music. But what I did do in Moscow, with my wife as a good singer singing in the British Embassy, actually the British ambassador’s choir I occasionally accompanied the choir. Although, there was a British music student at the Moscow Conservatory, a pianist, who was better than I, and he did more than I did. But it opened doors for me with the musicians. For example, I remember David Glazer, who was a clarinetist with the New York Woodwind Quintet. He and I hit it off because we could talk music, and when he did make contact with some important clarinet players in the Moscow Bolshoi Orchestra, he brought me right in as the interpreter. So, it was that kind of enhancement. And also, with the composers, the string quartet, Matthew Raimondi, the head violinist, and the number two violinist, Anna Hetagenia, and I became very good friends and we talked music. When we saw Mrs. (Lina) Prokofiev [Editor’s Note: wife of Russian composer
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Sergei Prokofiev] came to their concert in Moscow, they brought me right in, and I interpreted for that. So there was an advantage to being a musician. [Editor’s Note: For a general description of U.S. cultural programs see: Wilson P. Dizard, Jr., Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), especially Chapter Nine and pages 192 195.]
Q: Who was the ambassador when you were there?
GILMORE: Jacob Beam. Boris Klosson was the DCM.
Q: Now did Beam, was he culturally interested in these things, or was he mainly political?
GILMORE: He was a career Foreign Service person, very shy man personally, very disciplined, long experience in German and Communist world affairs; young officer in German affairs, and then in Communist world affairs. He had a dynamite wife, Peggy Beam. She kept Spaso House, the residence, lively with films with subtitles, or films dubbed into Russian with English subtitles. She kept him in touch with the cultural scene, and he encouraged this because he knew what kind of an asset she was. Otherwise, he was very, very kind, and very courtly, but not a particularly gregarious or outgoing person. But you always knew that he had very long experience, and knew where he was. He was also a bit unhappy because Kissinger, the National Security Advisor at that time, was making some contacts with the Soviets that weren’t always known...
Q: Well, he would appear without letting the ambassador know.
GILMORE: Right, and it was hard for Beam because he was used to being in every loop, and he was a very disciplined and loyal person; it wouldn’t have been a problem to bring him in. But I remember before the Nixon Brezhnev summit, when Nixon came to Moscow, Ambassador Beam did not feel like he was fully kept abreast of developments and preparations.
Q: Well, this is sort of a nasty side of this. One almost has the feeling that Kissinger, particularly in this early time, was playing the role of Iago to Nixon’s Othello.
GILMORE: Yes, when Kissinger became Secretary, I think it changed a bit. Now I follow him as a columnist, and he’s a tremendous national asset in terms of his understanding of foreign affairs. But you are right, he was operating very much close to the vest, and he was literally cutting the senior State Department people and the top State Department leadership out at that point. I guess Secretary Rogers was not in the loop on a number of things.
Q: No. You left there when?
GILMORE: I left there in the July of ’71.
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Q: Well first, before we get to that, what was your impression of and did you get involved in the Nixon Brezhnev summit?
GILMORE: I was only there with the performing arts group; I was the escort. So I was not involved. Subsequently, when Brezhnev came to the States, I was one of the captive audience, on the eighth floor of the State Department when they had a signing ceremony...but, no, I wasn’t involved.
Q: Well then, in ’71, where did you go?
GILMORE: I was assigned back to INR (Bureau of Intelligence and Research) to be an analyst on the Eastern European side; but before I could get unpacked, I was assigned to the U.S. Naval Academy as one of the exchange officers. I had literally a month’s notice to get up there and start teaching courses. I spent two academic years, twenty months, as an exchange officer, and a fascinating assignment in its own way.
Q: Oh, so this would be ’71 to ’73...
GILMORE: Yes, until late May, early June of ’73.
Q: What was your impression of the Naval Academy and its educational system?
GILMORE: I had not known much about it. I thought it was pretty strong. It had one aspect that was different from the education system at West Point: the faculty was civilian and military, and I was assigned to the political science department. It was mostly civilian and good quality, some very good scholars. The midshipmen were by and large quite bright, they kept on stepping with a heavy combination of academic and military related, naval related courses. But good.
Q: Had things changed? Were people still all getting out with a degree in electrical engineering?
GILMORE: Well, they were all getting the equivalent of an engineering degree at that time, but they were also allowed to have a double major, if they had good enough academic grades. So, a number of them would get a second major. For example, you’d get somebody in engineering and political science, engineering and English. That was desirable, if you could be a good engineer too. You had to be able to drive a ship, or supervise people that did, otherwise you were lost in the surface fleet, or you had to be a pilot if you were going to be in Naval aviation. But, those who were strong enough to get a double major had a tremendous advantage later in their career because they could do joint things. They could be on the Joint Staff. They were also, if they did well in their initial military assignments, billets, as the Navy would call them, they would then be high on the list to go to the war colleges. So there was a faster track, which included Political Science, English, History, for the very bright.
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Q: What sort of things were you teaching?
GILMORE: I taught a course that I particularly designed myself, called “Communism: Theory and Practice.” I taught a course in Soviet Politics, and the course I taught least well was a course in American Government, which I wasn’t prepared for and which they just threw me into the breach for one semester. It was a good time for me because I learned to teach. I hadn’t really ever taught before. It’s not easy. The other thing good about it was that I had to explain to bright, young midshipmen who had very little background, what the Soviet system was like and how it operated. Communism: Theory and Practice was a comparative course. I particularly compared the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia a bit. I didn’t get into China much, the time was limited. But I spent a lot of time on Lenin’s theory of imperialism, and how Communism might be attractive as an ideology in the Third World, which it was, and how Lenin’s theory of imperialism explained a lot of things to people in the Third World. It was exciting. At one point I missed a month, because, as I said, they asked me to be the escort officer for these performing arts groups, these chamber music groups, during the Nixon Brezhnev summit. But otherwise, I was up there solidly for twenty months, during the summer, to work on my next year’s courses, and to take two courses myself. So, I went to George Washington University and took several courses, which was a nice way to recharge my batteries. Of course, I focused on the Communist World, and it just enhanced my knowledge...
Q: Did you find, in teaching the midshipmen, that they had come from a rather simplistic view of the Soviet Union and all, and you were sort of opening up the window...?
GILMORE: Some did, and some were very interested. In fact, one fellow got so interested in Lenin’s theory of imperialism that I was worried that he was going to believe parts of it. He was very bright. But some of the midshipmen are so carefully chosen, they are so bright. They not only have a good background in math and science, physics and engineering, but they are just plain smart. So it was a mixed picture. You know, I had to pitch the class to the midshipmen who were more oriented toward engineering, but I found very quickly that four or five students in each section, each section would be 18, 19, maybe 20 midshipmen, I found some were as bright as you’ll find anywhere. Some of them were as bright as anybody going to Harvard or Yale.
Q: Did you, teaching that course, feel under any pressure of oversight, or anything?
GILMORE: No. It was amazing. I did not. And we also wrote a book on Civil Military Relations, I think that was the title of it, and I got to write the chapter on the civil military relations in the Soviet Union. The book was published and became a textbook for specialized courses. So, it was a good assignment, and it gave me a different kind of experience. The hardest thing was that I had to travel from Arlington. I had moved into my house and there was no housing for me at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, because my assignment came up so late. So I had to drive up there four days a week.
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Q: Oh, boy. That’s a...
GILMORE: Yes, I used to go very early in the morning. But I learned quickly to tape my notes for my classes. I’d read them into the tape recorder the night before, put the tape recorder on the front seat of the car beside me, and listen to my notes on the way up. On the way home, I always listened to classical music, WGLS, once I got close enough to Washington to receive it. It was a very interesting year. My third child was born during that year, and I was able to be home with him a little more because I was at the Naval Academy only four days a week. I was able to help my wife and enjoy the arrival of a new baby more than I would have, had I been at Main State ten or eleven hours a day.
Q: One of the sayings that the navy puts out is, “There’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Navy way.” How did you find the naval atmosphere there?
GILMORE: Well there is a traditional side to it, which is kind of heavy handed. But, you know, the midshipmen adjusted to that and to the civilian faculty and the courses that were taught by civilians. By the way, History, English, Political Science were all considered “bull” courses, navy lingo for bullshit. Because you bullshit your way through a test or exam. But basically, the midshipmen I thought adjusted very well to both. But I’m confident that the civilian faculty there was very important to the development of these naval officers because insularity was the big problem of the navy. That’s changed. By the way, when I subsequently became dean of the Senior Seminar here, the star of my course in many ways was a naval officer, and his political science background was not enormous, but was rather full. He was the best guy in my class.
Q: Admiral Crowe was an outstanding example of that. [Editor’s Note: Admiral William James Crowe, Jr. (January 2, 1925 – October 18, 2007) was a United States Navy Admiral who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and as the ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Bill Clinton.]
GILMORE: Exactly. This chap, I haven’t followed him in the last couple of years, but if he’s not a rear admiral by now, I’m surprised.
Q: You were there when the end game of the Vietnam War was beginning to play out. Did Vietnam and Vietnamese Communism play much of a role?
GILMORE: We talked about it a bit in the Communism Theory and Practice course, but not as much as we might have. Part of it was because I wasn’t as knowledgeable about it and partly it was, I think, because the midshipmen were getting a dose of Vietnam anyhow from the military side, because that was the enemy then. The interesting thing was the degree to which it did come up. The midshipmen in my Communism Theory and Practice course had had a more independent view than you might think. Of course, they were with me now, and I was a civilian, and we were in the classroom together. But, they
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grew well aware of the antiwar protest. And of course, some of them didn’t like the fact that the military was asked to do something that maybe the country didn’t really support. So it was interesting to me. And these are 18 , 19 , 20 year old midshipmen, and already they were seeing that.
Q: At that time, the Soviet Union had put tremendous resources into building what was called a Blue Water Navy. It was very impressive. They had some really beautiful and very capable war ships. Did that translate itself into your Communist course at all?
GILMORE: No, I talked mostly about civil military relations in the Soviet Union was how the party and (at different times in Soviet history) the secret police controlled the military. We talked about how those control mechanisms worked. For instance there’s the political leader in the officer corps, and the more insidious intelligence presence, which reached pretty far into the ranks when they were actually engaged in battle. It was more of that. We didn’t talk as much about strategy of the blue water navy. But they were all aware that the Soviet Union was the big competitor. And of course, as we all thought at that time, the Soviet Union loomed a little larger and a little more capable than we subsequently found it to be.
Q: Well, we’ll stop at this point, but put at the end...you left the Naval Academy when?
GILMORE: At the very end of May/first of June, in ’73, and then I was assigned to be the Hungarian desk officer. But when I got to work, I was actually put to work on the Yugoslav desk. But that’s the next story.
Q: Okay, we’ll pick it up then.
***
Today is the 24th of May, 2003. Harry, before we leave the Naval Academy, did you find sort of almost a sports competition between army and navy? Did that spill over into army being them, and navy being us?
GILMORE: That was the key competition, and it was football. It was the football game. I had a couple of football players in my class. It was interesting...the powers that be from the commandant on down, did not want the football players to fail. But they didn’t want you to break the rules. They did want you to provide special instruction, SI as they called it. So, if you had a football player in your class, you were expected to make sure, that if he got into any kind of grade trouble, he got special instruction. I had one football player, Midshipman Burnett. I don’t remember his first name, but it’s probably in one of my old grade books. He was a bright enough guy...couldn’t study much during football season though. He was carrying a C and I made sure that if he needed anything that he got it from me. He was actually capable of B+ or A, if he had just had more time to study. But that’s an example of it. Otherwise, the grounds of the Naval Academy would be properly decorated, shall we say, and there were proper pep rally types of events before the Army
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Navy game each year.
Q: But I was wondering beyond that, did you get the feeling as being an outsider, that the navy was inculcating in these midshipmen the idea that there’s a navy way, there’s an army way, and there’s the air force way, and sort of not trying to bridge the gap between, particularly between the army and the navy?
GILMORE: It’s interesting. Because the Naval Academy, uniquely among the military academies, has a mixed civilian and a military faculty. There were permanent civilian faculty members, Ph.D. holders, in almost all cases. So there was a feeling on the part of the civilian faculty, part of their duty was to end the insularity of the navy. And there was also a strong feeling that was encouraged by some of the military leaders of the academy that the navy should not be as elitist, I guess would be the word. I’m almost tempted to say aristocratic among the services as it had been.
You know, the surface navy had tremendous traditions of Filipino stewards. In fact, there were still some Filipinos left in Bancroft Hall, which was the cafeteria, etc. That was breaking down, though. Among the midshipmen there would be only a small number who really often came from navy families, very good families by the way. Only a small number who would be gung ho about that tradition. It was changing. But the emphasis on jointness, fighting jointly as they would call it, was much stronger when I got to the Army War College as deputy commandant for international affairs, in ’91 ’92. So the difference between ’71 ’73 and ’91 ’92 was a light year.
That being said, since the army had emphasized jointness much earlier than the navy, I can’t say that comparing the Army War College and the Naval Academy is a completely accurate barometer of what was happening. That being said, I played in some war games at the Naval War College and other places, and I could see the change by the ’90s. But the navy was pretty traditional.
I might add another point that I think is relevant here. When I ran the Senior Seminar in my last year in the Foreign Service, the ablest of a very able group of military officers assigned to the course, was a naval officer. I have to be careful here because there were many who were able, maybe six of them in uniform and five of them were as good as any of ours.
Q: Okay. We’ll move on. So in summer of ’73, you went to the Yugoslav desk.
GILMORE: In May of ’73, at the very end of May, because the Academy let out early, and I’d had some dispensation to study the summer before between academic years of the navy, so I owed the Department to come aboard. So I really came aboard the very end of May ’73 to the Yugoslav desk, where I took over from Herb Kaiser, who was an excellent mentor. As I said, I was supposed to be the Hungarian desk officer. I knew Hungarian pretty well, etc., but I ended up doing the Yugoslavia desk to my great satisfaction over time.
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Q: You were doing the Yugoslav desk from ’73 to when?
GILMORE: ‘Til the summer of ’75, when I went to Munich. Two years, and a little bit.
Q: In ’73, when you went out there, what was the situation in Yugoslavia?
GILMORE: Seen from the desk...I knew Yugoslavian history a bit, because I’d had an excellent course with Charles Jelavich at Indiana University. But I didn’t know the country yet on the ground. It seemed, from the desk when I first came aboard, U.S. Yugoslav relations looked pretty durable, pretty serviceable. There was a strong interest on both sides, underlying the relationship. The United States was very much interested in preserving, as we said, “the independence, unity, and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia.” It was in our geopolitical interest. It was also very much in our interest that Yugoslavia did well, relative to the countries of the Warsaw Pact, as a non aligned Communist country, not part of the Warsaw Pact (and not about to be part of it). So it would be an example of diversity and exert a kind of magnetism on some of the more intellectual people in, say, Hungary and Poland. A model of how you could be different and still be, as they would say, Socialists...but we would say Communist.
There were difficulties too. The Yugoslavs were very, very preoccupied with Croatian and Serbian American groups that, in their view, were prone to terrorist acts. There were a number of cases of bombings and attempted bombings of Yugoslav establishments in North America, in the United States and Canada, by both Serbian and Croatian extremists. They were preoccupied with that issue, so that was a tough one to handle. On the other hand, it was also a time when we were expanding our presence in Yugoslavia through these American centers, which were USIA centers. Very well staffed; USIA went out of its way to pick able officers to staff those centers. The Yugoslavs were receptive. There was a dialogue with Yugoslavia about the non aligned movement.
Let me back up. Not the non aligned movement, per se, but about issues of the non aligned movement, which was pretty sophisticated and pretty mature. The Yugoslavs cared deeply about non alignment, and sometime went along with the non aligned consensus when we thought they knew better, or it wasn’t exactly in their interests, at least in their specific interests. But we had pretty interesting dialogue on a number of issues. Under Secretary Sisco would see the Yugoslav Ambassador from time to time, and otherwise the Assistant Secretary of European Affairs saw him fairly often.
Q: Who was that?
GILMORE: It was at one time, Art Hartman. A very able officer. Arthur Hartman. And then I guess after that, George Vest. Art Hartman was the fellow I remember particularly... I had great admiration for him. [Editor’s Note: The assistant secretaries of European affairs during this period were: Walter J. Stoessel, Jr. (August 1972 January 1974), Arthur A. Hartman (January 1974 June 1977. George S. Vest served from June
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1977 to April 1981.] Also, the deputies to the assistant secretary of European Affairs saw the Yugoslav ambassador on a very regular basis. But it was not an easy relationship. You had to work at it.
Q: Given the strength of, say, the Croatian community and to a lesser extent, the Serbian, both these expatriate communities in the United States, which have settled in Cleveland, Chicago, and to a certain extent in the West Coast...
GILMORE: There was an important Croatian community in Pittsburgh, but it was a friendly community, friendly to Yugoslavia, and older, not as radical.
Q: But, given that, and then the politics, I’m talking about American politics with Congress, did you find yourself having problems with this?
GILMORE: Well, it was a very delicate thing to be talking to the Yugoslav consular officer, he was named counselor for consular affairs, who was the expert at the embassy, he was the number three officer, by the way, on those issues. Because you had to watch sensitivities on the Hill that their Croatian and Serbian American constituents’ rights would be in some ways undermined. On the other hand, one had to be very careful with some of these groups when they would come to see us, because they would misrepresent what they heard. In fact, I learned after about one time to have somebody with me when I met people from the Croatian and Serbian extreme groups, because they told fibs as to what was said. I would make it very clear about what our policy was. We were very interested in the Croats and Serbs in the Croatian Republic of Yugoslavia and the Serbian Republic of Yugoslav and elsewhere in Yugoslavia. Our policy was recognition of the unity, the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, etc. And then, in the Croatian newspaper in Chicago, I’d see falsification of what I’d said. In effect, saying, the United States was on the side of Croatian separatism. I had to watch.
There would be some interest on the Hill, but the people who really, in effect, bullied the State Department from the Hill, some of the congressional aides, really came along a little later. I didn’t have that problem as much in ’73 ’75, and then of course there were some cases, like Ed Derwinski on the Hill...I believe he was of Polish heritage...who would be interested in principle and good relations with all the countries including Yugoslavia. So we had some kind of weight on the Hill from people who were more knowledgeable and more balanced.
Q: Did you have any arrests of Croatian or Serbian Americans, who went and messed around or somehow got in trouble in Yugoslavia?
GILMORE: The ones we were working on with the FBI were here in the United States. They were the few extremists. I want to be very careful, because I had by the way, at one point in my life, a Croatian American uncle who was a splendid human being and whose family was the last thing in the world from terrorists. But, there were some cases where we found we were able to trace the suspects who were responsible for bombings or
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attempted bombings of Yugoslav Consulate and UN perm rep (permanent representative) facilities, for example. We were working with the FBI very closely, and a very enterprising FBI officer began to work on applying the RICO statute (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) to some of these groups, which he did successfully. [Editor’s Note: The RICO Act is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering, and it allows for the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes which they ordered others to do or assisted them, closing a perceived loophole that allowed someone who told a man to, for example, murder, to be exempt from the trial because they did not actually do it. While its intended use was to prosecute those who were actively engaged in organized crime, its application has been more widespread.] I can’t remember whether the real successful steps were made when I was desk officer or when I came back a few years later as deputy director. Because, in both cases, I was very much involved with U.S. Yugoslav relations. During my time as desk officer, they got very serious about these issues. Partly because Ambassador Toon in Belgrade was somebody who nobody would ever accuse of being anything except the most patriotic American who had an ambassadorial flag. And he would say, “C’mon, we can do better on this.” So we had that kind of support. And also what I had above me in the Department, from Joe Sisco and others on down, didn’t want any of this stuff to go on either. In some cases, where Yugoslavia had something like a consulate they had a consulate in Pittsburgh, they had one in Los Angeles, and a UN mission in New York some of these people lived in dread, and their sponsors as well, of possible terrorist acts. I remember when I went to Belgrade some years later as deputy chief of mission, I met some of the spouses who, during my time as desk officer, had been stationed in the United States. They had various positive memories of the United States, except on this issue.
Q: Were there any particular issues this first time, ’73 – ’75 that we were concerned with?
GILMORE: That was in many ways the most complicated issue that the desk officer in particular was in the thick of, because our embassy in Belgrade couldn’t be in the thick of it. They would want me to be engaged. There was another issue that I couldn’t do anything and didn’t do anything about at the time, which comes to mind, because we did do something about it later. I think very much that we did the right thing, although it was pretty controversial among Croatian Americans. That was the Artukovic case.
Q: Oh, God.
GILMORE: He would have been in the States since right after World War II. He had come here, as I remember, from somewhere in South America, probably Argentina. He’d been one of those…he’d been the interior minister in the wartime Independent State of Croatia. From all we could tell from historical records, he had been really the person who oversaw the Jasenovac concentration camp. It was, by concentration camp standards, a beauty, where many ethnic Serbs, Jews, Gypsies had been done in, tortured and done in.
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He’d escaped and gotten to the United States illegally, with an assumed name as I remember. I believe in the greater Los Angeles area. And there had been an extradition request by Yugoslavia I don’t remember the dates. Probably in the ‘50s, and extradition had not been granted and he was under a state of deportation. He had no status, he had no green card. I used to know this case very well. Every so often we would get a request from the Justice Department as to whether we saw any reason to change his state of deportation. Were there any political developments which changed the case? I remember I looked at the case, took it up with one of my superiors. I was troubled by it, because it looked to me like there was no question that Artukovic was a slaughterer of people, and in any case we didn’t do anything about it then except say that there was no fundamental change. But I had a pang of conscience that would kind of repeat itself until some years later... and I’ll come to that later in my debriefing. But in any case, that case came up that I remember was an important moment.
Q: I had my nose rubbed in it for five years, from ’62 to ’67.
GILMORE: As Consul General in Belgrade?
Q: Yes.
GILMORE: Exactly. They were very sensitive about it.
Q: And rightly so, frankly.
GILMORE: Yes, exactly. I guess the reason, in this case, that it was state of deportation was that we felt that he could not get a fair trial in Communist countries.
Q: Well, I think it was more than that....
GILMORE: Well, there was more to it than that. I think that was the stated purpose.
Q: But I think that the real thing was that his brother was a wealthy contractor and contributed particularly to the Republican Party.
GILMORE: Well, there were certainly political strings attached to the case, no question. As I understand it, as we looked at the case even back then must have been about ’74 ’75 when the Justice Department requested us to I looked at the file, it was clear that he was living well. He wasn’t involved in any kind of émigré activity that we could tell; he was keeping his head down. But I think his wealthy brother, as you said, had provided for him very well, materially. He lived on an estate, sort of a nice estate as I remember. We checked with the local police in California, and they told us that there were guard dogs behind a large metal fence and that sort of thing. This was a problem case.
Now there was one other thing that I remember which may sound peculiar, but it caused a fair amount of heartburn in Washington. The old Italian Yugoslav differences over
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Trieste resurfaced. At the end of World War II there were claims and counterclaims to the various parts of Trieste and the Trieste hinterland. They resurfaced at a time when we were about to send units of the Sixth Fleet, which we did from time to time, and there was quite a brouhaha over that, whether the Yugoslavs wanted us not to because they thought if we sent ships into Trieste during the time of these demonstrations, it would inflame public opinion. In the end, we sent them. Although as the Yugoslav desk officer, I had to make a case that there could be negative political ramifications in our relationship with Yugoslavia. I remember that very well. Deputy Assistant Secretary Wells Stabler was responsible for Western Europe and dealing with the Yugoslav ambassador, Turma Grantil. Very professional, but that was also an issue of some import.
Otherwise, just servicing the embassy in Belgrade was a heavy job, with Malcolm Toon as Ambassador. We had a series of good career ambassadors. Just keeping them informed, running down the various issues, bird dogging the issues they wanted to expedite was a lot of fun.
Q: Was there much thinking on your part and others about “... after Tito, what?”
GILMORE: Yes, there always was. As a matter of fact, you remind me that there was a post Tito study that was undertaken during that period. Actually, it was the Office of Policy Planning (S/P) that was responsible for it. Then there was one again, later, when I was deputy director of that office. People like Ambassador Toon felt pretty strongly that the likelihood of Yugoslavia falling apart in the post Tito period, at least in the immediate post Tito period, was not as great as some anticipated. Tito’s health during that period was still pretty good. He was still active, he was still traveling all over Yugoslavia as he always did. He’d have sessions with the party in Vojvodina Province, in Kosovo Province, with the Serbian party and the Croatian party. He was pretty vigorously in charge, so it wasn’t as acutely discussed or as frequently raised as it was later. Later, in my second go ‘round with Yugoslavia, my second and third, as deputy director of the office then as deputy chief of mission in Belgrade by the time I was deputy chief of mission in Belgrade he was dead. But during my period as deputy director, it became a much more acute issue when Tito’s health did fail, when his diabetes flared up and he had to have a leg off and then died.
Q: Were we concerned about other Communist countries messing around in Yugoslavia, or the Soviet Union?
GILMORE: We watched that. It was pretty clearly the judgment of our embassy, which by the way I came to share more and more, particularly once I served in Yugoslavia as deputy chief of mission, that the Yugoslavs were going to try to cooperate as well as they could economically with us, but when it came to any kind of Soviet meddling in Yugoslavia, they weren’t going to have any truck with it. And also the Yugoslavs did something that we considered very important...just strategically, in retrospect, it looks just as important as we thought it was then. The Yugoslavs gave no special access to Soviet aviation or the Soviet fleet. No special advantage to them that they did not also give to us.
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Each of us so called super powers had the same number of ship visits a year to Dalmatian ports. Very often the Soviet Union would send more ships because they had fewer places to go in the Mediterranean, that was the Mediterranean Flotilla, drawn from the Soviet Black Sea fleet. But we went there regularly. The Soviets were not given any special overflight rights. Period. The Yugoslavs were very zealous about that.
And we had a good relationship with the Yugoslav Army, not as close as we had in the late ’40s, early ’50s, when there was a really perceived threat, and when we sold them F 84s and F 86s, but we had a good relationship, one which we, a few years down the road, upgraded. We would sell certain reasonably sensitive military components to the Yugoslav forces, very carefully controlled, politically. That was one of the things the desk officer had to work hard on. For example, we wanted their Air Force to be capable enough to present a credible defensive deterrent to anybody who thought to play games. We also were open to military military relationships via some training of Yugoslav officers. It was delicate. Of course an ambassador like Malcolm Toon would be very interested in that. We always had very good Defense attachés in Belgrade in my time. Very capable, who were actually able to do business if you know what I mean.
Q: Well, in ’75, whither?
GILMORE: I was posted to Munich, to one of the most beautiful posts you could imagine in the Foreign Service, and a very difficult job but a very good one. The consulate general had shrunk in size, and two officer positions had, just right before me, been combined into one. One was the internal political reporting position for Bavaria. Bavaria was very important because it was strategically located in Germany. It had been in our occupation zone, and it was very, very pro American, with people like Franz Joseph particularly. The Great Oak Tree dominating the political spectrum. That position had been combined with the position of liaison to Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Of course, when I was assigned there, it was right after the CIA funding relationship with the radios was terminated by the Congress, and a new Congressional oversight mechanism, the Board for International Broadcasting, was set up to oversee the radios and to oversee direct congressional funding of the radios. So I basically had two jobs combined into one, and it was a fascinating time. It got me going in German politics, an interest which I retained to the end of my career. It was also a very difficult time for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. I don’t know which one I should talk about first, Germany or...
Q: Let’s talk about Germany first. You were there from ’75 to...
GILMORE: ’78.
Q: ’78. Overall, what were the politics that were going through Germany that we were concerned with? Then we’ll move down to Bavaria.
GILMORE: Well, we were concerned about what became, under the influence of journalists, the “Neutron Bomb.” I put that in quotes because it wasn’t that. We wanted
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very much to position some of those in Germany. We lost that one. Other issues in U.S. German relations were... well for that matter, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. There was some pressure from the Helmut Schmidt government to get them out of Germany, which we very much didn’t want. That was my bailiwick because I was the radio liaison officer. There was also one officer at the embassy in Bonn. The German government had to give a license for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. We knew that the Germans, as they pursued their Ostpolitik, wanted very much to be more accommodating to the Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union. Not to the point of undermining Western security, but more accommodating. So, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty’s continued existence in Germany was an issue. The Bavarian government wanted it to stay. The minister president of Bavaria, the equivalent of a governor, the Ländesvater, Alfons Goppel, was very strong for it. He, by the way, had his own independent standing in the CSU, Christian Social Union, of Bavaria, Strauss’s party. Strauss was in favor of it. So, playing the delicate game of keeping the Bavarian support strong, which wasn’t that difficult, and yet keeping the Federal Republic happy with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty was tricky. It was a time when Radio Liberty, the part of the two radios that broadcast to the Soviet Union in Russian and in all of the important northern languages was tough, because Radio Liberty had just had an influx of refuseniks. That was the name for intellectuals, among them, I remember, very impressive Jewish intellectuals, who were allowed to come West.
Q: From the Soviet Union…
GILMORE: From the Soviet Union. Some of them were hired by the radios. So in the Russian service of Radio Liberty, there was a tremendous kind of tug of war going on. The level of the American management between the older Russian émigrés, some of them who had gathered around the Journal Ponciev – “ponciev” in Russian means the sower, sower of seeds –and who were very conservative and wanted a particularly hard line, and the refuseniks who gathered around some younger people, particularly one very gifted but controversial young member, Vladimir Votosievich. So there was quite a struggle. It spilled over into the press because both sides would try to feed journalists that they liked in Germany and elsewhere. We were trying to keep that under control, the American management, and I was helping them as well. Because if the radio became too controversial, they would only potentially cause more difficulties for the radio. Radios, as we said, RFERL, with the federal government of Germany. It took a while for that to quiet down. In fact, during my time, there was quite a bit of tension and there was some, I guess you could call them firings. Also there was quite a bit of tension between the radio management...the management of RFERL, the American management, and the Board for International Broadcasting. And I had to kind of walk through that minefield.
And then there was a third issue: that was the relationship between the radios and some of the agency people who had been very close to them. I learned, by the way, and I think I’m right on this, and I want to be careful because there would be more in the archives that we can’t talk about here, appropriately. But, I learned that the CIA had really not tried to manipulate the content of the RFERL broadcasts in any kind of micro level. They had
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wanted basically the stations to exist, they wanted them to reflect U.S. policy, and they wanted them to be substitutes for non existent domestic opposition radio stations in those countries. In other words, they wanted them to be kind of an ersatz, free radio medium in each of these countries. Basically, that was what the Board for International Broadcasting wanted too. But the Board for International Broadcasting wanted no operations conducted under the umbrella of the radios, so there was yet another dimension to be monitored. But I think I succeeded in playing a positive role.
Q: Well, what kind of a role could you play? Because technically, these were not under your guidance.
GILMORE: The standards of what could be broadcast were pretty clear. There was quite an elaborate set of internal guidelines, and if they were just followed by reasonable human beings they would have worked as kind of ersatz, free media, broadcasting to those countries. What was the role I could play? Since the State Department could provide overall policy guidance to the radio management, not to the individual services, I could provide that in a careful way. Also, people came to me. A number of the people working for the radio station would come to me to air their gripes. There had been a tradition of this. I think that part of it was a hangover from the past when the agency had run the radios and some senior agency officials were responsible for them. I think also it had to do with, I want to be modest here, my personality and the fact that I knew an awful lot about Eastern Europe, particularly, but also the former Soviet Union, having served there. Also I think the radio management, the American managers of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty and the boss of the both of them, I think they had confidence in me. So what I basically did was play a kind of conciliator’s role getting them to talk with each other, and particularly in the case of the Russian service, keeping, where you had this deep divide between the old émigrés and the new refuseniks who were sort of internationalists and basically often not ethnic Russians, who were Russian speaking intelligentsia members but who were from the minorities. I think I helped keep then engaged in dialogue through a difficult period and maybe helped when they got involved with the press.
Also, there was the question of whether RFERL could be accredited to the Olympics, which by the way was a big thing, since the Olympics were a huge topic in all of the countries to which the radios broadcast. One year they didn’t get Olympic accreditation. The problem was the Federal Republic didn’t put them on the list of its journalists to be accredited. So we had to work that issue. We laid the groundwork for a more effective campaign for the next Olympics. I was gone by then but we succeeded.
So there were these issues. They don’t any of them sound like they’re earth shattering, but if one knew these countries well, all the Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union, these radios were important.
In Poland, they were immensely important. And, also, the radios were close to the Polish church. We used to say that the radios had an underground connection to the Vatican and
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laugh about it. The American ambassador to Poland would be called in by the Polish government and hell would be raised about the content of this or that specific broadcast, and he’d send a message back, and I would just brief the radio management on this. But, in fact, and I can put this bluntly, the radios often knew more than our embassy did about what was going on in Poland, and the connections with the Vatican. This is before Pope John Paul II, before Cardinal Wojtyla becomes the Pope. It’s amazing, the connection. So in Poland the radios were very much a factor in political as well as broader social and economic life.
They were important in Hungary, although there was a problem from ’56, where some of the native Hungarian broadcasters in radio may well have encouraged revolutionaries in ’56 to take action and to expect help from the outside, which they didn’t get.
In Romania, they were a factor. It was harder to tell from Radio Liberty because it was so much harder to have contact and do audience research there, but it turns out they were pretty powerful there. But all over Eastern Europe, Radio Free Europe was an important institution. I’m convinced the more I look at it, the more I learned about the area, particularly after the end of the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Communist regimes, they were a very significant factor in producing the broader context which ultimately let to the demise of the Soviet sponsored states.
Q: Who was consul general in Munich when you were there?
GILMORE: The Consul General was first Herb Spivack, and then David Betz. I was with Herb Spivack I guess a bit over a year, and then almost two years with David Betz. Both able people, very different people. Herbert Spivack had just come from Bangladesh where he’d been chargé, where he’d gotten into hot water with Secretary Kissinger for allegedly being more sympathetic to the Bangladesh Unity independence forces than the pro Pakistan State Department policy would have wanted him to be. [Editor’s Note: Embassy Dacca (now Dhaka) was established May 18, 1972, with Herbert D. Spivack as Chargé d'Affaires ad interim. He was replaced in October 1972.] And then David Anderson Betz was one of the senior consular corps people, and had had a very successful career as consul general in Manila, consul general in somewhere else, and then I think finally Montreal.
Q: Well, now let’s talk a bit about internal politics. You had Helmut Schmidt...
GILMORE: As the chancellor...
Q: As the chancellor, a very powerful figure. And then you had in Bavaria...
GILMORE: Franz Josef Strauss...
Q: What were your observations? What were we interested in, in this Strauss Schmidt relationship?
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GILMORE: Well, you know, we had some issues with Helmut Schmidt on the so called “neutron bomb” and other issues. And also there were some issues of Jimmy Carter and Helmut Schmidt not really speaking in the same language, initially. But we were very solicitous of our relationship with Helmut Schmidt, and we were not encouraging any one side. On one side of the spectrum, the Blacks more than the Reds, that’s the Social Democrats, we weren’t pro anybody. But we wanted a good relationship with the chancellor and we also wanted to keep a good relationship with Strauss. Although there were some issues in which Washington and our embassy in Bonn found Strauss a bit extreme.
For example, Angola... Strauss was strongly pro Savimbi, and we didn’t agree with him on that. He was sometimes considered harder on the East West issues than we wanted, although I quickly learned that that was an illusion. I had a wonderful mentor at the consul general, Herman Schtukel, who was the senior political Foreign Service National. He’d been a Sudeten German, as a young fellow drafted into the Nazi Army, very young, and ended up in Bavaria with his fiancée, also a Sudeten German. She, by the way, was shipped out by the Czechs after the war with just the clothes on her back in a cattle car. He had been from a Social Democrat family, in Sudeten, Czechoslovakia, and by the way wasn’t anti Czech. He had his issues with the Czechs, but in any case, we’d hired him in the military government and he just stayed with us. So, he knew Bavarian politics like a clockmaker knows a clock.
We had some important things to do during that period. One thing we had to do was to deal with the allegations against Strauss that he’d taken Lockheed money. Remember the Lockheed F 104 Starfighter, the ones that had caused so many accidents in Germany...partly because, by the way, they were built for Texas or Iraq, not built for flying in those cloudy German conditions with tight borders. But in any case, there were allegations that Strauss took what the Germans called Bestechungsgelde, bribes, so we had to deal with that. By the way, we could never find anything on that. We had to deal with some investigations on the Hill that were politically driven. I had to be very careful because there was at least one officer in Embassy Bonn who believed the allegations on the Hill and we had nothing, so we had that issue.
Q: Who was the officer in Bonn?
GILMORE: I’m hesitant to mention his name.
Q: Why not?
GILMORE: Bill Bodde. Very able fellow, a good friend.
Q: I interviewed Bill.
GILMORE: He’s a very good fellow and he’s a friend. But he believed that the
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congressional investigators had some evidence. I never saw it, but what I wanted to do was basically to preserve our relationship with the CSU and not put us on one side or another as to whether these rumors were true. But when the congressional committee staffers came to Munich after they had been to Bonn, I put them in touch with the Christian Social Union. It upset them a bit, the CSU people. But I was very careful to indicate that we, the U.S. government, were accusing nobody of anything, we wanted just the facts. That was a potential issue that would have ruffled our relationship with the Christian Social Union.
There was another interesting development with the Christian Social Union. I got a call from one of Strauss’ senior aides. I had excellent relationships with his staff. One of them called me and said he had an urgent matter to discuss. He had a letter in pretty darn good English, looking like it was on official paper, which accused Strauss of, in effect, improprieties, in that general area. Within 24 hours we had that back to Washington, State, and CIA, got a clear answer first from the chancellor and then from Strauss that it was a forgery, presumably a GDR (East German) forgery. We had that kind of relationship. It could have been very damaging. Had it hit the press before we clarified it, it could have been very damaging. But, we were able to get an answer back to Helmut Schmidt, to brief him, the chancellor, and to Strauss, that this letter was not in any way a U.S. CIA piece. Because what it was it was on CIA stationery, as I remember it. I don’t remember the details; it would be in the archives. But on CIA stationery...and basically it was talking about some illicit relationships concerning arms. But we were able to say it was a forgery and Strauss quickly put it out for the press that it was a forgery. So we defanged that issue. It was very important.
There was one other important issue with Strauss. It did not concern the United States directly, but it really roiled German conservative politics for a while. Strauss was very frustrated that the CSU CSU Black parties, together in coalition with the Free Democrats, couldn’t regain the chancellorship. So, to everybody’s surprise, at a party conference or party gathering at Wildbad Kreuth, they passed a resolution, the CSU, which Strauss had ordered before, saying that the Christian Social Union should expand to run in all the German states as a second conservative party. The feeling being that, together with the Christian Democratic Union, they could sop up 50 percent of the vote. This upset Helmut Kohl, the Christian Democratic Union leader, and later chancellor. And there was a tremendous row between Strauss and Helmut Kohl. We didn’t have a direct part in it but we were able to report on it in great detail. In the end, Strauss had to retreat. But these were the kinds of issues we were reporting on.
Now, there’s another story. Helmut Schmidt’s party, the Social Democratic party, was weaker in Bavaria than in probably any other Länder in Germany, Bavaria and Baden Württemberg. It was well led, but the problem was it just couldn’t compete against the Christian Social Union, which was kind of wrapped in the Bavarian flag. And it had big problems, too, with the young socialists. The Young Socialists, in Munich, were among the most radical anywhere in the Federal Republic. So we had to report on that and it was important that that party hang together because it was the ruling party in Bonn.
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Furthermore, we had an important other dimension in Bavaria the second most important person in the Free Democratic Party, Freie Demokratische Partei, FDP, was the agriculture minister, Josef Ertl, and after Hans Dietrich Genscher, he was the most important fellow. We had close contact with them because if the Free Democrats had lost their 5 percent, their ability to get at least 5 percent of the vote, they would have lost their seats in the Parliament, and the government would have fallen.
So, we had a whole number of issues. But, in retrospect, I guess the most important issues to Washington were really, except for the specific issues of Lockheed and the forged CIA letter, the really important issues were the radios.
Q: At this point, you talked about the “neutron bomb,” and the use of this weapon became quite an issue. Jimmy Carter, our President, put a lot of pressure on Helmut Schmidt to accept it. After he went through a lot of political turmoil to get Germany to accept it, Carter turned around and decided not to do it. Sort of an overnight conversion.
GILMORE: Right. Although it never really had any kind of real acceptance in Germany politically, because it was such a touchy issue. And because it was played so badly publicly, it got out of control. The journalistic descriptions of it and the horror descriptions were...
Q: A so called capitalistic bomb.
GILMORE: Right. And what it would do to populations, and everything else. And how it would harm East West relations. The German media, including some of the more responsible media, had a heyday.
Q: But this rift between Schmidt and Carter, was Strauss taking any advantage of this? Were we watching this...?
GILMORE: The interesting answer is “no”, and in fact on the big issues, he stood with Helmut Schmidt. Another thing we were able to report from Bavaria because of our good connections with Strauss’ staff...I mean they were good... For example, my wife and I went to the CSU annual ball as the guest of the secretary general of Strauss’ party, and sat with him at his table. If I needed to see him, or if I really needed to see Strauss, I could do it, which was, for just a mid rank political officer, was interesting. In any case, on the big issues of trade and arms policy, Strauss stood with Helmut Schmidt. And they communicated. We don’t know how they did it, but here and there they must have sat quietly every couple of months together in Bonn. It was not clear whether they spoke by phone, but when there were big issues, Strauss was a very patriotic person. It was a paradox.
And I have to add here something I learned then, but I learned even more convincingly when I was in Berlin. There’s a belief in Germany, the Eastern part, in Berlin and in the
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Northern German states, that the Bavarians are kind of country bumpkins. They speak this dialect, Bairish, which nobody can quite understand, and supposedly they’re not very well educated and they’re backward. Well, it’s not only nonsense, it’s total nonsense. On the Abitur exams, the examinations at the end of Gymnasium for those going on to university, Bavarians have the highest, or the second highest results in the country. Also, largely due to CSU, Strauss’ party’s, economic policies, many of the companies that were once headquartered in Berlin and then had to fold because of the division of Germany were headquartered in Munich. Siemens is one example. And those two southern, back to back, the two southern states, Bavaria and Baden Württemberg, are the two economic powerhouses, in terms of new technology, in Germany. So German politics is interesting.
Also, Strauss found Helmut Schmidt a very pragmatic, gutsy guy. I remember while I was there, there was the famous problem with the banker who was kidnapped. And Schmidt put the interests of the German states ahead of trying to save that banker’s life in trying to deal with the terrorists, and Strauss admired him for that. What I’m saying is that at a level above politics, and above at least ordinary day to day politics, Strauss and Schmidt were often on the same wavelength.
Q: Did you see the French playing around in Bavaria?
GILMORE: There was a French consulate general there. They had very good trade relations, but politically they weren’t much of a factor. There were very good cordial relations. Where they worked with the Bavarians, and Strauss, was on the question of European issues, getting the European Union (EU) started. Strauss was an ardent Europeanist, and he had lots of respect for the French view on that. The other place that they played footsie well together was agricultural policy. The French farmers and the Bavarian farmers have pretty parallel interests. They don’t have huge holdings. They’re very dependent on the right economic policies in the EU, so Strauss’ interests in the European Parliament and elsewhere, Strauss’ party’s interests, were very close to the French. On those two issues, European Union politically and building Europe and on the Common Agricultural Policy there was a fair amount of parallel interests. But the French didn’t have a high profile, politically, in Bavaria particularly; not a low one either. The British had a consulate general there; they, too, were close, but not as high profile. High profile foreigners were invariably the Americans. And of course, we had forces in Bavaria. Important military installations in Bavaria, and quite important intelligence cooperation with Bavarians; interrogating people from the East and that sort of thing. There was quite a bit going on there.
Q: Well, then, after this interesting tour, in ’78, you went where?
GILMORE: I went back to the Department as deputy director of the Office of Eastern European and Yugoslav affairs. They changed the name to include Yugoslavia by name, so that it distinguished Yugoslavia, which was a non aligned independent Communist country from the Warsaw Pact countries.
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Q: You did that from ’78 to...
GILMORE: ’81.
Q: What were your responsibilities, and what countries did you cover?
GILMORE: Well, we divided the office into a northern tier and southern tier, basically. The office director, when I went back, was Carl Schmidt, also a very able person. He had served in Poland and also Czechoslovakia, and he did Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. He picked Romania because he had a particular interest in Romania. I did, in terms of direct oversight, Hungary, Yugoslavia. Excuse me, let me back up on that. I did Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania, and a little bit of Albania. He was the director, and he did Poland, Czechoslovakia, and did all the financial things because he had been an excellent econ officer. Of course, he ran the office, and any time he wanted to pick up one of the issues, he did. Although, basically, I ended up doing the Yugoslavia thing, pretty fully. And I was the deputy, meaning I did the administrative stuff under his supervision. It was a very high voltage operation.
Q: It was?
GILMORE: A lot of stuff to do.
Q: What were the issues that you dealt with?
GILMORE: There were so many of them. The whole question of overall policy: should we have closer relations with those Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries that supported us or did things for us politically, or should we have closer relations with those countries which reformed economically? And basically, the policy was that we would reward independence for countries that did things for us diplomatically. Like Romania helping with the opening to China, and Romania defying the Soviet Union on certain issues. So, for example, Hungary never made it into the first tier. We used to say there were two tiers. There was a policy paper, which is in the archives, that defined all this.
But Hungary, which was doing much more domestically, in terms of reform, economically, and was only second to Poland in terms of economic rationality and getting out from under all this heavy state control, was always in the second tier. So, basically, we had special relationships with Poland and with Yugoslavia in the office. Then we had a very interesting diplomacy with Romania because the Romanian ambassador and our ambassador to Romania would sometimes do business. [Kissinger and his Romanian counterpart, Steffan Andre, did business on very sensitive, international political issues where the Romanians were pretty well doing their own thing, despite their Warsaw Pact membership.]
The big thing was the rise of Solidarity in Poland. By the time Solidarity started to forge ahead and show its independence and engineer changes in Poland, Carl Schmidt had gone
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as office director, and Peter Bridges became the office director. Very capable person as well, went on later to become ambassador, I believe, to Somalia. [Editor’s Note: Bridges was Ambassador to Somalia from December 1984 to May 1986.] I’d been to see him in Rome. Very capable. In any case, we kept the same basic division of labor. He watched the Poland thing very closely, but the real heavy lifting was done by Victor Gray. He was the Poland desk officer. He did a magnificent job and it got him an award. In fact, I wrote the award from Belgrade, after I left the office and became the DCM in Belgrade. I wrote it and sent it back to Peter. We wrote him a Superior Honor Award. He’d served in Poland, and spoke quite serviceable Polish.
He took an orientation trip when Solidarity was just getting started, and rented a car and went through Poland. You could do that in Poland; of course he had support from the embassy in Warsaw and the consulate in Krakow. He, by the way, had been the Principal Officer in Krakow. Very important. That’s the home, of course, of Cardinal Wojtyla, John Paul II, and it’s the most independent spirited part of Poland. In any case, he came back saying, “Look, this is going to go. Something’s going to change here. Solidarity has just got way too much support for the government to just kind of suppress it.” He followed Polish events on a day to day basis, and on the key policy issues Peter Bridges and basically the NSC formulated the policy line, i.e., what the United States expected of the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact countries in terms of non intervention and respect for Poland’s independence. In fact, Peter drafted memos, with Victor Gray’s input, and they went right to Brzezinski we were told. But I think it was one of the reasons there was no intervention a la Prague in ’68. It would have been much harder to crack the Poles. Another reason was of course subsequently a Polish leader came aboard who wanted to head off possible Soviet led intervention, and basically some would say did the Soviet Union’s dirty work for it. But, in any case, Poland was, with the rise of Solidarity, the big issue from ’78 to ’81 during my time in that office.
But there were numerous other issues, including permanent most favored trade relations treatment for Romania. We’d given Romania annually renewable, but mostly relation treatment. And there was a big challenge to that, which we beat back. I had to lead that because Peter Bridges had moved on in my last month in the office in ’81. There were other issues. By the way, when I initially talked about the division of labor, my other country was Bulgaria. I really had Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania, such as we did anything with it. And really, Carl Schmidt and Peter kept hold of Romania, so I misstated my responsibilities earlier.
I made a very important visit to the region and worked with some very tough family reunification issues with Bulgaria on it, very successfully. Jack Perry was the ambassador. He was pushing, I went with him, and we moved some tough cases on it in Bulgaria.
Q: Could you explain what these were?
GILMORE: These were cases where Bulgarians would not let out relatives of people that had emigrated to the United States. As you know, if there was anything a congressman
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would be likely to support and support strongly, it would be a constituent who was fairly important and was a political supporter from a Communist country who had a family member who couldn’t make it to the United States because of restrictive emigration policy. Often it would be the children of somebody who got out to the West and defected, or the wife and children. And it was not easy to move these cases because the Bulgarians, in this case, were very cautious and very, very close to the Soviet Union, and they didn’t want to look like they were vulnerable to U.S. pressure. On the other hand, if they wanted to make any positive steps with us, we had to solve these cases. It sounds like small potatoes in retrospect, but at the time these were important cases.
Q: And, of course they were important to the people, to the families.
GILMORE: Oh, very much so. And it would help on the Hill.
Q: Now, how would you deal with this? I mean, you go to the Bulgarians and say, “Hey, let these people go. They’re not going to hurt you or anything like that.” I mean these were mostly simple families and all. Would there be a quid pro quo or something?
GILMORE: Well, we would say – we would never horse trade for them – but what we would say is, “Look, if you want to make any kind of progress in your relations with the United States, you’ve got to remember, we have a system where not only did the executive branch do foreign policy, but there’s an important Congressional role.” And we’d explain what it was, in terms of funding, and what the Congress had to approve. And of course they all wanted most favored nation trade treatment. Bulgaria wasn’t about to get this. We’d say, “If you want to even move toward it, if you want to move toward any kind of economic relationship, you’ll have to take into account the fact that we expect freedom of movement, we expect family reunification.” And then we would argue that “Although there might be some angry folks down in your bureaucracy somewhere who feel that they’ve been betrayed by the father, the husband who had defected, and they want to punish him by holding the children back, you’re going to have to look at your broader interests.”
We did that. And also, with Bulgaria, another thing was happening. At the time, it was very important. Admela Juskova, the daughter of Juskov, who subsequently we learned for sure had a Bulgarian nationalist streak a mile wide running right through the center of her, had come to the United States to talk about children’s art. And again, it looks kind of picayune, but it wasn’t. She basically was bucking most of the pro Soviet Bulgarian hierarchy, and bucking her dad, in part, to try to promote a more nationalist Bulgaria, more reflective of its national traditions. Of course, when she came to the States, I was responsible, with the Deputy Foreign Minister Lyubomir Kyuchoukov, for coordinating her itinerary. And we, I think, made some progress in the family reunification cases through her and through her connections with the deputy foreign minister. I remember he came to see me, of all things a deputy foreign minister coming to see the deputy office director. He talked to me, and she was in the States. We talked on the fringes of her visit. And then when I went to Bulgaria for my trip, Jack Perry and I thought he moved the
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cases. They were not easy. But I must say, it took a weight off our relationship with Bulgaria, and you know Bulgaria was never about to become a defy er of the Soviet Union; but it was the kind of progress that you could make in those days if you worked hard. But to recap those years, it was really the special relationship with Poland with the rise of Solidarity and keeping Poland from being the subject of a Warsaw Pact intervention led by Moscow. Continued promotion of U.S. Yugoslav relations. It was keeping the special diplomatic relationship with Romania. Those were the basic issues.
Q: You were there from ’78 to ’81.
GILMORE: Right.
Q: And you’re talking about the Poles keeping Jaruzelski, who was the military...
GILMORE: The Defense Minister.
Q: Defense Minister who basically declared martial law ...
GILMORE: Right.
Q: And in a way, he stopped the Soviets from moving in. But this was also the time, in December of ’79 when the Soviets moved in, in great strength, into Afghanistan.
GILMORE: Right.
Q: And this surprised everybody. This is jumping beyond the internal, keeping internal order a la ’68 Czechoslovakia... What were you all thinking, is this a new Soviet Union or what?
GILMORE: Well, we weren’t directly involved, but the deputy assistant secretary for European Affairs who was responsible for us by that time it was Robert Barry, another very, very capable career diplomat was very much involved with the whole question of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. And it did have an effect on our relationship with the Soviet Union, a huge effect. But we didn’t work the issue directly, in terms of the Eastern European countries and Yugoslavia. We could feel the ripples, if you knew what you were looking for in Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslavs certainly didn’t like it, that Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, because it could have been seen by some as a kind of “fraternal assistance” that might be offered to Yugoslavia.
The other big thing that happened on our watch during that period is Tito died on May 4, 1980. He was old, he was dying. We helped Dr. DeBakey of Texas go out there to see him, in a quiet way. They consulted with his Yugoslav physicians. Dr. DeBakey concluded, by the way, that he was very professionally and capably being cared for by his Yugoslav physicians. He was up in, I believe, in Ljubljana, certainly in Slovenia; had to have an amputation of a leg because of diabetes and never really got out of his hospital
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Q: What were we thinking about?
GILMORE: We knew basically he was not going to recover. Another iteration of the post Tito study was being worked; it was getting unwieldy. By the time it was finished...again, it was sponsored by Policy Planning. But again, it was finished. It was no longer an operational document; there were too many annexes, etc. But it had the salutary effect of making the bureaucracy think about what the issues were.
The book would contain, on the operational side, even some proposed demarches, with the dates blank. Usually with demarches we could make to the Soviets or some of the neighboring countries, these are the kinds of points we could make to countries that were kind of supportive in a quiet way, like Romania, for Yugoslavia’s independence. When Tito died, we arranged for the proper condolence messages from President Carter. Carter, by the way, had hosted Tito in one of his last visits to the United States. We arranged the condolence messages; we facilitated the funeral delegation from the United States. But because we had focused very much on the post Tito period in this study, it really gave quick, instant support to the success of collective leadership. We were really quick to support them. Of course, we had in Belgrade, at that point, Lawrence Eagleburger, and he knew Yugoslavia well and had political courage and political acumen in very high measure. So, in many ways, despite Yugoslavia’s non aligned position, despite its very careful balancing act between the United States and the Soviet Union, we pulled closer to Yugoslavia, they pulled closer to us, during this period.
Q: Well, we’ve seen this collective leadership, and this thing has never really worked anywhere. I may be wrong, but I mean it’s an interim thing. What were we looking at, though?
GILMORE: We wanted to basically make sure that our interests in Yugoslavia, independence and territorial integrity, were met. So, I think we were under no illusions that it would be a lot more difficult for a collective leadership to make quick decisions. In fact, it became very quickly clear that the collective leadership in post Tito Yugoslavia was very conservative, the republican barons, the party, and the government leaders in each of the six republics and the two autonomous provinces were very jealous of their prerogatives, and the system only worked very slowly and very cautiously. But we gave them confidence that we were willing to deal with them. We also gave them confidence that our policy and our support for Yugoslavia’s independence, unity, and territorial integrity was very much alive.
Then I was posted to Belgrade as deputy chief of mission. When Eagleburger left post Jan 24, 1981, his successor was David Anderson, another very capable man. David asked me to be deputy chief of mission, so in August of ’81, I went to Belgrade. David had gone in July.
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We were very much in the business of working with this new collective post Tito leadership, and it was clear that they were not able to make quick decisions. It was also clear pretty quickly that some of the things that Tito had watched, and pushed against, and managed were starting to happen. It was pretty clear, for example, that Serbian leadership was falling back into the older “Greater Serb” mode of thinking, and was jealous of the autonomy of the Vojvodina, in particular that Kosovo had, and we were trying to work with them on that. It was also very clear that when there was an important visit and the Yugoslav leadership had to have an interlocutor for the visitor that they went to great pains to craft in writing the talking points.
Let me give you an example. Vice President Bush went to Yugoslavia in September 1983. If I’m not mistaken, the leader of the collective leadership, the acting president, as they rotated the presidency, was a rather colorless fellow. I know from having had very good connections with Yugoslavia before and after, particularly with the person who wrote his talking points now in the United States, now a U.S. citizen. They crafted those talking points very carefully. They briefed him in a sort of kind of murder board before he met with Bush, and they made it very clear, the other members of the collective leadership, that he couldn’t go beyond those points. So, he put up a very wooden dialog with Bush. You know, George Herbert Walker Bush is a pretty experienced diplomat, so this exchange didn’t impress him very much. For example, Bush came right on the heels of the September 1st KAL shootdown, you know, the Korean Airliner. Bush was very upset with it and the acting president couldn’t handle it. He didn’t have any...he just gave a bunch of platitudes. He didn’t want to take any position.
Q: The Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner over the Kamchatka peninsula...
GILMORE: That’s right, the KAL 007 shootdown. It happened. George Bush came with his wife, Barbara, and they were very, very upset by this. The Yugoslavs had put out a very careful position which preserved their non aligned status in the world, and they didn’t really come out and condemn it. So, George Bush beat up on them, or at least tried to. And he didn’t have a Tito. Tito might well have put something out that was critical of the shootdown , condemnatory of it; but the collective leadership didn’t do it, and they were basically super cautious. This was one of the first indications of how much Yugoslavia would miss Tito, would miss some decisive leadership. There were other indications. Any kind of difference between the republics: the budgets; the whole question of developmental funds for Kosovo...Remember one of the great battles in Yugoslavia had been how much should the well off republics, particularly Slovenia, but also Croatia with its Dalmatian Coast, how much should they pay in terms of development funding for the poorer areas. That became a really molasses like situation. They couldn’t easily sort that out. That being said, things were civilized.
There was only one thing that they did that was rather repressive internally. Milovan Ðilas had written his books, The New Class, and Conversations with Stalin, much earlier. He was in Belgrade, living in this house near the Parliament, and was hauled in for questioning. I guess he had been detained for a short time. We found out about it in an
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unusual way. Our DCM in Paris, phoned me, and said Sulzberger, whom he knew well...
Q: The newspaperman…?
GILMORE: Yes, from the New York Times and would have been close to Ðilas. It was the New York Times really that had helped him, gave him notoriety, and, I don’t know, maybe helped him publish his books. I wasn’t there at the time, that’ll be in the archives. We hadn’t heard anything about it, and sure enough, we did some very quick checking, and they had picked up Ðilas. There was no reason for this. He wasn’t doing anything extraordinary. He was not Tito’s favorite person, and he was a thorn in Tito’s side, but I don’t think that they would have detained him, but it was another sign of the nervousness. In fact, after some questioning, he was let go and put under something like house arrest. David Anderson decided to send the number two person in the political section to see him. We didn’t make any deal about it, we didn’t ask anybody’s permission. We just sent him over. Ðilas was delighted, gave him tea. It was Jim Clooney who subsequently became political counselor. Ðilas said how happy he was to see him, talked to him, smiled all over himself. Because you know what that meant, that meant the United States was interested in Mr. Ðilas, and the Yugoslavs ought to think twice before they did anything more harsh. But that was another indication of the lack of self confidence of the collective leadership.
During that period the Yugoslavs ran a very successful winter Olympics in Sarajevo. I didn’t get there. I got there before and after, but I had to run the embassy because the ambassador wisely was down there with the U.S. VIPs, making sure they were being taken care of, using his connections to get them the right connections with the Yugoslavian powers that be who were basking in the attention of the Olympics. It was well run and they built some pretty good infrastructure in Sarajevo which was subsequently knocked around, I’d say, by the pummeling of Sarajevo by the Serbs. The embassy did a good job. We put the administrative consular, Vince Farley, in charge of it. The Yugoslavs had run those well.
There was one really important thing that I want to mention. The Yugoslavs got into major financial trouble. This hadn’t to do particularly with the collective leadership; probably it was going to happen under Tito too. But for lots of reasons, the growth of the common market in fact, Yugoslavia was only an associate member, but not a full member. Yugoslavia was kind of caught between East and West, economically. They had taken some important bank loans and they weren’t able to service them. So by about ’83 they were in pretty good trouble, late ’82. They needed a major bailout. Here we should all take our hats off to our Ambassador, David Anderson, and to Ambassador Alfred Hoch, the Swiss Ambassador, and also to Kenneth Scott, now Sir Kenneth Scott, the then British Ambassador. The three of them, but particularly David Anderson and Alfred Hoch, played a heroic role over that. I use that word carefully, in getting Yugoslavia to refinance its debt and in getting the debt refinanced, and getting them to realize first that they were in trouble. It was not easy for them to do that. David Anderson was the one who took the message to them, after talking to the British and the Swiss. He went with
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me as notetaker, which was very unusual we went to see Milka Planinc, who was the equivalent to a prime minister, the chairman of the federal executive council. We indicated we knew what kind of trouble they were in. It was serious; we gave her some figures. We said if they were interested we were willing to use our diplomatic influence to help them get a rescheduling. She smiled all over herself, was very professional, and said she had to take it to the collective leadership. She did and they wanted help. So, David Anderson and Alfred Hoch spent many a night sitting up late with Zvone Dragan. He was vice president of the Yugoslav Federal Executive Council and his country's highest economic officer.
The Swiss ambassador had a special role to play because, if I’m not mistaken, the head of the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland was a personal friend, as you might guess, of the Swiss ambassador. That bank played an important role in the rescheduling. It was very difficult. The Yugoslavs, for example, were very reluctant to guarantee their little bit of gold as the ultimate security for paying their debt. It had to go before the collective leadership, and also the military leadership had to agree with it, and they balked.
But in the end, the Yugoslavs agreed to secure their commitments with their gold, so to speak, and the rescheduling went ahead and was successful. It gave them time to make some economic reforms, which seemed to be working as I left Yugoslavia in ’85, and I think were working really into the late ‘80s. But, in any case, the most important thing that happened on my watch and on David Anderson’s watch was the rescheduling, by far. I’m firmly of the belief that had we not gone to the Yugoslavs and told them how urgent we thought their problem was, and helped them push this rescheduling and get it through their own internal structure, they would have been in very serious economic trouble. They would have been in default and would have had a real economic crisis... maybe even something close to a melt down, by ’85, by the mid ’80s.
Q: Were we monitoring the ethnic divisions of Yugoslavia? Macedonians, Albanians, Muslim Bosnians, Croatians, Montenegrins, the whole thing?
GILMORE: Yes, as best we could. But we were particularly watching the Kosovo situation. That had flared up before David got there as ambassador. We had officers down there all the time. There had been important demonstrations and student unrest and the University of Pristina, the regional capital closed, the provincial capital closed. We were also watching Macedonia. We had political officers assigned to watch every one of the republics. And, of course, we had an America Center. We had to be very careful there because those center directors were not to be engaged in politics, and we didn’t. But when they came to Belgrade, we could always sit with them, and they could sit with the political section, or if it were interesting enough the Ambassador. But when we would go visit any of these places, we would have a walk with or a session with the America Center director. So, we had a pretty good fix on what was happening in each of the individual areas. And then we had some very interesting folks. The counselor for public affairs, Raymond Benson, had been in and around Yugoslavia for years.
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Q: Right. He was there when I was there, ’62 to ’67.
GILMORE: Right. And he didn’t do any reporting, but he had some very good contacts with the Serbs. So we were watching how the Serbs were becoming more nationalistic. We’d had some contacts with Milosevic when he was a banker. Just at the end of my time there and David Anderson’s time, Milosevic was the Serb leader and saying some nationalistic things, particularly about the Serbs in Kosovo. There had been a real problem there already from the late Tito period, of a huge population growth among the Albanians, high reproduction rates, etc. There had been a Serbian exodus from what as you know well was in the Serbian view, the cradle of Serbian Christianity and Serbian national identity, and of course the field of the blackbirds, Kosovo Polje, where they had been defeated by the Ottomans, and presumably buried historically, and yet had risen like the Phoenix.
In any case, we monitored those issues pretty closely, did a fair amount of reporting on them. We monitored the Serb Croat differences, particularly the budgetary difference which was increasingly the interest in Croatia in getting more of the revenues from the Dalmatian Coast tourism. This was booming particularly with German tourists...and putting less back into the federal coffers. When David and I left, and Jack Scanlan came aboard as his successor in July of ’85, Yugoslavia looked in pretty good shape. The economic financial crisis was being dealt with by rescheduling and reforms of the economy. It looked like it was turning around. The collective leadership wasn’t working swiftly, but it was a working mechanism, and none of the ethnic issues seemed to be about to explode. The Soviet Union had gotten into Glasnost and Perestroika full tilt. Those developments that led to the demise of the Warsaw Pact were yet off in the future.
Q: Yes, and that was in a way the pressure that kept Yugoslavia together.
GILMORE: It was very much, and it was also the pressure that kept the United States engaged. Because, once the Warsaw Pact had fallen apart, Germany was reunified, etc, the United States, and I want to be careful here, was no longer at all interested in taking the lead and in forcing a Western policy of support for Yugoslavia’s unity and independence. In fact, basically, we were going to leave it up, once they started to come apart, leave it up to the Europeans as we well know.
Q: That’s when Jim Baker said, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.”
GILMORE: Right.
Q: While you were there, did you see a split that would always be there, from whenever I looked at Yugoslav, between our consuls general in Zagreb and Belgrade?
GILMORE: Well there was always a question. One of my jobs as the DCM was to write the performance rating for the consul general in Zagreb, and the ambassador reviewed it.
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We had some very interesting reporting out of Zagreb, good reporting. It didn’t always match what we would have hoped for out of Zagreb, but I thought it was independent and professional, and there were differences emerging. Of course, Tudjman subsequently became the Croatian strong man. Stillton was around making some noises, and there was another dissident, Dobroslav Paraga, who was making noises... we had contacts with him. The whole issue of Serbs in Croatia, an issue which has largely been pushed onto the dustbin of history or taken care of by the Sudeten Deutsch, by the military action. The United States had some role in this in not facilitating, but in facilitating the planning of. That issue was very much alive then.
There were some energy issues in question. Yugoslavia had very little oil. What they did have was largely in Croatia, I think also in Slovenia. There were those issues, but the Belgrade Zagreb thing was pretty well okay, although there was always a problem, which was how autonomous should the consul general in Zagreb be. But David Anderson had a light touch. He could also be... he was a little fellow, a Scotsman, had played soccer, very good soccer player, he was a tough little guy, but he had a light touch. Basically, as long as he thought the consul general in Zagreb was being professional and as long as he felt he was being consulted on the issues he cared about, he didn’t get nervous, he didn’t get uptight, wasn’t a control freak, as some of his predecessors had been seen to be. But if you go back and read that report, it’ll be interesting to see how it stacks up in light of the subsequent developments. But there were clearly important personalities in Croatia that were unhappy with the federation, and we were seeing some of that.
Q: Well, you left there in...?
GILMORE: I left Belgrade in summer, August of ’85, and I came back to be the director of the Office of Central European Affairs from summer of ’85, August of ’85 to August of ’87. Two very interesting years.
***
Q: It is August the 3rd, 2003. Harry, you wanted to say something a little more about Andrija Artuković.
GILMORE: Yes, the reason I’d waited, because the actual date of what I want to mention at this point was February of ’86. In other words, after I’m back for the office of Central European Affairs and the Bureau of European Affairs, Artuković is finally extradited. With the creation of the Office of Special Investigations in the Justice Department, a much more vigorous attempt to look at World War II war criminals got underway. One of the huge cases that was pending, and of course as I explained the last time, that had not been resolved, was the Artuković case. In effect, he was under a kind of state of deportation. He was incommunicado on his brother’s estate in southern California. The Yugoslavs had been terribly frustrated that they hadn’t got him.
In any case, with this new Office of Special Investigations, what I want to put on the
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record is sensitive, but I think important: near the end of my stay in Belgrade, Mr. Murray Stein, I’m pretty confident that is his name, but I don’t keep my papers, because we’re not supposed to in this new day and age. But Mr. Murray Stein of the Office of Special Investigations came to Belgrade. In preparation for his visit, David Anderson sent me to see Milan Buliage, who was the head of the foreign offices, the federal secretary of foreign affairs office for legal and consular affairs. I had mentioned to Buliage that there was a new office, that they were seeking to look at some extradition questions, and I asked whether his embassy in Washington reported this. In any case, Buliage was personally involved, as a much younger man, in the earlier attempt to extradite Artuković. I believe he was skeptical. But when Stein came, he went to see Buliage. In fact, as I remember, I hosted a kind of little buffet at my residence. They talked about the situation and the Yugoslavs decided that, although it would very difficult to get all the people together who could bring new fresh personal testimony about Artuković, they would do it. They did it, and Artuković was finally extradited in February 1986. He was extradited after Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist had turned down a midnight request by his lawyers not to extradite him. Artuković was tried in Zagreb, the capital of the Croatian Republic of Yugoslavia. He was found guilty and was sentenced with capital punishment. He was quite ill at that time, quite elderly, but he was found guilty and died shortly thereafter. [Editor’s Note: The court in Zagreb issued a death sentence on 14 May 1986, but a year later the authorities ruled that he was too ill (with senile dementia) to be executed. He died from natural causes in a prison hospital in Zagreb in 1988, aged 88.]
Q: Did you get from Stein, or the bureau, a concern...I mean we’re talking about the Reagan Administration, they were Republican Californians, and Artuković’s brother was a strong supporter of them financially. Did you get a feeling that this was almost that the special investigation unit was being pushed into doing this? It was not politically palatable?
GILMORE: Well, it’s interesting. When Murray Stein came out, it was clear that he was very much determined to see if this Artuković case couldn’t be reopened because he knew the file. But I heard nothing, surprisingly, politically about the case, and my ambassador David Anderson had been a Reagan appointee to Belgrade, and he was wide open to seeing if we couldn’t look at this case again, and was committed to it. The assistant secretary for European affairs at that point, I believe was Lawrence Eagleburger. It might have been Rozanne Ridgway. Eagleburger had just gone back from Belgrade the summer of ’85 so I believe he was the assistant secretary for European affairs. I don’t think he had yet moved up to be the undersecretary of political affairs. In any case, he knew as well as anybody in the U.S. government what was at stake, and they played this one straight. I don’t know how much political pressure was withstood. I assumed that there was some, but it certainly didn’t affect what we were doing in Belgrade. We knew, what you said, that there were some very sensitive issues for some Croatian American groups. [Editor’s Note: Assistant secretaries for European affairs through the 1980s were: Lawrence Eagleburger (May 1981 January 1982), Richard R. Burt (February 1983 July 1985, and Rozanne L. Ridgway (July 1985 June 1989). Lawrence Eagleburger served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from February 1982 to May 1984. Oral histories of
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Eagleburger and Ridgeway are in the ADST collection.]
Q: Okay, let’s move to Central European affairs…’85 to ’87. What did Central Europe consist of?
GILMORE: That’s a very interesting question...[laughter] it doesn’t consist of that any more. At that time, it was the German Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, Berlin, Austria, and Switzerland. It was a very busy office, and a lot of voltage passed through that office every day. Lots of Berlin action. The Federal Republic by itself was worth an office. We had some interesting questions with Austria. Kurt Waldheim, which I can come to in a little while. And even Switzerland, a very delicate question that I believe that I should put on the record, but it’s very delicate.
Q: Alright, well before we turn to Germany, why don’t we do Austria and Switzerland first? So, why don’t we turn to Austria first?
GILMORE: In the case of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, who had been the UN Secretary General, and who had done a good job, I think most people would say, at least a very competent job, was under review. His file was under review in the United States because of alleged wartime activities in Yugoslavia. As I remember it, he was with an intelligence outfit that was part of the Wehrmacht. In any case, as we looked into his case and looked into our files, and looked into his published biography, it was very clear that he had said he was studying in Vienna and in effect mustered out of the Wehrmacht, at the time he was still in Yugoslavia, engaged in some pretty nefarious activities involved with Yugoslav Partisans. We found his biography did in fact misrepresent where he’d been at that time. There was quite a bit of publicity surrounding the case. The question was whether to put him on the watch list, which would have, in effect, made him ineligible for an ordinary visa to the United States, unless there had been a special waiver action.
Secretary of State Shultz met with Attorney General Meese personally one morning, unannounced to us. We got the decision in the office of Central European Affairs, through our deputy assistant secretary, who was by that time Bill Bodde, that we were putting Waldheim on the watch list. We were being very careful how we announced it, but we were to announce it to the Austrian ambassador in Washington first, and then tell our ambassador in Vienna, who was Ronald Lauder [Editor’s Note: Lauder, a political appointee, served as ambassador from May 1986 to October 1987]. We put Waldheim on the watch list. It was very much a blow to the Austrians in general because they took it, many of them, as a black mark against their state. We tried to make it very clear, however, that we had full respect for the institution of the Austrian presidency, and that we meant nothing by this action of putting him on the watch list in terms of a signal to the Austrians about U.S. Austrian relations, but in effect it meant the U.S. embassy in Vienna, the ambassador above all, could no longer have contact with Kurt Waldheim. It meant he was unwelcome in the United States. It was probably one of the lower moments in U.S. Austrian relations in the post World War II period. That being said, Shultz and Meese took the decision in full knowledge of the facts and I’m sure George Shultz, who
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was in my view a model of probity, took it after very careful consideration.
Q: Now, how did this affect you when this happened? I mean with your relations with your Austrian embassy and colleague. What were you getting and what where you getting back from our embassy?
GILMORE: For the Austrian embassy in Washington, they were very sad, and very crestfallen. One of the Austrian journalists in town, who was also a good friend, met with me about it, and voiced more openly than the embassy people, how disappointed he was and how much he thought his countrymen would resent this. But, in any case, we went ahead. In Vienna, our ambassador to Austria, Ambassador Lauder, didn’t welcome the decision, but I don’t believe he was surprised. He had known Kurt Waldheim as a weekend guest, I believe, because his mother, the very famous and successful Estée Lauder, had had Waldheim, when he was Secretary General, to her home on Long Island as a guest. Perhaps more than once, I believe more than once. But I think he understood the decision. It was very hard for Ambassador Lauder to avoid the kind of contact with Kurt Waldheim, which I believe Secretary Shultz expected. But, in any case, we got over it. There was so much positive in our relationship with Austria that we overcame it pretty quickly.
I might add, though, that a very important moment was occurring in U.S. Austria relations. You can’t, I don’t think, date it specifically by day or month, but we were looking more closely at what Austria had done in terms of treatment of its Jews, and reparations for Austrian Jews after World War II. In a number of ways we were looking at that. I went out to visit the post before we put Kurt Waldheim on the watch list, as I remember, and I called on the head of the Jewish team. He was a real estate broker, a very enterprising young fellow. He made very clear statements. One could call them allegations, but he...I would take them more as factual statements about the shortcomings of the Austrian efforts to make restitution in terms of theft of art, very priceless art, and property, and that sort of thing. Ambassador Lauder, to his credit, when he became the ambassador to Vienna, pursued the whole question of the plight of the Jewish community at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, and the failure to make restitution.
Meanwhile, there were organizations in the United States, particularly those seeking restitution of Jewish property, who had been maintaining that Austria had been given a kind of a free ride anyhow, and in contrast to the Federal Republic of Germany had not really made restitution to Austrian Jews. So, the issue was coming to a head, and it was a touchy one for some Austrian officials. The Austrian embassy in Washington played it very professionally, particularly on the level of the minister counselor, the deputy chief of mission, on down. The ambassador at that time subsequently became President of Austria, so this was a very high powered Austrian embassy.
Q: My understanding...please correct me if I’m wrong...Number one, Austria, going back to the Empire, had a very virulent strain of anti Semitism there and it showed itself with the Anschluss.
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GILMORE: I think that’s quite the case.
Q: .I’ve talked to people who served in Austria later, including up to the present day, and say it’s still there in some cases. Unlike other places that made a serious effort and tried to get rid of this nonsense.
GILMORE: I think there was truth in that. Hitler was born an Austrian near the Austrian German border, in Braunau am Inn, Austria. He was a housepainter in Vienna as a young man, and a budding artist, or a would be fine arts painter. They claim that Hitler really learned his anti Semitism in Austria, in Vienna. It was amazing, as in many cases that I know in Europe and Central Europe in particular, Jews were very important in the cultural and journalistic and other achievements of Austria. In music alone, it’s fantastic. There’s a parallel, by the way, in Budapest, and some other cities. In any case, there was a kind of virulent strain of anti Semitism on the streets and in certain organizations. Certainly, it was strongly felt. I must say, the Austrian ambassador to Washington at the time, Thomas Klestil, didn’t at all like his president being put on the watch list, but he handled himself with considerable dignity. Klestil subsequently became Austria’s president and was, I think, a very able representative of the Austrian state internationally. This was a very touchy time. John Whitehead, who was the deputy secretary of state during that period, had a close personal relationship with Ambassador Klestil. They played tennis. But nobody budged when it came to putting Kurt Waldheim on the watch list.
Q: What about Russian Jewish refugees coming through Austria and all? Was this still going on?
GILMORE: Well, the Austrians had been, by and large, magnificent in the way they would handle refugees. They were a model. It’s a small country, and they still do it, by the way. They were getting a little more selective in some cases, particularly about refugees who were clearly coming for economic purposes and who may even have a shady or even criminal background. But the Austrians were doing fine throughout this period. It was very interesting. It was an important chapter in U.S. Austrian relations, although at times an uneasy one. The journalist that I was speaking of, Klaus Emmerich, was a very distinguished journalist in Washington. My wife and I knew him and his wife. We went to dinner with them after Kurt Waldheim was put on the list. I remember just how downcast he was. He was reviewing in his own mind the whole question of whether Austria’s record, in terms of handling the Jewish reparations question, and Nazi war criminals question, was going to come under review. And I think, in a way, it has, but there were other people in the U.S. government who felt very strongly and with some considerable evidence on their side, too, that Austria had been given a kind of free ride. Particularly after the war, of course, Austria was occupied for a period of time, and after the state treaty Austria became fully independent. Austria really wasn’t held up to anything like the same standards as the Federal Republic of Germany, which, by the way, made full restitution and went out of its way, and continues in many ways to go out of its
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way to accept responsibility, if one can ever accept responsibility, for the Holocaust.
Q: While you were doing this, ’85 to ’87, did relations with Hungary come up? Were you seeing a change in Hungary that was affecting Austria?
GILMORE: I had served in Hungary, so I cared about Hungary. I knew about the Austrian Hungarian, I have to be careful not to say Austro Hungarian, connections. The Deputy Chief of Mission at the Austrian embassy was very much into the whole question of reconstituting Central Europe, which would have given Austria, and of course Hungary, the Czech lands, Slovakia, a special kind of satisfaction, in a kind of reaffirmation of an historical identity. He and I talked, and I could see the Austrians were doing everything they could, bilaterally, to try to work out good relationships not only with the Hungarians, but also with the Czechs and the Slovaks, but particularly the Czechs. There were issues. In the case of the Czechs, there was a nuclear power plant near the Austrian border that the Austrians didn’t believe was safe. But, by and large, the Austrians went far more of their share of the distance toward rapprochement with these countries, and I think deserve credit for it. Of course, I would also say it was very much in their enlightened self interest.
Q: During this time, were there any reflections coming out of Czechoslovakia? Czechoslovakia was still pretty hard line at that time...
GILMORE: Yes, we could see it on the cultural side, but basically Vaclav Havel was pretty much a dissident at that time. The Czech independent intellectuals and dissidents never went to sleep, but they were pretty well muted by the regime, not by their own actions at that time. Of course, ’68 had been almost two decades ago, but it still was a powerful memory.
Q: How about Switzerland? Let’s turn to Switzerland.
GILMORE: In the case of Switzerland, this is very delicate. The Swiss embassy in Washington was extremely capable. The ambassador, whose name was [Klaus] Jacobi, had been a very senior member of the Swiss foreign ministry. He had been number two before he came. And his number two, David de Pury, was one of the single most capable diplomats I’ve ever met anywhere. They by and large fended for themselves well in Washington and didn’t want to go through the desk for the things they could do directly with other parts of the government and we had no problem with them on that.
There was a very sensitive issue in U.S. Swiss relations though. It was a sensitivity I learned about firsthand when I visited Switzerland about halfway through my tenure. I was there visiting the embassy. The politically appointed ambassador, Faith Ryan Whittlesey, had become a kind of friend. She was a Pennsylvanian and so was I, although I didn’t know her real well. In the middle of my consultations in the foreign office with a senior officer from the embassy I think a political officer accompanied me and served as a notetaker I was asked by the deputy foreign minister, the number two, to meet him
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alone. He ushered me into a room, and as I remember, we were, indeed, alone. He asked me to please convey the message, and he was not going to give it to me in writing...please convey the message that Switzerland would dearly like to have a career American ambassador the next time around. He thought that Switzerland had been assigned a number of competent and very well intentioned political appointees in the recent past, but it was the considered judgment of the Swiss government that they would like a career ambassador and they believed that U.S. Swiss relations would benefit. I carried this message back and gave it personally to some senior levels, as I remember, the assistant secretary for European affairs, and director general of the Foreign Service, George Vest. I remember giving it to George Vest. It was a very touchy time because it was at a time when Ambassador Whittlesey was being, I think investigated may be too strong a word, but she was under scrutiny from Congress, the House, Congressman Dan Mica (D. FL), particularly, and maybe a couple of his fellow committee people, for allegedly misusing the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Switzerland to host senior Reagan Administration officials, etc. I don’t want to get into that because, I have no...
Q: It’s in the papers. It was certainly something that was in the papers. And Faith Whittlesey drew a lot of lightning, let’s say, publicly.
GILMORE: Right. I have tremendous empathy for her. Her husband had died a tragic death, she raised children, raised them well. One of whom, as I remember, had a learning problem. He was dyslexic. She was doing what she, according to her, thought best for the United States, but it was a very touchy period. I mention this, because I think it deserves to be on the record, although, I don’t mention it with any malice toward her. She treated me very well.
Q: This does, of course, raise the subject of assigning political appointees to places where you could get by on English, nice places and all, and this was...currency in kind for the political guy who was trying to get a president elected. This was a nice assignment to send somebody to.
GILMORE: And many of these political appointees have done wonderful work. I have come to the conclusion, after many years in the Foreign Service, that a well chosen political appointee can bring some great strengths to the U.S. bilateral relationship with a given country, particularly if they have access high in the administration. But I just mention this because I think it deserves to be on the historical record.
Q: Yes, just looking at this. For Switzerland from 1957, going up to 1990, we’ve had two career ambassadors, and one, two, three... and twelve non career ambassadors, which gives you a feel for…
GILMORE: What the Swiss were...
Q: They could feel that they were not getting top caliber people, because they weren’t.
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GILMORE: It was interesting. Shortly thereafter Dick Vine was assigned to Switzerland as ambassador. From all I learned subsequently, he was very well thought of. He was very professional, and the Swiss were delighted to have him. And there were important issues. They may not sound important to some people, but they were important. Money laundering, and other issues we had with the Swiss. Also, some important relationships were run out of Bern. For example, any U.S. dialogue with Iran to this day is run out of Bern. So, the Swiss capital was an important diplomatic post for some non bilateral issues.
Q: Was the money, Jewish assets, was this much of an issue when you were there?
GILMORE: With Switzerland, no, it wasn’t at that point. That came later. Money laundering, and the question of how the United States would operate with the Swiss to investigate money laundering, came up and the Swiss were forthcoming, but very discrete and very, very conscious of doing any business with us. They did business with us on a strictly professional basis and as equals.
Q: Well, turning to, at that time, the two Germanys.
GILMORE: Yes, there was plenty of voltage, as I said, going through the office. Imagine the relationship with the Federal Republic. It was fascinating. Dynamic. Foreign Minister Genscher, who was already, I think, the senior foreign minister in Europe, in terms of longevity, and was about to be...wrote numerous letters to Secretary Shultz, so we had that going on all the time. In fact, we used to say that he writes Secretary Shultz at least once a month, sometimes every Friday. The reason I would say that, I would get... the German foreign office, of course, closes before Washington and the State Department close. Very often on a Friday evening, the political counselor from the German embassy would arrive with a message from Genscher. Also, we had the very important quadripartite dialogue with the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany. It started around Berlin, the quadripartite party sponsors of Berlin, and Berlin was still important to it. But it also evolved into a kind of very special forum for discussion of important issues. The assistant secretary for European affairs was the U.S. participant in that kind of a permanent quadripartite group, and that person’s counterparts, they would sort of be the senior political person in the foreign ministries of France, England, and Germany continued, and then went up to the foreign minister level. So I traveled a lot because I was responsible as kind of a notetaker for any Shultz Genscher meetings, or any quadripartite meetings. There was always something going on in the U.S. German relationship.
One important thing from the U.S. administration’s point of view, the Reagan Administration’s point of view, was the question of how German companies would participate in Star Wars contracts. We called them Star Wars. A number of countries with advanced technology, like the Germans, wanted to be sure that their businesses that flew their flag could participate. Germany was a little more complicated because a chunk of important German know how and industrial prowess was in the western sectors of Berlin.
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And how Berlin based industries could work or not work touched on the whole question of Allied rights. So, when we negotiated that agreement, there was quite a bit of detail that had to be worked out. Weinberger was the signatory on our side, and the Germans...
Q: It was Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense.
GILMORE: Secretary of Defense. And, on the German side, they wanted to be careful to emphasize that they thought it was a commercial issue, not a defense issue. So, Martin Bangemann, the economics minister, negotiated for them. But that was an important moment.
In terms of the German Democratic Republic, they were still riding pretty high. Many people thought that they were doing very well in terms of their industrial prowess, and they were, in a way, compared to the other countries of the Warsaw Pact. But they were, as we subsequently saw, not nearly as successful as they tried to portray. But they were on a kind of a roll. They brought Katarina Witt, who was then the women’s world champion in figure skating. She was a beautiful young girl, very personable. Ambassador Herter, who was a very gifted diplomat, put on a pretty good show in Washington. We had a lot of issues with him, particularly where, we didn’t deal with him directly, they were kind of making trouble in our view, on Berlin.
Perhaps the most important issue was one that my deputy, Michael Habib handled. At least the most exciting. I was out one afternoon. When I came back, my deputy was just finishing a demarche to the East German chargé d’affaires, about evidence that we had that there might be some activity originating in East Berlin against U.S. forces in West Berlin. And sure enough, it wasn’t but a short period of time that the La Belle Disco was bombed on April 5 1986. We didn’t know it was to be La Belle specifically. That would have been in 1986, and as I remember, maybe one GI, I can’t remember whether a GI was killed. Somebody was wounded, and a woman died. I think a third country national in Berlin, a resident of Berlin, died. But I think this was subsequently shown to be an act of terrorism. [Editor’s Note; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_Berlin_discotheque_bombing]
Q: It was tied to Libya, which we bombed.
GILMORE: We didn’t bomb exactly Reegabum, but it was pretty clear that there was an enabling role played by the German Democratic Republic, at least in our best judgment.
Q: What was the GDR response?
GILMORE: They just said they would get their message back to their capital as quickly as they could. I remember they never said much to us, at least in Washington, afterward.
Q: Were you getting...I mean, this would be an intelligence matter…but the fact that we were sending a demarche to them, and something happened, and we practically killed
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Qadhafi, I mean we bombed the hell out of his place...
GILMORE: Well, we knew, by the time we got all the intelligence sorted out. It was a whole question of protecting sources and methods. We knew very clearly, I want to be very careful here, because it’s probably still highly classified. We knew from our very good intercept capabilities in Berlin, and they were excellent for reasons you might guess. We knew exactly that there had been such and such a conversation. We knew who was talking to whom.
Q: Well, with this, and our reaction to this, it certainly wasn’t in the GDR’s interests to be playing the Arab game, you know.
GILMORE: And I don’t think they would have wanted GIs hurt.
Q: No, but I’ve seen this. Were we getting anything? Maybe they didn’t announce it, but that was sort of the... they said, “That’s it fellas, no more playing around in our country.” And this sort of thing. Were you getting any indication of that?
GILMORE: We didn’t. If it happened, I didn’t know about it. I subsequently moved from the office director job in Central European affairs to Berlin as the minister and deputy commandant, so I probably would have been in the loop. There’s one other thing I should mention on the German Democratic Republic. Our assistant secretary for European Affairs was Ambassador Rozanne Ridgway. She had just been ambassador to the German Democratic Republic. She was very, very aware and motivated to do something about the question of reparations to Jews. The GDR had not paid any reparations. In fact, they always took the position that Honecker himself took that the GDR was representative of the part of Germany that was anti Nazi. Had nothing to do with the Nazi regime and was not responsible for its acts. That’s another story.
In any case, she was working on a special arrangement, first as ambassador, then as assistant secretary. We in the office of Central European Affairs were trying to develop an arrangement which was to allow the GDR certain special trade benefits linked specifically to them paying reparations to Jews who had been robbed of their property or special possessions. She’d already, as ambassador, worked on another important, symbolically very important issue, which was some art. I remember particularly some paintings from Lyonel Feininger, a fine artist, which had been in possession of Jews that had lived in what became the GDR and had never been returned. But that issue was very much on the table as well. Although, I’ll write a footnote here, it finally got resolved after the reunification, when in effect, as I understand it, the Federal Republic stepped up to the plate and took responsibility for the restitution cases that the GDR should have itself handled.
Q: What was your impression of the GDR at that time. We didn’t know it, but it was the last few years of existence. Was it dynamic? Ossifying? What was happening?
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GILMORE: Well, their diplomacy in Washington was pretty good. What had already happened, and I knew this from my Eastern European Affairs background, a number of the Warsaw Pact embassies began to send very capable envoys to Washington who worked a bilateral relationship as best they could within the strictures of being loyal to the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. Herter, the GDR ambassador, was one of those. My own judgment was always that the GDR was an artificial creation and wouldn’t last forever. I want to be very careful to say I was not prescient and I didn’t know the Wall would come down in a few years, etc. But I personally…the more I looked at the GDR, I saw it as increasingly in difficulty economically. By the way, that was a minority view, among some Germans, among many Germans on the U.S. side. Some of them would say, particularly those who had served in the GDR, would say “why it’s the sixth largest economy in the world”. I always found that...I was always skeptical, I had always found that unconvincing because basically, the GDR economy was already quite dependent on the Federal Republic economy. That being said, we didn’t see any serious domestic unrest in the GDR at that point…that was ’85 – ’87. Now, that changed very, very substantially, really, it really didn’t change until ’89...and we can talk about that more explicitly when I’m in Berlin. But, we watched that, we could see change happen.
Q: Well, was anybody... you mentioned, many people were saying, East Germany’s pretty hot stuff, economically, and all...Was anybody taking a look at the product that came out, rather than the statistics? Because it turned out that the products that were coming out of East Germany were not at all up to the standards so that they could really be used by the Western world when they came....
GILMORE: There was an exaggeration in general, until well into the ’80s, of the economic potential of the Warsaw Pact. If you could just think about how we overestimated and overrated the Soviet economy. It was smaller than we thought...and of course the GDR economy was very dependent on Soviet and other Warsaw Pact markets for its products, which weren’t up to Western standards, with very rare exceptions. Maybe some of the optical equipment. Zeiss, and a few places were acceptable at the low end of certain Western markets. But GDR had very important markets in the Third World. Their prices...they had no idea what the real value of things was because they had no markets to determine prices. They administered prices, they imported successfully from, and particularly exported successfully to a number of countries in Africa and other places in the Third World. They had extensive markets in the Warsaw Pact and I think we maybe didn’t look at the GDR economic situation hard enough. And I don’t want to be at all critical of our embassies to the GDR. We never said anything for legal reasons concerning the status of the GDR. We had a series of very capable ambassadors. John Sherman Cooper, the first, was a very capable senator and a serious ambassador. And if I could just mention some of the others, Frank Meehan [September 1985 to November 1988] was one of the ablest Foreign Service people I worked with. Roz Ridgway [January 1983 to July 1985], another very able person. Richard Barkley, the last ambassador, Dick Barkley [December 1988 to October 1990]. These were all first rate people. I mean back here, in terms of the analytical community. I don’t think we put a tremendous effort on east Germany watching.
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Q: We had this huge apparatus for looking at the Soviet Union. It missed the whole, the major picture. This is one of those things. I guess you get entranced by the Soviets and you can’t see what it really is.
GILMORE: Right. And you look at certain things. The Soviet Union was an extremely successful producer of certain kinds of military goods...tanks, personnel carriers, some aircraft. Some of the Soviet aircraft were very well...
Q: And I’m told that they had good pilots. They’re right up there with our best at the time.
GILMORE: Right, and if they had access to all the materials we had, all the miracle metals and everything else, they would have...they were excellent. So you could get mesmerized by that and not focus on the extreme shortcomings, like public health and housing. It was an abysmal failure in housing. The GDR was somewhat better. We used to always say that anything that the Soviet Union could do in the way of housing construction, the GDR could copy and execute more proficiently, and there was truth to that. But, as I got into the GDR, some few years later on a regular basis, after the reunification of Germany, you could just see how poorly many of the apartment buildings were maintained and constructed.
Q: Was this Stalin Alley and all that, that you see pictures of?
GILMORE: Right, I remember going to Halle, Magdeburg, Sherline, and of course whole sectors of East Berlin. Hellersdorf, Marzahn, were so called workers quarters, were horribly poorly built. They didn’t look badly and they were built as well as they could with the materials, I suspect, but they were in these, what I call, stacked up apartments. They were buildings built, put prefab materials in cranes, and these would be apartment buildings six and eight floors tall, with little apartments, literally stacked on each other. Not well engineered and not designed to last the fifty and one hundred years that some of the older building from the earlier times were. But, in any case, the GDR, when I left the office of Soviet European Affairs in the summer of the summer of ’87, it didn’t look like it was in massive trouble with its people. It was hard to read the whole question of how much discontent there was. There was no one that I talked to or read about who was forecasting the early demise of the GDR.
Q: How did we look upon the GDR military?
GILMORE: We thought they were formidable . There was massive conscription. The army was pretty well outfitted, in terms of weaponry. Lots of training; lots of exercises. We thought they were formidable. Some would say that, soldier for soldier, they were even more capable even than the Soviet group of forces in Germany, which was huge. There were 400,000 Soviet military in the German Democratic Republic when I got to Berlin. Most of them were land forces, although they had a very considerable air
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capability, which exercised all the time. So, you had to look closely. We would get reports through our embassy in the GDR and here and there from military missions who had an enormous source of good intelligence on the Soviet forces in Germany about how poorly the soldiers ate, how they only had one uniform that was wool and how much they suffered in the summer with those hot uniforms. You could get anecdotal evidence that that Soviet presence was not the capable power it seemed to be on paper. I think by and large we thought the GDR was more capable, given the level of equipment it had. The Soviet group of forces however had better equipment, some of the best they had. And as our military planners in West Germany used to say, the Federal Republic, they used to say, “The Soviets have way more tubes than we have.” What they mean by tubes, they mean cannon, artillery, and all kinds of firepower.
But by the time I left the Central European Affairs office and went to Berlin, the GDR looked like it had serious economic problems, but it didn’t look like it was about to totter. And of course, an important factor in the GDR tottering, was in fact Glasnost and Perestroika in the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s own view of the need for reform. In many ways, the best and most important reformer in the GDR was Mikhail Gorbachev. He pushed hard and you could see it. They were totally on different wavelengths.
Q: When you were dealing with East Germany from Washington, did you see this earthquake in the Soviet Union at that time with Gorbachev?
GILMORE: No, I began to see that once I got to Berlin. That’s a very interesting chapter too, because I had a very close relationship with my Soviet counterpart in Berlin, who turned out to be a very capable diplomat and a very fine fellow. And people may think I’m soft on this or that by saying that, but it’s dead true.
Q: Yes. Now, how about one of the issues that would come up quite often, and we’d get involved in that, and that is family reunification. We’d have Americans who had relatives in East Germany who are trying to get out. Did we have any cases of that?
GILMORE: Ambassador Ridgway, when she was there, under Deputy Jim Wilkinson, Ambassador Meehan, they pushed those cases, and there weren’t many of them, so the GDR could resolve a number of them over time, not all of them, but resolved them and pretty well got points with us, so to speak. Where the real family reunification problem, of course, was in between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic and there were other mechanisms, buying people out, which was done.
Q: Yes, I understand this was quite a trade.
GILMORE: Yes, it was done on a pretty extensive scale. I don’t fault the Federal Republic for doing it, if it was the only way to get certain things done. The onus, in my view, was on the German Democratic Republic for selling people, in effect.
Q: Now, moving to the Bundesrepublik, what were the issues that you were mainly
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dealing with there?
GILMORE: All the NATO issues, a number of trade issues, including, as I said, the special issue of the Star Wars contracts. We occasionally had some differences, not major differences, over Berlin. Because, while the Federal Republic understood in a way the importance of Berlin status...Berlin, of course, was not part of the Federal Republic. Berlin was basically under international law, an occupied city, and until there was a peace treaty, which there hadn’t been, the Federal Republic was not sovereign. It was a very sore spot. The Federal Republic, of course, financed Berlin from the federal budget. Subsidized it very lavishly in terms of the arts. West Berlin was a Mecca, particularly for opera, music. Of course, East Berlin by the way was a showcase too. In fact, I would argue that the cultural power of Berlin, the two parts together during that period was unrivaled by any of the other great cities, New York, even, Paris, Rome.
But in any case, when it came to the specifics of Berlin, the Federal Republic would get impatient. We’d see it at my level, at the office director level. I’d take my Berlin desk officer. And we’d have them at the level of the assistant secretary, Ambassador Ridgway. And we’d have them at the level of Secretary Shultz. It was always some tension over the Federal Republic. Genscher particularly, who after all had a home town called Halle, which he cared deeply about, and who cared first and foremost about any general issues. Don’t let anybody kid you. Very capable man, by the way. But on another level, we had wonderful personal relationships with individual West German diplomats. We were good friends, we were good colleagues, many of them very gifted. You could have all kinds of personal fun with them. It was a fun relationship. That being said, they very much worked for Genscher. We always got the feeling, unless Helmut Kohl, who was Chancellor during that period, unless he cared personally about an issue, it was Genscher’s view that the West German embassy was trying to push.
Q: Well, Genscher was FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei – Free Democratic Party). He came from a small, but crucial party.
GILMORE: Right. It kept being the coalition maker.
Q: He was sort of running foreign policy. But in a way, was Germany still hesitant about exerting his power on the world stage, would you say?
GILMORE: On some issues, yes. Economically, no. When we had to deal with the Germans on sticky issues, for example, German firms exporting dual purpose chemicals to Iran and Iraq, and similar issues, the Germans could be very tough. Very, very tough in protecting their economic interests. I remember we were particularly concerned about certain chemicals to those two countries, Iraq and Iran, particularly Iran at that point, but both.
Q: They were at war at that time.
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GILMORE: Right. And the other point was that we had very good intelligence in some cases. As long as they were dual purpose, and unless we could be very specific, the Germans, the Federal Republic embassy took the point of view...and their ministers too, that came over, their high ranking bureaucrats in Bonn would always say, “Under the German constitution, German firms have a right to export, and we can’t interfere with that unless there are very, very specific conditions.” And they by and large did not lean forward on this issue. By the way that was not an issue that Genscher more than called, or for that matter, more than some Social Democrats. By and large, the Social Democrats, as a party, were more responsible on those issues, in my view. But there was always a hauling and pulling, and there was a certain rivalry, a commercial rivalry that you would expect. Also the Federal Republic was dead set on building Europe. And of course, whenever there were any differences between the European community and the United States, the Germans were right in there fighting hard for the EC position, and fighting well. But by and large I had very good memories of my Federal Republic diplomatic ties.
Q: Well, it’s interesting. Some of the things you’ve been saying would apply to the French. Except, for some reason, the French, even today, were able to get under our skin and were seeming to talk one side and play...and I don’t know if it was a difference in attitude or how it was carried out, or if it was a different policy. I’m talking about working to make France paramount in Europe and selling anything to anybody no matter how odious the regime was, if you could turn a franc, they were doing it.
GILMORE: Well, the Germans, by and large, were operating very much like the French economically. In fact, some critics of Germany in the United States would call them mercantilistic. In fact, some people called it the most successful mercantilist country in the Twentieth Century, the Federal Republic. I wouldn’t go quite that far. But there was some truth in that. Where the Germans were careful was on the big time political issues. They worked very closely with the French, and the French German relationship was extremely important to whoever the Chancellors were. The Chancellor and the French President, Mitterrand and Kohl, etc., etc. But the Germans would shy away from clashing with the United States on really central political issues. They might back France tacitly, but when they had to choose between France and the United States they would duck and not offend the United States. I think that is a generalization.
But the other thing I should say about that office, the office of Central European Affairs, Berlinery, as we called it, was a constant generator of hard work. The Berlin desk officer position was one of the best positions for a middle grade foreign service officer I could think of. There was always some problem or another with Berlin, and some access problems, some problem we had to make a demarché with the Soviets on. Sometimes worse problems. People were still being shot at the Wall. So the Berlin operation in the office of Central European Affairs, was sometimes on a given workday, the most significant thing the EC director dealt with. So, I must say, of all the jobs I’ve had in the State Department, I think that position, and of all things, the Yugoslav desk, were the busiest. Although I have to quickly say that being deputy director for the East European and Yugoslav Affairs office was extremely busy too.
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Q: There had been this constant pressure, going back to 1964 8, on Berlin. You know, I always go back, how far can you lower tailgates and all this? And there was a big book filled up about what you can and can’t do to make sure that your position in Berlin would not be whittled away.
GILMORE: Right.
Q: But now, here we’re moving towards, really the end game. But we didn’t know it.
GILMORE: No.
Q: But did you find a diminution in pressure?
GILMORE: I found an increasing impatience with our colleagues in West Berlin, when I got to Berlin, and with the Federal Republic, with Allied status issues. But, in the end, it was very important to maintain status. Very important. Because when we negotiated the end of the Second World War in Berlin, that Allied status had been very carefully preserved. Nobody questioned it. In fact, it became of interest to the Soviets, paradoxically, because the four power rights were all they had left, when basically the GDR was no longer a willing ally. But there was great impatience with this.
Q: But, during this time, ’85 – ’87, were there still attempts of the sort of what I would call nibbling tactics, trying to...
GILMORE: From GDR... always. Always, the GDR and also, and... Aviation would be one area where the Allies were the only ones who had a right to have carriers flying to the Western sectors of Berlin, and there would be problems like Austria. We leaned on the Austrians, don’t fly directly from Vienna to East Berlin. They didn’t listen.
Q: Why didn’t we want that?
GILMORE: Because it would build up East Berlin as a center of aviation, and diminish the importance of West Berlin. And, the Federal Republic, in its way, didn’t want that either. But the Austrians thought that would be a lucrative route, and guess where their passengers went? Straight from Schönefeld Airport in East Berlin, to West Berlin. So, what it did was undercut the Western carriers’ service to Berlin. The Austrians knew it. I knew the Austrian consul general in Berlin when I got to Berlin. But, I mean the Austrian embassy in Washington. We made presentation after presentation, but they still, Austrian Air, still made a decision to fly to Schönefeld. We said, “If you want to fly to Berlin, what you need to do is take your passengers in the Federal Republic and let them get on one of the Allied carriers and go to Tegel,” which was the airport in West Berlin. It was that kind of issue. A lot of haggling. We didn’t have a lot of success, although we worked hard at it. In retrospect, I’m not sorry. Because I think the maintenance of the status...
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Q: Well, it kept things together.
GILMORE: The impatience of the Federal Republic was important. Let me give you an example. The security in Berlin was not something the Federal Republic could do a damned thing about. Not a damned thing, except diplomatically. Had it not been for the United States, Britain, and France, when the Soviets wanted to put pressure on Berlin or even the GDR, who was going to be around to be responsible for it, to stand up to it? And if there was any pressure on Berlin, it had to be the Allies. And of course, the extreme case was ’48, the blockade; but then in ’58, wasn’t it, when Khrushchev made the famous ultimatum?
There was pressure... that was when we got the famous quote attributed to Khrushchev, was “When I want to put pressure on the West, I squeeze Berlin by the... “ like squeezing their testicles.
Q: Yes.
GILMORE: That was it. But there was an ultimatum in ’58 as well. Of course, the Two Power Summit, in Vienna, Kennedy Khrushchev. Khrushchev talked very threateningly about Berlin. And of course, they had the Wall go up on Kennedy’s watch. Although Kennedy took some very important diplomatic steps and sent General Lucius Clay, the former commandant, the hero of the Airlift, and that sort of thing. But there were limits to what we could do. Just think, if it weren’t for us what would have happened in the Western sectors of Berlin, if it was just the Soviet Union dealing with the Federal Republic. Berlin would have been part of an integrated German Democratic Republic and there would be no such thing, perhaps, as a reunified Germany. And, worse, what language?
Q: I know that much of the time when I was in the Foreign Service in ’55 on, that one of the concerns we’d all have... “There’s going to be World War III. It’ll probably start over Berlin. One of the scenarios that one would think about would be somehow an uprising in East Berlin that would get out of hand.
GILMORE: And then would be put down bloodily.
Q: And then somehow the West Germans couldn’t stand aside and things could move out.
GILMORE: Right.
Q: Had that scenario, I take it by the time you were dealing with it pretty well, faded away?
GILMORE: In the GDR it started in September of ’89, down in Leipzig, the so called Friedensgebet (prayer for peace), the prayer that went on, was it every Monday night. It started from a small group of people until it became, at one point, 500,000 people in
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Leipzig! The point is that we didn’t worry at that time so much about the East German regime even being able to crackdown. We worried a bit, but the East German regime was by that time, in a funny position. Honecker was in effect on his last legs. I’m jumping now to ’89. He got cancer and he had some operations and of course he was ultimately ousted shortly after the GDR’s 40th anniversary. But by that time what we were worried about was that there might be heavy East German provocations in terms of people in some way demonstrating against Soviet troops and causing some reaction there. The demonstrations might turn violent. It was pretty clear to me once I was in Berlin dealing with my Soviet counterpart on a daily basis, that the last thing he wanted to see and the last thing Gorbachev wanted to see was Soviet troops getting into any kind of conflict with GDR people.
Q: I remember, I was an enlisted man in Darmstadt in Germany in 1953, and there were riots in Berlin, in East Berlin. We were all confined to the barracks. I didn’t realize how, this could have been quite serious.
GILMORE: It was and they were put down with great bloodshed, or considerable bloodshed. Great is too strong. Considerable bloodshed. There was always concern that that would happen again throughout the ’50s and then in the ’60s. But by the time we actually got to the foment in the GDR and the actual demonstrations, while we were always worried about the Volkspolizei, that was the police that guarded the Wall, because they had orders to shoot. We were always worried about them mowing down citizens trying to get into Berlin at the Wall. Or mowing them down at the borders where they had, at one period of time in the ’70s, the GDR had installed automatic weaponry that I think was triggered by sensors. We worried about that, and I must say when the foment occurred in the GDR in the fall of ’89, we did worry about it at some point. But we worried, in a way as we watched this thing evolve, I think we worried more about Soviet troops being provoked.
Q: Yes. Again, during ’85 to ’87, how would you say your office was evaluating Helmut Kohl?
GILMORE: I think we saw him as strong, very much in control, although giving Genscher quite a bit of latitude at the foreign ministry. I think we saw him as pretty staunchly pro U.S., although very much committed to taking full advantage of Germany’s sovereignty in the economic sphere, particularly trade and that sort of thing. But, we always saw him as a person you could talk to and who was a firm believer in the U.S. German relationship and in the NATO alliance. I think we saw him that way. There were people who saw some down sides to this or that aspect of Kohl’s personality. But by and large I saw him as a very tough political leader who had a tremendous power base in his own party that he built over a long number of years of knowing his colleagues, taking care of the ones who were helpful, dispensing patronage. I think I personally was not surprised when we learned that some of the financing was illegal.
Q: I was wondering whether we were looking at this. Because both in Germany and
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France, it sort of came out that an awful lot of money was being dispensed.
GILMORE: My mentor, as I said that earlier in this interview, my mentor in Munich did things very well. He had made it very clear to me how parties were financed. He was a pretty calm and careful observer. He had made it plain to me that he thought Helmut Kohl was very much in the fund raising business; including taking what he could get and soliciting what he could get from industrialists, doing favors. Here, I want to be careful, I don’t want to cast more aspersions on the Federal Republic than I would on the United States. I mean that’s how parties often fill their coffers.
Q: I was interviewing two days ago Robert Strauss, who was at one point our ambassador to the Soviet Union.
GILMORE: I remember that.
Q: But as a major figure in the Democratic Party, he was talking about how today in Congress, the collegiality has fallen apart because people on both sides are leaving their posts on Thursday, until late Monday, going back home to raise money. They don’t see each other since they are going back and raising money, which is not to the good of the Republic.
GILMORE: No, it doesn’t look like they are focusing on their immediate responsibilities. But in any case, we saw Helmut Kohl as strong. We saw that when he cared about an issue, that he was very capable of defending German’s interests. But we saw him as a stalwart ally, and also as one very much aware of German’s need for a strong United States, particularly in Berlin. Although, I would say, Berlin was not on the front burner for the Federal Republic government during that period, after Willy Brandt and Ostpolitik had changed the atmosphere and had changed the kind of arrangements that were possible between the GDR and the Federal Republic. The Berlin question was more or less regulated in terms of the broader picture. So I don’t think Kohl ate, slept and drank Berlin.
Q: Did you get any feel, obviously you were down at a different level, but was there any feel for the relationship between Kohl and Ronald Reagan?
GILMORE: I didn’t. Kohl of course visited during my time as a director. I remember the dinner that was given was actually given by Chief Justice Rehnquist. For some reason, Reagan wasn’t able to do the dinner. It wasn’t a real chummy relationship, I don’t think. But it was close and I think the two of them saw eye to eye on larger world issues. They were comfortable with each other. It’s clear they relied on each other. But they didn’t put up the telephone lines and leave messages and didn’t exchange a lot of letters. If they did, it should have gone through the desk, and I didn’t see any. In other words, if there was a personal correspondence, it was run out of the NSC, not out of the Department.
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Q: Today is the 7th of April, 2003.
It’s on to Berlin. You were there from ’87 to when?
GILMORE: From August of ’87 to August of ’91. The most eventful time in many ways except for the building of the Wall or the Berlin Airlift.
Q: Yes. Can you talk about what your job was and what the situation was in ’87 in Berlin. Sort of set the picture.
GILMORE: Right. My position was U.S. Minister and Deputy Commandant of the American Sector. The way Berlin had been structured for any number of years was that the U.S. ambassador in Bonn was the chief of mission in Berlin. Also he had a residence in Berlin. And, of course, he was still our representative to anything quadripartite. Just like the British ambassador in Bonn, the French ambassador in Bonn, and the Soviet ambassador to the German Democratic Republic. Then the second in command, on paper at least and certainly in terms of rank, was the U.S. Commandant of the American Sector in Berlin, always a two star general, always had been in recent memory. He was the deputy chief of mission in Berlin and the Commandant of the American Sector. I had a third title, which was the Assistant Chief of Mission. In effect, I ran the U.S. mission in Berlin, just like my British counterpart ran the British mission. I was, in effect, the ambassador’s deputy for Berlin. Not that the commandants weren’t important, but over the decade and a half or more, the political action was with the Berlin city government, the Senat, not a parliamentary body. The Senat of Berlin was actually the cabinet of the city government. The Parliamentary body was actually the House of Representatives of Berlin. But in any case, my job was liaison with the Senat to work with the British and French in the Western sectors of Berlin and in the allied bodies in Berlin. And also, very importantly, to conduct the day to day business with the Soviets in Berlin. My counterpart was the deputy chief of mission of the Soviet embassy to the GDR. He was also the counterpart of the British and French ministers. That was our contact with the Soviets over Berlin matters. I could go into more depth, but anybody who wishes can read any number of sources on how Berlin was structured.
In any case, my deputy was not called a DCM, or a deputy chief of mission in a formal sense, although he functioned as one. His title was political advisor. He was also an economic advisor, public safety officer, very important, because the three Western allies were sovereign in the western quarters of Berlin, just as we saw the Soviets as sovereign over their sector of Berlin, until such time as there was a peace treaty. What that sovereignty meant was if the Berlin police were to take any action that touched on or might have touched on the Four Powers’ areas of responsibility, they had to get a green light from the Western allies. Each month, one of the allies was the chairman, it was always the minister who was the chairman. That month, if the Berlin police needed to do anything that touched on Allied responsibilities, it would be U.S. sector commandant, minister, and the public safety officer who worked for the minister.
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Q: Who were some of your top people there?
GILMORE: At that time, my deputy, the political advisor, was Jim Williams, James Williams, a distinguished Germanist. Later, he got the title of ambassador for being the special envoy for Cyprus. Elizabeth Jones was the economic advisor, the first one. She is now the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, and in a larger sense for Europe and Canada. The larger sense of the word because her Europe reaches all the way to Vladivostok. Then subsequently John Nix became my deputy, the political advisor, although only for a short time, because by that time, we were in a new configuration. Berlin had become part of the united Germany. I had two different public safety advisors. When the Wall opened, that’s the key position, was Frank Collins. Before that Joe Limprecht. But one of my other colleagues was Andrew Goodman who was the protocol officer. Extremely important position, because the protocol officer had the day to day liaison with the Soviet embassy to the German Democratic Republic and with his Allied counterparts. Those are the key positions. There are more. There was a lot going on in Berlin. For example, there was an extensive intelligence presence. And of course, a very large U.S. military apparatus headed by the commandant of the American Sector.
Q: Let’s start off with relationships. What were your relationships, first with the Soviets?
GILMORE: The Soviet minister, the deputy chief of mission of the Soviet embassy in East Berlin was Mr. Igor Machsimichev, a senior Soviet German European specialist. He spoke fluent German and French. He was a very capable fellow, also a very correct and knowledgeable colleague, and I grew to admire him quite a lot. I think it was mutual. I have to say in all frankness, by the time it was all over, we were friends, including my wife and his wife, Anna, who was a German teacher in Russia before she’d become a diplomat’s wife. The British minister was Michael Burton, now Sir Michael Burton. I had two different French colleagues. The first one left before the Wall opened, Jean Marc Verkel. The second one was Serge Boidevaix. I had very close relationships with all of these people. I would say particularly with Michael Burton, who was the senior minister in terms of time in Berlin. He’d been there already about a year before I got there; in fact, he stayed well after me.
The ministers gathered regularly for just ministerial meetings, once a month, taking turns in the residence of the chairman minister of that month. The Allies, of course, gathered with the Berlin Senat, that means the governing mayor, the chief of the Senat’s Kanzlei, or Chancellery, was pretty much the mayor’s right hand person. We also had many meetings with the minister for Inter German Affairs, when that person came up from Bonn, the Federal Republic minister. Also, with various and sundry members of the Berlin Senat as needed. We had quite close relationships with our German colleagues as well.
In fact, I would say, having served in Munich and having been the director for Central European Affairs in Washington, Berlin provided a unique opportunity for Americans to
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work closely with Germans. Of course, the Berlin Germans weren’t, technically speaking, part of the Federal Republic. Under international law, Berlin did not belong to the Federal Republic, was not a constituent part of it. It’s deputies to the Bundestag, the German Parliament, couldn’t vote, for example.
But I would also add that I had quite close and constructive, and I think highly productive, relationships with the two different governing mayors. The first one was Eberhard Diepgen, who was a Christian Democrat. He lost the election of March ’89, so my colleague then was Walter Momper. He was subsequently voted out, and Diepgen came back toward the end of my four years. So, I had Mr. Diepgen as governing mayor twice, Walter Momper once. Mr. Momper was a Social Democrat. I had quite cordial relationships with both and also they could be tough, because there were issues on which the Berlin Senat and the Berlin governing mayor sometimes got a little impatient with the Allies in terms of thinking we were not flexible enough.
Q: Can you give some examples, or an example?
GILMORE: Some of it would have to do with very sensitive issues that we couldn’t talk about in public at all. I will be careful how I describe this. The Allies were responsible for the security of Berlin. We made no secret that we took that very seriously and there was a whole history of provocation by the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, so we had to be careful. One of the things we did was conduct surveillance in Berlin. Some intelligence operations were also conducted in Berlin. Here I’m talking about surveillance of mail coverage, telephone coverage. We couldn’t divulge any of that to anybody, except especially cleared people in our own establishment. But there was a kind of a resentment over that from time to time.
Also there was a feeling sometimes that we, in the case of Iranians in Berlin...remember, if Iranians were in East Berlin, they could also come over to West Berlin, to western sectors, Iranians accredited to the GDR. There was a question of certain radical Arabs, some Palestinians, the kind of people who organized the La Belle disco bombing, and Libya was bombed by President Reagan because of it. Those were areas of some slight tension.
Occasionally, too, there was a feeling that the Allies were an anachronism. You would feel that, strangely enough I felt it more from the Christian Democratic government when it was in power, it was a Christian Democrat Free Democrat coalition, than I felt from the Red/Green Coalition. The shushu Democrats and the Greens. That may be counter intuitive, but it was the case. But in any case, the feeling wasn’t that the German Federal Republic and then Berlin hadn’t proved themselves good democrats, and they were, and capable administrators, and they were, and therefore, they should be given even more scope to conduct their affairs in Berlin. The problem was international law, and the Western right to be there. Because that had been challenged very severely; Khrushchev and his ultimatum of 1958, but by the way it followed a statement he’d made at a diplomatic reception in Moscow. He basically told the Allies to close their military
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missions and go home. Close their military establishments, close their military operations in Berlin, unilaterally. We never allowed that, we always held the Soviets to what we saw as legal commitments we’d all made in ‘44 and ’45 and afterwards, concerning Berlin. In any case, the whole question of Berlin status and what the status reserved for the Allies, as Allied responsibilities, could become sensitive to the Berlin Senat and the Berlin governing mayor.
Q: So often, in my interviews with people who dealt in international things note that the French often veer off in a different direction. Did you find this happening here?
GILMORE: Less. One of the most pleasurable things working in Berlin was the very close relationship we had with the British and the French. While the French were very careful about their sovereignty and their sovereign rights in their sector, of course their sector hadn’t been provided for in the original Berlin agreement; it was between the Americans, British, and the Soviets. The French sector was subsequently added at the expense of the other two western sectors. But the French were very careful about their Berlin obligations. The French had a very well staffed establishment in Berlin. They always chose a very capable commandant, and also a very capable brigade commander. The brigade commanders were usually one stars, brigadiers, very carefully chosen by the United States. Both brigade commanders went on to bigger things in the Army. One of them went on to three stars, the two from my time. In fact, in some ways, they went on farther in the Army than the commandants, who were already two stars and very capable as well. But, in any case, the French were careful about how their sector operated. Very jealous of their rights should anybody challenge them, but we really had no reason to challenge them. They worked well with us in various Allied bodies. They had one or two diplomats in their establishment who I would say were gentlemen stars. There were people in there who were as good as anything in the French Foreign Service, and destined for the top.
Q: You’re talking about dealing with the mayor and the Senat. Were they both of the same party or were they separate? Were they two different entities?
GILMORE: The Senat was actually the government. It’s a very misleading thing. It sounds like a cognate for the U.S. Senate, or the Roman Senate, some parliamentary body. But, actually, the Senat was the Berlin government. All of the senators...there would be a senator for justice, a senator for building and construction. The governing mayor picked the Senat. Both governing mayors during my time were heads of coalition governments. The first one was the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats. Eberhard Diepgen headed that; the second one with Walter Momper headed the Social Democrats and the Greens. By the way, it was the first time the Greens had been in the coalition in power in Berlin, and there was great apprehension about how we would get along with them. After Momper was elected in March of ’89, we had a breakfast with him. He’s a very competent, open, very straightforward, friendly man. Very bright as well. And we had a breakfast with him at my deputy’s residence. The commandant and I and my deputy, and Momper and his Senat’s Kanzlei chief, that means the chancellery
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chief, and I believe one or more of his other aides. And we went over very carefully the whole question of what Allied rights were, including any sensitive areas. He understood, but we made the point that there was apprehension in some places about Greens being in the government, for fear they would not understand the special Allied rights and the special Allied responsibilities about Berlin. Momper, I must say, was excellent. The Greens, who had none of the power positions in the Berlin Senat, the Greens turned out to be quite friendly. We’d have them to dinner or breakfast. They came, some of them, in T shirts and tennis shoes and jeans, but they turned out to be wonderful human beings, the ones we dealt with. And one or two of them, for example, turned out to be very capable people, and we got along well. Although, I must say, they really weren’t in on the tough issues where status was concerned. Not directly.
Q: Well, at this time, was there, when you got out there in ’87, Gorbachev had been in power for some time now. Was there a feeling that we were really entering a new era, and was it positive? Or was there concern when things start getting soft, concessions might be made on Berlin which could make us feel very uncomfortable?
GILMORE: Gorbachev was very much a factor. His Glasnost and Perestroika were coming into full flower then, and it was clear that there were differences between Gorbachev and Honecker, who had been and was still the strong man in the German Democratic Republic. Of course the reporting on Honecker in the German Democratic Republic was done by our embassy to the GDR. Very capably led during my time as well by Frank Meehan, first, as ambassador, and then Richard Barkley. In any case, Gorbachev was having an influence, and it was clear that he wanted to push reform in the GDR. In fact, if I could jump ahead of my story a little bit, I would just say that he was a factor in Honecker’s fall, and he personally had much more popularity on the streets of the German Democratic Republic, including Berlin, than Honecker. I may be getting ahead of my story just a little bit because I could talk about the run up to the opening of the Wall and put Gorbachev’s famous visit on the 40th Anniversary of the GDR right into that as part of the context in which, for many in the GDR, meant the Wall to open.
Q: I think we might approach this somewhat chronologically, it probably works. So I’m trying to gather what it was like when you first arrived. Did you have the feeling that big things were going to happen? Or was it entering something that diplomats don’t like, sort of a slippery period where things are changing, and when things are changing you don’t really know what’s going to come out of it.
GILMORE: When I first got there, there were still incidents at the Wall. In fact, in one of my earlier chairmanships at the beginning of 1989, the year the Wall actually opened, I had to make a demarche on behalf of the Allies to Minister Machsimichev at the Soviet Embassy, because there had been shootings. And because there had been escapes. So, the situation at the Wall was still tough. No Man’s Land, and all the various barriers were still in place and the “shoot on sight” order was in force. On the other hand, there was quite a bit going on with inter German relations; the Federal Republic had its permanent representation to the German Democratic Republic, headed by the way some very capable
105 people, some of the best diplomats in the Federal Republic’s service. One of them, in particular, Hans Otto Bräutigam, was, I think, the single most impressive German diplomat wherever I had been. But, there was quite a bit going on in inter German relationships, particularly in trade. Bonn was trying its best to make life as easy as it could, or to make life easier for the population of the GDR, while making it clear that Bonn looked toward the day when there would be peaceful reunification. The policy of the German Democratic Republic was that there should be German unification in a peaceful Europe in a peaceful way, but that there should be free self determination for the GDR. But Bonn’s weight in the diplomatic exchanges with the GDR was heavier and heavier.
The GDR, despite what some folks pointed to as its significant industrial accomplishments, was becoming more and more dependent on the Federal Republic economically, and we watched that. I could see it happening, but it didn’t seem to be happening in any pell mell fashion. It was just a steady, ongoing development. Otherwise, access to Berlin still had to be conducted in the normal ways. If you came from the Federal Republic, you had to go through the right check points, with the right documentation. Soviet soldiers controlled your passport, and actually it was your ID card, from Helmstedt and then again as you entered Berlin. So, what I’m saying is that many aspects of the Berlin situation hadn’t changed really since ’71, since the quadripartite agreement, which the four powers, the British, French, Americans, and Soviets, had negotiated to basically simplify, and to an extent codify, Allied travel arrangements. And also, to make it somewhat easier and more regular for Federal Republic citizens to visit the German Democratic Republic. But there was no substantial change, really, from ’71, from the days of the agreement. The quadripartite agreement set up a Berlin regime which was still very much in operation, and functioning pretty well, given the anomaly of Berlin.
Q: When you arrived, was there still the Soviet testing to ...
GILMORE: There was less of that. Less of that. The Soviets still cared very deeply that the Berlin Air Safety Center supervised air safety in the air corridors. There was a huge Soviet Air Force presence in the German Democratic Republic. The cores, which basically should be seen as three tubes, had to be adjusted in accordance with Soviet military aviation practices, and they were. But the Soviets played an honest, fair game within the rules that had been set up for the Berlin Air Safety Center. That worked. The access regime worked. When there was trouble at the Wall, when somebody was either captured or shot, or whatever, we would raise it with the Soviets. We didn’t get much satisfaction, so to speak. When somebody had been captured and we could see them being taken back, we would say, you know, we would protest, and our Soviet counterparts would hint that there were ways that the two German states could deal with these questions. That was code for a person could be bought out, perhaps. But there was still that regime very much in place.
At the same time, the Berlin Senat was reaching out, trying to have contacts with the
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German Democratic Republic, which was not always comfortable for the Allies. Of course, there was overall management of the Berlin issues with the German Federal Republic, through the so called Bonn Group, which met in Bonn. Our representative of the foreign ministry, representatives of the German foreign ministry and the Allied embassies meeting regularly, so there were all kinds of venues for discussing Berlin. And they were all working fine. But there was still a very much Berlin regime that had been, as I said, essentially unchanged since ’71, since the quadripartite agreement.
Q: When you were there, early days and all, it sounds like Berlin... There was a cartoon called, Spy vs. Spy, showing little creatures running around blowing each other up. It sounds like Berlin was loaded with intelligence people who, in a way, would almost get in each other’s way.
GILMORE: Well, there was a considerable intelligence presence in Berlin. On the military side, each of the three Allied commandants had under his wing some intelligence presence. The United States had an extensive one, not only in terms of intelligence gathering of a HUMINT nature, human intelligence sources, but also, we had a large capability in Berlin to listen to military communications that reached across the GDR and actually into Poland. But that was all under the cover, so to speak, of the Berlin Brigade. The British had good intelligence capabilities. The French had theirs. We were less in close touch with the French on theirs, but we knew they had some too. The Soviets and the GDR, the Stasi [Staatssicherheit] of the German Democratic Republic ran extensive intelligence operations of all kinds. So, it was, in many ways the intelligence capital of the world. That being said, there were no huge new games being played. There was a lot of activity, but each side knew more or less what the other side was capable of. There were efforts at penetration. In fact, we learned when the state security apparatus of the GDR was in effect dismantled, and when Germany was reunified, that there had been efforts at penetration of the U.S. mission and of the embassy in Bonn. I still cannot speak about them to this day on any kind of record, as I understand the rules. But, there were attempts at penetration. Not very successful in the later years, but they were active.
The U.S. military, which had access all over Berlin, of course, under the Four Power Agreements, we didn’t have to, we just showed certain documentation. Soldiers in uniform with documentation could go over in patrols into East Berlin. And of course, we gathered intelligence. It was very much expected of us, and we were actively doing it, as were the British and French. The most successful intelligence was probably military intelligence, which I think, no doubt, was obtained through the military liaison missions, which went over into the...located in Berlin. There was also a Soviet counterpart located in the Federal Republic and with the Four Power rights, they could travel around. Our mission for example, we’d go over the Glienicke Bridge from Berlin into Potsdam, which was German Democratic Republic then. They would gather incredible amounts of information. Those missions, and the Brits Mix, as the British called it, the British Military mission, and our mission were staffed by top notch U.S. military intelligence personnel, and they were incredibly successful in gathering intelligence on the Soviet forces in Germany, which in many ways encompassed some of the crack units of that
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army.
Q: What were your relations with the embassy in Bonn?
GILMORE: I had two different ambassadors. The first was Richard Burt and his deputy was Jim Dobbins, James Dobbins. The second was Vernon Walters, a retired general, Lieutenant General Vernon Walters, and his deputy, George Ward. I had good relations with all four. I tended to be more directly in touch with the deputy chief of mission. He wrote the minister’s efficiency report, for one thing, and that was the channel both ambassadors and their predecessors, also, preferred. But of course, as chief of mission for Berlin, the ambassadors would come up, and at least yearly would have a meeting with the Soviet ambassador their counterpart responsible, in Four Power terms, for German Allied responsibilities in Germany. So when Ambassador Walters would meet with Ambassador [Vyacheslav I.] Kochemasov, who was the Soviet ambassador to the German Democratic Republic, I would be at the meeting with my protocol officer as note taker. I think relationships were generally good. I worked hard at making it clear that I saw myself on the ambassador’s team, whichever ambassador it was. I had good relationships with both sets of ambassadors and DCMs.
Q: Sometimes in our relations in Berlin, there has been concern from the Berlin perspective that an administration back in Washington might get a little too loose on Berlin. You know, things in Berlin were so tight, in a way, that you don’t do this...And an administration back in Washington might in a way give away part of the store. Were you concerned about that during this time, which would have been the Bush administration, mostly?
GILMORE: Not really. Ambassador Roz Ridgway, Rozanne Ridgway, who had been our ambassador to the German Democratic Republic, had become Assistant Secretary of European Affairs. She understood that Americans in Berlin and the British would get too enamored of the fine points of what we all called Berlinery, and that could cause a problem. She also well understood the importance of maintaining Allied rights, U.S. and Allied rights. So we had no real problem. She followed Berlin closely, not only because she was assistant secretary, as did her predecessors as well. Ambassador Burt, before he went to Bonn had been assistant secretary, and then George Vest before that. He, by the way, is one of my candidates for top Foreign Service Officer of the century. I mean that very carefully. So we had no real issues there. Occasionally you would find that people would serve in Berlin or who were back on a second tour of duty in Berlin, they had been there as younger officers, protocol officers, and then came back in a higher ranking capacity...some of them would get a little impatient with Washington for not being careful about how visitors entered Berlin and how we were getting visitors, for example, to East Berlin, which we legally did not recognize as part of the GDR. When we negotiated the opening of an embassy there, we made it clear that it was our embassy to the GDR, not in the GDR, for legal reasons. There was some impatience there. And, occasionally, people who served in our embassy to the GDR would get impatient with what they called Berlinery. And that was all out there. But by and large, there weren’t
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major frictions.
Q: How about with the military? One of the concerns was that some young soldier might run off with a tank or something like that. Did you have any problems of that nature?
GILMORE: Yes, as a matter of fact, once when I was there, I don’t remember the details any more...A Soviet tank driver took off with a tank and drove it around. He wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. Whether he had drunk too much or… I think there were indications that he was all upset because he’d had trouble with his girlfriend. But that was a danger.
On the military front, our ambassadors to the German Democratic Republic were sometimes concerned that U.S. military assigned not only in Berlin, to the Berlin Brigade and other things associated with it, but assigned to the Federal Republic who were coming up on the weekend, were using the U.S. Four Power right to go to East Berlin without visas or anything else, and just showing their ID cards, and buying up a lot of subsidized goods that the GDR state had provided at the subsidized rates for the GDR population, which was needy. So we had some of that. And there was also a certain sensitivity from various quarters about possible contacts between the U.S. military establishment in West Berlin and Soviet forces. Strictly speaking, the only people who were authorized from Berlin to be in there were the U.S. military liaison missions, which were not part of the Berlin apparatus, but which were there under broader agreements after World War II between the U.S., Britain, France and the Soviets.
Q: You mentioned that the public safety, i.e., the police function, became important. We all had to monitor that. Were there issues in the sort of pre fall of ’89 period of police problems that got you involved?
GILMORE: No, not specifically. In each sector, the public safety advisor cultivated very close relationships with his police counterparts, and all three public safety advisors, British, French, and American, had good relationships with the chief of police, as did I and my political advisor, my deputy. There occasionally would be questions of whether Allied rights in Berlin might unduly sort of limit what the Berlin police could do in a given situation. In fact, when we get to it, I’ll talk particularly about the night the Wall opened. Because there was a very important decision we had to take, giving the Berlin police more scope, an unprecedented decision. But, by and large, our relationships with the police were good. Occasionally, the justice senator, the senator in charge of justice, would drop hints sometimes that the Allies were, and this isn’t strictly police work, but the Allies were being a little cowboy like, in terms of civilian intelligence operations in Berlin. We didn’t really listen to that, to put it in plain English. We were careful to be circumspect and professional, but we weren’t about to be told by the Berlin Senat about certain security matters that we had responsibility for. We would listen, but we weren’t about to be schooled.
Q: What about the... This leads to the bombing of the disco. What about the GDR operating and assisting either terrorists or its own people messing around with Berlin.
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Was there much of that?
GILMORE: Well, we watched that. At one point, for example, my first commandant, Major General John Mitchell, and I were riding around Berlin going everywhere with police escorts, because there had been threats against us, which could have come from...they came, we think, from terrorists associated with the Baader Meinhof gang and their successors. But operating more out of East Berlin. Turns out that there was quite a considerable connection between the GDR state security service and Baader Meinhof or Rote Armee Fraktion, and other organizations. There was some tension there, but when it came to the Arabs and the others, we had the ability and we thought the responsibility to monitor through various kinds of shall I say electronic surveillance mechanisms, communications in and out of Berlin, particularly certain kinds of communications. And we were careful to target potential terrorist threats. That’s how we came on to the La Belle preparations that I had mentioned earlier. My deputy, when I was still European Affairs director, had called the GDR in on…we didn’t know specifically it was La Belle or what, but we knew from intelligence ....
Q: That was what? Explain what this was.
GILMORE: I have to be careful. Basically, through our intelligence surveillance capabilities we heard conversations, which made it clear that there was a target in West Berlin that was being looked at by Arab operatives. We knew from piecing together various kinds of information that it was Libya that was behind it. We didn’t know it was going to be La Belle. Of course, it was before I got to Berlin, that La Belle was actually bombed. But the aftermath was still in the air when I was there. And of course, we bombed Libya.
Q: Were you there when they bombed... where were you?
GILMORE: I’ll have to check that out. I believe I was. I’m almost certain that I was. The reason I have to be careful is that I did so much Berlin work as CE director, I’m never sure whether... I heard from Berliners and other Germans great skepticism about why we had done it. I think in retrospect, now with the East German state security services gone and we know what the Germans and others knew what was there, that there’s not that skepticism of how it happened, why it happened.
Q: Did you and your Allied representatives sense that the East Germans were a bit caught off guard by this? Because this doesn’t make any sense. For East Germans to be housing Arabs who were going to bomb an American frequented place or something, it doesn’t help their cause at all. And I was wondering whether you had the feeling that they weren’t going to let this sort of thing happen again, particularly the way we reacted.
GILMORE: Well, I think they did in fact, and they would never tell us that, but I think we could find, again, from our intelligence surveillance capabilities, that there was a tightening by the GDR of its monitoring of what some of these groups were up to in East
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Berlin. But we didn’t talk to them in the sense that they came and made any kind of acknowledgment that this had happened. They never did that. But we sensed that they tightened up, yes. Of course, we monitored the potential for any further violence in West Berlin, particularly against U.S. forces, U.S. personnel. Very carefully, and I would say even more carefully. But, from what I know, I’m absolutely sure Ronald Reagan had the right target in mind. I didn’t make the decision, he made the decision on the bombing, but we knew and he knew what the ultimate source of the action was.
Q: Kind of leading up to ’89, and some of the, I take it, things during, up through the summer of ’89, things were pretty well going in a straightforward manner, the way they’d been going for some years.
GILMORE: Right. It was hard to detect. There was more pent up desire to travel in the GDR, more frustration over travel. We could see that well before September of ’89, but it came into focus really to the extent of disenchantment and disaffection for the GDR, the Socialist Unity Party regime became really focused in September.
Q: You were saying that the East Germans were getting restive and all that.
GILMORE: Yes, there was a tremendous desire to travel, particularly to the Federal Republic, and there was a strict regime regulating such travel. It was not easy for the average GDR citizen to travel within the Federal Republic, unless they had relatives. Even there, it’s complicated. You could see that. I think what really started to reveal to me and here I think I’m speaking for the people at the U.S. mission in my time in Berlin was the service of the St. Nicolas Church, Nicolaikirche, in Leipzig, which started September 4, the first large demonstration occurred in Leipzig, September 4. There had already been Monday evening freedom prayers, Friedensgebet. Well on September 4, one spilled over out into the streets of Leipzig, near and around the church. It was totally peaceful, but this started to grow and grow after each Monday night prayer there would be a bigger group. And meanwhile, the Hungarians in September of ’89, took a very courageous decision. They signed some UN convention, I don’t remember the specifics of it, which committed them to allowing free travel across their borders. What they basically did was break ranks with the Warsaw Pact countries. Because the idea was that GDR citizens could travel to other Warsaw Pact countries and not be allowed to leave them unless they had exit documentation. Well, the Hungarians changed that, and guess what? It didn’t take the GDR travelers much time at all to start getting into Austria and then the Federal Republic, across the border at Sopron and other places.
Q: Going through Czechoslovakia.
GILMORE: Czechoslovakia. And then Hungary. Particularly Hungary first.
Q: Yes, going to Hungary, well the Czechs were still pretty...
GILMORE: Pretty tight. The GDR citizens would go down through Czechoslovakia into
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Hungary and across the border to Austria. And that became quite a huge number of people who were improperly documented, according to the GDR. Of course, the Federal Republic cheered Hungary, and by the way, rewarded it, I think, in terms of assistance and diplomatic solidarity very quickly thereafter. But this ferment grew and grew and grew into October. Also in early October, the governing mayor of Berlin, who was our regular conversation partner, the Allies’ regular conversation partner, invited the ministers to meet with him. Sometimes it was commandants and ministers, sometimes just ministers. He began to talk to us about what he and the Berlin Senat were hearing from the GDR political leaders. This started just about the time of the 40th anniversary of the GDR. I think the first meeting Momper invited us to, to talk about these concerns, was October 3rd. The 40th anniversary of the GDR was October 7th. Erich Honecker meant it to be a huge celebration of the success of the GDR and his personal success as the successor to Walter Ulbricht. Gorbachev came. Meanwhile, all this ferment is taking place in Leipzig. In Berlin, it is very clear that the crowds in East Berlin see Gorbachev as a symbol of change and reform. When he gets out on the streets, they shout, “Gorbi, Gorbi.” They welcome him, and of course Honecker is basically ignored. Meanwhile, Honecker is quite ill. It becomes quite clear that he is very seriously ill, and hasn’t got too many months on the planet in all probability. Gorbachev, in effect, gives a boost to the “reformers,” and I put quotes around the reformers in the GDR leadership in a kind of a rebuff to Honecker, which means that Honecker is not long for this world. Gorbachev is there on the 7th of October. On the 18th, Honecker is ousted, ostensibly on the grounds that he asked to be relieved, for medical reasons. But, while he was ailing, no doubt, he was really pushed out. The Socialist Unity Party chooses Egon Krenz as his successor, in the hopes that Krenz, a younger person and more vigorous, would signal to the GDR population a change in the direction of reform.
Meanwhile, the GDR begins to look at the question of its travel legislation, its travel law. Here we have an interesting window on what’s happening. Momper and his administration have close ties to Gunther Schabowski, who is a member of the SED Politburo, allegedly close to Krenz, and he is the spokesman for the regime. He and Momper have meetings, which Momper debriefs to us each time. Schabowski tells Momper that the GDR is preparing a new travel law, and there is debate about how it works. The first attempt at a new GDR travel law doesn’t commit the regime to full travel freedom for its citizens, and is therefore not accepted by the populace. A second attempt is being readied. Schabowski was telling Momper that the plans for the new GDR travel law were ready. This was November 3rd. Then there was a strong demonstration. The first one in Berlin on Alexanderplatz, the first big demonstration in Berlin, on November 4. Travel was one of the key demands, “We want to travel freely”…in Berlin, to the Federal Republic, in general. On November 6, the party newspaper in the German Democratic Republic, Neues Deutschland, published the text of the new travel law, and it doesn’t seem to go far enough to suit the population. So, meanwhile, we have these big demonstrations in Leipzig on Monday evening. By November 6th, the demonstrations in Leipzig had grown to 500,000 people.
Q: God!
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GILMORE: Can you imagine? In Leipzig, which is not nearly the size of Berlin. Meanwhile, I should add, and I take great pride in this, the U.S. mission in West Berlin, has already, for a couple of weeks, had an around the clock operation monitoring what may be happening in Berlin. We don’t know what is happening for sure, but we see the pressures building up. We see now that there are demonstrations in Berlin. We follow the reporting of our embassy in Berlin to the GDR.
Q: The Leipzig demonstrations, if they’re that big in a not really major, major city, I would think there would be copycat type things going on in other places too, wouldn’t there?
GILMORE: In other GDR cities, you could see manifestations, but the biggest manifestations were in Leipzig, and then very late in the game in Berlin. And the other manifestations were GDR citizens getting in their little cars, going down through Czechoslovakia into Hungary and over the border. And, already, of the whole question of where else they may go to. A number of the GDR citizens go to the Federal Republic embassy in Prague. Do you remember that? Don’t leave, we’re not leaving until we can go to the Federal Republic. And of course, you can go across the border even easier since it’s a shorter ride, so to speak, across the Czech border into say, Bavaria. But in any case, the pressure is building up, building up...
Q: As you were watching this, in not at the very end game, did you say, “This whole thing is going blow” or did you....
GILMORE: We could see that the new GDR leadership under Krenz was not really winning the hearts and minds of the GDR citizens. It was not really seen as going far enough, in terms of reform. I want to give primacy of place here to our embassy to the GDR reporting on what was going on in the GDR. But the issue had become so big. We were reporting on it from Bonn because GDR citizens were coming into the Federal Republic through Hungary. The Federal Republic embassy in Prague was getting reports, some of them from Vienna, as the GDR citizens moved into there. The thing had gotten huge. Meanwhile, as I said, we had decided on our own at the U.S. mission in Berlin, earlier in October, to start doing sit reps [situation reports] every day as to what was happening in and around Berlin. We didn’t know what, for sure, was happening, but we could see that there was a very strong movement afoot among the population pushing for change. I would say the point of the spear in terms of their demands was travel freedom, but there was more. We didn’t know how much more, and I don’t think anybody could have at that point.
But, early in the evening of the 9th, Momper, we now know, learned at 7 p.m. that Schabowski was going to give a press conference about travel regulations. Remember the new travel law of November 6th published in Neues Deutschland really didn’t seem to go as far as the citizenry expected. But Schabowski does give a press conference at 7 o’clock. Basically, they ask him at the end of his press conference, after he announces this
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new travel regime, they ask him when it’s in effect. He seems to look at the piece of paper he has, and he allows that it must be now. In retrospect, we understand it was a fake. They were liberalizing, but they didn’t mean for it to go into effect. Well, by 8 p.m., an hour roughly after Schabowski’s press conference, we have information, and of course the three allied sectors work very close together, we get information that there are East Berliners gathering at the Wall, showing their passports and IDs and seeking to cross into West Berlin. And shortly before 11, the chief of police of Berlin reports to the Mayor that several other persons, who had gathered at the Wall, had crossed.
I got an historic telephone call from the German minister sometime after 11, between 11 and closer to midnight. I should have looked at my watch but there was too much excitement. I had just gone home to my residence from the mission where I had been checking on the sit reps and that sort of thing, and I had been in touch with the commandant, my deputy, and others. Momper called and we were on a first name basis. He said, “Harry, we have a problem. The police chief tells me that all bedlam is breaking loose here.” These aren’t the exact words. He said something that I’ve never reported exactly until right now. He said, “Harry, wir kriegen den Laden zurück.” “We’re going to get the shop back pretty soon”, or “We’re going to get the store back soon, but meanwhile, we need flexibility. The West Berlin police chief tells me he cannot cross through the Wall area into East Berlin because of Allied restrictions,” where West Berlin police are not permitted to operate in East Berlin. And he said he can’t keep order and they were very worried about somebody getting trampled. So, Momper is telling me how hairy it has gotten, in various places. At that point, Momper was at the Brandenburg Gate. So, I said that as far as we were concerned, we had to do something about it. We agreed with Momper, so that they could go ahead and use the West German police in East Berlin. I said I’d make arrangements for that. When I hung the phone up, I called Frank Collins, our public safety officer, and told him...he was the channel to the police chief. I told him to get to the police and say, “On behalf of the Allies, the West Berlin police may temporarily go into East Berlin. I then called the commandant and told him what was up. He and I had talked earlier in the evening. General Haddock. Then I also, as I remember, called Bonn. Now, the reason this may not sound like much, but in the Allied context, strictly speaking, I should have gotten the green light from the British, French missions as well, at least from their embassy in Bonn, if not their capitals. All things being equal, I should have gotten to the embassy in Bonn first, and maybe even to Washington. But the point was, we had to act very quickly because there was a real danger of a kind of a stampede as people came through that tight area and were excited and were pushing.
Q: Well, what did the West Berlin police do in East Germany?
GILMORE: They were in East Berlin. What they could do... In the first place, you have to recognize that this is a highly professional police force. These are some of the best trained crowd management police in the world. There had been demonstrations in Berlin by various and sundry factions for decades, and so they were very highly trained. Meanwhile, the East German authorities temporarily fell apart. They didn’t have clear instructions, the crowds were moving...at this point they weren’t even checking. They
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weren’t able to check documents at the Wall, they’re the Volkspolizei on the Eastern side. So, basically what the West Berlin police did was go in and establish cordons and keep order. They immediately gained the respect of the East Berliners. The East Berliners were cut off in many ways, but they could see what was going on in terms of TV. They had a lot of knowledge, they knew what the West Berlin police were like. So, the West Berlin police were able to regulate the flow. Now, they weren’t in there all night. I should be careful here. They were in as they needed to be; into Alexanderplatz, out into the Eastern part of Berlin, for whatever they needed to do that night.
Now there was another problem, and that was the Soviets; to tell the Soviets. I tried that night as I remember, but I didn’t reach my Soviet counterpart until the next morning. But he wasn’t upset. He and I stayed in very close contact those days. In fact, we had been in close contact in the run up to the situation inside the German Democratic Republic. He indicated that the Soviets too wanted order and calm, and nobody hurt. He and I in the subsequent days talked. We were worried about the Soviet forces being the subject of demonstration or giving some kind of orders. He made it very plain that, absent provocations from the forces inside the GDR, the Soviet government didn’t want any clashes. Didn’t want any trouble.
What I should probably do here, if it’s alright, is talk about how, within the U.S. sector and among the Allies, we had prepared for some moment...not this one; we didn’t foresee it in these specific terms...but for some moment of this nature. American diplomats, Foreign Service people sometimes get a little impatient with the American military’s penchant for having meetings and discussing contingencies. It’s part of the military’s way of training. In Berlin, we had an institution that was really created by Berlin commandants, had been in existence for some years, called Talk Team. It may sound trite, but it meant the Commandant, the Brigade Commander, the Minister, the Political Advisor, and some of their key people gathering at a special place on the Wannsee, one of the huge Berlin lakes and talking very informally without any note keeper or any...talking about issues. In Talk Team, the last couple of meetings we’d gather every couple of months we talked about what we would or wouldn’t do in the case of some kind of opening of the Wall, or in the case of East Berlin citizens rushing the Wall. And we had decided that we would not use U.S. brigade troops anywhere near the Wall. Absolutely the right decision. The brigade was there to defend Berlin; it wasn’t there to police; the Army wasn’t trained in police work. Professional military officers would tell you right away that the last thing they want is soldiers, other than MPs who were trained, doing any kind of police work. So, we agreed on that principle. We talked about what kind of contingencies might happen in a very general way. So, when I took that decision to the governing mayor that night, I had that background in mind. Also, the Allies would meet (this is the British, French, and Americans), I believe it was once a year but it could have been more often, to talk about the defense of Berlin. There was a plan to defend Berlin, believe it or not, or at least to tie down some attacking military elements long enough to evacuate the Allied personnel, and maybe some key German officials from the city. In that group, we had talked in general terms about what we might do under this or that contingency, and the principle of not using military brigade personnel, soldiers, near the
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Wall, was very firmly adhered to by all. So, there was a background to all this.
I must say, that when I took the immediate decision, I felt confident that it was the right thing to do. But, strictly speaking, there should have been, had there been more time, what I would have done was consult first and then get back to the mayor. But there was no time. In retrospect, I feel very good about the decision. When I next talked to my British counterpart, Michael Burton, that was within a short time, he was totally supportive. As I said, the next morning, when I reached my Soviet counterpart, and indicated, not in specific terms what I had discussed with the German governing mayor, but in general terms, he was supportive. I do believe that the restraint shown by the Soviets with their forces, and the fact that the West Berlin police were able to organize crowd behavior and channel it, those exciting moments when the Wall opened were very important to the subsequent peaceful flow of GDR citizens, including East Berliners, in and out of Berlin. This was a huge movement. I got a note which tells me that in the first weekend of the Wall’s opening, which was Saturday the 11th and Sunday, more than 2 million East Berliners and GDR citizens outside Berlin visited West Berlin. It was huge.
Q: This was not a flow to the West to leave East Germany. This was..
GILMORE: ...flow to see Berlin...
Q: And to see Berlin, and go back, and be prepared to come back again.
GILMORE: Yes. And, here, I would add that the West Berlin government, the Senat, the governing Mayor, his Senat Chancellery Chief, Dieter Schroeder and others, the mayor’s deputy, were very, very careful about how they planned to handle these GDR citizens. They didn’t have Western currency. So, there was what they called Begrüßungsgeld, which is kind of “greetings money.” Every GDR person was entitled to get this money in hard currency. So, they had this money dispensed. There were lines, but nothing unmanageable. They got this money dispersed. The shopkeepers in some cases gave away some of their bananas. Bananas became the most sought after item, because there had been no bananas in East Berlin for ages. There was a stream of people on foot. In some cases, women pushing baby carriages in downtown Berlin, and by Friday and Saturday, the stream of visitors was coming in over the Glienicke Bridge from Potsdam, which is in the GDR. As you know, parts of Berlin border on the GDR, other parts border on East Berlin. In fact, on Saturday, Ambassador Walters had come to town and the commandant took the ambassador, himself, me and his chief of staff up in a helicopter ride up over Berlin to watch was happening. We could see this stream of little Trabant vehicles and then pedestrians, all in one direction at that point, or virtually all, from Potsdam, walking and driving slowly across the Glienicke Bridge into Berlin. It was a sight to behold. The GDR citizens were being given flowers, money! The West Germans were standing there giving kids money through the car window. It was a very emotional scene. There were a lot of grown people, males included, crying. There was a sense of finally the luck is on the German side, as Willy Brandt put it. “Finally, we Germans have luck on our side.” But in any case, it was a tremendously emotional period. The amazing thing was how
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orderly it had been. Here I go back to something our ambassador to the German Democratic Republic and his staff were saying. They were saying, during the period when then this ferment had started in Leipzig, and then the travel exodus out through Hungary, they were all saying, “Remember one thing: this is a group of Prussians, culturally, and if they make a revolution it can be peaceful. And they can make one where it says, ‘don’t tramp on the grass’ and nobody steps on the grass.” So, there was a combination of factors at work, but the amazing thing was in all this tremendous upheaval and the opening of the Wall, or the breaching of the Wall as some people would prefer to put it, nobody was killed. Some people were bumped and hassled a bit, but it was an amazing experience.
Q: Did the Stasi, or the state police, just sort of throw up their hands?
GILMORE: Well, they weren’t around. The Volkspolizei, the “People’s Police,” so to speak, who guarded the wall, basically had no instructions, and they did not try in any large numbers,…if at all, I’m not sure if there was any case,…didn’t try once it was clear that the flow was under way, they didn’t try to stop anybody by force. In subsequent days, the East German Army people were put around the Brandenburg Gate so that people couldn’t come up over the Wall at the Gate, and that sort of thing, but that didn’t stop East Berliners and East Germans from traveling through the Wall at other points. But, basically, the state security people were not visible in any way that I can remember in the early opening of the Wall; the night it was breached or in the next days. However, the whole question of the future of the state security service was central to what happened next. Because as I said, travel freedom was the spearhead of the revolution from below. Among other things, what was very much on their minds was getting this all pervasive security apparatus off their backs. But that was done more gradually.
In subsequent attempts to reform the GDR, and here maybe other people should talk about this, Kranzfel, and a man by the name of Modrel was put in charge of the SED, a much more reasonable, pragmatic, modern man, but still not a man ready to give up all party authority, or in giving up the Socialist Unity Party as a leading role. Nothing would hold. To telescope what happened thereafter, there was an election in March, I believe in March, in the GDR. What emerged was a surprise. The belief was that the newly reconstituted Social Democratic Party would probably be the leading vote getter and that while unification would be the goal, that it would be more gradual. There might be a kind of an inter German agreement, between the two German states. There would be a rewriting of the constitution, but a much more deliberate path. What happened in the elections was the Christian Democratic Union was the strongest force by far, and there was a majority for unification. So the new GDR government’s real task was to negotiate reunification. And in that sense, and here I leave it to colleagues in Bonn and others to talk in their own, give their own accounts, it was Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor, who pushed hard for immediate reunification. It was his line that won the day.
Q: Well what was the feeling within the ranks of your office? Do you feel that this is the millennium or something?
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GILMORE: I think we all shared the elation of the Germans who were seeing each other in a virtually unrestricted way for the first time. You couldn’t help it. Families had been divided by the Wall. People had been killed as recently as February earlier in the year. You couldn’t help share in the elation and be happy for the Germans. By and large, I think that we felt that what the Allies had done in Berlin in the long run had been right. I think we knew that but we didn’t know what...it was wonderful to see that affirmed and the very fact that there had to then be a negotiation among the four powers. The very fact that the Soviets all of a sudden again became conscious of their four power rights to negotiate the future of Germany, kind of vindicated our steadfast position about the importance of maintaining the four power rights to keep the German question open and to guarantee real free self determination. I think we all felt good about that.
It was interesting. I don’t remember the date exactly, but the Soviets called for a meeting, a quadripartite meeting, the kind that hadn’t taken place in Berlin for a long time, with the fours ambassadors, the four chiefs of mission. Their ambassador to the GDR, Ambassador Walters, the French and British ambassadors in the Allied control building, which had to be cleaned up and made ready. There was a meeting after the Wall opened, but the meeting was a clear sign that the Soviets felt all of a sudden that their four power rights were important to hang onto. By the way, that meeting was not applauded by the Federal Republic government. They were looking toward a reunited, sovereign Germany and many of them saw the four power meeting as an indication of the four powers once again stepping in to shape Germany’s future and take decisions that might be to the detriment of the Germans. In fact, however, there was only one such meeting and nothing important transpired, and the United States was not in favor of a second meeting.
But in any case, there is much more to the chapter of German reunification, but maybe I might turn now to what happened in Berlin after German reunification. There were the elections in March, and the government that was elected, the coalition government that came to power, headed by Lothar de Maizière, a Christian Democrat, negotiated reunification basically. The negotiations were called, “Two plus Four” or “Four plus Two.” We called them, “Four plus Two”; the Germans called them, “Two plus Four.” Four Allied powers plus the two German states, or the two German states, and four Allied powers negotiated basically an end to the occupation in Berlin. They negotiated arrangements creating the backdrop for German reunification. But, when Germany was formally reunified, the following October 3rd, we’d had our last meeting with Commandants and ministers as the Allies with the governing mayor on the 2nd. We gave him a letter which he appreciated very much, and it’s become a historic document, wishing the Berliners well and saying how we as the Allies were proud of them standing up to all the pressures in Berlin and keeping Berlin free and keeping the option of reunification open. That night there was a big party and the Allies played a very low key role. Ambassador Walters came up to Berlin. He was the only one who was out there with the Berlin leadership celebrating reunification. The Allies were invited to a quieter reception in downtown Berlin where we could see the fireworks, but not be part of it.
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Starting the next morning, I took up my new responsibilities. Ambassador Walters had made the key decisions with Washington’s approval that I would no longer be the minister because there was not such a position with the deputy commandant. But I would be the principal officer of the U.S. embassy office in Berlin, and that I would have four German states under my supervision. They were Länd Berlin, the state of Berlin, which is a huge piece of work by itself, plus Brandenburg, which is Potsdam, the area around Berlin, plus Mecklenburg Vorpommern, up toward the Baltics and on the Baltic Sea, and Saxony Anhalt. We would then open a consulate in Leipzig, which Todd Becker was chosen to open, and the new regime began.
But the biggest part of my responsibility then, perhaps, was consolidating the two American missions into one. We had a big mission in West Berlin, my former mission, and the embassy to the GDR in East Berlin. It was a very difficult period. My deputy, John Nix and I, and my secretary, Cynthia Lorey, went over to the former embassy to the GDR and decided that that would be our political headquarters. Ambassador Walters particularly pushed for that, for symbolic reasons; because it was near where the old embassy had been. He also felt we were turning over a new leaf in leaving Clayallee headquarters in the upscale suburban part of West Berlin called Zehlendorf. So, I worked out of there and we consolidated the two missions. My deputy, John Nix, and I drew up a plan for consolidation, which was by and large accepted in Bonn, with a couple of changes, one of which was sensitive. I had proposed to use two deputy chiefs of mission for the initial period, the former minister, DCM, to Ambassador Barkley, and the ambassador to GDR. I proposed to keep him on to consolidate that part of the mission under my supervision. And to keep John Nix, my political advisor, to have him wind down the huge administrative and other presence in West Berlin. With a few changes, I went over and took the helm of this new mission. It was a very sad day for our FSNs [Foreign Service Nationals, i.e., local German staff] at Embassy Berlin, our embassy to the GDR, because they were all let go, except the third country nationals, i.e., non Germans.
Q: Why was that?
GILMORE: The feeling was for security reasons, that they had all been compromised.
Q: Yes.
GILMORE: It was sad, because in the interim period after it was clear that Germany was going to be reunified and before I formally went over and opened the mission, before formal reunification, American security officers from the various parts of the U.S. government interviewed the FSNs at our embassy to the GDR. Some of the FSNs thought if they came clean at the interview, that they had a chance of being kept on. But, in fact, they were all let go. So it was a very sad day for them and for those of our personnel from the former embassy to the GDR who had worked with these FSNs. As I said, we did keep a number of third country nationals. The really sad part was we had very good diplomats in both East and West Berlin missions, and we couldn’t keep them all. We had to start
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curtailing people and whittling the size of the new mission down to what we needed. It was a tough period. But, what I’m proudest of is we got through that period, I think, with about as much dignity and grace as was possible. I’m particularly proud of the way we started reporting on the new Länder and putting together a picture of what was going with the new leadership... leaderships, I should say, in the new Länder. The German Democratic Republic had abolished the old German states and Länder in the GDR and organized the GDR into districts, Bezirke. So the new Länder were coming back to life with no real budgets, in some cases no real offices, so we were able to report very carefully on that. We were also able to report on how the industrial reorganization of the GDR was to take place. How state factories were being privatized, put up for auction, that sort of thing.
I departed in August of 1991. By the time I left, we were well underway to consolidating our mission. Subsequently, the embassy office was given an award for the reporting on the GDR, and here I would like to draw a little footnote. More than once, colleagues at the embassy in Bonn would say to me, “Harry, you folks at the embassy office should remember the old question of whether the glass is half empty or half full. And we think sometimes your reporting is taking the position that the glass is half empty, when you could look at the same set of facts and conclude the glass was half full.” These were the kinds of hints I was getting that our reporting was too pessimistic. But, I think, in retrospect, our reporting was very measured, and very accurate, and I think that the hurdles in the reunification for the average citizen of the GDR were not exaggerated in our reporting. If anything, I think more skepticism and more emphasis on the difficulties in reunification would have been in order. But, I’m very proud of the role my colleagues and I played in that reporting effort.
The other thing I would say is...maybe I could discuss this one vignette, which suggests how different life was, and how much of a problem there was in Berlin. There were many, but one example would be the First Gulf War the war against Iraq. During the First Gulf War, there were heavy protests from the former GDR citizens, who were basically peace loving, and didn’t understand or didn’t believe that any kind of force was justified under any circumstances. So, we had I would call them more vigils demonstrations around our embassy office day and night. Because the East German police had fallen apart, there weren’t any, we had to bring police over from West Berlin. They were stretched so thin that we couldn’t get many of them. But we could hardly get in and out of our own embassy office for all of the young former GDR citizens, now again German citizens, with candles...just kind of clogging the little square square would be an over generous word in front of our embassy office. But I think that was a symbolic indication of how difficult it would be to change the mentality of the people who had grown up in the GDR and who had made this peaceful revolution from below.
Q: You had this large responsibility in what had been East Germany. Were you picking up signs that... ok, these people had made this revolution from down below, but at the same time, they had been brought up in what can only be called a very controlled welfare state.
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GILMORE: Very controlled.
Q: Very controlled. So, in a way, if you’ve made your compromise, you can be quite comfortable in this.
GILMORE: And some were. When they used to call it the Nischen Gesellschaft the niche society, where everybody who could found a little niche and existed and got as much, if you would, freedom or as much personal satisfaction as was possible in such a totalitarian state. But the mentality would take a long time to change. I would add here, another little anecdote that I thought was instructive. Christa Wolf, the East German writer, was given an award by an American literary organization, which nobody seemed to want to present in any kind of public way after the reunification. So, it was decided that I should present it as principal officer to the embassy office, and so I invited her to my office for coffee, and I hadn’t met her. I spoke with her. Christa had not been a total enthusiast by any means for German reunification on what she saw was the Federal Republic’s terms. But she was a dignified lady and a respectable person. I asked her how she felt, and how women, in particular, in the German Democratic Republic looked at the whole question of reunification and whether there might be some issues.
She mentioned two. She didn’t take a position on them so much as just underline them. She said childcare in the GDR was universal and free and the women liked it and wouldn’t be in the Federal Republic and there would be a lot of problems ensuing from that factor. The women were less free to pursue an education or to work, and particularly it would be a difficulty in the GDR because of the economic dislocations. That was point one. The other point was there was abortion on demand in the GDR. Of course, in the Federal Republic, particularly within the Christian parties, there was very strong anti abortion sentiment or sentiment that abortion should be limited only to some very specific medical cases. She thought it would be very difficult for East Germans to get used to that. That was a messy issue to be sure. But without touting her as being a spokesman for all of the women in the former GDR I thought that was revealing and in a way she was prescient. Both those issues, particularly the childcare issue, had been difficult ones for women who grew up and worked in the former GDR to adjust to.
Q: Was your office getting a good look at the economy of Eastern Europe, what they were producing, or was that more coming out of reports of West German entrepreneurs going out and saying, “Oh, my God.”
GILMORE: We saw that some West German entrepreneurs, particularly the fact that we’d been in West Berlin before, some of us, and had contacts with a number of business people, a number of entrepreneurs in West Berlin. We’d meet with them socially after the Wall had opened and after reunification had happened, and we’d get a picture of what they saw, so we did some reporting that way. We also had a very talented commercial officer. He’s by the way now the senior commercial officer in China, in Beijing, Lee Boehm. He was aggressive and trying hard to promote business opportunities for
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American companies in the GDR. He ran up against some Federal Republic interests that wanted to keep opportunities in the GDR basically for themselves. But I remember the area he was focusing on particularly, which was power generation. The question was would there be an extension of what in effect were monopolies from the Federal Republic to the GDR, or would there be an open market for bids from firms from where ever the United States, France, etc. to take over or privatize power generation, or to build new power generation capabilities. We ran into a lot of protectionism, the unwritten kind, and a strong belief coming from Bonn and coming from the power monopolies and oligopolies in West Germany that they didn’t want us around. So we reported some of that, although I’m not sure how popular the reports were. I think they were accurate.
Q: Did you sense that people away from the situation who were so full of euphoria I’m talking about people in the West, in our government and all that they weren’t seeing things on the ground? Were you sort of the cold dash of realism?
GILMORE: In a way, I think there was some of that. I want to be careful here because I want to be fair to everybody. Our ambassador in the Federal Republic was a wonderful gentleman, and a very kind and thoughtful person...Vern Walters. He was convinced from the outset, once the Wall opened, that there was going to be quick reunification. That was where the chancellor was. He had good rapport with the Chancellor. He was right, by the way, and he was widely read in history, Ambassador Walters. But, I think, in fairness that he overestimated the degree to which it would be easy and quick, an easy and a quick process for the GDR citizenry to become part of and accept the values of the Federal Republic. Even when they wanted to accept the democratic values, the former East German citizens often didn’t accept some of the commercial values. And some of them were kind of proud of the small achievements of the German Democratic Republic and I might particularly mention the free nurseries and childcare establishments. They were proud of that. And we just reported what we heard. Nobody was against German reunification. That had been U.S. policy and we were all aboard. And the other thing was, we were right up, cheek by jowl, with the Germans from the four Länder we were responsible for. Todd Becker, our consul general in Leipzig, was given administrative support for a long time by the embassy office. Todd and my staff, we were all right next to real Germans from the East. We had a number of people who spoke good German. We were just reporting what we heard. It was kind of tempered, to put it nicely, the optimism and the euphoria that was present not only in the U.S. embassy, but other Western embassies in Bonn.
But I would add another thing: we got numerous visitors. First, when the Wall opened, before German reunification, we had all kinds of visitors to Berlin. Large delegations, from the Senate including Lugar and Moynihan and a number of distinguished senators. We also had some visitors to Berlin, particularly following the breaching of the Wall and the actual reunification of Berlin and Germany, many of them from foundations. Very distinguished and interesting people. And I remember one person, whom I prefer to leave unnamed, from, I guess you could call it a more conservative foundation, but very respectable. Telling us how Jeffersonian democracy was really kind of natural to the
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human spirit, that people would just naturally gravitate to a democracy when they were released from the fetters and the constraints of the totalitarian state. I remember thinking that wasn’t my experience as much as it was a very noble thought. For me, democracy was in many ways something that was learned in a series of procedures that had grown up over a long period of time. But, I remember this particular person talking about how easy it would be. I thought to myself, come spend a day with me visiting various different kinds of persons in the former GDR. But there was this almost euphoria and optimism about how quickly the East Germans were to become West Germans; and it was widespread.
But as a useful anecdote, I would point to the example of Mr. Biedenkopf. Kurt Biedenkopf who had been a leading Christian Democrat in the Federal Republic, had been one of Kohl’s rivals, at one point had been the deputy chairman of the CDU. He came over and got active in East German politics as a ministry president. I would just tell anybody who wants to get an idea of how difficult it was to look up Biedenkopf’s name and read some things that he said. He put it on the line about how overoptimistic Bonn had been, how much more investment it would take to turn things around, how much more difficult it would be and how long it would be before the citizens of the GDR were able to feel a real part of the Federal Republic and share its values and institutions.
I would just add one last point, and that is there was a sentiment, reasonably widespread, after the initial months of reunification in the German Democratic Republic that there had been a takeover by the Federal Republic. I want to stress that by and large Germans in the former East were very pleased and happy to be part of the Federal Republic. But many of them still felt that there had been a takeover that they were basically just next to the Federal Republic and that it hadn’t been a marriage of equals. I would add, finally, myself, that there couldn’t be a marriage of equals unfortunately. There was no way that I could see it could be. But I just point out the difficulties that had to be surmounted, and are being surmounted. I think I’ll stop there.
Q: Okay. I just want to ask one question, going back a bit. I’ve always felt that we played it very well, that we didn’t have President George Bush dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall, you know the equivalent of people coming over and touting American triumphalism. Was there any problem with that? I can think of an awful lot of political publicity seekers to come over and show off.
GILMORE: There was a bit of that. And in the case I just described, the gentleman who was going on and on about how easy and automatic almost the transition would be, had a triumphalist quality to some of his pronouncements. George Bush, President Bush, won the deep respect of Germans, almost across the board, and I mean not only conservatives but also Social Democrats, Greens, for his handling of the reunification...
Q: Really a splendid job.
GILMORE: For his dignity, for his knowledge, for his quick support of the Federal
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Republic, and yet his restraint in letting it be a German show, not putting the United States in the leadership and not trying to crow or in any way be paternalistic about the role the United States and the British and the French had played during the Airlift or the building of the Wall. I must say Bush had been very popular among Berliners anyhow. But once the Wall opened, it was clear that the United States was going to put its money where its mouth had been about reunification, it was an adulation of Bush. But he never, he and his Secretary of State Baker, never got highhanded about it, never gloated, never crowed. They were the model of professionalism and far sightedness, in terms of the U.S. German relationship.
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Q: Today is April the 10th, 2003. Harry, we’re still in Germany. You were there until when?
GILMORE: I was there until August of 1991. Almost exactly four years from the time I had arrived in August of ’87.
Q: We’re now after the Wall has come down and Germany is moving together. Were you picking up anything about East German agriculture? Was this sort of paralleling what was happening in West Germany? Very protected farming practices and all?
GILMORE: East German agriculture had been really organized on essentially the Soviet model with state farms, collectives. We really didn’t get into it very far the roughly nine months I was the principal officer of the embassy office. Even though, as I have said, I was responsible for four Länder, Länd Berlin and three other Länder, or states…what we found, that I remember, essentially, was some serious problems. Vast, vast overuse of agricultural chemicals, fertilizers. The whole question of whether large areas of crop land would have to be given a sort of remedial attention to restore the, I guess agricultural people say, sweetness of the soil, to restore the balance in the soil. The whole question of restructuring agriculture though, was one that really didn’t arise during my time there. Surprisingly. When I accompanied Ambassador Walters on his initial calls in Mecklenburg Vorpommern, Mecklenburg, I guess we say West Pomerania, and other places, agriculture was not yet on the agenda. The Treuhandanstalt, the outfit that handled privatization, was really looking at privatization of industry and business, and while I think it got into some agribusiness type privatization, to my knowledge, we at the embassy office weren’t yet reporting on agriculture. Also, we didn’t have an agricultural attaché to give us any specific advice. But, interestingly enough, I received any and all American business people that came through in my nine months over at the embassy office. Not one American interested in agricultural equipment sales called on me. And as I think I mentioned, our very capable commercial officer, Lee Boehm, was focused very heavily on the question of power generation and whether very efficient American firms who were interested in the GDR market could succeed in doing so in light of the very special interests of the, I call them monopolies, coming over from the Federal Republic.
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Q: What about the concern that really started with Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik... the concern that we had, that somehow or another, if Germany became united, it might withdraw from NATO and all, and remain sort of a neutral country, sort of a big blob, an undigested blob in the middle of Europe. When this was happening, was there concern that NATO no longer was as important and maybe Germany might drift off somewhere?
GILMORE: Yes. And President George Herbert Walker Bush, to his eternal credit, made it very clear that the United States was in favor of German reunification and they were making a number of changes in NATO to accommodate the new situation. But NATO was to remain vital, although it was to be adapted to the new situation, and we insisted that a united German state be part of NATO. That was very clear. President Bush was very supportive of that. Of the three Western leaders, Bush, Thatcher, and Mitterrand, Bush was far and away the one the Germans knew they could rely on to be true to his word. We’d always said that if there could be free self determination for Germany, we would support it. But, he had two strong considerations. As I remember, he articulated them in an important speech. He didn’t speak out much on the subject, but in one important speech he mentioned two things: that the united Germany would be part of NATO, and he also indicated that existing borders in Europe must be respected. I would indicate here that at this point the Kohl led coalition government had not recognized the German Polish border, which was a source of great anxiety to the Poles. Later on, there was an agreement between, or a statement that Germany made, and Poland accepted, that the new, united Germany would negotiate an agreement with Poland to recognize those borders, which subsequently happened, but after reunification. But Bush put a clear marker down on the Polish border as well.
Q: But, you’re saying Bush did this. What about looking internally at Germany? Germany and NATO and all...were you and your fellow German watchers watching for signs of neutrality...
GILMORE: There were very important forces in Germany, not only in the German Democratic Republic, which of course was changing rapidly, particularly after the March 18, 1990 elections which brought to power a coalition government that basically negotiated unification. The Social Democrats, and certainly the successor party, the Socialist Unity Party, the SED, the Party of Democratic Socialist or PDS, they were not at all in favor of any kind of NATO membership. They would have preferred two German states, some kind of confederation, and certainly no NATO membership for the Eastern portion of it. Important intellectuals like Gunter Grass, the great novelist, wanted no part of a greater Germany. He didn’t want reunification in any case. He wanted a confederation and a cultural nation. But he wanted no part of what was still East Germany, and NATO. Also the Social Democrats in the Federal Republic, some of them were not at all as convinced about NATO. Some were…about NATO membership for united Germany. The Greens by and large had no interest in NATO period, and probably would have preferred to see a kind of a neutral Germany. So the important point is Helmut Kohl, Chancellor Kohl, with his CDU CSU FDP coalition, understood the importance of Germany being anchored in NATO, and being protected by NATO. He
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also wanted to see NATO change, as did President Bush. Mrs. Thatcher was very strong. I believe Mitterrand in his way was very strong about Germany remaining in NATO. But, within Germany itself, it was basically CDU/CSU, the so called sister Christian parties, that really wanted Germany to stay in NATO. In fact, Germany did stay in NATO. There was an important document released by NATO in the Summer, I believe it was June of 1990, it could have been July, talking about the kinds of changes NATO would like to see, including very close contacts with the former governments of the Soviet Union and the other governments of the East, Warsaw Pact. Also noting how NATO was going to be quite ready and would take an active role in negotiating with the Soviets the lowest possible level of nuclear weapons. Noting that NATO would only use force in self defense. It was carefully worded. They didn’t say no first use of nuclear weapons, but they’d only use force in self defense. They were looking to negotiate lowest possible level of nuclear weapons, also looking particularly to eliminate nuclear artillery shells. In fact, the Federal Republic, in the process of German reunification, undertook not to put Federal Republic forces into the former German Democratic Republic while the Soviet forces were retreating, and even thereafter they undertook to limit what kinds of troops would be stationed there. One interesting thing, though, right in the Two Plus Four Treaty, the two German states and the four powers that had held responsibility for Germany after World War II, the so called victor powers, in that document it was very clear that the German government would ask the American, British, and French garrisons in Berlin to stay under a status of forces agreement during the period that the Soviet forces were returning to the Soviet Union. All this was very carefully negotiated. Clearly Chancellor Kohl wanted Germany in NATO. I believe Foreign Minister Genscher did too, although he was maybe less vocal about the subject. Bush, and Thatcher for sure, and Mitterrand as well. That carried the day. Gorbachev drove a pretty hard bargain, particularly an economic bargain: the cost of having Soviet troops return to the Soviet Union and on other financial issues that he thought the Soviet Union was owed something by Germany. Gorbachev in the end accepted the idea of a united Germany in NATO, with as I say the force limitations that the Federal Republic was willing to make.
Q: And, I assume, correct me if I’m wrong, that there was some sort of an agreement, or at least an understanding that the Americans, British, and French would not intrude their troops into the former East Germany.
GILMORE: On that issue, what I remember… I’m not as expert as the people that actually negotiated the Two Plus Four...what I remember particularly was that the Federal Republic limited what it would do. The United States, Britain and France signaled their intention not to put their forces in the territory of the former German Democratic Republic while Soviet forces were retreating. And, presumably, by implication, beyond. But the key thing was that it was clear that our concept and the concept that the British and French shared with us was that there would be no diminution of security, that we would defend the new Germany as a full member of NATO, and defend it at its new borders. We would give it a defense guarantee. There are people who followed this issue more closely. Robert Zoellick, who was a Counselor at the Department of State and was Secretary Baker’s chief advisor on the whole issue of Two Plus Four agreement and the
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arrangements to end four power rights with regard to Berlin and Germany. He was the point person on the U.S. side, and there is a very good book I think you mentioned when we were talking here a moment ago, by Dick Smyser, From Yalta to Berlin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), which treats this issue in some depth.
Q: During the time that you had responsibility for the East German Länder that you mentioned...what were you getting? How were they forming their governments? What were we seeing?
GILMORE: There were different governments in different Länder, depending on which political parties were stronger. The Länder I was closest to were the new united Länd Berlin. Mayor Momper lost the next election, the Social Democrats lost and Eberhard Diepgen came back to be the governing mayor. Of course, I’d known him well. I was also particularly close, in Brandenburg, with Manfred Stolpe, the lay church leader who was so important in pushing Honecker and then Krenz, but particularly Honecker, in the direction of openness and reform, and became the minister of reform, the minister president of Brandenburg. I was close to him. He was a Social Democrat. In Mecklenburg Vorpommern I went up, I visited Mecklenburg Vorpommern with Ambassador Walters.
The impression one got, particularly in the three Länder other than Berlin, was one of considerable learning curve, a very steep learning curve for the new governing people. They faced daunting problems. In some cases, they were not quick to deal with them. But, I have to be careful here, because I don’t know that anybody could have done more than they did. We reported on the developments in the East, but of course much of the reporting was just begun during my months as principal officer of the embassy office in Berlin. But I remember particularly going to Saxon Anhalt and Magdeburg, and being horrified by the state of parts of the environment, particularly the river, the Elbe. And also the apartment buildings that clearly were not going to stand up very long. They were prefabricated, built sort of just by crane, stacking prefab apartments one on the other. They were in bad shape. Of course, there were massive employment problems, because the state industry was up for privatization. In many cases, the Western companies, or potential Western entrepreneurs from the Federal Republic and elsewhere, didn’t want to touch the existing corporations, or the existing industrial areas because they needed so much environmental work. They preferred new, as they said, green areas, to acquire new sites and build new industry. So the impression I had, and I don’t remember as much as I should having spent a dozen years almost, but the impression I had was that much of the old smokestack industry was not going to survive. Important activities, for example, were optics—one thinks of Zeiss—those operations were going to be kind of refurbished and continue. But many of the industries, steel, metals production, were just basically not going to survive. Ship building, for example, up in Schwerin on the Baltic coast, was clearly a leading industry of the German Democratic Republic, and as I left was in very grave danger. There was no industrial policy, and in fact the new federal government specifically eschewed any industrial policy to revive industries like that. So as I left in August of ’91, the overall impression I had was of very considerable and growing
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unemployment and a major restructuring job which was only getting underway.
Q: During the time you were there, how did the opening of the Stasi files affect... From what I gather everybody was spying on everybody else and it was a society that was completely riddled with... it was almost better to burn everything.
GILMORE: It was a massive effort that Stasi undertook with many, many informers, neighbors informing on informers. A number of people who wanted to participate on the new era, like Ibrahim Böhme, a Social Democrat, who was one of the founders of the revived Social Democratic party, turned out he had been an informer. There were many cases of this.
There was a gentleman by the name of Mr. Gauck, of the Gauck Commission, who was put in charge of the Stasi files. I got to know him; in fact, he and I had a very nice relationship. I went to call on him very soon after he got set up. He basically made it very clear that he wasn’t going to be told by any government or any government official how to handle these issues. He was going to do it in as even handed a way as he knew how. The idea was that any German, any citizen of the new united German state, would be able to see his file, or her file. That was happening as I left, and of course we were concerned on the American side whether we’d been penetrated.
We had, although not in any really serious way at the former mission. I can remember three different cases of penetration. In fact, we knew about one of them pretty early on from the time of the breaching of the Wall...a little before maybe, we already had that picture. But as the Stasi collapsed, I have to be careful here, what’s on the public record, but when the Stasi collapsed, we particularly tried to pay attention to this issue. I concluded by the time I left that while there had been some penetrations, they really hadn’t been serious in terms of revealing classified information. But one thing that might have happened is that some of the persons might have been able to give pretty accurate bio reports, biographical reports about Americans with whom they worked.
In general, however, one of the things that brought the GDR down… there were a couple of particular issues, but one of them was travel freedom. As I mentioned early on, the draft new travel law just didn’t... it was published by Neues Deutschland just a few days before the Wall opened...just didn’t convince anybody. So that was one issue. Another issue was the Stasi apparatus. Everybody wanted the Stasi apparatus destroyed. One of the mistakes that successors to Honecker tended to make was they’d say, “Well we still need some security,” and they didn’t come right out quickly and say they were going to smash it. It was very clear that taking that apparatus down was a very important demand of the populace of the former German Democratic Republic. By the time I left, and from what I gather, beyond, Mr. Gauck was doing an excellent job, and enjoyed a lot of confidence on the part of the citizens of the former GDR.
Q: Did we have any policy or stand on whether these file should be revealed? Was there concern saying, “Well, let’s get on with it. Let’s forget the past.”
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GILMORE: No. That’s a very important question. No, basically, of course we wanted to find out what kind of intelligence operations had been conducted against us and we got into that very quickly. I think I can say to future historians that we were effective in getting access to the Stasi records very early on, in terms of that issue. On the broader issue, it was basically an issue we left up to the Germans. It was very clear that they were angry, angry about what Stasi had done, and there was a widespread feeling that maximum openness about the Stasi files was in order. Everybody should be able to see his or her file. My personal judgment was that it was important to let that cleansing take place, although there were some very bitter moments as people learned that their former neighbors and friends had been informers.
Q: Wives on husbands, husbands on wives.
GILMORE: It was sick. But basically, the impression I have is that the Gauck Commission did an effective job. Again, I have to say that I lost touch with it really after August of ’91. Although one of the real pleasures I had...I gave my last Fourth of July party in...I gave two...the last one I gave in Berlin, Gauck came and greeted us very warmly. He thanked me personally as he came through the line, for my visit to his Commission and it had given him a sense of moral support which was important to him.
By the way, I gave a second reception. It was a very interesting time, at the invitation of Manfred Stolpe, the new minister president of Brandenburg, the place we hadn’t had any presence throughout the period of the post war. He invited me to give a reception at Sanssouci, the famous palace, and we did. We had a little chamber music concert. I made some remarks. The head of his government I guess it was the head of the House of Representatives in Brandenburg gave a speech. Then we had a party, which we threw by taking a truck full of hamburgers and hot dogs and grills out to Sanssouci afterwards. It was a tremendous satisfaction to be there while the process of reintegration was going on and to have been invited by Stolpe to do this. I think it was particularly a mark of honor, not for me personally, so much as for the United States, that he wanted us to do a Fourth of July thing at Sanssouci, which of course is ceremonially about as important a landmark in Brandenburg as you can have.
Q: Were you getting reflections from our consulates in other places in West Germany that they weren’t too happy to see the Prussians and the Saxons start coming back into the system again?
GILMORE: No. Surprisingly. I read of course very carefully the reporting from our other consulates, particularly the embassy in Bonn, and the embassy to the GDR before it actually closed on reunification. The impressions I got were by and large a sense, on the part of the Americans, and our German friends and colleagues, of elation that they were back together as one family. At least temporarily a sense of greater German national cohesion and identity and less particulars. Don’t get me wrong...Germany is a very conservative society, culturally, but there were important regional differences. Bavarians
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were the subject of some jokes, as were Saxons, and that sort of thing. But, by and large, there was a kind of euphoria about the family being back together again, and that was the dominant feeling.
Q: Well, then, in August ’91, you left.
GILMORE: Yes, in August ’91, I left and was assigned to the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as the Deputy Commandant for International Affairs. A position that I sought for several reasons. Certainly I wanted to come home for a while. My mother was widowed and not well. My mother in law was also widowed and not well, so those were personal considerations. But also, I thought I needed to kind of rev up my batteries. And, I’m thinking here now Henry Kissinger’s statement that when one is working actively in government, one’s living on one’s intellectual capital. In a sense, I thought I needed to recharge my batteries, to change the metaphor slightly...replenish my capital. So, I went to the Army War College, which turned out to be wonderful year.
Q: What was your impression of the men and women who were getting instruction? In the first place, where were they drawn from? And then you could talk about the education they were getting and their interests.
GILMORE: There was an increased emphasis since Goldwater Nichols on jointness and fighting jointly. The preponderance of the students in the class for the one year course were lieutenant colonels, and occasionally a full bird colonel, and were from the Army ranks. There was also a very substantial number of Air Force and Marine students. Very important in terms of learning how to fight together, fight jointly.
A very important ingredient there was the International Fellows Program, where officers from friendly armies and military establishments, not only Army officers, usually at the brigadier level, came and spent a year as international fellows and basically went through the same program. The focus was on particularly the strategic level, war at the strategic level. I was particularly impressed at the foreign students. The Germans, they sent all these very fine officers. From the countries we used to think of before the end of the Cold War as Third World; it was amazing to see the quality of the people they sent. Many of them were going to be chief of staff at one point down the road in their own military establishments. Or, some of them became even defense ministers.
I particularly spent a lot of time with the international fellows, although a very able colonel ran the program. By the way, it was considered a very important position for an Army colonel to run the international program. I traveled with him and the War College Commandant, Major General [William A.] Stofft, a very capable officer, to Latin America. We visited Southern Command, when it was still in Panama, and went on to Brazil and Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico. Very important trip. That was the focus of the International Fellows that year.
I also spent a lot of time as an expert on former Communist Europe, watching the Soviet
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Union come apart, and I would speak to the various classes, seminars. Most of the work of the War College is done in individual seminars. Selected groups of officers, very carefully mixed, with at least one or two Foreign Fellows focusing on the college curricula. I spent a lot of time on those seminars. I talked in classes about the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, the reunification of Germany, and then I watched the Soviet Union come apart. That was the year when it was literally coming apart. And Czechoslovakia was coming apart. I took a particular interest in that, because I was responsible for having the Czechoslovak UN permanent representative come to the War College. I remember very clearly him saying, he was a Slovak, by the way, I remember him saying Czechoslovakia may well come apart, and if it does, it will come apart peacefully. We’ll sort it out. He proved right. By the way, I believe he was the first or second foreign minister of Slovakia, the Slovak Republic. But it was that kind of curriculum.
Also, the Commandant asked me to host lunches for visiting foreign military delegations. That was an important function. He couldn’t always do it. So, one week I might be hosting a lunch with the very important support staff from the War College, of course, for say, a Thai delegation, and the next week it might be some delegation from a small European country. The other thing that I did was I spent a fair amount of time getting to know the Foreign Fellows from Hungary, Poland. These countries were now, again, sovereign, fully sovereign. We were very anxious to work with the officers they sent. I’ve been told, at least in one case, that the Hungarian, Colonel Sabo, I believe he’s risen to a position of considerable responsibility in his own military since he was at the War College.
Q: Did you see any difference between... well, in the first place, there were Marine personnel, but were there Navy officers?
GILMORE: Some. The jointness that is really most important immediately to the Army, as well as the Marines, and particularly with the Air Force. Because of the air support issue, precision munitions in ’91 – ’92 were very much on the agenda, but we hadn’t come as far as we’ve come now, as is demonstrated by the Iraq war. But there was considerable emphasis on having the air element present and talking and being fully aware of Army doctrine, and the Army officers in turn being fully aware of the Air doctrine. A similar thing was going on at Montgomery, Alabama, the Air War College. There would be a significant number of Army officers down there. But I must say, the caliber of the young officers, male and female, and the very increasing numbers of women officers, the caliber was very high. Anybody who had any notion that somehow Army officers weren’t carefully educated and chosen would be quickly disabused.
Q: I know. In contrast, our present Under Secretary for Political Affairs says that he has a little act that he follows with our Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who came up through the military, and he asked, how about education for leadership and other things, and how much have you had? Colin Powell would say, “Well, I had six years of education under a system such as you’re talking about.” And Marc Grossman says,
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“Well, I’ve had two weeks.”
GILMORE: Right, except...
Q: I mean it changed. You were part of this change.
GILMORE: Right, in fact, there were always two, sometimes three State Department officers at the War College. I thought that was very important. I think they benefited...I stayed in touch with at least one of them. I think that was an important benefit. Of course, the U.S. Foreign Service officers who go to the National War College were always better off for it, I believe.
Q: I think, too, it adds, it’s a resource too, for people to get a sort of diplomatic perspective. Of course, one of the things that, in my generation, we had this, but so many of us had come out of the military, the draft, like myself, fours years as an enlisted man. But I had a feel for the military.
GILMORE: Right.
Q: And today’s generation, you don’t have that experience…
GILMORE: Right. I missed the military, for example. I was too young for the Korean War, and the Vietnam War really began after I was in the Foreign Service, and also, when I went to grad school, I was classified 1 A. My draft board told me, when I checked in with them heading off to grad school, it would be very unlikely that I would be called. So, what I learned about the Army and the military, which I consider, by the way, very important, I learned working with them so closely in Berlin, and also at the War College. And I must say what I learned about leadership at the War College came in very handy when I then ran my own embassy in Armenia, and particularly when I spent a year running the Senior Seminar as my last position in the State Department. In the Senior Seminar, we had a number of uniformed officers as part of the class. I was better able to communicate with them and much more full of respect for what they knew about things we were trying to teach to the foreign service officers about leadership, because of my experience at the War College.
Q: Well then, after, in ’92, where’d you go?
GILMORE: I was nominated by President Bush to be the first U.S. ambassador to Armenia. [Editor’s Note: The United States recognized Armenia Dec 26, 1991. Embassy Yerevan was opened Feb 3, 1992, with Steven Mann as Chargé d'Affaires ad interim.] So, without formally leaving the War College, in about a year from the time I arrived, in August, I went down to go through the ambassadorial course with all the ambassadors going to the newly independent states. Unfortunately, the White House was unable to move my papers through the Senate with the papers of the others, for reasons that I think had to do with a glitch in the White House down at the working level. So I was not
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scheduled for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing when the others were. I therefore was not able to go out to Yerevan, to Armenia, as quickly as had been foreseen. The others went out, were confirmed, and went out to the field, and meanwhile, I was waiting for a hearing with the Senate. There were several attempts, but unfortunately I did not get a hearing before the election that Fall, and President Bush was not re elected. And the whole question then of hearings of the president’s next round of appointees as ambassadors became a kind of political football, as some important voices in the Senate said that they didn’t wish to consider any political appointees. They would look at career appointees, but they wouldn’t give a hearing to political appointees. I think President Bush’s position was pretty clear, which was, “I’m the President, I have the right to appoint ambassadors, I’m either going to appoint who I want to appoint, or we won’t go ahead.” The long and the short of it is when President Bush left office, my appointment lapsed, and I was instructed by Secretary of State Eagleburger, at the end of the Bush administration he had become the Secretary that I was basically a non person and I had no status as an ambassador designate, once the president left office. So, I studied some more Armenian and was reading everything I could about Armenia and about the Armenian American community, which was large and very active politically. I was basically waiting in the wings. Not many weeks after the new administration was in place, Strobe Talbott invited me to see him. I had a briefing with him, and he said that he had looked at my credentials and he had talked to the president about my situation. The President said, “Make it happen. We’re going to nominate him again.” So, President Clinton re nominated me. I was given a hearing in May.
Q: This was May of ’93.
GILMORE: May of ’93. So, that horrible winter in Armenia, and I’ll talk about that in more detail, I didn’t get to go to head up the mission. There was some talk about sending me as Chargé d’Affaires and then bringing me back and nominating me again. But Senator Dodd, among others, made it plain that they thought the Senate’s role should not be circumvented in these ways, sending somebody out to be chief of mission who is really the administration’s intended choice for ambassador, didn’t seem right to him. He signaled that he would oppose such nominations once they occurred after the person came back from being chargé. So, I sat.
I learned pretty fluent, basic Eastern Armenian. There was a real problem. There was not even a textbook. Most of the Armenians in the United States at that time, not all but most of them, were Western Armenians. And Western and Eastern Armenian are significantly different, mutually intelligible to native speakers, but significantly different. But, we found a teacher. I basically studied spoken Armenian, spoken Eastern Armenian, and I, as I said, read the files, and got myself really briefed on very many important issues in the Armenian world and in Armenian politics, not only in the United States but in Lebanon and in other places where there was significant Armenian political life.
I got a hearing in May. It went well. I remember particularly, Senator Sarbanes, while I was waiting to be heard, making a very demonstrative gesture in asking me to come out
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of the hearing room, and spoke with me and thanked me for my service in Berlin, complimented me on it, and said how supportive he would be. Turns out, he’s one of the important friends of Armenia in the Senate.
My hearing went well. I believe the goals set at the hearing were goals that I largely fulfilled as ambassador. I would just note them briefly. In my statement, which I submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I said I had several basic goals. One was to spearhead the United States’ effort to meet Armenia’s emergency humanitarian needs in the face of blockades which stemmed from the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Secondly, to encourage Armenia and its neighbor, Azerbaijan, to work for lasting peace and security for their people through good faith negotiations. And, thirdly, establishing a strong U.S. Armenian relationship based on democracy, human rights, and economic reform in the direction of free market principles. I also had a personal goal. I didn’t express it, because it was a personal goal, but it was based on my careful reading of U.S. Armenian relations, or the absence thereof in the twentieth century, and that was to engender among the people of Armenia a confidence in the United States as a reliable long term friend and partner. Here I referred explicitly to the fact that when the first Armenian Republic came into being in 1918, the United States never got around to sending an ambassador, and while we recognized it, we didn’t do much while it was in existence. We did very well with many orphans who had turned up from the Armenian catastrophe in Ottoman Turkey from 1915 to 1918, the mass deportations and genocidal massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. We did well in terms of taking care of orphans. But, it was important to me, when I set out for Armenia, that I wanted them to see that the United States was going to be around this time and was going to be supportive, and that they had a reliable friend and partner in the United States.
Q: Well, now, Harry, to get to your appointment... So many of these early appointments to the... with the breakup of the Soviet Empire... sort of the White House process got quite political. You had an awful lot of people of Estonian descent, or Ukrainian descent, or what have you, ending up as early ambassadors. And Armenia is probably one of the most politically sensitive places in American political life, Armenians, for a small country, carry a lot of clout.
GILMORE: It’s true.
Q: How come they didn’t pull out some American Armenian?
GILMORE: It’s a very good question. I think it was a conscious decision, in part, because to find somebody that the whole Armenian American community could coalesce around, might not be easy. I mean there could be people, like former governor of California George Deukmejian, or someone like that, might have been a choice. But, otherwise, there was strong and conscious decision, I think, made by the Department that you recommend to the President a career person. The feeling was, in part, that the career person would be able to work with all shades of Armenian American opinion. I personally think that was exactly right.
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Q: But, that’s our perspective. The Foreign Service perspective. Because usually, there’s a completely different perspective by the appointment secretary, or what have you, in the White House.
GILMORE: Very often. It’s interesting. I got to know the Armenian American community very, very well by the time I became ambassador. In fact, in the run up to my nomination by President Bush, I went around and called on the Armenian American officials. They were looking to talk with me, and I found that they welcomed the idea there would be a professional person. They’re interesting on this thing. They wanted very much to have my ear, and they made it very plain how strongly their interests in Armenia’s survival were and in an effective humanitarian aid program. They also made it plain they were going to work hard to influence me, and they also made it super plain that they had a lot of influence in the Congress. But, by and large, they welcomed it. And, in fact, one of the reasons I believe that President Clinton looked to me quickly was not because I was Harry Gilmore, but because once he got into office, there was considerable pressure coming from the Armenian American community to name an ambassador.
Q: Yes.
GILMORE: So, I was among the first, perhaps the second, round of Clinton ambassadorial appointees. But, it’s interesting. So far, we have not had an Armenian American ambassadorial appointee to Yerevan. I think this is still in part because the Armenian American community, at least the important leaders of it, see it as advantageous to have an experienced Foreign Service person, providing, of course, that they understood that they have an abiding, deep interest in Armenia’s survival and ultimately prosperity. And they expect whoever the ambassador is to take that into account.
Q: Okay, Harry, you served in Armenia from ’93 to when?
GILMORE: From May of ’93 ‘til July of ’95. I received my appointment on May 12, 1993 and presented my credentials on May 31. Twenty six months, and I curtailed, I cut the tour short because I got the word that my mother seemed to be dying, and I was the oldest son, and it made some sense to come home. Turned out, she went to a nursing home, but didn’t die for a couple years thereafter. But, I asked to be relieved, and was.
Q: May, ’93, when you went out there, what was the situation that you were facing in Armenia at that time?
GILMORE: Grim, indeed. There was the humanitarian catastrophe on the way. Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan had been closed before Armenia’s independence in 1991 because of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan. Just before I got there, earlier in ’93, Armenian forces, primarily Karabakh Armenian forces, but with some support from the Armenian Republic, took the area between Karabakh, which
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is inside Azerbaijan, an enclave, and the Armenian border. Turkey closed its border. So, by the time I got there, the only borders that Armenia had open were the border with Iran, a small border in the South, and the border with Georgia. And Armenia’s access to the global scene was via Georgia, and Georgia was in tremendous disarray.
Georgia declared its formal independence from the Soviet Union in April 1991, but Tbilisi’s authority in Georgia didn’t go far. Georgia had disintegrated into a, to put it nicely, into a series of fiefdoms, with no central control. And to get assistance or any kind of shipments from the Georgian Black Sea coast, which is the only point of access for Armenia and Azerbaijan, to Armenia or Azerbaijan, was a horrendous process. The train would be stopped four or five times by local self appointed militia. They would climb aboard. There were bags of wheat aboard; they took some wheat off to use it locally. Trains were held up. So Armenia’s basic life lines to the United States and the European community, both of which were more than willing to provide assistance, were through a very fragmented Georgia. Mr. Shevardnadze was working quickly to consolidate Georgia’s unity, but it was a difficult process in my first year there when the process was only beginning. By the time I was there a year, the situation had stabilized in Georgia considerably, and by the time I left, it was essentially okay.
But I have to add, for example, that when anybody in my embassy in Yerevan went overland by car to Tbilisi, which we did frequently, we had to watch out for armed robberies. We had several of them. The embassy car would basically just get into Georgia a few kilometers and a Soviet made car with Georgian irregulars, self appointed militia types, would drive up, force it off the road, and fellows with carbines or pistols would order everybody out of the car and basically take their money. This was still going on, so the situation was extremely fragile.
There were bread shortages. Armenia is energy poor. The most important source of energy in Armenia was the nuclear power plant in Metsamor, which at that particular point had been closed because of Armenian Green activity in the wake of the devastating earthquake of December 1988. So, with the border to Azerbaijan being closed, the natural gas pipeline not in operation, Armenia was desperate for energy. The winters were cold, schools were closed and the Soviet world, particularly the urban areas of the Soviet world, had the kind of heating systems we’re not used to. It’d be like heating plants four, or five, or six, or ten, within a given area of the capital city, which then in turn heated blocks of apartments. They were all out. Also, in Yerevan, the water pumps were all electric, and the electric was generated from mazut, which was heavy fuel oil in the former Soviet Union, or natural gas, both of which were in short supply, or not there at all.
So, our first effort was to mount a massive assistance program, which started before my time. The embassy was run, I think, quite ably for a year or more, by Thomas Price. When I got there, though, Armenia was in a humanitarian crisis. My key task, in the early part of my tenure, and in fact throughout my 26 months there was assistance. We did very well in the end. There was no lack of funding on the U.S. side, in part because of the very active
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advocacy by the Armenian American organizations. There was plenty of assistance money. The question was how to get the assistance there because of the fragmentation of Georgia. Of course, we would never try to get assistance in through Iran, because of our Iran policy.
But, in any case, the key point of our assistance program my first year there, and through my second as well, was a so called Winter Warmth program. The idea was to distribute kerosene and kerosene heaters for home heating needs in these huge apartment blocks, particularly in Yerevan. And, I add here that Armenia was kind of a tadpole country. The head is bigger than the body in some ways. Yerevan had close to half the population and was the location of all the important governmental and cultural institutions, virtually all. In any case, we, together with Jean _____, the French Armenian crooner, and also in parallel with the European Union, were focusing on assistance. We put kerosene heaters in the schools. We carefully provided a targeted kerosene heating program to civil categories of vulnerable people. They were nursing mothers, the elderly, families with small children.
And while we had a devil of a time getting the kerosene in the first winter, in fact, much of the winter was over by the time the first shipments were able to get up from Batumi, the Georgian port at that point, or Poti port, the second Georgian port on the Black Sea. They sat and sat. By the time we got them up there, much suffering had occurred, many schools were closed. But, when we did get them there, there came a kind of surge of hope to many Armenians that they could make a go of it. I have to add that the Armenian population is extremely well educated. One of the great achievements of the Soviet period in many ways was in the area of education. But they had no light to read, and during the winters couldn’t read after dark. They had no light, they had no heat. And our Winter Warmth program, plus our support for providing mazut heavy fuel oil, which ran some of the power plants, I think made an important difference. In some cases, I think it saved lives.
I remember personally spearheading the Winter Warmth program. I went out to the tank farm where we delivered kerosene from the railroad, and put in the tank for them to store it and from there put it into trucks. We went out there, sent an expert from Petersburg, Virginia, who knew how to run a tank farm. We began to run trucks all over Yerevan. Some of the trucks were pretty decrepit looking, but I remember loading the trucks to the applause of many Armenians, being on Armenian TV, both before the kerosene arrived when we were in desperate situations trying to get it through Georgia.
Also, I visited schools where kerosene was the only source of heating. I remember one vividly, a school just outside Yerevan, not too far from our tank farm. I took my interpreter from the embassy, although I spoke a fair amount of Armenian, it was clearly foreign Armenian. So, through my interpreter, I asked a little girl who was sitting in the back with her coat on, they all had their coats on because you couldn’t really heat the classroom...her hands were purple. I was very worried about her. I remember asking her what it was like at home. It was cold. When I asked her what she was eating, she was
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eating one meal a day, the meal at the school, which we were providing. We also provided massive quantities of wheat, and later wheat seed.
We also provided funding for heavy fuel oil, mazut. In subsequent years we provided funding for natural gas, although the natural gas supply was a very precarious thing, because the natural gas pipeline from Azerbaijan was closed because that border was closed. The other natural gas line which brought Turkmen and later Russian gas down through Georgia was frequently blown up because it came down through the Azerbaijani minority inhabited parts of Georgia. So, these were precarious times.
I remember once the president, with whom I became close friends, Levon Ter Petrossian, a very distinguished, scholarly person. I remember him saying that he didn’t know how to justify his role as president because they had no bread. We focused on humanitarian shipments of wheat, and by heavy persuasion and by a lot of work with Georgia, and making sure, by the way, that the Georgians had enough assistance, that they weren’t sorely tempted to take assistance destined for Armenia from the train. We finally got an important, consistent aid pipeline working. But I think it’s very fair to say that we saved people from malnutrition, and in some cases from probably near starvation. So that was the fundamental focus of my stay in Armenia.
The second important task, in addition to getting an embassy up and running, although Tom Price had done much of the important groundwork for that, was making a team out of the embassy. Particularly pushing the idea that the FSNs were our colleagues. They work with us. They may not be able to do everything, and in some places they can’t be included because of security classification, but I pride myself on having forged a team with some very capable people. We were one of the better employers to work for in Armenia at the time because we paid regularly and paid well by comparison with other installations, with the Western embassies, and the United Nations organizations that really were the desirable places to work. We forged a very good team.
I had other important tasks. One of them was to rebuild essentially, certainly restructure the embassy building that we acquired. We acquired a very good building at a very reasonable price, opposite the Parliament and near the president’s office. But it was a Soviet era building; it had been heated by one of these district heating operations. It had no heating system of its own. It had not proper earthquake resistant walls. In many ways it didn’t meet our standards. So the decision was made in the case of that embassy and several others in the former Soviet Union, we would rebuild the embassy, reconstruct it while we worked in it.
A very difficult proposition, and not one I would recommend to anyone. First place, with the energy shortage in Armenia, the source of power for most of the time was a generator, which worked much of the time, but didn’t work always. It had to be taken down every so often for maintenance. We had no water because the city water pumps weren’t working for part of the time. We kept having to move within the embassy as the construction moved around. And we were at the very end of the U.S. pipeline for materials. Very
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often, we couldn’t conduct organized work plans because materials wouldn’t reach us, couldn’t get to us through Georgia in anything like the time they were expected. Two of the cleared American workers died while we were reconstructing the embassy. In one case, it was clearly a reversible medical condition, just that there was no energy in the local hospitals, and they had no electricity to run a defibrillator. And by the time we got a medical evacuation plane in from Switzerland, the doctor that came in on the plane joined the Armenian physician in pronouncing the fellow dead. These sent shock waves through the American embassy staff. The feeling was, “What happens if we get sick?” I have to say that the State Department medical system did not do well. They tried. They had had a regional physician who flew out of Athens covering us, but he just couldn’t cover all the new posts, and he couldn’t spend all his time in Yerevan.
Reconstruction was hard in other ways. You’d get home in the beginning, and there would be dust all over your desk. There would be incessant noise some of the time. I would not recommend this as a way of operating. On the other hand, I think it saved money, but above all it kept us continuing in operation. At the end of the process, which wound up essentially before I left, we did have a much more livable embassy building. There’s another thing that the State Department ought to look at as it does this in the future. The practical, and more important than most non professionals would understand, I had to turn the AID mission out of the embassy building during the reconstruction period because there was no room for it. They had plenty of money. They picked up a pretty good rental building, and the embassy’s coordination with AID mission is not an easy thing at best. The AID mission tended to follow its own drummer more when it was separate from us, and we had to work hard at that. Luckily, my first AID representative, Suzanne Olds, was a real can do person, and wanted to work with me and with State, and we made it happen. But subsequently, when it was time for the AID mission to return to a refurbished embassy, there was immense foot dragging on the part of AID. Granted, there were practical problems. For example, we only had limited access to the airport. We had passes, and I had to make sure that the passes wouldn’t stay with AID which was receiving most of the humanitarian shipments. I don’t want to go into more detail than that, but I just want to suggest how administratively tough it was.
Q: Armenia is bordered by what states?
GILMORE: Armenia is bordered by Turkey on the west, to the north is Georgia, and then on the northeast and east, Azerbaijan, and on the south for 40 kilometers, Iran. It’s a tough neck of the woods.
Q: Could we do anything with Turkey?
GILMORE: Before the Karabakh conflict reached the phase where the Armenian forces occupied the area between Nagorno Karabakh itself and the Armenian border, the so called Kalbajar region of Azerbaijan, we were able to get some humanitarian assistance in through Turkey. At one point, earlier on, Turkey ran a train with wheat up to the Armenian border, and although there are different gauges, Turkey has European gauge
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railroad, and Armenia had the Soviet gauge, that worked. But Turkey, after February of ’93, closed the border, then nothing came through. Even before that, any U.S. cargo for Armenia that came through Turkey was subject to inspection. Armenian Americans were up in arms about that, saying the Turks were unduly delaying...but there was another point. Once the Turkish border was closed, Turkish air space was closed for a long time. So any flight to Armenia had to fly around Turkey.
Q: What was the problem with Armenian Turkey?
GILMORE: The biggest problem with Armenian Turkey goes back into the last stages of the Ottoman Empire. Armenians were one of the larger minorities in the Ottoman Empire. They were scattered all over the Ottoman Empire and a very important community in Istanbul. In fact, Armenians were the largest Christian minority in Istanbul. The Greeks were large, but not quite as large a community. They’d be more known in the west. There were maybe as many two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire...1.8 or 2, it’s hard to get the exact figure. But when the concepts of the nation state and nationalism, which came into Europe really through the French Revolution, finally reached the Ottoman Empire… we know the consequences. Serbia became at least autonomous. Greece, and then later the rest of the Balkan states became independent. Well, the Armenians lived basically in the heartland, and had no place to go. Without getting into a very fascinating but complicated historical situation, I should note the failure after 1908 of the Young Turk movement to establish a kind of Pan Ottoman concept, which none of the Armenians would have joined. The more radical Armenian nationalists, who by the way, both the Ottoman and Czarist Russian empires were perfectly capable... they operated in secret much like Nerobmaiavoria, in many ways the prototype organization, Russian organization, the Leninist Party... the Armenian radicals had taken action against the Turkish state, which the Turks saw as terrorism, and which I think could be fairly labeled as terrorism.
In any case, during World War I there was great suspicion that the Armenians were a fifth column, anxious to see Russia come in and take as much as possible of the Armenian lands in Anatolia. The Armenians had been at home in Anatolia since well before any Seljuk or Ottoman Turks came to the region, and there had been a succession of Armenian states, up until 1375. There was a view of the Armenians as a fifth column, and, in fact, there were some Armenians from Ottoman Turkey that joined the Czar’s ranks. Meanwhile, in the late stages of the Ottoman Empire, particularly after the Russo Turkish War and after the Congress of Berlin, there was an increasing Armenian area in czarist Russia bordering on Turkey. The long and short of it is, the Turks were suspicious of the Armenians as a fifth column and the Armenians sought protection from Russia, France, Britain, Western Allies because of alleged atrocities. In fact there were atrocities. There were massacres in the Ottoman region. There were Armenian massacres in Ottoman Turkey from the 1890’s on. During World War I, on April 24, the night from April 24, April 25, the flower of the Armenian intellectual and cultural and religious community in Istanbul was decapitated. More than two hundred of the leading lights were rounded up in their homes and were hauled in. Most of them, according to our
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ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at that point, Henry Morgenthau [Sr.], were sent off into the interior. That seemed to kick off a massive effort by the Committee of Union and Progress, which would be the technical name for the Young Turks, the Jön Türkler, in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, to round up Armenians, take them out of Army units where they just only in recent years been able to serve, put them into labor battalions, or else outright shoot the male military...just shot them. In many cases, they didn’t even use bullets. They wanted to save bullets; they bayoneted them. And to start deporting en masse Armenians from the five deliaths, the five provinces in Anatolia where they were a significant minority.
By the way, I should add, in some of these deliaths, there was no majority in absolute terms. There were ethnic Turks who weren’t seen as Turks then; they were seen as part of the Muslim, greater Muslim community, Kurds Armenians, Syrians. In any case, the Armenians were deported ostensibly to a place called Deir ez Zor, down in the Syrian Desert, near Aleppo; of course that was all part of the Ottoman Empire then. The deportations were witnessed by numerous American missionaries throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. We put a lot of missions into Turkey. By the way, many of their converts were non Turkish minorities in the Ottoman Empire, non Muslim minorities, I should say, including Armenians. Also, we had numerous consulates in the Ottoman Empire, run by very good consuls who reported on this. In fact, some of the best first hand information on the Armenian deportations and massacres comes from them. They reported all this to Henry Morgenthau, who made representations to the Young Turk leadership, particularly to Talat Pasha, who was the Minister of the Interior. But by the time the World War I ended, and here I am simplifying it; there is so much of it to be delved into...there were virtually no Armenians left in the new modern Turkish republic which emerged. Very small minority in Istanbul, and smaller minorities in some urban areas, in the Turkish Aegean area, because the presence of the Western missions in Constantinople is largely credited with holding down the large scale massacre activity against Armenians and the Syrians and others there. But this is a way of sketching the background of the Turkish Armenian animosity, hatred on the part of Armenians for most Turks. There had already been an Armenian Diaspora growing since the 1890s to the United States, France and other places, but those Armenians who did survive, that made their way to Aleppo, Syria and Lebanon. But more of them went to the United States and France. What they brought with them was an immense hatred for Turks who had decimated them and had thrown them off what they considered to be their ancestral land. Some of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire who survived made their way to Soviet Armenia. First they made their way through the independent Armenian state which emerged for about 20 months, from 1918 to 1920. That state was taken over by the Bolsheviks. But the Armenians still saw the Russians as their protectors against the Turks. So, within the Armenian republic and the Armenian strongholds in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, and France where there is a significant Armenian community, and the United States where there is an even larger one, and in Russia, where the largest of all Diaspora Armenian communities is and has, by the way, grown enormously since Armenian independence there are these important Armenian communities that all have political influence wherever they are and care deeply about
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Armenia and don’t like Turks. They expect the Turks to acknowledge that the massacres were genocidal and Armenian properties were seized without any kind of recompense. So, without going into further detail, I think I’ve sketched the reason for the immense dislike.
Many Armenian émigrés, politicians, over the years have already hinted that the Turkish Republic should give to the Armenian state some border areas which were historically Armenian. In other words, they have a revanchist policy, although that’s not the policy of the Armenian government. Also, there’s a widespread feeling among Armenians everywhere that the Turks owe the successors of the Armenians who were dispossessed their recompense. So, there’s all this baggage in the Turkish Armenian relationship. On top of this comes the Karabakh conflict. The Turks and the Azerbaijani are ethnically and linguistically particularly close. Linguistically quite close. The Azerbaijani Turkish and the Turkish spoken in Turkey are close, they’re cousin languages. Also, there are numerous Azerbaijani in Turkey, and the Azerbaijani national movement, which really began at the end of the 19th century and flourished about the time of World War I, modeled itself, in some way, on the Young Turk and Atatürk movements.
In fact, in some cases the intellectual leadership came from Azerbaijani Turks, the intellectual leadership for even the Young Turk movement. There is a tremendous affinity between these two countries. So, when the Karabakh conflict broke out, the Turks sided with Azerbaijan, and in fact their policy has been that they will not normalize relations with Armenia until such time as the Karabakh conflict is ended and the Azerbaijanis and Armenians reach a settlement which is satisfactory to Azerbaijan. So, while Turkey recognizes Armenia, there have been no exchange of diplomats and all attempts at dialogue have foundered on two issues: the Karabakh issue and the Turkish insistence that the Armenians withdraw or openly deny that they have any territorial claims on Turkey and also they ask the Armenians not to push for recognition of the Armenian genocide. Well, the Armenian communities in Russia, France, and in a number of other states, Greece, have succeeded in persuading… [end of tape]
Concerning whether the events of 1915 to 1922 1923 constitute genocide, as defined by the UN Genocide Convention, the U.S. government has taken the position… To have the terms of the Genocide Convention met, you have to have proof of intent. They claimed that there’s no proof that it was the intent of the Ottoman authorities to commit what is defined in the convention as genocide. There was controversy, although in all fairness, more scholars believed that there was a genocide than not. The U.S. Congress is the scene of numerous genocide resolutions, one of which very nearly passed in the Clinton period. In fact, they had the votes in the House to pass, very clearly. President Clinton wrote to Speaker Hastert and asked him to take the genocide resolution off the House floor, with reasons that had to do with our interests in Turkey, and the danger to our American troops there, and some other points.
The point is Armenians and Turks have not been able to establish a relationship. There had been efforts. There was a Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission, which was
142 sponsored in part by the U.S. government’s State Department. They met. Some leaders of Turkey, some important personalities in Turkey, some important Armenians from the Republic, from the Russian Armenian Diaspora, from the U.S. Armenian Diaspora met. They ostensibly agreed to have an impartial body look at the question of whether the events of 1915 ’22 could constitute a genocide. The body said they did, they came back and said they did. The Turks said, “This is not possible.” The Commission ground to a halt. There were important elements in the Armenian world, particularly the Armenian Diaspora, that didn’t like it anyhow. I mention this solely because it gives you some sense of how deep the divisions are and how heavy the historical burden is.
Q: Well, there is also, at that time... well for some time that I was familiar with, a terrorist campaign against Turkish diplomats.
GILMORE: Yes.
Q: Including at least the consul general, Mehmet Baydar, and his deputy, Bahadir Demir, in Los Angeles.
GILMORE: Yes.
Q: They were killed and somebody in...
GILMORE: And Orhan Gündüz.
Q: In New York or Boston...
GILMORE: Boston, an honorary Turkish consul, I believe there. When I was deputy chief of mission in Belgrade, Ambassador Galip Balkar, the Turkish Ambassador was assassinated and his driver as well. Those terrorist activities took place in the ‘70s into the early ‘80s. There was also a bloody airline hijacking at Orly Airfield in Paris, as I remember. There were two basic organizations active in the Armenian community, engaging in this terrorist activity against Turkish diplomats. One is ASALA, which is the Armenian Struggle for the Armed Liberation of Armenia. The second was Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide. ASALA was basically a left wing, probably in some ways a pseudo Communist organization whose center of gravity was really the Armenian community in Lebanon, although important Armenian Americans including from California joined with ASALA. One would have been Monte Melkonian, the well known person who took part in some of these activities... who, by the way, was subsequently killed as a volunteer in Karabakh, fighting for the Karabakh Army. The other organization, the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, was, in fact, affiliated with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, although there has been no open acknowledgment backed by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation leadership. The Consul General in LA that you mentioned was killed by someone associated with the Justice Commandos.
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That terrorism died out in the early ‘80s. We’ve seen nothing since. Although, I can’t excuse it, nor can you assume that there wouldn’t be more. The interesting thing in my view is first, the terrorists were in effect the grandchildren of the victims of the Armenian deportations and massacres. And secondly, these acts were regarded by the overwhelming majority of Armenians, in the Diaspora particularly, as justified. The United States took great pains to protect Turkish diplomatic establishments in the United States and to root out terrorism, and in fact did not allow certain Armenian Diasporan leaders thought to be responsible ultimately for these actions to visit the United States. Particularly one important person in Lebanon. The terrorist activity had in fact subsided in the mid ‘80s, and hasn’t reoccurred. Turks are very sensitive about it, and point to it as something that was unjustified.
Q: What are the roots of this... I can never get that double name...
GILMORE: Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Nagorno Karabakh, which basically translates into English as Mountainous Karabakh. The Azerbaijanis call it the Mountainous Karabakh. For that matter, so do the Armenians. Nagorno is a Russian word for mountain, mountainous. Karabakh means black garden. It’s a combination of Farsi and Turkish.
Q: Kara means black.
GILMORE: Kara means black, and bocha, or bakh, means garden. In any case, it’s a part of Azerbaijan, geographically, but the area has been inhabited by Armenians and by Azerbaijanis, and some smaller other elements, particularly some Kurds. This is as far back as we know. The last czarist Russian census, which I believe was 1896, showed more Armenians than Muslims. By the way, at that time, at that census, Azerbaijanis were not recognized as a national group. They were considered Turks, or there’s another name for them as well. In any case, the Armenians, the Georgians, and the Russians just called them Muslims. There was a plurality of Armenians. In fact, I guess a slight majority of the population was Armenian. The last Soviet census showed roughly 120,000 Armenians, about 40 or 50,000 Azerbaijanis, and the rest are the minorities, particularly Kurds, although not necessarily Muslim Kurds, some of them were of a different stripe...Yezidi Kurds. Fighting broke out in the Soviet period. It’s very important to recognize this.
I should add that there had been fighting among Azerbaijanis and Armenians over Karabakh in World War I as well. It was Stalin who awarded it to the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic. First it was the Azerbaijani component of the Soviet Federation. But, in any case, Stalin made it an autonomous area where there were certain rights ostensibly guaranteed to Armenians. Armenians never accepted it. The first Armenian Republic was too weak to do anything about it, but didn’t accept it. Fighting broke out in 1988. There were massive demonstrations in Stepanakert which is the Armenian name for the capital of Karabakh. The Azerbaijanis called it Xankəndi. The demonstrations quickly were echoed in Yerevan, where there were huge demonstrations on the streets. And this
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generated the Armenian Pan National Republic which was the force that was the harbinger of, and the engine that achieved Armenian independence. And the kind of mirror image for the Azerbaijani...APF, the Azerbaijani People’s Front, came into being also because of these clashes. The demonstrations in Stepanakert for Armenians were echoed by activity against a very substantial Armenian population in Baku and Sumgait, which is across the Absheron Peninsula across from Baku, had substantial fighting. As fighting erupted in Karabakh, the Armenian minority of Baku and Sumgait was pushed out, as was the Azeri minority in parts of Armenia.
Q: There was some pretty nasty stuff in there.
GILMORE: Oh, yes. Well the conflict itself was bloody. The number of people who died as a result of the Karabakh conflict is usually put at 25 to 30,000. It would have been much more a subject of concern to the United States had there been any real news reporting. There wasn’t. There were no United States journalists on any kind of regular basis, no stringers. Occasionally a stringer would report something on the conflict. So, like Bosnia, which by the way was probably not bloodier, bloody as it was...this didn’t make the headlines. Didn’t make CNN on a regular basis. There’s also a tradition in the Caucuses of taking hostages. So there were kidnappings: you locked a hostage in your basement, give him bread and water. You had him in case you need a trade in, because there had been hostage taking on the other side. The fighting was bloody. There was considerable mine laying, so there had been a lot of injuries, particularly during and after the conflict as a result of mine explosions. Particularly the children. The long and the short of it is, the conflict ended in ’94, with a cease fire engineered by Russia. The then defense minister, Pavel Grachev, was the key person, supported by all the members of the so called Minsk Group, which includes the United States, France, and other important countries. The Minsk Group, by the way, was so named because there was to be a conference in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to end the conflict had the Minsk Group succeeded.
In any case, since ’94 there has been a cease fire. The cease fire left the Armenian forces in occupation of about 17 percent of Azerbaijan. Areas around Karabakh, including the entire region between Karabakh and the Armenian border, and from Karabakh down to the Iranian border are occupied by Armenian forces. The Armenians say that the reason they occupy those areas is to get Stepanakert out of artillery range. And there is some logic to that. In any case, the Azeris, pointing to the fact that the CFC, the OSCE has recognized the borders as they existed when the Soviet Union collapsed, say that their territorial integrity needs to be restored. The Armenians say that Karabakh was never a part of a truly independent Azerbaijani state and there are negotiations underway with three co chairs of the Minsk Group, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United States, Russia and France. There have been times when there appeared to be progress toward a settlement. And the present presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia: Heydar Aliyev from Azerbaijan, and Robert Kocharyan in Armenia, have personally negotiated two times. Once in Paris, under the auspices of the French President, and once in Key West, under U.S. auspices. But the conflict has not been
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resolved, although there still are contacts by presidential emissaries, and there are still activities by the Minsk Group.
There is some increased sentiment in Azerbaijan for trying to retake Karabakh, militarily, but the general assumption is that the Armenian forces are too strong militarily for now. The best army in the Caucasus , pound for pound, is undoubtedly the Karabakh army. For several reasons. They fought during the Karabakh conflict, but also they had a long tradition in the Red Army and the Czarist Army of providing soldiers. Mountain boys who were rough and tough, good shooters, and marshals, to the Soviet Army. So they’re a very good army, although small. The Armenian Army is the next best force in the caucuses. Both the Azeris and particularly the Georgians are considerably less well organized militarily. So, for the time being, it looks as if the Armenian Republic is backing the Armenians of Karabakh and can’t be realistically defeated by the Azerbaijanis. There is a concern that if oil pipelines are built, that as Azerbaijan’s oil and gas wealth generates hard currency, that Azerbaijanis will be able to buy an army, so to speak, and improve their forces. They’re getting considerable military education assistance from Turkey, which is of course a very formidable place to learn soldiery. But the conflict has not been resolved. There’s just been a presidential election in Armenia, and the final round is in March. There’s going to be a presidential election in Azerbaijan in the fall, and the best judgment of veteran observers is that there may be a more concerted effort to try to wrap up some kind of negotiated solution after both presidents have been re elected. The assumption is that President Aliyev will be easily reelected. Probably a safe assumption. The long and the short of it is, neither country is going to develop, in my judgment, normally as a secure country. Neither country is going to be able to develop in the normal way democratically until this conflict is resolved, and don’t hold your breath.
Q: Let’s talk about the political system there. Also about the spirit of the Caucasus. One picks up what the Caucuses from Tolstoy and other... this is a pretty unstable...
GILMORE: It’s one of the most ethnically complex places on the planet. I’ve served in the Balkans and in the Caucasus and the Balkans are extremely complex, but if there’s any place that I know is a degree more complex ethnically, it’s probably the Caucasus.
***
Q: Today is the 14th of April, 2003. Harry, back to Armenia. Did you get involved... was the United States involved in peace efforts there?
GILMORE: Very much so. Starting with Ambassador Jack Maresca, and continuing through a series of very able American special envoys for Nagorno Karabakh and disputes in the former Soviet Union and areas like the dispute over the Abkhazia part of Georgia. Also Moldova. There was a series of envoys. Jack was the first, and he was the envoy for the first part of my tour of duty.
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Q: His name again is...?
GILMORE: John, or “Jack,” Maresca. Very capable fellow. I believe he is now living in Europe. [Editor’s Note: Following his Karabakh assignment, Mr. Maresca headed the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty affiliated Open Media Research Institute in Prague.] Then, he was followed by Joe Presel during my time, and then a series of very able envoys, all of whom I’ve known and kept in touch with. The basic channel for discussions on the Nagorno Karabakh dispute was not the embassies in Baku or Yerevan, although we talked about Karabakh all the time because it was the central issue for both countries. But the center of gravity for the U.S. efforts to try to encourage and foster a compromise solution to the conflict was the Minsk Group of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the CSCE. We worked closely with them, and of course, Jack Maresca, Joe Presel, and their successors were in Yerevan and Baku a lot. Strobe Talbott, who was then the senior U.S. official involved with the talks, was also in the area from time to time, during my stay there. The Karabakh issue was central to what was going on in Armenia and Azerbaijan. But the embassies were focused more on bilateral issues and on a very important support role. So, while I could say the Karabakh issue suffused everything we did in Armenia, it was still not our issue as much as it was the issue for the special envoy.
Q: Who were our ambassadors in Azerbaijan?
GILMORE: Richard Niles was our ambassador in Azerbaijan during the first part of my tour of duty in Armenia [Editor’s Note: Ambassador Niles served from September 1992 to November 1993], and then he was succeeded by Richard Kauzlarich [Editor’s Note: Ambassador Kauzlarich served from April 1994 to July 1997]. Kent Brown was our ambassador in Georgia during that period. [Editor’s Note: Ambassador Brown served from September 1992 to August 1995.] Kent is now, I think, working for RJR Nabisco, formerly RJ Reynolds. But, basically, we did get together.
We inaugurated a series of meetings. I met bilaterally with Kent Brown once in his residence and then he came to mine. Then we had a trilateral meeting arranged on an annual basis. We had one of those in Georgia. Ambassador Brown hosted it. Ambassador Kauzlarich and I attended it. We had a second one set up, but I suggested that maybe we wait until I left, when the new ambassador to Armenia, Peter Tomsen, my successor, came aboard.
These meetings were useful. The one we did in Georgia began in Tblisi, where Kent had arranged a call on Shevardnadze by the three of us. I had met Shevardnadze before in connection with the German reunification. Then we went to Tagori to see Stalin’s home town and see the memorabilia that is still there from the Stalin era. We went to Kutaisi, Georgia’s second city, I think you could call it the second city. And then we went down to Batumi, which is the stronghold of Aslan Abashidze, who is a scion of an old family which is basically a Georgian speaking Muslim family that’s been in Batumi for centuries. He’s a strong man there. He basically rules there without writ from Tblisi. His
147 party does participate in the Georgian Parliament. It was very instructive, particularly the visit to Batumi. Batumi at that point, together with Portia, north of Batumi on the Georgian Black Sea, literally Batumi was the key access of Armenia and Azerbaijan to the Black Sea, then down to the Aegean to the Mediterranean and then on. Otherwise, the only other way you could get to Azerbaijan or Armenia was via Iran. The Azerbaijanis and the Iranians have very tense relationships largely because of the large Azerbaijani speaking minority in the northern part of Iran, around Tabriz particularly. The Armenians and the Iranians had more friendly and constructive relationships; but for other reasons, particularly including the American view of Iran, Iran was not seen as an appropriate transit country for assistance. Therefore, Armenia relied on Batumi as well.
Q: Was there any talk of oil lines or oil exploration while you were there?
GILMORE: Oh, there was very much. It was the big topic in Azerbaijan, and the “contract of the century,” as it was dubbed, between Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijan International Operating Company, which at that point included a number of U.S. companies. Unocal, Amoco, which subsequently became part of BP. BP was already in the consortium. So, BP, Amoco, when they combined, became the primary force in the consortium. That contract had been underway before Heydar Aliyev came to power. But he renegotiated it in ’94. The contract of the century was signed and then the question of pipelines arose. That issue was very much alive, first in so called early oil pipelines, the pipelines that would take the early production to the Black Sea. Then the question of longer term pipeline, with the U.S. government particularly advocating an Azerbaijani oil pipeline from Baku to just near Tblisi, just south of Tblisi, and around Armenia and down to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. That was very much alive.
So there was a lot of talk about oil and transportation. Gas was just coming on the horizon. Since that time, the consortium has discovered that Azerbaijan is a major source of natural gas, i.e., the Azerbaijani offshore area in the Caspian Sea. So pipelines were very much alive, although Armenia basically was the odd country out, for reasons that had primarily to do with the Karabakh conflict and the Azeri position that no pipelines could go via Armenia until that conflict was settled on terms acceptable to Azerbaijan. That kept Armenia out of the picture. Of course, this was a serious problem for Armenia because Armenia is energy poor, and the border was already closed from actually before independence. The border from Azerbaijan to Armenia, and hence the natural gas pipeline from Soviet times was closed.
Q: Did you see in Nagorno Karabakh...you know, sometimes there’s a solution that everybody kind of understands as today you kind of understand what a Palestinian Israeli settlement will be. I mean if there really is going to be one. Nobody can get to it. But, did you see a settlement that probably in the long run would end up between Azerbaijan and Armenia?
GILMORE: Well the negotiators for the Minsk Group...the leaders of the negotiations were really first Italy, then Russia, and Italy and the United States and Russia, Sweden,
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Russia, and Finland, but now the co chairs of the Minsk Group are the United States, Russia, and France. They’re very intelligent folks, those negotiators, as are the chief negotiators on the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides. I would say the short answer to your question is no, although there were several possible solutions. The big problem is on the Armenian side. The Armenians feel the there are some important forces in Azerbaijan, often led by the ruling authorities, who want Armenians out of Karabakh. They want it ethnically cleansed of Armenians. That’s the perception although that well may not be the case, but that’s their feeling. The Armenians see it against the background of the Armenians being driven off the Armenian Plain, being driven out of the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They see it as a question of survival and they see it as a question of Armenians surviving on their historic lands, of which Yerevan is not one. The first Armenian president would tell me, quite a distinguished historian, would say Yerevan, one hundred fifty years ago, was not really an Armenian city. It was a Caucasian city where you had mixed populations, but actually there was probably a Muslim plurality in Yerevan. That changed. But when he looked at Karabakh, he would say that in parts of it there had been a continuity of Armenian civilization since much earlier. So the Armenian perception is first security and then, in modern terms, self determination on their historic lands for the Karabakh Armenians. And, of course, that means other things. It means also a permanent linkage on the ground by road and rail to Armenia so that they can be secure.
For the Azerbaijanis, Karabakh is also important. It was part of a kind of literary, national revival for Azerbaijan. The capital city of Karabakh, Stepanakert in Armenian, and Xankəndi in Azerbaijani, is important to both, symbolically and culturally. So the short answer is that neither side wants to give up what would be necessary to satisfy the other. That being said, there are possibilities. There had been several ideas out there. One of them was to form some sort of a confederal state, some kind of confederal arrangement between Baku and Nagorno Karabakh, where Nagorno Karabakh would not be under any horizontal control or direction from Azerbaijan, but that there would be linkages, economically particularly, presumably financial where the area would have its own constabulary, its own military establishment. There’s been quite a bit of work done in that direction. That’s still a possibility.
There was talk, in principle, more by people from afar than people in the region, but still, there was talk of a territorial swap that came up several times. A so called Goble Plan, because Paul Goble who was then an analyst in the INR, in the State Department, I think first suggested to Secretary Cyrus Vance the idea of a swap. The Armenian Panhandle, the part of Armenia reaching down to the Iranian border, bordering on Azerbaijan, would be at least part of it. Cede it to Azerbaijan while the Azerbaijani would cede Karabakh to Armenia. There are lots of problems with that. The Armenians in the Diaspora, particularly, but Armenians, important players in Armenia itself didn’t want that. They feared that there would be a direct territorial linkage between Turkey and Azerbaijan and this would bode ill for Armenia. They would be surrounded by people that didn’t like them and didn’t wish them well. And also Armenia would lose its geopolitical clout, what little it has. The fact that the Armenian panhandle in effect separates Turkey from
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Azerbaijan is seen by many Armenians as giving Armenians a bit of leverage in the region. There’s no question that of all the states that emerged as independent from the former Soviet Union it is Azerbaijan that has the closest relationship with Turkey and has the closest ethnic, particularly linguistic, affinity with the Turks.
But there are possibilities. We came close at times. We came close in Key West when Ambassador Terry Cavanaugh was the U.S. envoy. In the last several years, there’s been regular contact between the presidents of Armenia, Robert Kocharyan, and Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev, and their special envoys had quite a bit of discussion. So, a solution is possible, in principle. It’s going to take immense political will on both sides, because there are important forces, particularly in the political opposition in both countries that basically thrive on the absence of a settlement. That’s particularly true in Azerbaijan. Personally, I don’t see a great deal of responsibility on the part of the political opposition, or opposition in the two countries. They would rather let the government bear the onus for the absence of an agreement, and at the same time push the government toward the kind of an agreement that would not really be possible to achieve.
That being said, the growth of both countries, in terms of democratic development, particularly, and also economic development, is stunted by this dispute. Because of the dispute, there’s no possibility for Caucasus wide, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani cooperation, which is very important. There are not very many people in those three countries if you add them up. The market is small anyhow, but three small markets make for less attractive conditions for investors. The Georgians try hard. Both countries need Georgia very much as access to the sea, etc. The Georgians have tried hard, Mr. Shevardnadze and others, to foster some kind of dialog. But basically what you have is bilateral relationships, important ones between Azerbaijan and Georgia, and Armenia and Georgia. No Caucasus, some south Caucasus wide cooperation. Of course, when I say Caucasus, I have to be careful using the term Caucasus, and south Caucasus and north Caucasus, because the north Caucasus, of course, is part of the Russian Federation, and that’s a different question.
The Karabakh conflict was extremely bloody, and it was the kind of conflict that came home directly to the population of the region. There was hostage taking. There were extensive minefields laid. There have been a lot of injuries, including of innocents, children played in the area. The conflict also led to, considerable… ethnic cleansing is a strong term, but considerable pressure on the Armenian minority in and around Baku, Sumgait, and a somewhat small but still significant Azeri minority in the Zamuzur and even greater area around parts of Armenia. The conflict has caused endless hardship to the peoples of the region, and there now of course are a number of internally displaced persons in Azerbaijan from the so called occupied territories, the territory occupied by Armenian forces outside Karabakh proper, around Karabakh. As the Armenian military would say, “within artillery and missile range” of the capital of Karabakh. So, it’s an important, unresolved matter.
Q: When you were there, were there any signs of...well I suppose it would be on the
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Muslim side, but was there recruitment of Muslim fanatics in other places? We’re getting that in Chechnya...
GILMORE: Right. And Azerbaijanis are very special people. They are like their political and linguistic cousins, the Turks from the Republic of Turkey: they’re secular. Secular, as in ingrained. While it’s not as important, it’s very important culturally and most Azerbaijanis are religious. Most are Shi’ite by the way, although there is an important Sunni element as well. But although they are Shi’ites like the Iranians in name, the Shi’ism practiced in Azerbaijan is much less strained. You haven’t had anything that goes in the direction of the Ayatollahs, Khomeini and others. There have been small elements of the population that have perhaps a certain affinity for the Chechens. However, the combination of the strong secular state and the strong political commitment to secularism, a combination of that plus very the strong actions taken by President Aliyev have not allowed that kind of sentiment to get out of hand. He is a very stern, I would say authoritarian, without question, ruler.
On the other hand, the Russians have pressed the Azerbaijani to not give succor, refuge to Chechen fighters who might come over the border by coming through Chechnya, Dagestan. Dagestan borders directly on Azerbaijan. Also, in Dagestan itself, there is an important minority which is really a kind of Chechnya, the Akin Chechens. But in any case, Azerbaijan has been basically on the side of the coalition in the Iraq War. It has offered facilities, if need be, as I understand it, from airport refueling types of facilities. And Aliyev has been very careful in his dealings with Russia and others not to be perceived or charged by the Russians as aiding and abetting the Chechen separatists. Armenia, of course, has virtually no Muslims left. There were some Muslims, not many, at the end of the Soviet era. Basically, the forcing out of the ethnic Azerbaijani minority happened, much of it, before independence or right around independence as a result of the Karabakh conflict. It wasn’t well noted in the West. The plight of the Armenians, often there were more in Azerbaijan, was somewhat more in the attention of the Western press. This was largely because there were so many important Armenian organizations in France, the United States and other countries around the world, particularly in the West, who care deeply about Armenians anywhere, and brought it to the attention of the media in the United States and some of the other countries.
Q: What about the Armenian Americans while you were there? How did you find dealing with them?
GILMORE: I have to be very clear here. I know the Armenian American community very well. Not everyone; it’s a large community of about a million strong, almost all of the members of the community care about their ancestral homeland as they regard Armenia, care about Armenia’s independence. They are very well organized politically. So, I have quite close contacts. Because, as I had indicated earlier, I wasn’t able to get out to Armenia in the late summer or early fall of ’92 because of the foul up on my papers from the White House. I had more time to sit here and read about the Armenian American community and to read about Armenia in general, and study some Armenian before I
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went to the post. When I got there, of course, I was in contact with all three major Armenian organizations. I should say a word about them because they’re not well understood in the United States.
Americans tend to think of the Armenian Lobby, as they call it, as a kind of a single force that is close to being monolithic. That is not at all the case. There were two major advocacy organizations, and there’s another important organization I should mention. And there are numerous others I won’t get to. The two important lobbying organizations are the Armenian Assembly of America, which was founded in ’72, as an umbrella organization over all the Armenian organizations in the United States. Subsequently, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Dashnaktsutyun, or Dashnaks, as they’re called. Dashnaktsutyun being the Armenian word, basically, for the Federation. They pulled out. They have now their own lobbying arm. Very capable lobbying arm called the ANCA, Armenian National Committee of America. So there’s two primary prongs to the Armenian advocacy effort: the Assembly, the Armenian Assembly of America, and the Armenian National Committee of America, which is the political arm of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.
There are big differences between them. Although they work in parallel, they are certainly not characterized by joint directorships or anything like that. The Assembly, for example, is not a political organization. It takes no part in Armenian politics as a party, and it will work...it’s position is not to get involved in Armenian politics in the sense of trying to run anything, direct anything, and to support whoever’s in power in Armenia. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation and its ANCA advocacy arm are very different. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation is a party that has its roots really in czarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey. It was founded in czarist Russia; it’s over 100 years old. It’s still a player in Armenian politics. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation has a party organization in Armenia; they have seats in the Parliament. They have one or two cabinet seats now in Kocharyan’s government. They also are important in Lebanese politics; they’re in the Lebanese Parliament. I think there’s one ARF person in the Lebanese Parliament. So, they are both an advocacy organization and participate in Armenian politics, a more partisan organization.
Let’s see, I was talking about the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which has the ANCA, the Armenian National Committee of America, as its political arm, its advocacy arm. It also has the Armenian Relief Society, which operates not only in the United States or the Republic of Armenia, but operates where ever there are Armenians, which basically is focused heavily on relief to Armenia. Now, both these organizations have very close ties to a number of persons on Capitol Hill. There’s been an Armenian Issues Caucus, a caucus in the House, for the last half dozen or more years, and that caucus, depending on where we are in the cycle of elections for the House of Representatives, has 130 140 members. At present, I think it has 140 odd members. It’s very powerful. So, when you look at assistance to Armenia, automatically, there are 140, say, votes for it by people who care deeply about Armenia. For example, the present co chairs of the caucuses are Frank Pallone and Joe Knollenberg. A Democrat and a Republican, both
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very capable members of the House. So there’s a strong foundation of support for assistance to Armenia, not only in terms of the two big advocacy organizations, both of which are very capable, but also in terms of the Armenian Issues Caucus in the House.
Now, in the Senate, there’s no caucus, per se, but there have been a number of senators over time who have cared deeply about Armenia. Some of them are now retired. Senator Dole and Senator Paul Simon are the two best examples I can think of as retired senators, both of whom were very consistent friends of Armenia in terms of assistance. At the present time, Senator Sarbanes comes to mind, Senator Levin. They’re just two who come to mind immediately; there are more. During my time, Senator Harry Reid and Senator Phil Graham came to Armenia. Harry Reid is now very important. He’s the Whip, I believe, in the Senate...Democratic Whip, very capable fellow. Phil Graham is, of course, retired. It gives you an idea what kind of oomph the Armenian advocacy has. Those two came at a time when Armenia was in grim shape and where the hardships were very palpable. I remember Mrs. Reid came. They stayed in the best hotel in Armenia, such as it was. There was no hot water, only cold water. I remember the brave lady with no heat in the room, cold water in the tub. I remember her telling me she took a bath. I mean, she was a trooper, and so was Senator Reid. But this is the kind of support Armenia has.
There is another important Armenian organization, which is not an advocacy organization in the classic sense, but has done some advocacy work. That’s the Armenian General Benevolent Union, which was actually founded in Egypt. There was an important Armenian community in Egypt during the Ottoman period and then afterwards. At the time the AGBU was founded, which I believe was 1906, Egypt was no longer formally a part of the Ottoman Empire. It had gained a kind of autonomy. The organization was founded there to deal with earlier Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire...Ottoman massacres and others. But why I mention it particularly is that it sponsored and advocated for funds for the American University of Armenia, which is modeled, in some ways, after the American University in Lebanon...
Q: In Beirut.
GILMORE: Beirut. AUB, American University of Beirut, and the American University of Cairo. Very successful. It’s in the process of gaining accreditation now, full accreditation, in the United States. It’s partnered with the University of California, whose Board of Regents really serves as the nucleus of the Board for the American University of Armenia. But, like AUB, it’s immensely successful. So I mention that. But the Armenian Americans are just, I would say, very strong on advocacy. They care about a number of issues. Above all, right now, they care about assistance, both in terms of economic assistance and democracy building. Particularly, the Assembly cares about democracy building assistance as well to Armenia. They also care very much about an issue that really brought them together before Armenia was independent: the genocide recognition. There’s a strong belief among Armenian Americans and Armenians everywhere that the events from 1915 to 1922 in the Ottoman Empire, the forcing out of Armenians from
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those eastern provinces of Turkey, forcing them off their historic lands, the deportations and massacres, constitute genocide under the UN Genocide Convention. They care very much about a genocide resolution. There have been a number of efforts in that direction. They also care about assistance to Nagorno Karabakh, which is not recognized by any government. They’ve been able to get Congress to vote some humanitarian assistance to Nagorno Karabakh. They also care about Armenia’s security, in the sense that they want see great efforts by the United States, together with France and Russia, in trying to bring the Nagorno Karabakh conflict to a conclusion.
Q: Did you notice... it’s something that often happens and that’s the cultural clash or gulf between Armenian Americans when they get up into the mountains of Armenia and all of a sudden they come across their counterparts that they’ve been hearing their grandmother talk about. This is true about almost every ethnic group that ends up in the United States. They go back to the homeland and they say, “Oh, my God.” Did you find this then?
GILMORE: To a certain degree, yes. And I think that those who hadn’t been to the Republic of Armenia, the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia, were perhaps shocked by the hardships that the people were faced with, and also shocked to find how difficult life was. But, with the Armenians, it less so than with other groups. I know I’ve known Serbs well, Croatians, Slovenes, from the former Yugoslavia. The reason is a chunk of the population in the present day Armenian Republic, like more of the population in the United States and France, is from the same source. Basically, these are remnants of Armenians forced out of Ottoman Turkey, forced out of, particularly, the eastern provinces, the five, particularly, where they had been historically. Some of these people forced out had made their way directly, not as many, to what became the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, after World War I. First, it was the Independent Republic, and then a number of refugees went there. When that failed in 1920, of course the Bolsheviks took control and first made the Armenian area part of the Transcaucasian Federation, and then in 1936 made all of the area, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, into Soviet Socialist Republics.
But, the bulk of Armenians that survived being pushed out of, cleansed out of the Ottoman Empire made their way to Lebanon and Syria first, and then many of them to France. France gained the protectorate of Syria after World War I. France was on the side of the Armenians in the First World War and then after it. Or, they came directly to the United States. Stalin, meanwhile, starting I think in the ’40s, particularly right after World War II, called the Armenians “home,” as he put it, from the Middle East. So, what I’m driving at is there are relationships, they’re distant, between Armenians in the United States, many of them, and Armenians who made their way via the Middle East, via Lebanon or Syria, to the Armenian Republic. So there’s a lot of very interesting dynamics going on. Armenians from the United States who visit Armenia may find it the first opportunity to see some distant member of their family. This is very important to Armenians, because so many Armenians were decimated in the 1915 to 1922 period. Whole families, if not wiped out entirely, were without important relationships. They
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were without grandparents or without aunts and uncles, etc., so just a cousin in Armenia may have a meaning to Armenians from France or the United States all out of proportion to what a cousin would have for us.
Q: How about, one thinks of the author William Saroyan, and I’m sure there are others. Did they have an echo in Armenia?
GILMORE: Oh, yes. Saroyan is a hero in Armenia, and of course he was a fine writer. The Armenians were a cultural nation and a religious entity for centuries though the last Armenian state before 1918 came to an end in 1375. For centuries, they were stateless. So, for them, cultural and religious relationships are very important, and in many ways their cultural heroes tower historically over their political leaders. Particularly Aram Khachaturian in music. He’s a figure widely respected throughout the Armenian world. The liturgy of the Armenian Apostolic Church is very beautiful. Several versions, several iterations of that. So some of their heroes are really religious figures, patriarchs, or Catholicoi. The Armenian Church is headed by a universal bishop called a Catholicos. Cultural leaders; these are their heroes. When one looks back much earlier, you find also political heroes. Although even then, some of the kings were also important because their families became important as church leaders, as patriarchs as well.
Q: The French singer, Charles Aznavour, has always kept Armenia in the focus of his work in France.
GILMORE: Yes, he’s widely respected in Armenia. He visited a couple of times when I was there. The Aznavour Foundation was one of our partners in bringing kerosene to schools. Of course, Aznavour speaks fluent western Armenian. As I mentioned earlier, the two dialects, when spoken fluently, are largely mutually intelligible; not always in every instance. But Aznavour is a hero in Armenia. And, for that matter, figures like Cher, who’s partly of Armenian origin, and when she went to Armenia (it wasn’t during my time), she was a sensation. There are a number of figures like that. There are some political figures in the United States: former Governor Deukmejian of California is very widely respected. And then there are certain members, Anna Eshoo, Representative Anna Eshoo [Editor’s Note: California’s 14th congressional district], is partly of Armenian origin. The Armenians are well aware of that.
If they look back, the Armenians see a huge, long history. An Armenian American newspaper editor was asked to name the most important events in Armenian history. When he did, he started telling about the 20th Century, and the second Millennium, and the important events in Armenian history for him started with 1064, when the Seljuk Turks took on Onik, which was the great Armenian metropolis, which is now, by the way, just inside Turkey, on the Turkish Armenian border. It’s as if it were yesterday.
Q: How did the Armenians look upon the Russians?
GILMORE: By and large, the Armenians see the Russians as pretty positive, in terms of
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Armenian history. Now I have to be very careful here. If you talk to individual Armenians and you know them well, and I’m speaking now of Armenians in the Republic, not in the Diaspora...they will say that the Russians can be imperialistic, can be kind of overbearing in that direction, but by and large, as a people and as a culture, they respect them. They know Russian well, they know Russian literature. And anyone who knows Russian literature sees a side of Russians which I think can only be described as highly attractive and impressive. Russian novels, we know. But Russian poetry, for example, is wonderful and rivals English poetry in terms of its scope and depth.
Politically, the Armenians see the Russians as, not always consistently, but at least in principle, from the 19th Century on, trying to help Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Trying to provide a haven for Armenians in czarist Russia, the part of czarist Russia that subsequently became the Armenian Republic. Now, they’re not uncritical. They will say that the Russians at that point, the czarist Russians, would certainly look after czarist Russia’s interests first. And of course the Armenian political parties that tried to get organized at the end of the 19th Century in czarist Russia where subjected to oppression in czarist Russia. So it’s not uncritical. But by and large, Russians are seen as positive, they’re seen as defenders of Christians, brothers of Christians. They’re also seen as having provided a haven for Armenians. They’re seen as the enemy of the great oppressor of the Armenians, which in the Armenian view is the late Ottoman Empire. I want to be very careful here, because in the early Ottoman Empire, you can make a very, very different case. But by and large the Russians are seen as positive. There’s a fair amount of intermarriage. An Armenian in the Republic with a Russian spouse is not an unusual occurrence.
Q: Well, Harry, maybe it’s time to turn to... You left there, when?
GILMORE: I left Armenia in the summer, August of ’95, right after the first Parliamentary elections, and the referendum on the Constitution. Elections which were not without flaw. I came back here to become the Dean of Area Studies at FSI.
Q: Let’s talk about this. You were the Dean of Area Studies from when to when?
GILMORE: I was Dean of Area Studies from the summer of ’95 until Area Studies were subsumed into the School of Professional and Area Studies. The FSI director at that time, my boss, Ambassador Teresita Schaffer, proposed to make Area Studies a division of the School of Professional and Area Studies, to change the name from the School of Professional Studies to the School of Professional and Area Studies, and eliminate the position, abolish the position of Dean of Area Studies.
While I had chosen the School of Area Studies as my first choice, in terms of the bidding process, when I left Armenia, I was basically engineering or co engineering this amalgamation. My partner was the outgoing Dean of the School of Professional Studies, now Ambassador Barbara Bodine. Subsequently, Ambassador to Yemen, and now about to be a key part of our transition team in Iraq. In any case, I still believe that the keys to
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Foreign Service success are language and area studies, then of course the specialties, consular specialty, economic specialty, political, but for all of us in the Foreign Service area studies in combination with language studies, I think are crucial.
Q: Amen.
GILMORE: So I was not in favor, I did not advocate or take the lead by any means in urging this merger. But, I understood the logic of it, and Ambassador Schaffer was the doctor. She was the one who had the right to prescribe the remedies. So, I was committed to making it work. It wasn’t easy because many of my colleagues in the School of Area Studies were very capable people and, as you know well, were not pleased with it. And also there was a certain tendency on the part of some of the other folks in the School of Professional Studies, particularly at the top, not to realize how important psychologically it was that the new school be called Professional AND Area Studies. School of Professional and Area Studies. But the merger took place and Area Studies has I think survived. The Area Studies Division Chief, Dr. Andy Memor, I think has done a fine job.
In any case, that was my first position. I became for a short period of time the acting dean of the School of Professional and Area Studies during this merger period. Not an easy time. But I think we successfully engineered the merger. At that point, Ambassador Schaffer asked me to become the Dean of the Senior Seminar for my last year in the Foreign Service. That was a wonderful experience. I would have done an even better job the second year, having been through the traces. But I think the most important thing that I accomplished there was to take Barry Wells... Mr. Wells had been the Associate Dean in the School of Area Studies... and I brought him over to the Senior Seminar as the Associate Dean. He had such professionalism, provided such continuity, and has given much to the School and to the Senior Seminar, which I believe is particularly valuable. I pride myself for pushing for his transfer to that position. He has been a wonderful asset.
During the year, there were a couple of things I was particularly pleased with. Drawing on my experience in Berlin where I worked cheek by jowl with senior American military, I emphasized strongly the importance that we in the State Department and those in the uniformed services had to understand each other’s cultures, how different they were, and how you had to work hard to understand the other person’s institution and the culture of that institution in order to be able to communicate. I stressed the importance as we looked out into the future of U.S. diplomacy and U.S. military activity outside the United States, of working together and understanding and being able to bridge these cultures. I think I made a positive contribution to the careers of most of the members of that year’s Senior Seminar.
Q: Did you find when you were looking at the students who came in, those, say, from the State Department, for the most part weren’t really aware of the military perspective and all?
GILMORE: A number of them weren’t. There would be, of course, here and there a
157 person who had been an officer in the military. That was an important exception. Once you’ve been an officer in any of the armed services, although you may have been an officer 15 or 20 years earlier, you had a basic understanding of the important principle that there were different cultures. Also, the uniformed services sent us some wonderful candidates. There was a little feeling on the part of the some of the State people that since those candidates tended to be at the Colonel level, that they may not be quite as senior in their own respective services as many of the Foreign Service people. But, in fact, we had some wonderful candidates. The Navy and Air Force officers, the Navy Captain and the Air Force Colonel, were absolutely excellent and hard working. They made a central contribution to the seminar. The Air Force officer won the prize for writing, which is given annually to a member of the seminar. He wrote on the issue of whether U.S. troops could serve under UN command, and making a very good case for why that was not feasible. The prize, by the way, was awarded by retired Foreign Service people. So, it wasn’t awarded by anybody with a military bias. The Naval Captain has gone on to greater things, but just an example of how capable... Also the Coast Guard Captain then went to head the Coast Guard Academy.
On the State Department side, there were some very able people, a number of whom have become ambassadors. The State Department people, by and large, would understand that foreign affairs was a much broader preserve than just the State Department, and that the State Department was not going to be automatically perceived by our colleagues in the Defense Department or CIA there were a number of CIA officers in the seminar as the lead agency; and we would have to lead in a new way. My conclusion, as I left the Senior Seminar, is that more emphasis on leadership training while by and large contrary to the culture of the Foreign Service at that point would be in order, and I see it’s happened. There are ways of teaching leadership; it’s done in the military, at the War Colleges, for example. Now down here we have a school of leadership and management. In any case, I hope I helped point in that direction at the Senior Seminar.
Q: Did you get the feeling that the State Department was still kind of resisting training? I’m talking about the institution as a whole. That, you have some of your people who have moved up to positions of responsibility rather quickly and often have... And Larry Eagleburger is somebody one thinks about…and others...
GILMORE: Tom Pickering...
Q: Tom Pickering...
GILMORE: Two good examples.
Q: These people have bypassed the training. Our present Secretary of State came up through military ranks, Colin Powell.
GILMORE: And believed strongly in leadership training.
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Q: And he said he had six years of training, whereas our undersecretary of state for political affairs says he had two weeks.
GILMORE: Marc Grossman, right. A very able person.
Q: Very able, but...
GILMORE: There is a kind of a bias on the part of a number of Foreign Service people against formal training and the belief that a year in training is a year lost. That’s not an uncommon notion, as you and I both know. I’m not sure that that bias has diminished. I hope it’s diminishing, but I’m not sure it has. Although I personally understand those who hold that bias, because at one point in my career I was not crazy to be going to courses other than language training or consular training if you needed it just before consular work for example. But, I think that with Secretary Powell aboard, you could feel...I was teaching the contract program chair for Caucasus Area Studies...you could feel Secretary Powell’s influence when he came aboard, and his belief. You could feel his belief in educational training, because he cared about this place. He came over early. It’s clear in his decisions that he saw the importance of it. I hope that will make a difference. But I would say that after 35 years in the business, and more than five years in retirement looking back, more training is better than, by far, than not being trained. Although I would add a quick footnote and just say very able people, like Larry Eagleburger and Tom Pickering, probably can make do. But I remember even Larry Eagleburger had language training in Serbo Croatian, I believe, and Tom Pickering had language training at least in Hebrew, and probably also Swahili. While they had their language training, there was some area studies. So what I’m saying is even they had some training. The Senior Seminar, though, I would recommend as very useful. The most useful part of the Senior Seminar in many ways, in addition to the focus on leadership, is the knowledge you get about the contemporary United States. There’s quite a focus on what’s going on in the United States and I understood the United States better myself after having gone through the Senior Seminar with my students than before. Much better.
Q: I was in classes, numbered 17, I think it was 17, of the Senior Seminar, and I simply came away with a much greater respect for local government…
GILMORE: Amen.
Q: …than I’d had before.
GILMORE: The complexities of it and the capabilities of the people in it. I agree. I came away with a couple of other strong impressions. One was that the prison system in this country was totally broken, and I’m still convinced of that. There are some noble exceptions here and there in this or that state, but basically it’s not working. The other thing that I came away with was a strong sense that the lower roughly one fifth of the population was really getting left behind in every which way. In education, in terms of health care, in a way that I hadn’t understood before. Another thing I came away with
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was, as you said, the respect for local government, the respect for state governments, and also with a much better understanding of the military services. We made important visits to the Army, Navy, and Air Force, to their educational institutions, and their important bases. We had some really hands on experiences. That can only be helpful to Foreign Service people who hadn’t served in the military, and those who have but needed to be updated. Also, the kind of strategic thinking that goes on in the services is something we’ve got to know about if we are going to be doing work in senior positions in the state department.
Q: Well, then, Harry you retired in...
GILMORE: I retired as of the end of September, the first of October of 1997. Since that time, every year but this year I’ve chaired on a contract basis the Caucasus area studies. I’ve done some lecturing around the country, actually, on the Caucasus and occasionally on broader foreign policy interests and issues. I’ve deliberately avoided the 40 hour week work commitment. Although I must say when I chaired the Caucasus area studies course, I ended up spending 40 hours a week. Thirty five of them just trying to read and keep current with what was going on in that complicated little part of the world.
Q: Well, in a way, you must have ended up as sort of a preacher, on the Caucasus, because it’s a place nobody thinks about. And it’s bloody complicated as you found out.
GILMORE: It is, and had CNN been out there, the Karabakh dispute for example would have looked a lot more immediate, and a lot more like something we should do something about, I think.
Q: Well, I think probably this is a good place to stop.
GILMORE: I agree. It’s been great.
End of interview
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