The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
AMBASSADOR JOHN M. EVANS
Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: October 19, 2009 Copyright 2010 ADST
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Background Born and raised in Virginia Yale University Entered the Foreign Service in 1971
Teheran, Iran: Consular Officer/Special Assistant to Ambassador 1972 1974 Ambassador and Mrs. Douglas MacArthur II The Shah US military support “White Revolution” Reporting Relations Nixon/Kissinger visit Political situation Ambassador Richard Helms Consular protection cases Opposition groups Tudeh Party Minorities Kurds Persian Gulf issues Iranian views of Nixon Iranians in US
State Department: FSI: Czech language training 1974 1975
Prague, Czechoslovakia: Consular Officer 1975 1978 Czech beneficiaries of US social programs Environment Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Helsinki Final Act Charter 77 Dissident movement
1 Secret Police Havel Human Rights Czech/Slovak relations Czech/Soviet relations Czech officials Social life
State Department: Staff Secretariat, Operations Center 1978 1979 European Political Military Issues Operations Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty
State Department: Staff Aide to the Secretary of State 1979 1980 Secretary of State Cyrus Vance Operations Iran developments Vance/Brzezinski rift Teheran rescue plan Soviet invasion of Afghanistan US withdraws from Moscow Olympics Brzezinski views on fall of Soviet Union Richard Holbrook Panama Canal Treaty Carter/Vance relationship Shah’s last days Carter’s idiosyncrasies Teheran hostages escape Secretary of Sate Muskie Working hours Carter entourage Camp David Accords
State Department: FSI; Africa Area Studies 1980 1981
Moscow, Soviet Union: Political Officer (Eastern Europe) 1981 1983 Relations U.S. Ambassadors Information sources Poland developments Soviet forces in East Europe Martial law Polish films Elections Daily life KGB
2 Afghanistan
Brussels, Belgium: U. S. Mission to NATO 1983 1986 Soviets shoot down Korean airliner Strategic arms talks US delegation officers Pershing missiles in Europe Operations Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Soviet missile defense system Member delegations Soviet leadership US Soviet informal discussions US officials’ views on Gorbachev Scandinavians “Whiskey on the Rocks” Reagan/Gorbachev summit Soviet forces in East Europe Greek/Turkish relations
State Department: Deputy Director, Soviet Desk 1986 1989 Soviet presence in New York Bilateral Relations Committee (BRC) Reykjavik Summit Zakharov/Daniloff issue Jewish Defense League Soviet espionage Sense of change in USSR Reagan/Gorbachev Summits Relations with Soviet Embassy Jackson Vanik amendment to 1974 Trade Act US media reporting Russians in Africa Cuba Soviets’ American experts US Moscow embassy Sergeant Lonetree Earthquake in USSR Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) 1989 Helsinki Commission
Kennan Institute, Wilson Center: Cox Fellowship 1989 1990 Future of the Soviet Union “Ottomanization of the Soviet Empire” Review of Ottoman history
3 State Department: European Bureau, Regional Political/Military 1990 1991 Bonn Conference on Economic Cooperation Duties and operations East European progress East Germany Expert conferences East Bloc return to nationalism Peaceful Settlement of Disputes CSCE Members Baltics Operations Vienna Review Conference Max Kampelman Krakow Conference American Indians Third Basket of Human Rights
Prague, Czechoslovakia: Deputy Chief of Mission 1991 1994 Ambassador Shirley Temple Black President Vaclav Havel Relations Velvet Revolution Czech/Slovak split Vladimir Meciar Ambassador Adrian Basora Communist Parties Sudetenland Nuclear plant Moscow coup Relations with new Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus Departure of Ambassador Black Background of Ambassador Black Expansion of NATO President Clinton visit
St. Petersburg, Russia: Consul General 1994 1997 History Economy Morale Consular district Visit of Queen Elizabeth Wife’s activities Contact with public Political situation Vladimir Putin
4 Crime Moscow/St. Petersburg rivalry Environment Russian Orthodox Church City renovation Communist Party Mayor Sobchak Vladimir Yakovlev American business presence President Clinton visit City architecture Soviet Navy Border issues Ryland Homes Emigration Russian officials Social life Putin leaves for Moscow Local media Church services Grievance Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
Chisinau, Republic of Moldova, Chief, OSCE Mission to Moldova 1997 1999 Mission Organization Purpose of Mission History Ethnics International nature Contacts with government Transnistria issue Separatists Problems Moldovan sensitivities Negotiations “President” Igor Smirnov Soviet weaponry Moldovan constitution Economy Romanian nationalists OSCE goals for Moldova Religions Peacekeepers Russians Georgian deputy problem Moldavian view of Transnistrians
5 Russian views of former Soviet armaments Moscow Memorandum Moldavia view of unitary state
State Department: INR: Russia and former Soviet States 1999 2002 Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Impending Russian elections Chechen War President Bush and Putin Daily Brief abolished Soviet submarine Kursk sinks INR stress on source information Russian expansions into Black Sea Arab support of Chechens US policy re Chechen war 9/11 Bin Laden U.S./Russian consultations Putin popularity Russian organized crime US/Russian bilateral problems
State Department: Director, Office of Russian Affairs 2002 2004 Russia argues against Iraq War Bush and Putin NATO expansion Micheil Saakashvili Chechen terrorism US/Russian disagreements Erosion of Bush/Putin trust Russian Embassy
Ambassador to the Republic of Armenia 2004 2006 US Armenian community Armenian Genocide dilemma US Assistance Program Armenian history Embassy staff and accommodations Peace Corps President Robert Kocharian Government Armenia Azerbaijan conflict Karabakh conflict Ethnic conflicts in former Soviet nations Genocide Convention terms Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission
6 US speaking tour flap American University Agriculture Turk/Armenian animosity Soviet legacy Armenia/Israel relations Armenia/Russia relations Christian Herter Award Trouble over “genocide”
Retirement 2006 “Ethnic Cleansing” replaces “Genocide” Troubles in State Department
INTERVIEW
Q: Today is the 19th of October, 2009. This is the first interview with John M. Evans, E V A N S. And John, you go by John? Or not?
EVANS: Yes, John; Marshall is my middle name.
Q: And Marshall. Is that with two Ls?
EVANS: Yes.
Q: Two Ls, okay. All right, John, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born?
EVANS: I was born in Newport News, Virginia, on May 16, 1948.
Q: And let’s get a glimpse of your family. How about let’s take the Evans side and then we’ll move to your mother’s side. What do you know about the Evanses?
EVANS: I know a fair bit about them, actually, because my great great grandfather, who was a businessman in Philadelphia, had the good fortune to make a bit of money and retire at the age of 32; he spent the rest of his life taking his family around Europe and doing genealogical research. So we have a big book at home which traces our family back 12 generations to one William Evans, who arrived in 1699 near Philadelphia and founded the town of Limerick, which is about 10 miles from Valley Forge.
Q: Was he coming out of Ireland?
EVANS: Yes.
7 Q: Evans would seem to be Welsh.
EVANS: Well the surname is Welsh but this is a family that had moved to Ireland. Presumably they were anglicized Welsh.
Q: Miners came in there too, I think.
EVANS: Miners did too. These people, well, first of all, there was a Captain John Evans who in the 17th century was in the New York area. We suspect that he was a privateer and sometimes a pirate.
Q: This is switching back and forth.
EVANS: Depending on the circumstances. He got an enormous grant of land from Benjamin Fletcher, who was at that time governor of New York, and it was basically the Palisades, which are, you know, that part of New Jersey across from Manhattan. But there was some wrongdoing involved here and by the time William Evans came over to join his cousin John in what was going to be a big project there, John Evans was in chains and on his way back to England with Benjamin Fletcher. There’d been a turnover in the New York government and so that deal was off. So instead William and his family continued on to found Limerick, Pennsylvania.
Q: Well did your the man who retired at the age of 32, this is the great great grandfather?
EVANS: That’s right.
Q: What was his business?
EVANS: Well, he prepared to go to the University of Pennsylvania but then he ended up working; he was interested in chemistry and science. He ended up working for a lab and found out that he could make money and he got involved in a number of things, including tanning and the production of women’s shoes and so that served him very well.
Q: Well how about your grandfather; what was he up to?
EVANS: My grandfather on the Evans side did go to the University of Pennsylvania and ended up as an executive; he was vice president of Bell Telephone and he had three sons and they lived on the Main Line of Philadelphia, in Wynnewood.
Q: And then, let’s take a year or so, where did how did your father come along?
EVANS: Well, my father attended the William Penn Charter School and then Amherst College before World War II and he got a PhD at Princeton in neo Platonic thought and then started teaching. He taught at Tulane. Right after Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the Navy and was a commander of a mine sweeper in the Pacific. Then, after the war, he
8 found a teaching position at William and Mary and that’s why I came to be born in Williamsburg.
Q: What sort of a war did he have? Did he talk much about it?
EVANS: Yes, and he knew about the Pacific Campaign. He had read all the official histories and so on. The mine sweepers, of course, were the first to go in to places that needed to be swept of mines before invasion and he was involved in that; he took fire several times. We have at home a Japanese bullet that whizzed past his ear and landed in the bulkhead. But fortunately he survived and came home in one piece and resumed teaching. He was a little bit older than many people who fought in the war.
Q: He was teaching at William and Mary; what was he teaching?
EVANS: He was teaching primarily Renaissance literature, of course a certain amount of freshman English and other subjects and he also taught graduate courses. He taught the Bible as literature and some courses in classics.
Q: Well let’s do your mother, on your mother’s side. Where do they come from?
EVANS: Well it’s another old family from the Philadelphia area by the name of Moore. They founded Moorestown, New Jersey.
Q: Is this M
EVANS: Double O R E. My maternal grandfather worked for Day & Zimmerman in Philadelphia. My mother and father actually knew each other in kindergarten.
Q: My God.
EVANS: Amazingly.
Q: And they, I mean, did they sort of grow up together or had they parted and come back together?
EVANS: They did go separate ways in their early youth and only really ran into each other again after the war. In the meantime my mother had completed the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and had set out being a painter and she had a one person show in New York at one point and sold everything she had produced. But that was during the war and a very hard time to be a painter, particularly of the subjects that she chose. She had been very much influenced by the collection of the Barnes Foundation in Merion; she knew Dr. Barnes and spent a lot of time there with the Cézannes and the other Impressionists. But her career really didn’t continue after her marriage to my father.
Q: Well you certainly came from, you know, an intellectual background. How many Were you one of several children or ?
9
EVANS: I was one of two. I have a sister, Ann, who’s four years younger. But you have a point that it affected our lives, growing up with a professor as a father. My first dog’s name was Ulysses – because he was a wanderer and whenever we had plumbing problems it was always “double, double, toilet trouble,” things like that were present in our lives.
Q: Well then let’s talk a bit; did you grow up in Where did you grow up?
EVANS: Well, we lived all my life in a house that my father largely built with his own hands he was quite handy with carpentry and so on overlooking a lake near Jamestown just outside of Williamsburg. And I went to the public schools of Williamsburg/James City County, until the eighth grade. It was a pretty good school system because there were a lot of interesting people there. We didn’t know it at the time but Camp Peary was the CIA training “farm” just outside Williamsburg so a number of the young people from those families were in the school system.
Q: Well then, did let’s talk a little about family life. Did you sit around the table at night and talk about things or how did the family get together?
EVANS: We always did have a family dinner. That was absolutely for sure every single night and one of the great advantages of having a teacher for a father. Although it wasn’t the most remunerative profession it did mean a long summer vacation and so from very early years I remember we would go to Maine. We had a little cottage which again my father built with his own hands on the coast of Maine looming out over the rocks and with the surf coming in underneath and we learned to sail and did all sorts of things in the summers on the Maine coast. So I feel very blessed that first of all we lived in one place all those years and I had educated parents and was fortunate in my schooling.
Q: Where did your family or maybe politically?
EVANS: We were really Yankees, as you can see, and we were living in tidewater Virginia, so there was a difference between ourselves and some of our neighbors, although there were quite a few Federally employed families on the Peninsula of Virginia, military families and so on, but we found ourselves rather liberal in a rather conservative neighborhood. And I remember the election of 1960 when my father first got us a television so we could watch the campaign and we were all for Kennedy.
Q: This is Kennedy versus Nixon.
EVANS: Exactly. And I remember tacking a political poster, a big portrait of Kennedy, to our oak tree in the front yard and finding that the neighbors were quite disturbed by that and said some pretty nasty things about the Kennedys being, and I use this in very heavy quotations, “nigger lovers” and that sort of thing. So there was that prejudice and my father had always been a generous donor to the NAACP (National Association for the
10 Advancement of Colored People) and the United Negro College Fund and so, yes, you put your finger on that; we were…we did stand out as Yankee “liberals.”
Q: How did Well let me ask one question and then I’ll come back to that. Religion. Where did your family fall in the religious spectrum?
EVANS: The first Evanses who came to Philadelphia and a related family, the Brookes, were Quakers, but sometime before the American Revolution they mostly became Anglicans and by the time of my generation we were members of Bruton Parish Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.
Q: Well now, as a kid, let’s talk about the racial situation, because Virginia was one of these states that was going to fight it to the very Well, it shut down a school system at one time.
EVANS: That’s right.
Q: Did this affect you or did you get your family at all?
EVANS: Desegregation was coming to Virginia during the years probably when I was in seventh and eighth grade and it wasn’t on account of that but for other reasons that for my ninth grade year I was sent away to St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, which is an Episcopal Church school. They had far more on offer in the way of the classics, Latin in particular, modern languages, history and sports, because I wasn’t big enough to participate on the big teams in the local high school, and also they had a greater variety of sports at St. Andrew’s. But of course my sister went through the desegregation process because she was younger and it affected her more.
Q: Well how did What were you gathering, how did this work in your public school, desegregation?
EVANS: In Williamsburg there had been for many years separate education. A school that served black children was called Bruton Heights and the school that served the white children was James Blair, on the high school level. I think two things happened. First of all, the population started growing and there were more and more schools. There was some moving of people around by busing but we were not particularly aware of that, and I think the fact that Williamsburg had two major employers, the College of William and Mary and Colonial Williamsburg, which those two employers were more progressive than one might have expected other purely commercial employers to be so I think Williamsburg actually got through this moment of crisis better than some parts of the state. For example, Richmond.
Q: Yes.
Well, I was wondering, William and Mary is actually a state school, isn’t it?
11 EVANS: William and Mary was a private college in the early days but William and Mary’s endowment was basically invested in the Chickahominy Ferry, which crossed the Chickahominy River and sometime in the years after the Civil War when there were no students, the professor simply rang the bell for classes after the Civil War a great storm took the ferry down the river and smashed it and they were left penniless. So in, I think it was in 1906, William and Mary was taken over as a state school. And again I should mention in this connection that the Federal involvement on the peninsula of Tidewater, Virginia, I think had a lot to do also with easing the process of desegregation because there were so many people at places like Fort Eustis and the Mine Warfare School and so on who were used to Federal policies.
Q: Yes. And of course the year you were born was the year that the military was desegregated.
EVANS: That’s right.
Q: Let’s talk about the school you went to in that area. What were classes like and sort of what was it like there?
EVANS: Well, the Williamsburg/James City County school system was considered one of the best in the state outside Northern Virginia, where of course really the outstanding high schools were and I don’t have too much to compare with. I think it was quite a good school; there were some good teachers, good programs. I do remember one teacher who showed up probably in my seventh or eighth grade who was a former Soviet citizen. He was a Russian, he was young, he was an excellent pedagogue and I believe he taught us English literature. And I was very impressed with this man from Russia who was just a terribly well prepared teacher.
Q: Were you much of a reader, you know, when you were on your own? I mean, considering your background you probably would have been crucified if you weren’t but how about were you was reading a big part of your life or not?
EVANS: Yes. Reading certainly was. One of the points I made earlier was we didn’t have a television until 1960 and so what we did was read and also during our summers in Maine there was a public library there and we were always getting books out of the public library. I guess my tastes mainly ran to the normal things that boys are interested in, adventure stories, Slocum’s “Sailing Alone Around the World” and “The Cruise of the Cachalot” and “The Red Badge of Courage” and those kinds of adventure stories.
Q: How about Kenneth Roberts? I mean, considering you’re up in Maine did that ring