The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project SAMUEL E. FRY, JR. Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: January 26, 1993 Copyright 2016 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in New York; raised in Midwest Dartmouth College and University of Edinburgh, Scotland; University of Massachusetts U.S. Army in Germany - 1958-1959 Entered Foreign Service - 1961 Masters thesis Trieste (Free Territory) - consul; administrative officer 1961-1963 Political status Italian language study (in Rome) Historical background of Trieste Visa cases Yugoslavia situation Ambassador George Kennan State Department - economic officer/Soviet Union 1963-1965 Soviet grain purchases Aviation matters Dealing with Soviet diplomats Russian language study - FSI 1965-1966 Moscow, USSR - consular officer 1966-1968 Embassy operations and staff American visitors Environment Cases of Americans arrested by Soviets U.S. defectors to USSR Soviet reaction to U.S. riots and assassinations Embassy morale Ambassador Foy Kohler 1 Oslo, Norway - economic officer 1968-1971 Duties Ambassador Tibbetts Svalbard (island) visit NATO presence Soviet threat Norway's relations with Swedes Vietnam issue Vice President Humphrey visit State Department - Operations Center 1971-1974 Watch officer Operations and duties Kissinger influence Communications innovations Arab-Israel 1973 war Top level briefing summaries Pueblo incident Competition with NSC Personnel State Department - personnel - training and liaison 1974-1977 Meshing training and assignments Assignments to other political entities Helsinki, Finland - DCM 1977-1981 Ambassador Rozanne Ridgeway Working with the Finns Fulbright program and chair Relations Soviets and Finn relationship Nuclear power program Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Sauna conferences President Manno Koivisto Ambassador James Goodby Bucharest, Romania - DCM 1981-1983 Ambassador David Funderburk, views and operations Dispute over Ceausescu Between the Pinstripes and the Communists Ceausescu visa extortion scheme MFN issue Secretary Shultz and Funderburk 2 Grand Rabbi Rosen Haig visit Environment under Ceausescu U.S. business interests Senior Seminar 1983-1984 Inspection Corps 1984-1986 Issues and problems Dependent problems Alcoholism Sexual discrimination State Department - Office of Public Programs 1986-1988 Speaking engagements USUN - advisor 1988-1989 Soviet, East European affairs Glasnost Reagan and Gorbachev meeting Gorbachev speech Presidential award recipient Arafat at the UN TDY - preparing report on Arctic policy 1989-1990 Retirement 1990 University of Alaska - professor - 1992 Large animal research station INTERVIEW Q: Could you give me a little of your background--where you were born, where you came from, a little about your education, etc.? FRY: I was born in December of 1934 and began my travels in January 1935 at six weeks when, as my mother recalled, I took the Twentieth Century Limited from New York to Chicago to join my father and sister who were already out there. My father had started work for Montgomery Ward. I grew up in the Middle West until about age ten and then returned to the New York area. My parents divorced and my mother moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, the home of Smith College, and began working at Smith until she retired. I went to high school there and then on to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, up the Connecticut River a hundred and ten miles. I graduated 3 in 1956 and spent the next year on a Dartmouth fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. As I was finishing off my first year studies at Edinburgh, and was getting ready to travel for the summer, it dawned on me when I got a letter from the draft board that I had not renewed my student deferment. I would like to remind anyone who was not around in those times that the draft was a no nonsense thing in the nineteen ‘50s when Eisenhower decided to beef up two eighteen thousand-man infantry divisions, plus other elements of the army, reflecting the growing concern about the Cold War and some of the activities of the Soviet Union, particularly in Europe. So I was drafted and went into the Third Infantry Division which was stationed in West Germany at Bamberg; our positions were up on the Czech border and the Fulda Gap where we trained and would have been annihilated within about twenty-five seconds had war actually come. We were using military equipment at that time that was basically from the First World War except for the Garand Rifle which was from the Second World War. Q: When was this? FRY: We arrived in Germany in January of 1958 and I left in October of 1959. Q: You were protecting me when I was there at the Consulate General in Frankfurt. You were all that stood between me and the Soviet forces. FRY: It was a thin reed, I want you to know. It was an interesting experience in the sense that for the rest of my life I was, for reasons originally not of my own choosing, involved in the Cold War on the periphery of the Soviet Union or in the Soviet Union. I think that the element of having been in the military and knowing a bit about how the military conceives its action plans on the basis of civilian instructions--how they interpret threat in a concrete military sense--was always of very great value to me. I think it helped in a practical way later in more senior jobs in dealing with the military mission at our embassies, with the military attachés, with intelligence work and in understanding the dedication that it does take to serve in the military, particularly in peacetime. That is when you begin to get the slackness and the feeling of "why are we here?" We certainly had an element of that in the nineteen ‘50s; however, we had enough alerts and enough things to keep us busy so that the time passed pretty quickly. Q: The Hungarian Revolution was about that time. FRY: The Hungarian Revolution was over by early December 1956, but it was exactly that, together with the Suez crisis, which was seen as crippling NATO resolve because of the conflict between the United States, Britain, and France, and other elements which occurred in the mid-’50s, that led to the resolve to rebuild the American Army after the end of the Korean War and to form it for the first time to fight a nuclear war. The divisions were called pentomic divisions, which was simply an acronymic form for a five regiment division. One of the regiments was mobile for the first time, with helicopters 4 that were not generic to the regiment but were always available. I was in this regiment which was said at the time to be the first helicopter assault regiment--I don't know if that is truly accurate. So we were flying around in helicopters all over the place and also guarding the atomic canon that now seems like the tyrannosaurus rex of the military world. It was a gun that would throw a nuclear shell twenty-three miles; I guess you hoped that it landed where you wanted it to land. When that cannon came out of its cave at our base in Bamberg we would fly along behind in case it broke down because the whole secret of being able to throw a shell that far was in the breach; this had only been tried on railway guns and naval cannon in the past. What we didn't want to happen was to have it break down so that some squad of East German or Soviet commandos in place could come and steal the breach. We were not actually told that, but that is what we figured out. The wheels were something like twelve feet high and sometimes when we would go through a German town they would shave off the church and part of the school and we would have to stop and apologize. Q: I remember seeing that thing go through; we are talking about a real monster. FRY: We would fly down and put a perimeter around it; we had twenty-four people, four machine guns and four BAR's, so we weren't kidding, and live ammunition which was kept in a locked case that I as a sergeant was responsible for. It was something that when I was at Dartmouth and the University of Edinburgh I hadn't counted on for the next two years of my life. Q: You are touching on something here that I think is very important. In this oral history program the interviewees, mostly male, belong to a generation in which the great majority of us have served in the military, mostly with reluctance; but we did it and came away with the idea that while this wasn't for us these were people who knew their job and it was a very difficult job. There was a greater appreciation and understanding of the problems and how to handle them and of what military force means than came out of the next generation. Many who ducked the Vietnam War or the post Vietnam period just don't have that military experience and they don't have an appreciation for the military which still remains a major element of our foreign policy. FRY: Yes. I would not argue that my Foreign Service judgments on the civilian side would be so much different if I had not had military service, I don't know. But I would say that, on balance, that part of the composite of my life was positive, even though I didn't think so at the time. I never had a feeling of what some people have described as bitterness over the fact that college classmates were graduating from law school when I was just getting out of a sergeant's uniform--and what had I been doing with my life the last three years.