Safirka: An American EnvoyKent State University Press, 2000 - 241 pages Peter S. Bridges's service as an American ambassador to Somalia capped his three decades as a career officer in the American Foreign Service. Safirka, a frank description of his experiences in Somalia and elsewhere, offers pointed assessments of American foreign policy and policymakers. Bridges recounts his service in Panama during a time of turmoil over the Canal; in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis; in Prague for bleak years after the Soviet invasion; in Rome when Italian terrorists first began to target Americans; and in key positions in three Washington agencies. In Somalia Bridges managed the largest American aid program in sub-Sahara Africa. He dealt with a postcolonial regime, hobbled both by traditional clan rivalries and by a leader who cared far less about Somalia's people and progress than about maintaining his control over that poverty-stricken, strategic - which soon erupted in civil war. |
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... American aid program in Poland , credit guarantees for Polish purchase of American grain , which amounted to a third of a billion dollars annually . I was told that the question had to go to the president . I wrote a memo to go up the ...
... American diplomats who had died in tragic or heroic circumstances . The second name on the list was Joel Barlow , America's first hostage negotiator , who had died in Poland in 1812 ; I had used Barlow for a pseudonym as a secret joke ...
An American Envoy Peter Bridges. flow into Somalia . The Security Council agreed . The first American troop contingent landed at Mogadishu in December 1992 , a month before Clin- ton's inauguration as president , as part of the new ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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