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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... ambassador . Spike Dubs , with whom I had worked years earlier in Moscow , had been killed in 1978 while serving as our ambassador in Afghanistan . More American ambassadors had died violent deaths since World War II than generals and ...
... ambassador would have to decide for himself what was the proper size and shape of such assistance in the future ( though what the ambassador thought might , I realized , have little effect in Washington ) . I left CENTCOM to return to ...
... ambassador to hold weekly meetings of the " country team , " which comprised the heads of embassy elements . I had never liked the term , which implied that an ambassador was team captain but not really much above the other members ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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