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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... later years , a bureaucratic State Department would proclaim that all main lines of Foreign Service work - administrative , consular , economic , and political - were of equal value ; a number of senior admin officers with little direct ...
... later left the Soviet Union , and they spent a New Year's Eve with us in Virginia before his untimely death in a road accident in Spain.5 I never asked any of these people if they had been forced to report on me . Orlova admitted later ...
... later , after I had left , would draw on these idle young men for its heedless , deadly gunners . On December 12 I was asked to call on the new permanent secretary , that is , number - three , of the foreign ministry as a prelude to ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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