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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... named Ivan Denisovich , written by an unknown author named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn . In this and other ways we could see a degree of thaw on the Soviet literary scene , which had been so frozen when I was a Columbia student . One of the ...
... named Sal- eem , who would soon come down with malaria and go home to Lahore ; a little Somali steward named Cali ; and a Somali woman with laughing eyes named Ambia , who was the boyessa ( the Italian colonialists had decided that the ...
... named to African posts . There was just one senator present to 3. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee , Sen. Richard Lugar , had written me a warm note after I was named to Somalia , recalling a long dawn run we had done ...
Contents
Scholar Soldier Someday Diplomat | 7 |
From Foggy Bottom to the Isthmus | 13 |
The Moscow Hand | 26 |
Copyright | |
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