Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project TERRELL (TERRY) E. ARNOLD Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview dates: March 9, 2000 Copyright 2003 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in West Virginia U.S. Navy, World War II, Korean War China Columbia University (Champlain) (SUNY); San Jose State College, Stanford University Teacher, Oakland, California - 1954-1956 Entered Foreign Service - 1959 State Department - INR - Latin American Affairs 1958-1959 Mexico Cairo, Egypt - Economic Officer 1959-1961 Nasser Environment Petroleum Israel Suez Contacts Aswan Dam UAR splits Calcutta, India - Economic Officer 1962-1964 Economy AID Environment Mother Theresa Tea U.S. military aid University of California - Economic Training 1964-1965 Theory versus practice Free Speech Movement Terrorist groups State Department - Economic Bureau - Food Policy 1965-1969 Africa Disease Competition Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) - DCM 1969-1970 Politics Tamils Madam Bandaranaike election National War College 1970-1971 Vietnam Manila, Philippines - Economic/Commercial Counselor 1971-1976 U.S. presence/interests Laurel-Langley Agreement Marcoses Vietnam refugees State Department - Senior Inspector 1976-1978 Post inspections Sao Paulo, Brazil - Consul General 1978-1980 U.S. interests Environment Economy Relations Human rights USIS National War College - Faculty Member 1980-1983 Courses of study Counterterrorism State Department support State Department - Counterterrorism - Deputy Assistant Secretary 1983-1985 Near East terrorism FBI State-sponsored terrorism Israel State Department - Counterterrorism - Consultant 1985-1986 State-sponsored terrorism Fighting Back Intelligence community Iran-Contra State Department - Emergency Management Training 1986 INTERVIEW Q: This is an interview with Terrell E. Arnold. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I'm Charles Stuart Kennedy. All right, let's have at it. Could you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? ARNOLD: I was born in Bluefield, West Virginia, in 1925. I was the middle son of a family of 11 kids. I came from families equally large. My mother's family was nine, and my father's family actually was 12. I was the absolute middle of the surviving nine - two children died in childbirth - a son of farmers who grew up in North Carolina, Ashe County, as a matter of fact, in that region. My great grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee of the eastern band of Cherokees. How she got into the family I have no way of knowing exactly, but the family was from there, right in the middle of the Cherokee Nation, and women were scarce. I suspect nature took its course. The family was on the reservation - at least seven families of the Arnold clan were on the reservation - in the 1838 Census of the Tribe. Q: The Arnolds, where were they sort of from? ARNOLD: Well, the family tradition is that the family was from England, but in the clan were some Dutch. My mother's line, Craven, was an offshoot of one of the old cabinet furniture-making families of England, and that tends to run in the skill path for the kids, so I would take it there's some merit in it. I spent my childhood up to age 17 in southern West Virginia, seldom even out of the state except on short visits down to Virginia and Tennessee. Q: Could you tell us about West Virginia? Well, first let's talk about your mother and father. What were they doing and what were they like from your recollections? ARNOLD: Neither one of them had much formal education. My father was a very mechanically inclined individual who could do virtually anything he set his mind to. My conclusion about him over time was that he had a fairly short attention span. He kind of liked to move and change and change things that he was doing, so his family moved about a lot. I think by the time I got out of grammar school I had been in five schools. My mother didn't have much formal education either, but she was an avid reader, especially of the Bible, and an excellent scholar in Biblical matters. She had an enormously capacious memory for both the scriptures and for offspring of offspring and all of that. You could count on her having a genealogical chart in her head, and that was true right up to the day she died at age 86. She had by count 68 grandchildren and great grandchildren at the time she died, and I have no idea how many others there are now. I can tell you that the family proliferates like rabbits. I spent my childhood down there in those hills of southern West Virginia, the most remarkable period being in a little town called Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick was one of the old turn-of-the-century lumber-milling towns. It had stopped producing any lumber by the time we moved there in the Depression years, and the town as of now no longer exists at all. It's just a place with a sign that says Fitzpatrick as you cross the railroad track, and it's right outside the edge of the city of Beckley. I had some memorable and interesting formative years there. We had a two-room school, and I had one teacher for the better part of the four years of grammar school. Q: How many, several, classes in one room? ARNOLD: Four classes in each room, and the teacher, Mr. Fred Lilly, would rotate among us through the day, and we all had things to do when we were not up front. He used some of us as monitors and teachers and so on. He used me as a monitor in math, for example. It was one of his training tools. He was a grand man. He walked to and from school every day. And once in a while he would take one of us home with him for the weekend. Q: How about family life at home? You were talking about nine kids. It must have been pretty rambunctious. ARNOLD: One of the things it taught me was how not to listen if I chose not to, how not to hear in bedlam. I became an avid reader very early and read everything that was available. I had no boundaries. I read the Bible at least once before I was 15 and read everything else that came into our house. Q: You moved to different towns. Were there little libraries there? ARNOLD: I never used one of them, but, yes, there were. I used the school libraries a lot in the various schools that I attended. But I had an elder brother who was nine years older than I, who was hard at work when I entered the teens, and he started feeding me everything that he read, and his reading list was interesting. It was science fiction, adventure, science, all of the greats Astounding, Astonishing, Popular Science... Q: Oh, yes, those wonderful paperbacks or magazine, pulp fiction, yes. ARNOLD: The Shadow, etcetera. Q: Great illustrations. ARNOLD: Yes, especially in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. My brother would bring them home in a boxful to me, and I would read them completely, every one of them. I was getting a very liberal education. I finally got to the end of grammar school in a location very near to Fitzpatrick, a little town called Mabscott, alongside Beckley, the County Seat of Raleigh County, and graduated from the eighth grade there - a full cap and gown ceremony, by the way. We moved at that point to Wyoming County in the middle of a coal-mining region. Q: This is about what year? ARNOLD: Well, you're looking at 1938-39. Q: John L. Lewis country, was it? ARNOLD: John L. Lewis country, right in the heart of it, and that has a bearing on my history. During a very tough time I started high school at that point, and things got tighter and tighter as time wore on there. We were approaching World War II, but we were not yet involved. I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade and went to work in one of the mines. I had two elder brothers who were working there. They were in good jobs and they could get me in easily, so I got in, and at the beginning of World War II I was making a horrendous income of about $40 a week, not bad, a dollar an hour for a teenager. Q: In this where did your parents fit? This is the era of Roosevelt. Was Roosevelt a major figure and the New Deal, or was there sort of a mountain reserve about this? ARNOLD: There were lots of political arguments in my house. You know, there was a great deal of rejection of Hoover. Hoover was not responsible for the Depression, but he got credit for it in the minds of a lot of people. Radio was enormously popular, and my dad was good at being sure that we always had a radio that worked, even if he had to virtually manufacture it, so we listened to a lot of radio and, yes, the family really liked FDR. He did initiate some good things that the family liked. Q: Before you dropped out of high school, what were your subjects? ARNOLD: I was taking a standard load except that I took typing. I was the only boy in a class of 30, and thanks to my English teacher, who convinced me that it was a skill I needed in the future, I took typing, and she was absolutely dead on. I'm an 80-word-a-minute typist now on the keyboard, but it was an odd situation to go into that class and be the only male. That lady was very influential, and so was her husband. He was my math teacher; she was my English teacher. Q: What was her name? ARNOLD: Barrett. She was Elizabeth. He was William Jennings. They came to that school as their first teaching job, and they died there in those mountains right above that little school. Q: Did you feel while you were in that area that you were in a depressed area? As a kid it's easy not to understand what's happening around you because I assume everybody else was in the same boat. ARNOLD: Everybody was pretty close to the same boat. Southern West Virginia probably was more evenly impoverished than many other areas of the country, but the coal mines were doing reasonably well in those days, and my elder brothers particularly were able to get jobs because they were very skilled people, they were very good mechanically. Therefore, we did have an income typically, some income. We ran a subsistence farm in addition and grew a lot of the foodstuffs that we needed. We cut some timber and sold posts to the mining companies around there for use underground as mine timbers. We managed, but it was touch and go. My mother was a marvelous household manager. She had the most gentle touch with her kids of anybody I know. She threatened a time or two to whip me if I would go get the switch, but beyond that I never had much in the way of punishment from either Mother or Father. Q: When you were in a coal mining area, did you owe your soul to the company store? ARNOLD: A lot of people did, no question about it. Even as remote as that area was, it was not all Anglo-Saxon WASP. There was a sizable Italian population, for example, barely speaking English but good underground workers. Mining was changing in those days. The old mines had been pick-and-shovel operations with occasional uses of dynamite to bring down the walls. The new mines were the mines that my brothers and I were associated with, and I eventually went into one of those jobs. Technologies were moving along pretty rapidly back there in those days. The mine that I worked in was one of the most modern in the region. It was completely mechanized. Everything was done by machine, the cutting, the loading, the movement, the sorting, the sifting and washing were all machine operations, and that was just a very different kind of process. With variations, that's the process that's now used. Q: What were you doing? You were what, about 16 years old? ARNOLD: That's right. I started out in the tipple. Hardly anybody will remember what that is, but the tipple is where the coal comes through for sorting, cleaning, grading, loading, and storage if it's not going to go immediately on a railcar. I was on a slate line picking slate with two fairly senior people along the line. Q: You were taking slate out of the... ARNOLD: Observing the coal as it flowed on a belt and taking the slate out of it and throwing the slate into a waste pan. Q: What's the difference between that work and the old one that I have seen pictures of, breaker boys? I thought they kind of sorted out... ARNOLD: We didn't have that function in our mines at that stage. At least, I don't recall it. But slate picking is probably pretty close. In the mechanized mine this is the first close encounter for humans with the actual product. Up to that point it's delivered mechanically and processed. A lot of the slate separation was hydraulic. They used a very fancy kind of mud (heavy medium) that circulated, that is surged upward and it created an updraft just exactly sufficient to take the coal up to the top and let the stones go down to the bottom - why not? We also used some centrifuge separation. Q: Was there a big boss or big company that you were working for? ARNOLD: Oh, yes, the Consolidated Coal Company, which was around until fairly recently as a matter of fact. It's not in that area anymore, I don't think. Q: What was the outlook towards the coal company? ARNOLD: The outlook for this company was very good. There were lots of mines that were quite marginal, over age, or undercapitalized, because they didn't have the equipment. But this one was leading edge. It was doing well and obviously going to do well, especially as we got into World War II, because it was capable of meeting the high-volume requirements for clean coal, a pretty good place. And all of that was visible to us, the people who worked there, because we knew the other mines around and we knew what kind of a place we were in. Q: How was John L. Lewis? ARNOLD: John L., as you indicated a little earlier, was in his heyday. He had a sizable, very active trade union in that mine. I graduated from slate picking to the mining machine shop as an apprentice electrician, and I did that for a few months before I enlisted in the Navy. Q: That was only two years of high school? ARNOLD: That's right. Q: You enlisted when? ARNOLD: Enlisted in November 1943. Q: I can't remember when the great mine strike came during the war. ARNOLD: There were spates and strikes, and they were mostly after the war, the ones that got real serious, and that's the part of the mining union history that had some bearing on my future. I went off to the Navy, to boot camp at Great Lakes, Illinois, did the regular stuff there for about three months. My test scores were very good on the Navy's testing program, so they sent me to the University of Chicago, a fascinating program on training equipment. This is where the manual skills came in. Q: Could you talk about the program there? ARNOLD: Well, the Navy early on was looking for ways to train without doing actual field operations. It still is, and the systems are much more advanced now than they used to be then. But the Navy used a lot of simulators. After all, you know, to move a battleship and fire 16-inch guns is very expensive, so any way you can get the aggregate training in how to do that without ever moving a ship or firing a gun is a step forward. That's what the Navy was looking for, and this program at the University of Chicago was a program to train trainers. We were using a number of simulators. We had a fighter simulator, for example, in which the pilot flew the airplane and the instructor flew the sky - neat piece of work. Some people got airsick from flying it. Q: I mean before that there was this famous thing, their Link Trainer. ARNOLD: The Link Trainer was one of our most advanced tools, technologically a beautiful piece of work. You wouldn't necessarily see that by looking at it, but all its motions were powered by a vacuum motor, a six-cylinder vacuum motor. All you needed to run it was a strong fan that exhausted a vacuum cell to supply that motor, and then you allowed air to flow through the cylinders to run the motor. All of the plane’s motions were powered by this motor through various mechanical linkages. Q: It was a covered cockpit so you could only see the instruments. ARNOLD: That's right. It was totally blacked out for the pilot It was an instrument flight and radio navigation trainer. My group was trained on how to diagnose, how to maintain, and how to train with that tool among the others. We were given good basic courses in electronics, hydraulics, mechanics and optics so that we could deal with the ailments of all those tools. Q: How did a boy from the hills of West Virginia find Chicago in those days? ARNOLD: I had a ball. Servicemen as a group are in love with Chicago, the ones who remember it. I got there in January of 1944, and the training program I was in was one that was very demanding. We worked pretty darn hard all the time in our training classes, and we were, except for Terry Arnold, relatively mature individuals. I was eighteen, and the youngest member of our class, because the others all came out of a V-12 officer training program that had been discontinued. Q: I was going to say you must have been sort of the kid. ARNOLD: Yes, but they gave us 24-hour freedom of access to the base and to the city seven days a week. We were free to go on liberty every night overnight. Q: Was the Navy pier going on? ARNOLD: We were first stationed at Navy Pier, and then we moved onto the campus of the University. A good move, because Navy Pier was drafty and cold. After we left the Pier, we had our classes in the Museum of Science and Industry. Q: Oh, a wonderful museum. ARNOLD: Oh my. When I was on guard duty at night, I would wander around and study both the active exhibits and the backroom collection of stuff not on display. We lived on the University campus in Sunny Gymnasium, which, we were told much later, had the unique history of having been the place where the first controlled nuclear reaction was achieved. There is now a plaque on the wall there, I am told. Q: Did it glow at night? ARNOLD: No, not to our knowledge anyway. We took our meals in Ida Noyes Hall, which is the famous library of the University of Chicago, and we lived and worked in the west wing of the museum. I got out of that with a promotion to petty officer third class. Q: What sort of a rating, mechanic's rating? ARNOLD: Special devices, aviation training devices. They sent me to Brunswick, Georgia, to run a training school, but let's talk about Chicago. Q: Yes, please. ARNOLD: Chicago had two major United Service Organization (USO) clubs. One was on Michigan Boulevard in a building that is now Roosevelt College. It was just down the boulevard from Orchestra Hall and within walking distance of museums. Q: Oh, yes. ARNOLD: The other was on Washington Boulevard. They both had the same basic philosophy of taking the best care of servicemen, and the City of Chicago had the same philosophy: Anything servicemen wanted, they had. All theaters were free except for one. There was an ongoing performance of 'Oklahoma' that they never gave out any tickets for. But anything I wanted to see at Orchestra Hall I could go there to see for free. There was always food and at least three cafeterias in that Roosevelt College building, along with two dance halls and tickets to anything that was happening. They provided free transportation on the elevated and buses, so that I could go ashore at night after a day of training with a dime in my pocket, have a very fine evening, go to a concert, have a meal, dance with hostesses, have a late supper, and come back to the base with my dime still in my pocket. Servicemen who were there on assignment or who passed through the city remember Chicago very fondly. Q: I was born in Chicago, moved out early on, but it took its culture seriously and it always has. Did this sort of waken things for you? ARNOLD: Chicago and the Navy training experience were tremendous launching pads, because, you see, the whole world was open. People didn't have any idea how ignorant I was, so they opened the doors and I went through them. Q: Keep your mouth shut and your eyes wide open. ARNOLD: And go for it. So as a third class petty officer the Navy sent me to Brunswick, Georgia, to a place called Glencoe. Glencoe is still in operation now, but it's an INS and Customs Service operation. We had at that time a squadron of Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers and a squadron of K-type airships, three of them. Q: These are dirigibles - not dirigibles but lighter than air. ARNOLD: Helium LTA, yes. The middle class was K. There was a little one called an L class and a larger one, an M class, but the K was the most versatile. It was an anti-submarine patrol vessel. Q: They were used with great effect, weren't they? ARNOLD: They were, because you could go stationary above the water and you could look down into the water and see a submarine. They didn't have much armament. They had one 500-pound depth charge and a Browning automatic rifle on a swivel mount, so you didn't want any close encounters. Q: It's over there, fellas. ARNOLD: Hopefully way over there. I ran the ground school for both the dive bomber pilots and the blimp crews until the end of the war in Europe. Q: I'm just curious. Was the submarine warfare off the coast pretty well over, or was it continued up to the end of the war. ARNOLD: Well, it continued up certainly to within three or four months of the end of the war in Europe, but it was obvious to us that the threat was diminishing. We were running our patrols regularly, and we ran those airships out there for 10/12 hours at a time without seeing anything other than surface ships and seagulls. Crews would go out with their food on board and just hang out there and cruise the region. We were running those ships from Lakehurst, New Jersey; Elizabeth City, North Carolina; Tallahassee, Florida; Glencoe, Georgia; and Curaçao in the Netherlands East Indies. So we had them distributed throughout the region. They were not hard to maintain. They were a bit tricky to care for on the ground because they were always just on the verge of fluttering away. Q: Would you have to put them inside of these closet-type hangars? ARNOLD: We had two of those hangars at Glencoe, and there are two of them still at Moffett Field in California. There are a number of other places.