The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project JAMES ALAN WILLIAMS Interviewed by: Ray Ewing Initial interview date: October 31, 2003 Copyright 2010 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in Wisconsin, raised in Virginia Princeton University Fulbright Scholarship, Munich, Germany Entered the Foreign Service in 1965 Ankara, Turkey: Rotation Officer/Staff Aide 1966-1969 Ambassador Parker Hart Peace Crops Kurds Cypress Relations Terrorism Fleet visits Economy State Department: Operations Center 1968-1969 Operations State Department: Petroleum Officer, Arabian Peninsula Affairs 1969-1970 ARAMCO Officer personnel US Embassy, Saudi Arabia Persian Gulf oil Yemen Jeddah desalination plant Office of Saline Waters State Department: Staff Aide to Undersecretary John Irwin 1970-1972 Personnel Office Environment Secretary of State Rogers Operations 1 Henry Kissinger Relations with NSC Family Chile State Department: FSI: Greek language training 1972-1973 Nicosia, Cyprus: Political Officer 1973-1975 Relations Reporting Political Parties EOKA and EOKA-Beta Civil War Makarios/Grivas rivalry Security Greek Junta Greek political developments Greek/Cypriot relations Nikos Sampson Recognition issue Ambassador Rodger Davies United Nations Special Representative Greek/Turkish troop rotations Archbishop Makarios Enosis Dimitriou brothers Local press reporting Coup London-Zurich Accords Turkish invasion Turkish enclave Partial evacuation Cease fire UNFICYP US policy Refugees Cerlides Embassy attacked Ambassador Davies and local employee killed Family Canadian troops Ambassador Dean Brown Ambassador Bill Crawford Bonn, Germany: Economic/Political Officer 1975-1979 Energy 2 International Energy Agency (IEA) Ambassador Hillenbrand Internal Political Affairs (FRP) VIP visitors Reporting Nazi criminals Helmut Schmidt Political parties Terrorism Embassy organization President Carter visit State Department: Cyprus Desk Officer 1979 Cyprus Embassy State Department: Turkey Desk Officer 1979-1982 Terrorism Suleyman Demirel Turkish military coup US view of coup US economic and military assistance Protection of Turks from terrorism Turk-Greek aid levels US Ambassadors to Turkey National War College 1982-1983 Overseas tour State Department: Office of United Nations Political Affairs 1983-1985 Jeane Kirkpatrick Operations Coordination with regional bureaus UNESCO Major issues NATO consultations Personnel Voting Practices Report President Reagan Relations with White House Berlin, Germany: Political Advisor 1986-1990 Relations with Embassy Bonn Environment US Army role Relations with Allies Quadripartite Agreement 3 Mission organization Allied Kommandatura La Belle disco bombing Terrorism Berlin politics National Green Party US Embassy in East Germany Major Nicholson tragedy Embassy/Military relationship Berlin Wall East Germans in Czechoslovakia Germans flee East Berlin Soviet Missions Relations with Soviets President Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Berlin restrictions relaxation Dismantling Berlin Wall Ambassador Vernon Walters Operations Budget issues Athens, Greece: Deputy Chief of Mission/Chargé d’affaires 1990-1994 Ambassador Michael Sotirhos Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement (DECA) Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis President Karamanlis Operations Terrorism Security Environment PLO US bases phased out Cyprus President Bush visit Ambassador Tom Niles Ambassador’s residence State Department: Ambassador, Special Coordinator for Cyprus 1994-1996 Personnel Operations Greek-Turk meetings in London Greek/Cypriot negotiators Presidential Envoy for Cyprus, Richard Beattie Richard Holbrooke European Union interest Clerides/Denktash New York meetings 4 Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller Ambassador Albright State Department: Director, Officer of Career Development and 1996-1999 Assignments Organization Computerization Operations Voicemail Director General National War College: Deputy Commander and International Affairs 1999-2002 Advisor Operations National Defense University Course of study Evaluation INTERVIEW [Note: This interview was not edited my Mr. Williams] Q: This is an oral history interview with James A. Williams. It’s the thirty first of October, 2003. Jim, it’s good to be starting on Halloween for this conversation. This is being conducted under the auspices of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center, and Jim this is our first session. I see that you were born in Washington, D.C. and a little bit later on you went to Princeton University. Did you grow up in Washington, or were you here as a war baby November of 1942? WILLIAMS: I’m definitely a war baby. My father went into the Navy soon after Pearl Harbor and I was part of his insurance policy to make sure there would be another generation. I grew up in Arlington though. My father got out of the military when the war ended. He stayed in the Navy as a civilian management analyst, so essentially he worked at the Pentagon and at main Navy down on Constitution Avenue when I was growing up, and my brother and I grew up in Arlington, Virginia. Q: Okay and you did go on to Princeton, class of 1964. Was it at Princeton, or even before, that you became interested in the Foreign Service? WILLIAMS: I really became interested in the Foreign Service before Princeton. Living in the Washington metropolitan area you hear a lot, read a lot, breathe a lot of history, foreign policy, government affairs. So from a fairly early age I was interested in that. I majored in history and German literature at Princeton and wanted to have a career, either 5 academics or foreign affairs that would enable me to continue that interest. And on the idiosyncratic side it just happened that my father and Graham Martin were college friends from Wake Forest. From the earliest I can remember my parents were in touch with Graham and Dot Martin, sending them care packages in Paris after World War II, corresponding with them when they were in Geneva and Thailand and Rome. So hearing about the Martins’ adventures in the Foreign Service through perhaps a rose colored glass gave me a very early interest in that profession. Q: Graham Martin was our ambassador in Italy when I first arrived there in 1970. Of course, then he went on to Vietnam and certainly he’d had a very distinguished career. I’d also known him a little bit when he was a special assistant to the undersecretary for economic affairs, Douglas Dillon, in the late fifties. After Princeton you did a little bit of graduate study. WILLIAMS: I had a Fulbright scholarship for a year, for two semesters, at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. I spent two semesters there basically studying post-war German history, learning how to ski with my bride. We were married when we took that trip, and getting to meet a lot of people in Munich and renewing old contacts in Bonn which I had met the previous summer when I worked there on a scholarship. Q: Not with the embassy in Bonn. WILLIAMS: No, I was doing academic research. I got a scholarship from Princeton and lived across the river and worked in the SPD library on a project involving the elections for the German national assembly after World War I. Q: Okay and when did you take the Foreign Service written examination? While you were in Munich or before? WILLIAMS: No, I took the written exam that summer I lived in Germany and studied in Bonn. That was the summer after my junior year. It was given in some huge room at the embassy in Bonn. A lot of people took it. I took it and was fortunate to pass, although very narrowly because I was always a good test taker. That particular day I rushed through the math section and could not understand why nobody else had finished, and only three minutes before the bell rang did I turn the page over and discover there was a second page. And I raced to finish it, did not of course, and barely passed, or even flunked that portion of the exam. That was something the oral examiners asked me about when I had the oral exam. Q: When and where did you have the oral? WILLIAMS: I had the oral the summer after I graduated from Princeton, before we went to Munich, in Washington, D.C. and passed it. But the thing they zeroed in on early was why were my scores on the written test generally pretty good except for math which was 6 atrocious. I had to tell them it was because I’d been too careless to look at the whole test before I put my pen down. Q: Did you have to defer entry into the Foreign Service then to do the Fulbright in Munich, or did it all kind of work out, the timing the way you wanted it? WILLIAMS: They allowed me to do that with some reluctance. That was another part of the grilling and the oral exam, just when did I plan to come into the Foreign Service if I passed the exam. Was I really an academic who wanted to go on to the academic track or was I serious about wanting to come into the Foreign Service? I think their questions pushed me to clarify my own thinking on that point, and tell them truthfully that I planned to come into the Foreign Service if I passed the test after my Fulbright in Munich. Q: And I see you did come in September of 1965 at age 22 if my math is right. WILLIAMS: That’s right. That was not unusual at the time. Many of us were A.B. generalists with one or two years of post-graduate experience or as former Peace Corps volunteers. There were several of those. Some had masters degrees. There was only one Ph.D. in the class. He was the old man at 31, Ron Casagrande, a great guy. And it just worked out perfectly in terms of the timing. We came back on the ship. In those days you still took the ship to Europe and came back, at least the Fulbright grantees did. And we got off the ship in August and I came into the class that started sometime in September as I recall. Q: And you had the usual A100 orientation course at the Foreign Service Institute and what happened after that? I see your first assignment was to Ankara, Turkey. Did you have any language training or other specific preparation for that? WILLIAMS: Not at all. The A100 course was fairly straightforward. We visited various desks in the Department of State, including the German desk. We heard all kinds of lecturers, some good, some bad at the old Foreign Service Institute, and we had a fairly useful but short course in consular affairs, and that was the essence of my training. I had gotten off of language probation by passing the test in German since I had majored in German literature. I’d spent a summer in Germany. There was no language training, nor was there any request by me to go to Turkey. I, of course, wanted to go back to Germany and the system wisely decided not to send me there. When the announcements were made, you may recall the old style, for us at least, our class, we were in a windowless room and somebody like the DG (Director General – head of personnel) would come into the room and call out your last name. You would stand up in a more or less military brace and he would give you your assignment. You would say thank you sir and sit down. My name started with W I was at the end of the line. When he called out Williams I stood up and said, “Yes, sir,” and he said, “Mr. Williams you are going to Izmir,” and I said thank you sir and sat down without having a clue where Izmir was. I asked my wife where is Izmir and she said I don’t know. Somebody behind us thankfully whispered he thought it was old Smyrna and I did know what Smyrna was so I quickly figured out I was going to 7 Turkey. It was a country that I had never particularly studied or shown any interest in or shown any desire to visit, and the system sent me there, for which I am eternally grateful. Q: And you actually did go to Izmir? WILLIAMS: No, that’s another story. We were going to Izmir, the assignment was announced so I assume that the director general made it. Normally that was it. So dutifully my wife and I wrote the letters of introduction to the consul general and his wife, it was Lew Schmidt and his wife. We wrote the letter saying how happy we were about our assignment, how much we looked forward to coming to Izmir. I got a fairly quick reply from Lew Schmidt saying that he was very happy to receive my letter, but that it was the first he had known of my assignment to Izmir, and on checking with Ankara he had discovered that the assignment had been changed to Ankara instead of Izmir. So, in fact, we went directly to Ankara as did our household effects and our car, and not to Izmir. Now the reason for that was very interesting. Unbeknownst to us, and certainly Lew Schmidt and his wife never told us this, we discovered later there had been some kind of scandal involving a key club and other things in Izmir. This had involved a number of people in the consulate, not the Schmidts. They were sent there to clean the mess up, but their predecessors and a whole lot of people there had been involved, or some of them had been involved in the Key Club. There were other goings on with the local community including expatriate Americans. The Inspector General had come in there and basically cleaned house, and I think they decided on reflection that this was not the kind of cauldron of temptation into which they wanted to commit a 22 year old junior officer and his bride. For reasons I suspect of prudence as well as personnel management, they aborted the decision to send us to Izmir, moved the position and us to Ankara instead. Q: What was the position? WILLIAMS: It was a central complement rotation job. In fact, Ankara is a huge embassy. Ankara had a wonderful set of people in those days. It’s large they said so they can afford the luxury of training you, and they trained me in economic-commercial work, in consular work, in general services work, and so on. So that’s what we did. Q: So you rotated among those functions and got training and had some experience. WILLIAMS: Had lots of experience, learned at each of them. The people who trained me were at least 20 years older than I was. Some were older still, but they were very nice to us. They took us in as they took in other junior officers. We were not the only ones in Ankara at the time. It was a very collegial and well-run post. I’ll say it again because it deserves it. A very happy family and it treated its people well, and trained its junior officers very well. I didn’t become an economic commercial officer, but I became much more literate in that field than I had ever been and I was grateful for that. The consular training had helped me a good deal for my rotation tour through the consular section, but as is the case with many junior officers I was largely under the tutelage of the senior locals in the consulate section. 8 Q: How long were you there? Two years? WILLIAMS: It was a little over two years. Closer to two and a half years. We got there in early March of ‘66 as I recall and left sometime in July of ‘68. I was supposed to rotate through the other sections of the embassy. Political was the one I really wanted to get to. Mutual security affairs, political/military was also a possibility. Either would have been fine. The ambassador’s office had a staff aide position. The incumbent got married, that was Sam Peale an old friend, got married and took an extended leave of absence for his honeymoon. They needed a quick fill-in so they yanked me out of I think the general services section where I was working, to become staff aide on fairly short notice. Sam and his wife, did not come back to Ankara. They went on to another assignment, and I wound up staying for the rest of my tour as staff aide to Parker Hart which was a wonderful job working for a great Foreign Service officer. Q: He was the ambassador the whole time you were in Turkey? WILLIAMS: He was. He had arrived about I think a year before we got there, succeeding Ray Hare, and he was there when we left. He and Mrs. Hart, Jane Hart, were two professionals who really took their job seriously, showed interest in their people, and tried to make the place a happy one. Q: And who was the DCM? WILLIAMS: The DCM was Ed Martin. There were in those days two Ed Martins in the Foreign Service. This was China Ed. Edwin W. Martin I think. He and his wife Emma Rose as I recall were both the children of American missionaries, and I believe both of them had been born in China or one of them had been born in China and one in what was then the Ottoman Empire but then went to China later. They had both had deep experience in China, spoke Chinese and this was I guess an out of area tour for Ed. He was the DCM. Q: And you were the ambassador’s staff aide for the better part of a year then? WILLIAMS: I was the ambassador’s staff aide for about 16 months. Our first three months there we lived in the DCM’s residence because the DCM was on home leave and the embassy didn’t want the residence vacant. One interesting thing that happened while we were there is that my wife was often at home. She was involved in many activities with the German American Women’s Club and playing tennis, but usually she was home doing something and I was at the office. And while at home during the daytime she frequently noticed men coming in and out of the basement stairwell, going down to the basement and coming out. And sometimes when we would play ping pong in the basement in the evening we would hear door shutting in the basement and whispering, but never saw anybody. It was rather strange environment. Well it turned out after we left our brief sojourn at the DCM residence that the local cook was running a brothel in the basement of the DCM residence. The RSO shop finally did a number on him and rolled 9 the whole thing up, fired the cook, and obviously put an end to the brothel. But for a while there we were living on top of a brothel and perhaps even giving, unwittingly of course, cover to it. Q: Well I thought there would be some good story on Halloween and that’s a good one. Good remembrance. Anything else you want to say about this first tour? Sounds like a very varied and interesting one for you. Anything about U.S.-Turkey relations in that period? ‘66 to ‘68. WILLIAMS: It was in many ways an era of good feeling, even though it was coming to an end. Terrorism began soon after we left Turkey. I mean serious terrorism. When we lived there Turkey was essentially a safe country for tourists and foreign diplomats to travel in. This included the eastern provinces which is a sensitive area for the Turks because that’s where the Kurds live. That’s one reason the Peace Corps was first moved out of eastern Turkey and then tossed out of the whole country because of great sensitivity to what the Peace Corps volunteers may or may not have been doing with the Kurdish population out there. But essentially in our small VW beetle which was painted bright red, we could travel the length and breadth of the country alone in safety, except at night. You didn’t travel at night, not because of terrorism or anything like that, but because shepherds and other native folk had a habit of sleeping on asphalt at night, or parking their flocks there. There were no road signs, reflectors, and you might have an unpleasant surprise rounding the corner and seeing the road ahead of you covered by two- footed or four-footed creatures. So generally it was not a good idea to drive in Turkey at night. On the whole U.S.-Turkish relations were under strain continually because of the Cyprus problem in that period. One of the continual refrains I heard when I was in Turkey traveling around to meet local officials as a consular officer, as a vice consul, was reference to the Lyndon Johnson letter of 1964 which was sent to keep Turkey from invading Cyprus essentially by threatening that Turkey, if it did so, could not invoke the NATO guarantee to protect it against a Russian reaction in defense of Archbishop Makarios’ regime. And that letter achieved its purpose but rankled deeply and it was standard fare for every Turkish official who met with an American for years thereafter to make a regretful reference to the Johnson letter of 1964. We went through the ‘67 crisis when I was there. That did not seriously impact Turkish- American relations at my level. As far as Ann and I were concerned life went on pretty much as normal. It was still fun to be with the Turks, to travel and meet Turks and so forth. The one thing we were all conscious of in those days and it became worse and worse and was one contributing factor I think to the terrorism that was directed against Americans, was the huge presence that we had, not just at the military and intelligence bases on the Black Sea and at Central Anatolia, but also the wealth of that presence and the gap in the standards of living and income levels between American officials and Turkish officials. That was a very obvious gap; it was a matter of continuing concern to Ambassador Hart and the management of embassy Ankara. We had something like 35,000 official Americans in Turkey in those days. That was mainly Air Force. And the problems arose when these young hot-blooded Americans would come into town to have a good time. We’d often run into difficulty in some of the bars in Izmir, Adana in the 10