Video Transcript
Bruce A. Flatin—Kabul 1979:
On Valentines Day in 1979, Ambassador Dubs was seized from his car on his way to work. And the embassy was stunned. We were stunned also to hear that he had been taken to the Kabul Hotel at the center of the city. If a real Mujahideen had seized him, it would be an unlikely place, to hole up in the center of the city. So, the DCM decided to stay at the embassy and get in touch with Washington, and I went down to the Kabul Hotel then with a few officers to try to handle the situation from that end, down there. And I had – those were the days of the Cold War as you recall – and at the Kabul Hotel I dealt with the KGB – they had a senior officer there – and with the Afghan police and military authorities. And I was informed that, first we were told the ambassador had been seized by four people, one of whom was wearing a police uniform. At the hotel, however, they had a fellow down near the desk who was sort of a prisoner of theirs. They just screamed and hollered at him. And we were told that down in the room there were two there with the ambassador. So that didn’t add up to four, but that’s the way this was in Afghanistan out there. Two and two were rarely four out there. Anyhow, the, things became very tense. The whole hotel filled with police and internal security and troops. And they also covered the building from a roof of a bank across the street. So the place was very heavily armed. Our strategy – Bruce Amstutz, our DCM, got in touch with Washington, and Secretary of State Vance wanted us to stress to the Afghans that this man must be returned unharmed. Therefore, we should not take any precipitous action, and time is usually on the side of the government in these types of situations. This was clearly discussed and understood by the Soviet KGB and by the Afghans, but we had to keep reminding them during the morning.
Response
I kept saying that I wanted to go upstairs and talk to the ambassador, so he’d at least know that we were there. And I also asked the embassy to send out our embassy doctor with his blood type, because I thought things might not go well. And so the embassy doctor arrived with the embassy ambulance, and with one of the nurses, and the blood type, of course. And we waited there and finally the KGB officer came up to me and said, “Mr. Flatin, what language does your ambassador know?” I said, “Well, he knows Russian very well, because he’s an expert on the Soviet Union.” He said, “Well, besides Russian.” And I said, “Well, he talked German once.” And he said, “Do you speak German?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “We’ll use that upstairs then.”
So then they said, “Introduce yourself to the ambassador.” So I said “Guten morgen, Herr Botschafter. Hier spricht Bruce. Wie geht es Ihnen?” [“Good morning, Mr. Ambassador. This is Bruce. How are you?”] And he said “Es geht mir gut.” [“I’m well.”] He sounded healthy and strong and able. And then the police whispered, “Tell him in exactly 10 minutes he is either to go to the men’s room or fall to the floor.” I said, “Just a minute. I want to talk to you people elsewhere.” So I got the KGB and the Afghans off to the side, and I said, “What you’re asking me to do is to light a fuse that is going to go off in exactly 10 minutes. We’ve just got done repeating to you over and over again that our Secretary of State has a message for the Foreign Minister requesting no precipitous action, and that is exactly what you’re trying to launch here.”
And then one of the Soviets waved to another Soviet on an embankment across the street from a balcony and the next thing you know all the gunfire started. It lasted for exactly 40 seconds, and that’s a long time, if you watch. The floor shook with gunfire. So, when it was over we went up to the room. Oh, pardon me, we were asked to wait a few seconds by the Afghans, and then I heard four shots inside the room. So then we were asked to wait outside the room, and then they opened up the door and they pulled out these two thugs in there, one of whom looked like he was dead, probably dead, and the other looked possibly dead. And they were flopped right at my feet, literally on my shoes. And the ambassador, himself, was sitting, slumped up against the wall in a chair, but one half of his body was wet. And it was winter, it was February. And the gunfire had broken up the radiators in the room and they had leaked a lot of water on the floor. Obviously he had been on the floor, and they had repositioned him that way. He was definitely dead.
Personal Qualities
I hope that the Foreign Service continues to do this, but the Foreign Service makes it a point to look for people who are resourceful, and who think on their feet. You can’t depend upon Washington to help you with these details. I had had a lot of action experience. I was in Berlin. I was there for six years during the Occupation period, and I was in charge of the police in the American sector in internal security, and with my French and British colleagues handled the whole police and internal security for all of West Berlin. I just can’t tell you how many problems we had there. Those were the days of the Wall. As I said to my wife once, I used to see dead bodies on the streets of Berlin next to the Wall. In Kabul I saw pieces of dead bodies. That was the difference between those two posts. I had to be armed in Berlin, and I had to be armed in Kabul. After Dubs was murdered, security issued me a .38, which I always wore. Because I had been in the army, I had been used to weapons, and I decided I might as well use it. It would be better to have it than not to have it. As I told you before, I was the director of the Operations Center at State, and the Operations Center deals with these types of crises, all night long as a matter of fact. It gives the State Department a 24-hour-a-day way to cover the world. And we could make decisions in the Operations Center without waking people up if we thought it was possible. And we had a lot of problems up there. As a matter of fact on the day of Dubs’s kidnapping – that was Valentines Day – the students in Iran seized our embassy for the first time.
Advice
I’d like to say that it’s very important for young people entering the Foreign Service to realize that you’re not going to be able to depend on Washington for detailed advice. If you look at the Foreign Service manual, you’ll see there’s absolutely nothing in it that will cover these situations. And you’re expected by Washington to try and do the best you can, because they have no way of knowing what the on-the-scene operational needs are.
To begin with, to the degree that they can acquire an area of language training, and FSI offers the area training, they should take as much language training, even on their own, because that helps them. When they get to the post, they should try their best to get to know people, especially people who are significant. People like police officials and military officials. That may be of use to you later. They should also know other diplomats. My career was spent entirely in the Cold War against the Russians – as a soldier, as a soldier in Germany, followed as a diplomat in Germany and also in Kabul. And I was the guy who always seemed to have face-to-face contact with the Soviets. And there’s a certain way of dealing with your opponent. You both have to deal with each other rather carefully, but it’s possible to do it. The degree to which you get that kind of experience helps – as in negotiations with the Cubans, where this kind of experience helped. They’re not nice guys, but you can do business with them, if you do it the right way. The point is that the person should make themselves as prepared as possible for these types of very fast moving situations. And if they can’t hack it, they have to be moved out.