When I arrived in Rome, my predecessor had been gone for some time. His assistant, who would be my assistant, had been handling the science job until my arrival. I had not had Italian language training, and the main issue for the office was fisheries, which was handled by the Agriculture Ministry, where unlike many of the other science-related ministries, few people spoke English. In Rome, my portfolio included more science issues than it had in Warsaw, including non-proliferation space affairs, and technology transfer.
The fisheries issue was driftnet fishing for swordfish by Italian fishermen. The UN had decreed a limit to the length of the nets, and the Italians were exceeding it. The most pressure to get the Italians to comply came from Greenpeace. The Agriculture Ministry had enforcement officers monitoring the fishing boats, but they tended not to be too rigorous. Greenpeace had observers who were more scrupulous, and reported every violation to our office, as well as to the ministry and other officials. The American government, including our office in the embassy, continually pressured the Italians to comply. As the matter came to a head, the State Department sent a team from Washington to negotiate a solution with the Italians. I had never been involved in fisheries matters, while my assistant had been during a previous assignment. She had already developed a good relationship with the Agriculture Minister’s special assistant for fisheries. Although there were 15 or 20 participants in the meetings between the two delegations, they two tended to lead the process of finding an agreement. The agreement they worked out was basically to get Italy to enforce the UN guidelines more zealously.
A few months later, the Agriculture Minister requested Ambassador Bartholomew to meet with him on this issue. Unfortunately, my assistant who was now the expert on this issue, was sick and unable to attend the meeting. The minister was upset because the fishermen, most of whom lived in Sicily, had taken out hit contracts with the Sicilian mafia on the ministry enforcement officials, and meanwhile environmentalists had staged a demonstration in downtown Rome which had tied up traffic for hours. The Ambassador was unhappy with my still poor Italian language skills. In the absence of the main experts, I recommended moderating the stringency of the enforcement requirements in the agreement, but I never knew whether they were implemented.
On the non-proliferation side, which I knew more about, the US was about to renege on its agreement with North Korea, which had agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program. Ambassador Robert Gallucci had created an organization called the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO) under which the US, Japan and South Korea promised to build a light water nuclear power reactor if the North Koreans would discontinue their bomb program. Until the reactor was built, they promised to supply oil to North Korea for traditional power production. Mirroring my experience with science cooperation in Poland, the US Congress refused to fund the money it had promised in the agreement. As a result, it became my job at the embassy to ask the Italians, as the current presidency of the EU, if they would be willing to pay the millions that the US refused to pay.
I was disappointed that it looked like the US would be responsible for not fulfilling its obligations under the agreement, rather than the untrustworthy North Koreans. To demonstrate the urgency of the issue, the US sent a high level delegation to Rome, led by the head of KEDO, to plead with the EU to make up the American shortfall. As they had been when I first approached them, the Italians were noncommittal, but agreed to consider the matter. I left before they made a decision but KEDO later claimed that the US did not default. About the same time the US discovered that the North Koreans were secretly enriching uranium, which was a violation of the agreement on their part.
While I was in Rome NASA flew an Italian tethered satellite on Shuttle mission STS-75. NASA described the mission as follows:
TSS flew previously on Mission STS-46 in June 1992, but experiment operations curtailed due to jammed tether. TSS concept designed to study electrodynamics of a tether system in an electrically charged portion of Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere. Satellite provided by Italy and tether/deployer assembly U.S.-built. Twelve investigations — six NASA, five Italian Space Agency (ASI) and one U.S. Air Force — planned. Deployment of TSS-1R on STS-75 delayed one day to allow troubleshooting of onboard TSS computers by flight crew. Excellent scientific data was being gathered when tether snapped on flight day three as the satellite was just short of full deployment of about 12.8 miles (20.6 kilometers). The satellite immediately began speeding away from orbiter as a result of orbital forces and the crew was never in any danger. Reason for tether break not immediately clear and investigative board convened on ground to determine cause. Crew retracted deployer and remaining tether following day.
When the astronauts visited Rome to report on the mission shortly after they returned from space, I arranged several presentations for them to brief their Italian colleagues. At that time it was not known exactly why the tether broke and the satellite was lost. It was later determined that it broke because of electrical buildup in the wire connecting the satellite. But it was somewhat embarrassing to report on a mission that had gone wrong. It was not the fault of the American astronauts, but to the casual observer, it looked like it might have been. It would have been more fun to organize a visit after a successful mission.
Around this time I was invited to a reception to celebrate America’s launch of a telecommunications satellite for the Italian telecom company. One of the company officers sought me out and said something like, “You Americans must really hate me; you won’t give my daughter a visa to visit Disneyland.” I didn’t know what the situation was. The next day I went to ask the head of the consular section why his daughter’s visa had been denied. She said it was due to the Helms-Burton act of 1996. According to Wikipedia:
Exclusion of certain aliens from the United States, primarily senior officials or major stock holders, and their families, of companies that do business in Cuba on property expropriated from American citizens. To date, executives from Italy, Mexico, Canada, Israel, and the United Kingdom have been barred.
I had been reading Herman Wouk’s Winds of War and War and Remembrance about World War II. In War and Remembrance, the Jewish heroine is trying to escape from Rome. The Nazi sympathizers in Rome tell her that she can have an Italian visa to leave, but her child cannot. This fictional situation seemed to me too close to the actual situation I encountered in Rome. Modern America seemed to be emulating World War II’s Nazis and Fascists.
I had had enough of representing a country that did not fulfill its obligations or live up to my expectations, either in Warsaw or Rome. So many things had gone bad that I felt snakebit I could retire, so I did.
I had left Warsaw and moved to Rome because the State Department asked me to. They wanted me to move quickly. When I arrived I found that I would have a lower diplomatic title than I had in Warsaw. I would be a first secretary rather than a counselor, which apparently meant that I would not qualify to live in my predecessor’s apartment; it would take the embassy months to find a new, cheaper apartment for my wife and me. At the embassy I did not work well with my new supervisor, the economic minister. Over time it became somewhat clearer why and how I had been transferred.
The ambassador, Reginald Bartholomew, had a science adviser who had been with him through several jobs. The adviser had been hired by the State Department as a schedule C employee because of his connection to Ambassador Bartholomew. Most career State employees are either in the foreign service or the civil service. Schedule C employees are hired in many government agencies as political appointees brought in by a new presidential administration. Therefore, their appointments are limited to eight years, the usual term of a president. Ambassador Bartholomew’s science aide had reached the end of his eight year term. Apparently, he tried to transfer to the career foreign service, but was denied. Thus, he had to leave unexpectedly, which led to the urgent call from Washington for me to move to Rome.
I never knew exactly what happened, but it looked like the ambassador went on a crusade to prevent the foreign service from filling the job, because the foreign service had rejected his aide. The ambassador and my boss, the economic minister, had a candidate from the State Department civil service in Washington that they wanted for the job. They had apparently tried to get him immediately, but the foreign service had refused the assignment because it was a foreign service job. They had sent me, a foreign service officer, instead. Almost from my arrival, it appeared that I was not getting along with my boss or the ambassador, although the ambassador’s deputy, the deputy chief of mission, was a colleague from a previous assignment and was supportive.
Rome is a coveted assignment. I could probably have “retired in place” and just enjoyed Rome, but I did not want to end my career under a cloud. I decided it was better to leave and retire, which I did. When I left, the foreign service surrendered to the ambassador and agreed to allow the civil service employee whom the ambassador wanted to replace me. It was somewhat galling for me because his job in Washington was in an office that was supposed to support foreign service science officers in the field, yet he participated in undermining me. I never knew how he and the ambassador became so closely connected.