Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (22 page)

The next morning we buttoned down the embassy as best we could, reviewing our procedures and requesting more local police support. I sat down behind my desk to place a call to Milosevic’s foreign ministry aide, Bojan Bugarcic, to check one last time. He told me, “We will not be in contact again for a long, long time. I wish you well.”

On March 24 the bombing began.

E
arly in the afternoon of March 25, 1999, I snuck out for a jog in a park across from the embassy in Skopje. There were no signs of expected demonstrations. About a dozen student-age protesters were serenading us in front of the embassy with an off-key version of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” the only intelligible words of which were the title (over and over again). They paid no attention to me as I crossed the street in shorts and a sweatshirt, wearing a Red Sox hat pulled down over my head. I was giving a local television press interview that afternoon and had met with foreign ministry officials in the late morning to give my daily pep talk and briefing to them on why things were as they were in Kosovo. Our administrative officer, Greg Slotta, had been in touch with the interior ministry to introduce our new, but very temporary, security officer and to seek assistance.

The withdrawal of the KDOM observer mission from Kosovo over the weekend meant orange SUVs everywhere in town, pulled up in front of Skopje’s many restaurants and cafés, a scene that I knew from
my Macedonian friends was not welcome, even though it meant more business for the bar owners. The now totally unemployed monitoring mission members, several hundred, had filled the hotels, especially the deluxe Aleksandar Palace Hotel, about a twenty-minute walk from the embassy. There monitoring mission members competed for rooms with the international press now streaming through Skopje’s tiny airport. Like spectators at a sporting event, everyone was surging through the turnstiles looking for their seats. Room rates were shooting up, another temporary dividend for a crisis. Senior members of the international monitoring mission were giving interviews to the gathering international press about the deteriorating situation in neighboring Kosovo.

The war correspondents, many of whom had cut their teeth on the Balkans in Bosnia, were now assigning identities to the new players. (“Serbs are still the Serbs. Albanians, they are the Bosnians, and the Macedonians, are they maybe like the Croats?”) They would inquire about Macedonia, a country whose people had never been enthusiastic about the growing crisis on their border, and both the journalists and the members of the monitoring mission didn’t find much to like about their reluctant new hosts.

The Macedonian concern about war was increasingly taken as a lack of support for Kosovo independence (a fair inference), nostalgia for the former Yugoslavia (less fair), and tacit support for Milosevic’s policies (not fair at all). For those who did not understand Macedonia’s historic and contemporary predicament—and Skopje was fast filling up with such people—all this, including Macedonia’s troubled internal relations with its Albanian community and its failure to sort out its problems with neighboring Greece, was being tossed into a blender out of which came a not very digestible narrative of a country that seemed incapable of working together or with anyone else.

By the late afternoon, I could see from the window that the young singing group, having repeated “give peace a chance” about a thousand times, had retired, presumably to find some throat lozenges, and had been
replaced by a somewhat larger crowd less interested in singing than in throwing eggs over the fence of the embassy. Along with eggs there were now occasional rocks as the crowd brought in reinforcements and new ammunition.

Our temporary security officer was busy giving updates to Washington, but the main problem continued to be the Macedonian government’s lack of interest in providing greater police presence. Busloads of protesters were being let off nearby at the heavily guarded Aleksandar Palace Hotel. According to the telephone reports we were getting, the crowd, on seeing the menacing police lines, was turning back and heading in our direction down Ilenden Street.

By about 5:15
P.M.
, embassy windows in the front had begun to give way as heavier rocks crashed against them. A Mylar coating on the windows prevented the glass from shattering but the rocks themselves started to crash through the windows and land on the floor.

At that point, Charlie Stonecipher, who had been on the phone calling for more police help, came to me. “Mr. Ambassador,” he said, “I can’t see that there are any police out there at this point. It is a matter of time before they get through the fence and into the compound. We need to get to the basement
now
.”

I ordered all hands down to the vault in the basement and checked all offices and rooms to make sure everyone was accounted for. There were forty-two persons, mostly local Macedonian workers in the embassy. Accompanied by Bix Aliu, I went into the security control room to get one more look through the camera at the growing crowd. The front fence had been knocked down. The crowd was in the compound. Others were climbing the walls in the back. Bix and I went to the back entrance, a security door with five-inch-thick ballistic glass that had been magnetically sealed with several dead bolts. The scene outside was horrific. Demonstrators were everywhere and in the process of torching our vehicles. I saw one person, not particularly young, in a long wool coat and not appearing to have set out that day with the idea of attacking the
American Embassy, take a large rock and pound it on the rear window of a hatchback car until it broke. He lit a Molotov cocktail and threw it in the backseat. I was seething. I looked at the huge switch that would open the door. I was thinking about that Belgian ambassador in 1962 and how he had essentially frightened a mob away from his embassy in Belgrade. As if reading my mind Bix said, “We need to join the others in the vault, now!”

By about 5:45
P.M.,
all staff was accounted for and locked up with me in the basement safe room. The vault had an enormous steel door that sealed it off from the rest of the embassy’s basement. Behind that door were several small rooms, some furniture—consisting mainly of folding metal chairs—broken computers and computer monitors, and some provisions including bottled water. For most of the forty-two employees there was little to do but wait. Thankfully, there were telephones that allowed us communications with Washington in the form of an open line to the State Department Operations Center, while on another line we were in touch with the head of the embassy guard force, Ljubco Bajevski, who had ripped off his embassy uniform, melted into the crowd, and continued to give us telephone reports with his cell phone. On another line we monitored progress with the Macedonian government in providing the necessary riot police.

You can tell a lot about people in a vault, I thought. Some, such as Phil Reeker, remained totally calm, retaining a sense of humor while making sure others were all right. Some seemed lost in their thoughts. Nobody was panicky, but I told Phil and Tina Kaidanow we needed to keep an eye on those not doing well, and above all keep them busy. Tina gave people things to do, usually in the form of logs and lists. All but three in the vault were embassy employees. One exception was my eleven-year-old daughter, Clara, who had come to the embassy earlier that day before any signs of the crowds. Clara, the ultimate Foreign Service trouper, who a few years before had visited me in Dayton and urged Holbrooke and Bosnian prime minister Haris Silajdzic to bomb
Milosevic (what Holbrooke would later describe to people as “the Clara plan”), was fine and chatted up some people to keep their minds off the situation.

The other two were a cameraman and Biljana Sekulovska, a reporter from A-1 television network, who had come in the late afternoon for an interview arranged by Phil but which had to be cut short when rocks started coming through the windows. My answers to her were in a tone of calm resolve. At one point I had actually talked through the sound of a rock that landed on the floor between our chairs. Before we finally stopped it, the interview had begun to resemble a Monty Python skit. As we got everyone in the vault, Biljana seemed nonplussed, other than continuing to ask, “Can I smoke now?” “No!” we all replied.

I reached Secretary Albright through the State Department Operations Center line. She asked, “Chris, are you okay? What can I do? I’ve talked to Wes [Clark] and they are preparing a force to come help you.” I assured her (against any evidence) we were all going to be okay and briefed her on the situation. By this time the line on the other end in Washington involved numerous people receiving updates from us and asking questions, as if my answers were going to help us get out of our plight. The Pentagon command center was on the line, as was Wes Clark, who, as Secretary Albright informed me, had ordered a quick reaction team of some seventy-five soldiers from the U.S. logistics base out at the airport. He told me they would be in the vicinity within ten minutes. I told him we needed to coordinate very closely on any further moves by these troops. But when he said they were minutes away, I thought, Thank God.

I made my way through the four rooms, telling people we were going to be fine and assuring them that U.S. forces were nearby. Though I did not tell anybody, not even Phil or Charlie or Tina, I was particularly worried about one aspect of what I had witnessed a few minutes before, when I saw the cars being burned. What would happen if bottles of kerosene were thrown between the thick iron bars of the windows and the broken glass into the embassy? Could the embassy burn? There is a sprinkler
system, right? And if the embassy did burn, what would happen to the air supply in the basement, where we are? I walked around as if I were on an inspection tour to make sure of people’s comfort, though I was really looking for whether there was any air supply in the event the air ducts started pumping smoke. I saw a trapdoor in the lower part of a rear-facing wall and asked Mitko as calmly as I could if he knew where it led.

“That is the door to a tunnel that leads out to the middle of the parking lot. But I wouldn’t try to use it now.” We laughed at the thought of coming up through a manhole in the middle of the parking area with hundreds of demonstrators and blazing cars all around. But I thought, Okay, we could get out, albeit to some uncertain circumstances.

I racked my brain for anything else I should be doing; I’d run through checklists in my head, trying to remember various courses in the Foreign Service Institute about crisis management. Instead I remembered something someone had once said to me about leadership: it is about imparting a sense of optimism to the others. I tried to do that but all the while worried about fire and smoke, and about some of the quiet types who appeared lost in their thoughts. I asked Phil, Tina, and Mitko to stay engaged with them.

At about 6
P.M.
we all heard a steady but slow noise above us. Boom (ten seconds) . . . boom . . . boom. Like a scene in a submarine movie, we all looked up and then at each other. No one spoke. I turned to Greg Slotta, who was on the phone with Ljubco. “Greg, find out from Ljubco what that noise is.” Part of me didn’t want to know.

“It’s the flagpole,” he told me. “They are using it as a battering ram on the embassy front door. But, it’s holding, no problem.” I sighed. “Medieval,” Phil remarked.

At about 6:15
P.M.
, the heroic Ljubco was reporting to Greg that riot police were entering the compound, and about that time we heard what sounded like a knock on the vault door (it turned out to be some piping that had fallen from the ceiling). I was on the telephone with Undersecretary Tom Pickering and the Balkan office director, Jim Swigert. I told
them we were hearing that riot police were entering the compound and that the knock came maybe from them. On the other hand, I continued, it might be Land Shark, referring to a particularly absurd
Saturday Night Live
episode. “Should I open the vault?”

“Wait!” Pickering and Swigert, presumably both
SNL
fans, said in unison. “Not yet!”

I briefed Wes Clark, who was still on the line. He confirmed he was hearing from our quick reaction unit nearby that police were beginning to enter the compound. I told him we were going to venture out from the vault.

We started turning the crank to open the door and sent a small party out to survey. Bix Aliu came back to say that the compound was empty of demonstrators and full of police and now U.S. soldiers. As I started up the stairs, Biljana, still holding her unlit cigarette between her fingers, asked, “Can I smoke my cigarette now?”

We opened the back door of the embassy. The smoke was still thick from the carcasses of the vehicles and burning tires. I saw a U.S. soldier in full battle gear, and as he approached I could see two stars on his helmet.

“General Craddock, I presume.” I had always wanted to say something like that in such circumstances.

“Mr. Ambassador, I think we are okay now.”

He explained the situation, and I then toured the compound as the riot police left and the U.S. troops took up positions. They strung large bales of razor wire across the front where the fence had been taken down, and were starting to string wire on top of the walls in the sides and back. I approached a U.S. soldier standing nearby at the side wall.

“What are your orders?” I asked.

“Well, sir, if a few come over the wall, we cuff ’em, and turn them over to local authorities. If more than that start coming over, we fire warning shots in the air. If even more than that comes over, well, sir, they won’t want to do that.”

And they didn’t. The next morning I got to the embassy early. All
the wrought-iron bars had held, as had the thick, though cracked, ballistic glass in the doors. But most windows were broken and glass lay everywhere in the compound. Outbuildings, including the guard posts, were destroyed and burned out, as were some twenty vehicles in the rear parking area, some still smoking. Greg Slotta’s motor scooter had been reduced to a puddle of plastic on the pavement, and his Hyundai car to a burned-out wreck. Our General Services officer, Rudy Kyle, a rock of a person, as steady as they come, had begun to organize a cleanup staff consisting of about twenty dispirited Macedonians. I told Rudy I wanted to speak to them all. They gathered around me in the parking lot. I asked Mitko to translate and wondered whether anyone had given a motivational speech to an embassy cleanup crew before.