Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (68 page)

Twenty-four

“Are We Out? Or In?”

A
nton Smith, who was the chargé d’affaires at the United States embassy in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, when Barack Obama was elected president, possessed a streak of independence that sometimes made it difficult for him to accept the conformity required by government service. He was a tall, lean, athletic man in his early forties, with green-gray eyes and a flattened nose that looked as if it might have been broken in a fight or a scuba-diving accident, possibilities that would not have surprised his friends. Smith had grown up in Arkansas, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Henderson State University. Later, he earned a master’s degree at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., as well as a second graduate degree at the U.S. Army War College, and he joined the foreign service. His political views were difficult to categorize, but he tended toward libertarianism and spoke favorably with friends about Representative Ron Paul, a member of Congress who did not often attract even glancing admiration from American diplomats. Smith moved through diplomatic postings in war zones such as Iraq and the Balkans. He also served for a year as a fellow on the staff of Senator Richard Shelby, a conservative Republican from Alabama who held an influential position on the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking. Although Smith had never served in Africa, his exposure to economic matters helped to qualify him for a posting in Equatorial Guinea. Malabo job openings, in any event, did not attract the swarm of internal State Department applications typical of, say, postings at the Barcelona consulate.

In 2007, Smith arrived as deputy chief of mission at the two-story rented concrete house that served as the U.S. embassy in Malabo. The ambassador, Donald C. Johnson, departed his posting before its scheduled end, leaving Anton Smith as chargé d’affaires, a designation that gave him the role of ambassador without its salary or full rank.

Equatorial Guinea remained a troubled country, but it was no longer the isolated, poor, malarial place that had seemed to induce occasional bouts of madness in previous generations of international diplomats. Modern hotels, housing complexes, hospitals, and freshly painted government compounds had sprung up in the tropical forests; the island capital and the mainland coast resonated with the mechanical roar of construction equipment. Internet connections were slow and balky, but they nonetheless brought Equato-Guineans into contact with worlds of information previously beyond reach. Oil-funded scholarships allowed more and more young people to study abroad. Many of the recipients were handpicked by the regime, but Western education endowed them with new ideas. When they returned to Malabo in polo shirts and baseball caps, they formed businesses or took up positions of responsibility in government ministries. The country remained anomalous in a number of respects—its government’s failure under Teodoro Obiang, even after the resolution of the Riggs Bank fiasco of 2004, to adhere to international banking rules meant, for example, that Equatorial Guinea had no access to credit card facilities and therefore almost all local commerce arising from the oil boom had to be conducted in cash. Organized political opposition to Obiang remained virtually nonexistent, and the president periodically tried, jailed, and executed real and imagined conspirators against him.

Anton Smith took to Equatorial Guinea with a passion. Its remoteness and its lush landscapes spoke to his sense of adventure. On weekends he dove into the Atlantic to scuba dive or snorkel or swim through the warm saltwater lagoons. He made friends with an international cocoa farmer who spent weekends on a colonial-era seaside estate. Smith would turn up on some Sunday afternoons to help cook up paellas for eclectic bands of relaxing expatriates and Equato-Guineans. He spoke enthusiastically about introducing Equatorial Guinea to the international sport of bungee jumping. He met regularly with the country representatives of the American oil companies whose operations enriched Obiang’s regime—ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess—and he tried to support their investments and policy priorities within the country and back in Washington. He developed friendships across the local community as well. Smith’s long marriage was ending when he arrived in Malabo. He fell in love with an Equato-Guinean woman; she became pregnant, and they moved in together. (They later married.) Smith could occasionally speak about Africa in ways that struck some of his friends as misguided, but his intimate connection to a local family deepened his knowledge of the country he was professionally assigned to understand. Smith was self-conscious about the possibility that he was “going native,” as diplomats refer to the tendency of envoys sent abroad to identify with their host countries, potentially at the expense of clarity about American interests. Yet if Anton Smith did seem, as the months passed, increasingly to resemble a character in a Graham Greene novel, this did not come at the expense of his professional devotion. He brought the same restless energy and willingness to defy convention to his role as America’s principal liaison to the oil-endowed government of Equatorial Guinea as he did to the rest of his life. And the more time Smith spent in Malabo, the more he believed that American policy—its one-dimensional focus on past and present human rights abuses, its unwillingness to respond seriously to Equatorial Guinea’s security needs, its reluctance to engage fully with Obiang’s regime—was misguided, hypocritical, and self-defeating.
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Smith pointed out in sometimes-heated exchanges with colleagues at State Department headquarters that since the Second World War, during its search for oil security, the United States had entered into deep alliances with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, among other Middle Eastern oil producers. All were authoritarian states with dismal human rights records, particularly in the realms of free speech and assembly. Yet a diverse number of American presidents continually sold these regimes jets, tanks, and missiles so that they could protect their oil inheritance in an unruly neighborhood, and by doing so, assure supplies would be available to the United States. American military forces intervened directly to liberate Kuwait after Iraq’s 1990 invasion, and the U.S. military provided an ongoing de facto defense of Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. These geopolitical bargains had endured despite evidence that the Saudi government tolerated financial flows to violent anti-American Islamist radicals.

How did the case of Equatorial Guinea measure up by comparison? Rather well, Smith argued. Its government pledged full cooperation with American foreign policy. Its oil flowed a shorter distance across safer seas to American refineries. Its political economy was unattractive and its human rights record was poor, true, but at least Equatorial Guinea had the excuse that it had enjoyed a basis for economic modernization for only a decade—Saudi Arabia had been rolling in oil revenue since the 1960s, and it still had not liberalized its politics. Moreover, and perhaps most important, in Smith’s judgment, the situation in Equatorial Guinea was improving. Obiang had made heavy investments in the social sector, particularly in housing. He had accepted international police training on human rights.

Yet the State Department seemed congenitally unwilling to acknowledge these incremental changes and the positive direction that they might suggest. In the Middle East, generations of diplomats had operated on the assumption that it was necessary to accept the limitations of Persian Gulf political economies in order to fuel America’s economy with reliable, relatively cheap oil supplies. In Africa, by contrast, generations of diplomats had operated on the assumption that all that mattered were the continent’s large, often intractable problems, such as disease and low-grade civil wars. When it came to setting policy priorities for Equatorial Guinea during interagency meetings at the National Security Council in Washington, human rights issues figured more heavily than they did in the cases of America’s longtime Gulf allies. Saudi Arabia’s oil production dwarfed Equatorial Guinea’s, and the dangers of losing even unreliable allies such as Riyadh’s royal family in a region where Iran’s radical revolutionary government continued to foment upheaval might justify the different approach Washington took in the Middle East. But the policy differences were not subjected to careful scrutiny—the assumptions undergirding America’s regional foreign and defense policies had become deeply embedded.

The United States had not formally imposed economic or military sanctions on Equatorial Guinea. But America’s policies of restricted military aid and sales, and its constant harping on human rights and elections, amounted to “crypto-sanctions,” as Smith called them in his private arguments with State colleagues. These constraints limited American influence in Malabo and threatened to drive Obiang into alliance with China, France, India, and other less squeamish oil-importing nations. This was the case even though the country produced 450,000 barrels of oil per day, and American oil companies, including ExxonMobil, had invested about $13 billion that would be at risk if Obiang fell from power or stopped trying to curry favor in Washington.
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During 2008, Smith struggled to persuade his superiors in Washington of his viewpoints. In May, Equatorial Guinea staged parliamentary elections in which Obiang’s ruling party won ninety-nine out of one hundred seats. International observers raised doubts about the credibility of the polls, particularly given that the country’s opposition leaders had been harassed, jailed, and forced into exile for years. Smith believed, citing his firsthand observations, that the vote itself should be certified as “free and fair.” He failed to persuade Washington. Then, in November, Manfred Nowak, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, visited Equatorial Guinea on an invitation from the government. Obiang’s willingness to issue such an invitation struck Smith as a sign of progress. Nowak, however, inspected police stations and prisons, found evidence of recent abuses, and declared publicly that the country continued to use torture systematically against prisoners who refused to make coerced confessions. “Torture Is Rife in Equatorial Guinea’s Prisons” was the headline on a U.N. news release about Nowak’s inspection.
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Smith criticized Nowak as a grandstander with preconceived ideas and argued that Obiang should be given some credit for openness. Not long afterward, Obiang was reelected to yet another term as president with 95 percent of the votes cast. Smith’s superiors at Foggy Bottom reprimanded him during his annual review for failing to take policy direction from Washington.
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Smith decided that Barack Obama’s inauguration and the changes of political appointees that accompany any new administration offered an opportunity to lay down fresh, reasoned arguments to reexamine American policy toward Equatorial Guinea. On February 27, 2009, he filed the first in a series of six analytical cables to Washington. Smith’s series offered a comprehensive review of Equatorial Guinea’s relations with the former African colonial powers of France and Spain; its recent business deals with oil-thirsty China; its internal clan politics; its struggles with corruption and government capacity; its security challenges; and the policy choices facing the Obama administration. Smith marked the cables Sensitive but Unclassified—as a practical matter there was little choice but to send diplomatic transmissions from Malabo through unclassified channels, as the embassy lacked cryptographic equipment. “Are We Out? Or In?” the chargé d’affaires asked in his first filing.

“Since at least Forsyth’s ‘The Dogs of War,’ E.G. has been a favorite takeover target for both outside and inside plotters,” he wrote. “President Obiang came to power himself in a coup likely assisted from the outside. He and his team know how it works. Though without official declaration, the country persistently operates under martial law-like conditions. This posture generates human rights concerns as documents are checked, guns are displayed, and foreigners get the fish eye.” Still, Smith concluded, American policymakers would be better off if they recognized that Equatorial Guinea “is less a rogue state than it is a rudimentary one.”

He argued, too, that American economic and energy interests required a new approach. “Under pressure from U.S. oil companies,” he wrote, “Embassy Malabo was reborn in late 2003. . . . Nonetheless, our current state might still be better described as half-born than fully hatched. . . . The internal ambivalence of [the State] Department, the specter of a reluctant Capitol Hill and associated oppugnant human rights N.G.O.s, and the argument of scarce resources has kept Embassy Malabo on a drip-feed in these early years.” He continued:

Despite open doors E.G.’s nasty reputation is sustained and our ability to address problems constrained. . . . We are behind the curve. Unfortunately, while American oil companies are paying the bills (NOTE: U.S. operators Marathon, Hess, and ExxonMobil are responsible for almost all current production and most of E.G. government revenues), it is still more often the Chinese, the French, or the Egyptians who get credit for assisting the country’s development by undertaking high-profile projects. Our official allergy to E.G. apparently acts as an appetite suppressant to most private U.S. companies that might otherwise be interested.

“There are good guys and bad guys here,” Smith wrote. “We need to strengthen the good guys—for all his faults, President Obiang among them. . . . We need to get serious about engagement,” Smith wrote. “It’s time to commit. . . . It is time to abandon a moral narrative that has left us with a retrospective bias and ambivalent approach to one of the most-promising success stories in the region. . . . What do we want for Equatorial Guinea? Do we want to see the country continue to evolve in positive ways from the very primitive state in which it found itself after independence? Or would we prefer a revolution that brings sudden, uncertain change and unpredictability? . . .