VISITORS TO THE CONSULATE
Diplomatic posts in conflict zones tend to receive a lot of visitors, and ours was no exception. To start with, we had official visitors. There were State Department officials and members of Congress, who would make a quick in-and-out. Then there were the American foreign correspondents. They often stayed for many weeks, frequently dropped by the consulate, and hung out at certain bars to gather information. I got to know several of them who went on to fame: J. Anthony Lukas and Lloyd Garrison of the New York Times, and Claire Sterling, then of The Reporter, an influential liberal biweekly magazine.
Then there were the strange visitors. My duties included dealing with them. One fellow who stayed in town for a week and a half, stopping by the consulate daily, was George Blomgren Dewey, who identified himself as an ordained minister and “Chief Overseas Correspondent” of Liberty Lobby. Dewey wanted the consulate to arrange an interview for him with Moïse Tshombe. He said he had interviewed 44 of the “world’s great,” including Tito, Mussolini, and Chiang Kai-Shek, and wanted to make it 45 by talking with Tshombe, who he saw as bastion against communism.
I sensed something was not quite right with Dewey and politely told him he’d have to try to see Tshombe without our help. As I write this, a little online research confirmed my suspicions that Dewey was a creep. Liberty Lobby was a far-right group founded in 1958 by Willis Carto, who the Anti-Defamation League called “perhaps the most influential professional anti-Semite in the United States.” George Blomgren Dewey wrote books in the 1930s under the name George Dewey Blomgren that were published by Defender Press, the imprint of Gerald B. Winrod, a pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic evangelist who was indicted for sedition during World War II. Dewey himself was imprisoned in the 1950s on several counts of embezzlement.
We had another kind of visitor early one morning when two elephants escaped from the zoo across the road and went straight for our garden. Not having been told about this, I got there at my usual time, 8:30, and found my groundskeepers laughing uncontrollably while scooping up huge piles of elephant dung. The elephants left two-inch-deep footprints all over the garden, destroyed a banana tree in the process of eating the fruit, and trashed the lovingly tended vegetable garden of Alphonse’s wife Michelle. I wondered where the elephants had gone and easily traced their turd-marked route toward the center of town along Avenue du Congo, where a few blocks along I found a smiling zookeeper gently guiding his charges back to their home.