Interview with Jonathan B. Rickert
Desk Officer for Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam; Washington, DC (1980-1982)
Jonathan Rickert was born and raised in Washington, DC and educated at Princeton and Yale Universities. After service in the US Army, he joined the Foreign Service in 1963, serving tours in both Washington and abroad. His foreign posts include London, Moscow, Port au Spain, Sofia and Bucharest, where he served as Deputy Chief of Mission. In his Washington assignments Mr. Rickert dealt primarily with Eastern and Central European Affairs. Mr. Rickert was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 2002.
Q: It looks like in 1980 you came back to Washington and what was your assignment in the Department?
RICKERT: One last footnote which isn’t about Trinidad. Before I left, I did a TDY in Surinam because when I was coming back to Washington I was going to be in the Office of Caribbean Affairs, ARACAR, with responsibility for Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname. Suriname was an even smaller embassy. Nancy Ostrander was the ambassador there. The DCM had to leave or his political officer, the DCM, had to leave on short notice for personal reasons not permanently but for a period of time. They just had a military coup there. So ARA agreed to my going down and filling in as a TDY political officer. So I had a good introduction to Suriname before taking over the Suriname desk. It was a lot of fun, it was a much more open society in terms of willingness to be able to talk to people. In Trinidad you can meet with anybody but they wouldn’t say much. In Suriname, they would not only meet with you but they were very open.
In the three weeks I was there I met the President, the Prime Minister, about half the cabinet, the trade union leaders, Alcoa had a big operation there and the union worker Frank Darby was later murdered … and also Desire Bouterse or the corporal who had staged the coup and a number of his thugs and others.
Nancy and I went one time to meet with the Prime Minister, Chin A. Sen. He was of Chinese origin and he was very despondent about the way things were going. Nancy and I convinced him not to resign which I thought was because he was viewed in Washington and by the embassy as a stabilizing force. You don’t think as a mid-level officer that you were going to be involved in trying to convince prime ministers not to resign. The scale of these countries, there is only, 60, roughly, 350,000 people in Suriname. There are more Surinamese in Holland than there are in Suriname.
In any case, then when I left, I came back to Washington, took over as desk officer and had responsibility for those three countries to start with.
Q: Now, did you spend any time in Guyana?
RICKERT: Only one visit on the way back from Suriname. I stayed with Dick Dwyer who had been shot at Jonestown. He was DCM there. That was kind of a scary place, I have to say; much poorer and much more lawless than either Trinidad or Suriname but part of the same Caribbean culture with the same tradition of colonialism and sugar and other tropical products and exploitation of slave labor and all the rest. So one could feel at home culturally in Guyana very easily if one had lived in Trinidad or other parts of the British West-Indian empire.
Q: So as the desk officer for Trinidad or Guyana or Suriname you did the usual desk officer things, you liaised with the embassies in Washington and went in the field, made recommendations up the line … Anything particular about this period which was at the end of the Carter Administration and the beginning of the Reagan administration?
RICKERT: Well, I don’t know where you were at that time but our assistant secretary was Bill Bowdler. One of the lessons that I learned very quickly when the Reagan Administration came in was what happened to people who were on the wrong side of the new administration because Bowdler was there one day and he was gone the next. There were no farewells or anything else. He was out the door because, I gathered, of the position that he had taken legally, correctly, honorably, on behalf of the previous administration on Central America. So he was an immediate casualty who was eventually succeeded by Tom Enders.
Rob Warren was our office director when I got there. Richard Howard was the deputy. We had a number of good desk officers. Marsha Barnes who took over Guyana at a certain point is now Ambassador of Suriname and later was director of Caribbean affairs. Her first tour in the foreign service was in Guyana. She spent a fairly significant chunk of her career down there. When Tom Enders came in, as I understand it, there were pressures to have a bunch of DAS [Deputy Assistant Secretary] including political ones. He insisted on having two DAS’s for ARA. One was Steve Bosworth and the other was Ted Briggs. They really had their hands full because, I’ve forgotten the exact number of countries, but it was in the range of 25 or so countries in ARA. Just with reasonable travel, that meant that there was usually one DAS. The assistant secretary was gone and the two DAS’s were there or one of the DAS’s were traveling. So it was tough, but that’s the way Enders apparently wanted to do it.
Q: I assume his main focus was on Central America and things other than the three countries that you were responsible for?
RICKERT: Right. Steve Bosworth was our DAS. The main concerns in the Caribbean were the Reagan Administration’s Caribbean Base Initiative which was an effort to increase trade and investment and help raise the standard of living in the region and then to prevent further spread of Communism. There was a lot of concern about Suriname. Steve Bosworth was very much involved on Suriname because no one knew where this Corporal Desire Bouterse was going to take the country. There was concern that he might have Marxist links or leanings. The U.S. had been caught by surprise in the Western Hemisphere before and the Reagan Administration, I think quite rightly, didn’t want to see that again even in a very small place.
Q: As I understand the situation in Suriname there was presumably a debate between those who thought that we’d try to work with him, work around him, have contact with him, as I guess, Ambassador Ostrander did and you mentioned the visit you had made with her … and those who thought maybe the best thing was to maybe try to oppose him, isolate him, boycott him. I did an interview in this program with Ambassador Denis Hayes who was there much later than the time we’re talking about but as I understood from him, he decided not to have any contact with Bouterse.
RICKERT: Bouterse there and the military.
Q: … feeling that anything he did would be misinterpreted, it was better to shun him and then I’m not sure I pushed him hard enough on the success of that approach which I kind of wondered about. I wish I had debated it a little bit more. But anyway, is that the kind of thing that you had to deal with at the time?
RICKERT: My recollection is that we didn’t want to do anything that would raise him in the estimation of the population. But we needed a key contact with him in order to know what he was up to. I don’t recall any efforts to isolate him during this time. I don’t recall the exact date of the military coup but it was early in 1980, February, something like that. So Bouterse was unknown to the outside word. People were still trying to figure out who he was, what he wanted, why he had done this, where he was headed, all these other things … I remember I sent, I don’t remember his name but the Army found a fellow, a Major if I recall, who was sent as defense attaché. We haven’t had a defense attaché before, but he was an American of Indonesian origin and therefore spoke Dutch. Bouterse did not speak English as I recall, or spoke very poor English. The hope was that through this defense attaché we could get a closer contact with Bouterse, not to glorify him or to get him attaché but know what he was up to and why.
When Nancy Ostrander left, a very good career officer, Jack Crowley, who had been DCM in a number of places and sort of a career ARA hand, took over. He was there for a while. I think, from what I could tell, did a very solid job. He was replaced after a couple of years at the request of Tom Enders actually.
Q: I’m very interested in hearing what you’re about to say given that build up.
RICKERT: Well, Enders called Rob Warren and me and our deputy director, Dick Howard up to his office one day and said, “How are things going in Suriname?” We said, “going well.” Well, “How’s Jack Crowley doing there?” We said, “Fine professionally, he’s doing a good job so forth.” “How does he get on with Bouterse?” Rob Warren actually carried the conversation and said that he talked to him from time to time but there is a cultural difference and generational difference between the two. Enders, I’m sorry I have to quote this but he said: “Well, I think we should have somebody down there who can really get in with Bouterse and his people.” “Somebody who’d go drinking and whoring with him” – was the term he used. Enders didn’t think Crowley was the man so Crowley was recalled.
The person who was supposed to have replaced him ran into problems. He had been in Afghanistan just prior or was it after, I don’t know if I’ve got the chronology exactly right but Spike Dubbs had been assassinated there. Then we had a series of chargés maintaining relations on a very reduced level. This officer had been there as chargé. He had, according to what everybody said, I can’t say this from personal knowledge, but apparently a girlfriend, an Australian girl who came and stayed with him there for extended periods. Others didn’t have local girlfriends or spouses and some complaints were made. This got to the undersecretary for management. When the undersecretary heard about this, he blocked the appointment. I can’t vouch for anything except the quote from Tom Enders for which I was personally present, but I heard the rest of this from enough sources so that I think in outlines at least it is an accurate picture of what happened.
Q: Somebody went to Suriname?
RICKERT: Frankly … I don’t know.
Q: That was perhaps after your time?
RICKERT: It may have been after my time because I honestly don’t remember who ended up going. As time went on, Rob moved on. Enders was told he was going to get a DAS he didn’t want, a political gentleman named John Upston. He refused to accept Upston. To make a long story short, Upston agreed to take a political appointment. He was made the coordinator for Caribbean affairs and he took over Rob Warren’s office and he had his own secretary but because he had a, shall we say, less than sterling reputation, Rob and Dick Howard and all of us went to see Enders and asked that we not be put under his direct direction.
Enders, to his credit, created a special position that supervised no one but went around, made speeches and visited the region. Upston was a perfectly amiable fellow. He wasn’t nasty. He accepted this arrangement. He didn’t make anyone feel that they had stabbed him in the back or anything like that. The tradeoff was that we didn’t get a director because the slot was taken. So Dick Howard, who was really a career ARA person and a very good and decent fellow and very good officer, became the acting director. And I, as the senior most desk officer, became the acting Deputy Director. So I gave up Guyana to Marsha Barnes who was delighted to get it back and did the deputy stuff in the office.
Q: And continued to do Suriname and Trinidad.
RICKERT: Right.
A couple of interesting things that happened. What happened during the Reagan administration? I remember they were very concerned, as I mentioned, about Communism possibly in Surinam. The Surinamese foreign minister was due to come to have a meeting with Secretary Haig. I was told to write very tough talking points which I did, which were cleared up through the chain and went to Haig. I was the note taker at this meeting. The Surinamese foreign minister came in. Haig put his arm around him and didn’t use one of the talking points. He achieved the same end through different means. I’m not saying he just rolled over but he figured that in this case, I’m assuming, that talking tough to a person representing 350,000 people was less likely to get the desired end than showing some concern and interest and friendliness … So that was one little lesson there.
One bizarre Trinidad thing happened while I was there. After I left Trinidad, the second DCM, I mentioned the first was Mike Yohn, the second was Joe O’Mahony who had spent time in India and Latin America: a fine person who had been very badly shot up in WWII and was in a lot of pain a lot of the time. Joe was a decent person and a good DCM. He was chargé after I left because the next ambassador who was a politico had not yet come. There was a delay in his getting there. I came back from lunch one day and I was told by my secretary, “you have a flash message from Trinidad.” That’s almost a contradiction in terms. I had never seen a flash any time in a place except during my time in the OP center. The flash dealt with the following: Prime Minister Williams had died suddenly. Well, you don’t need a flash message for that, but the decision had been made to cremate him in Trinidad. They needed a crematorium, because the only cremating that was done in Trinidad was done on the banks of the streams, Indian style. That was not considered sufficiently respectful for a person who came from an African and Christian background. So I had about three or four days to get a crematorium … a portable crematorium to Trinidad so that Eric Williams could be cremated. Where do you start?
At first I called DoD [Department of Defense]. They were extremely pleasant but they said they had no such thing. They didn’t know of such a thing and they couldn’t give any help. I scratched my head and I finally though, well, let me call Gawler’s Funeral Home out on Wisconsin Avenue. They had handled the arrangements for Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. I figured they had long experience when they handled the arrangements for my father’s funeral in 1950. I got ahold of the cremations guy there and explained the dilemma and he said to me, he was very polite and understanding and helpful and said: “You know, I hope you don’t mind my asking but, most of the time, it’s found more efficient to take the body to the crematorium than the crematorium to the body.” I hadn’t told him who this was for, I said I couldn’t, because it was all very hushhush. I said, “I understand, but in this case it doesn’t work.” I said it was for someone outside the country. So he said, there’s a company in Orlando that makes crematoria. He gave me the name and the phone number and everything else and he said, “Why don’t you call them and see what you can find out.” So I got hold of someone there and they said that they had a crematorium that had just come off the assembly line and was test fired and was ready to go for use in Michigan but that it could be diverted.
We got the dimensions and found that it would fit in a 747 cargo plane, big enough to take it. They of course wanted to see the color of the money, which I don’t blame them. The payer for this operation was TRINTOC (Trinidad and Tobago Oil Company Limited) which was the Trinidad oil company which had an office in New York. I put them in touch with TRINTOC and TRINTOC took care of the money. The crematorium was trucked down to Miami. We had to hold the plane a bit but it got on the plane and got there by the deadline.
It was one of the more bizarre things that I did in foreign service.
Q: So the Trinidad government came to the embassy for help and it was told that this would be a nice gesture?
RICKERT: I guess. I could only surmise. As I recall, the cable was a request. They certainly didn’t cook it up themselves. It may be that the Deputy Prime Minister or someone mentioned it to the chargé and he said, well, we’ll see what we can do. Whether it was request or demand or just something that they heard about, I no longer recall. The chargé took it on and was “charged” to get hold of this crematorium. It was a gas-fired crematorium. They had plenty of gas in Trinidad so that’s what happened.
Q: And it worked?
RICKERT: Well, that, I’ve heard mixed stories about that. There were problems with it but I think it eventually worked. There’s a little footnote in this. I’m jumping ahead in this story and I won’t go in to all the gory details but some years later in the late ‘80s I was in Bulgaria and we had a CODEL [Congressional Delegation] a large CODEL there. I ended up chatting with the military aide that normally accompany these CODELs. He asked where I served and so forth, I mentioned Trinidad and he said, “Oh, Trinidad. I worked for BWIA, the British West-India Airways, for many years.” To make a long story short, he said, he knew that it must have been me there who made the arrangements, but he picked it up from the point where there was a crematorium and all the rest and he got it taken care of. So here was an American diplomat and an American military officer; He was a Reserve officer; He did this in his free time, so to speak, standing in the garden of a Bulgarian government villa in Sofia talking about the cremation of the Trinidad prime minister. It was really kind of macabre. It was very enjoyable to both of us to meet the other half of this process.
Q: It helps about your assignment in Caribbean affairs.
RICKERT: There are a couple of other things I might mention. The way things worked back then. Of course, the Caribbean countries were very small. When Rob Warren was Office Director, a foreign minister would come to town. There were no representational funds. So Rob would ask, “Anybody from the office want to have lunch with the prime minister of Grenada or the foreign minister of some other island like Barbados?”, and we’d all trundle off to the Foreign Service Club and split the bill. That was our representation and entertainment. It was nice for meeting some of these guys, but I thought a little bit from the skimpy side.
Q: It reminds me of the time I took Javier Perez de Cuellar to have a bite to eat at the Kennedy Center way before he became Secretary General of the United Nations.
RICKERT: Another thing I ended up doing in Caribbean Affairs… There were a couple of people that were not really persona non grata with the State Department but whom we couldn’t ignore completely. One was Cheddi Jagan, the once and future prime minister of Guyana. When he came to town I, with my elevated position as Acting Deputy Director of Caribbean Affairs, would be given the pleasure of meeting with him because nobody of higher rank than I would see him. I only remember one meeting with him. I remember he was a very charming, engaging, articulate fellow who was fun to talk to.
Q: And didn’t feel insulted that he had to talk to you as opposed to somebody else.
RICKERT: No. I think he was pretty savvy. I don’t remember meeting with Eric Gairy, the prime minister of Grenada who believed in UFO’s and had Grenada introduce UN General Assembly resolutions on the subject of UFO’s. But I had correspondence with him and talked to him on the phone. I don’t recall meeting him, but I ended up with some of those tasks.
Q: …and the U. S. military action in Grenada came well after you left.
RICKERT: That’s correct. One other little incident that was one of the less attractive sides of the Foreign Service – and I might want to edit this when I get to it – I had a call one day when I was still on the Guyana desk from a gentleman whose first name I can’t remember, but his last name was McCormack, and he later became assistant secretary for EB (Economic Bureau).
Q: Richard…
RICKERT: Richard something. I can’t remember for sure. But he called me up as the Guyana desk officer and chewed me up one side and down another because of the problems that a businessman who had gone – he was a staffer for Helms at the time…
Q: McCormack was.
RICKERT: McCormack was and he had a fellow who was dealing with the Guyana government and the embassy hadn’t helped this guy. This was an African American fellow who was taking advantage of some kind of a set-aside to provide rum to American Commissary, military commissaries, and I had met and spoken with the guy. He had essentially a trade dispute with the Guyana authorities. He claimed that he’d been ripped off and he’d been cheated, and so forth and so on. And McCormack really tore a strip off me in the State Department for our failure to get this guy’s money. He was loud, abusive, obnoxious over the phone. I put the phone down shaking and immediately typed up everything I could remember and sent it to Steve Bosworth. No one wanted to have someone be blindsided at a higher level by this. And after I calmed down, a couple of hours later, McCormack called back and, in a sense, apologized, and said, “I’m sorry I had to do that, but he was sitting in my office, and I had to put on a show for him.”
Q: Thanks a lot! Anything else? We haven’t, other than this trade dispute, haven’t talked much about Guyana, and you mentioned Jagan coming to see you. Is there anything else…
RICKERT: There was not much. Guyana was in a quiet period then. The name of the prime minister who was somebody that we favored over Jagan escapes me, who later became a tin pot dictator of his own. He was running dishonest elections and persecuting the Indians there mostly through disenfranchising them to a sufficient extent yet reelected though the Indians were the majority in Guyana by that time. And Guyana was of interest, but I don’t recall anything of particular note had to do with our relations with Guyana during the talks the year that I dealt with it. There are a couple of other things that I might mention. The next ambassador to Trinidad after Irv Cheslaw was a black politician from the American Virgin Islands, a republican, believe it or not, named Melvin Evans. He was actually a very nice man. He’d been the Virgin Islands delegate in Congress. I learned a little something about Congress from him. He was named, and I didn’t hear from him, and I waited and waited, and so forth. He finally called, and we had a chat. His hearing was scheduled for Monday afternoon. He came to town on Sunday, and I had a meeting with him on Sunday, and we chatted and so forth. His first question was, Jonathan, what does an ambassador do?” I told him a little bit, and he had read some things about Trinidad, but he hadn’t done very much. Well, of course, when it came time for his hearing, he received, shall we say, members or former members courtesy, and wasn’t asked any questions of any sort at all. And so he hadn’t done the usual homework which, I know, you were very familiar with to assignments as ambassador. But he was very relaxed through this whole thing. He was a very nice man, a very decent man, but he had medical problems and actually died in Trinidad during his time there. He went over for his meeting with President Reagan, and he was there with his family and so forth, and I had accompanied him just to be there as kind of an escort. He said, “Jonathan, come on in. You’re welcome to come in for my meeting with the president.” I declined and said, “This is a moment, Mr. Ambassador, for you and your family, and not for outsiders.” As much as I would like to have done it, his wife was there, his children were there, and some grandchildren. This was not…I mean it was very kind and thoughtful of him to ask me to participate, but not a situation which I thought I should insert myself.
Q: Maybe you should have. He probably really didn’t _________?
RICKERT: He was, but I didn’t feel that I should. I did meet Vice President Bush on that occasion. He was wandering around in the vicinity. We had another ambassador named Milan Bish who went through Barbados who was a developer of commercial real estate from Nebraska or some such place. As you recall, one of the very good things in my view as one who was never an ambassador that Ronald Reagan did was to call each appointee to tell him or her personally that he had been…or she had been…named ambassador.
Q: Actually it was really a request, a question, “Would you be willing to serve as the United States ambassador to somewhere?”
RICKERT: You’re entirely right. Milan Bish was a very jovial and outgoing Elks and Lions Club type of guy but with a somewhat limited geographic background. He told us about this story about how this had happened and how he got this call. He knew he was up for something, but he didn’t know exactly what. Ronald Reagan got on the line, and they chit-chatted, and he said, “Well, I want you to know that I’m offering you the position as U. S. Ambassador to Barbados, and I hope that you will accept,” and so forth and so on. And Bish said, “Oh, yes, Sir, I’d be very delighted to accept.” They finished their conversation, and the first thing he did was to run for an atlas because he also didn’t know where or what Barbados was. And we heard that he was telling the story in Barbados. We quietly suggested that he save that for the Elks or the Lions Club in Nebraska and not for Barbados because people from small countries can be very prickly about these things. So anyway, he was the ambassador that was totally ignored during the invasion of Grenada which was staged on Grenada which was technically one of his areas of responsibility. He was accredited to Barbados but co-accredited to Grenada and some other smaller islands.
Q: And wasn’t kept informed, and wasn’t consulted, certainly.
RICKERT: No. The whole thing was just done over his head because, I’m afraid, he was in over his head.