“We are not overstaffed,” the veteran Polish diplomat murmurs with a faint smile as he reaches for the phone on the U.S. ambassador’s desk to ring for coffee.
That done, Jan Piekarski settles back to chat about what it’s like to run, on a shoestring, the remnants of what was once a huge American diplomatic establishment in Iraq.
Whoops. Backtrack. Something very curious is going on here. He’s our man in Baghdad-and he’s a Pole?
Well, yes, and he’s knotted precisely into the middle of one of the more turbulent twists of recent history. It’s a story that begins with Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein and goes on to involve Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa and George Bush.
It continues today with Hussein and, rather less noticeably but no less meaningfully, Jan Wojciech Piekarski.
Who has an appreciation for the irony of it all.
“Two or three years ago, this would have been completely unimaginable-that the United States would treat the Polish foreign service as a comfortable ally,” says Piekarski in smooth, barely accented English.
The coffee is brought by the embassy switchboard operator, an Iraqi woman. There isn’t anyone else to do it: All the Americans went home long ago.
They left so hastily that a Baghdad warehouse is still crammed high with the office furniture, refrigerators, VCRs and all the other paraphernalia, down to typewriter ribbons, that they abandoned late in 1990 as the Persian Gulf war was about to break out.
Keeping a round-the-clock guard on the warehouse is just one of the things Piekarski has had to arrange as chief of what’s now known as the United States Interests Section of the Embassy of Poland in Iraq.
How he came to be here requires a quick history lesson-one that shows that long after the guns have fallen silent, the after-effects of war persist in all sorts of unexpected ways.
Throughout most of the 1980s, outraged by the clerical recalcitrance of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, the Reagan administration funneled millions of dollars worth of weapons and non-military aid to Hussein’s government as it waged war with Tehran.
The conflict, characterized by inhuman brutality that treated front-line troops and civilians as equally dispensable, lasted eight years and slaughtered an estimated 1 million people on each side.
Administering the Washington-Baghdad axis at this end was a U.S. presence that grew apace, eventually encompassing 41 buildings, scores of Iraqi employees, a fleet of official cars with drivers, and all the other accouterments of any major embassy.
Then, abruptly, it all ended. Within a few months after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the game changed. Suddenly Iraq was the enemy, Hussein was the devil incarnate, and the Americans pulled out.
But there was still all that stuff here-the buildings, the furniture, cars, boxes of stationery, TV sets, fridges, washer-dryers? How to protect the investment?
In May 1991, after the gulf war, the Bush administration cooked up a way to deal with it. The answer lay with Walesa’s post-commmunist government in Poland, newly free to cut deals as Gorbachev pulled Moscow’s shroud off Eastern Europe and concentrated on Russia’s internal problems.
Washington and Warsaw signed an agreement, based on the excellent state of U.S.-Polish relations, under which Poland took on the task of looking after American interests in Iraq.
Two months later, Piekarski had left his comfortable high-level desk job in the Polish Foreign Ministry and was traveling across the rocky desert to Baghdad. He’s still here, maintaining the American establishment against the day the worm turns yet again and the U.S. and Iraq return to some semblance of normal relations.
“I’m running the office in a way that will make that transition as smooth and quick as possible,” says the tall, 50-ish Piekarski, an elegantly tailored man whose affability remains unaffected by a job that often requires some fast diplomatic footwork.
Consider, for example, the Social Security payments that have to be made each month to the 17 Iraqis who qualified for them by working 15 years or more on the U.S. Embassy staff.
There isn’t any legal or practical way the money can be transferred. The United Nations embargo of Iraq cut off all airline flights into the country so there’s no international mail delivery, and country-to-country bank transfers are out of the question.
Here’s how Piekarski worked it out:
His office issued a power of attorney for friends of the 17 with valid visas to travel to neighboring Jordan.
The U.S. Treasury Department sends the checks by diplomatic pouch to the U.S. Embassy in Amman, the Jordanian capital.
A punishing drive
The friends drive the 600 punishing miles through the desert to Amman. They flash the power of attorney to pick up the checks and cash them for Jordanian dinars, which are widely used in Iraq or can be exchanged at a highly favorable rate for depressed Iraqi dinars. Then they drive back and hand over the money to the 17. Problem solved.
That’s almost ordinary compared with Piekarski’s basic concern: planning for the time, however unlikely it seems now, that Washington and Baghdad resume at least some level of mutual diplomatic recognition.
At the moment, there are three professional Iraqi diplomats in Washington. They work out of the Iraqi Interests Section of the Embassy of Algeria.
There has been no sign that the Clinton administration wants to appear any less unforgiving toward Hussein than the Bush administration was. When Bill Clinton made pre-inaugural noises about the chance that Hussein might be changing his spots, the reaction was withering.
So Clinton, as president, issued a harsh denunciation of Hussein’s regime as “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States and to Mideast stability.
Now the FBI is investigating reports that Iraq dispatched a hit squad to Kuwait to assassinate George Bush with a car bomb during his visit there in April. American officials said they were told at least one of the men confessed. The trial opened Saturday in Kuwait with two Iraqis pleading guilty, while 12 other Iraqi and Kuwaiti defendants pleaded not guilty.
Piekarski isn’t allowed just to sit on Square 1. He has to keep lines open to the dozens of people who will be needed to get the embassy up and functioning someday.
“We had to (fire) 100 local Iraqi embassy employees because there wasn’t anything for them to do,” he says.
“But a minimum of them will be necessary if the embassy’s mission is reconstructed and it starts working again.”
The building he works in is an ugly, forbidding place, caught in a time warp. Its high concrete walls are topped with concertina coils of barbed wire, but the surveillance cameras have been switched off and the Marine sentry box is empty.
On a table just inside the entrance is a stack of brochures describing a University of Illinois master’s degree program in economics. The cover letter, from professor Stanley W. Steinkamp, is dated Oct. 3, 1991.
Spare parts get scarce
Piekarski insists he’s not lonely, though he has been back to Poland only twice, at Christmas.
His two teenage daughters, who are back in Warsaw with his wife, visit from time to time and he keeps up contact with diplomatic colleagues (but never Iraqis; that’s against the rules).
He lives alone in the roomy, nicely appointed U.S. Marine residence and tools around town in an armored gray 1989 Chevrolet Caprice, the only embassy car still running.
Because of the UN embargo, getting spare parts for the car is harder and harder; they have to be imported under diplomatic cover from a GM dealer in Warsaw.
There are about 50 known U.S. citizens in Iraq, mostly Iraqis who married Americans, whose legal needs Piekarski and his three professional Polish assistants look after.
He says there also is a group of perhaps another 50 Americans who are afraid, in Hussein’s country, to identify themselves and essentially live undercover.
All this costs a fraction of what the United States was spending in Iraq less than three years ago, but America’s man in Baghdad won’t tell how much.
“Let’s just say we’re doing the best we can to make every U.S. taxpayer dollar go as far as possible,” he says-and breaks into a grin: “And tell all those Poles back in Chicago that they can be proud of what we’re doing here.”
