Robert F. Ober, Jr.: Tchaikovsky 19, A Diplomatic Life Behind the Iron Curtain. Xlibris, 2008. 480 pp., ill.
Robert Ober provides advice from a veteran foreign-service diplomat who knows Russia well and has valuable lessons to impart. An insider, not a tourist, he gets all the details right because he has experienced life in Moscow firsthand and long-term. His lessons remain relevant for the present.
Take, for example, his judicious words on the shortcomings of American education, which so signally fails to acquaint students with the history, culture and languages of other nations. Quoting David Brooks, he argues for the value of the liberal arts: “I’ll believe the intelligence community has really changed when I see analysts being sent to training academies where they study Thucydides, Tolstoy and Churchill to get a broad understanding of the full range of human behavior.” (pg. 65) His own spectrum of interests is wide, taking in avant-garde art and classical Hollywood cinema; in Moscow, he promoted American culture by screening films such as “Casablanca,” “The Maltese Falcon,” and “Dr. Strangelove” (a DVD of which Oliver Stone recently gave to the Russian president).
But it’s not just the education at US universities that Ober takes to task. Over the years, while the Foreign Service has become increasingly diverse – meaning more women and minorities have been hired – language training for future diplomats has been cut, with unfortunate consequences for linguistic and area expertise. He recounts the story that during the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis, no one in the Prague embassy could be found who spoke Russian.
Ober is disdainful of the Kissinger-era Global Outreach Program, which he refers to as “GLOP,” claiming that it was designed to keep “area experts out of embassies and geographic bureaus that corresponded to their expertise,” thus leaving a free hand for Kissinger and Nixon and “protecting themselves from well-informed second-guessing.” (pg. 174) There is much to be said for this interpretation. Speaking from personal experience, after expressing an interest in joining the Foreign Service in the 1970s with the hope of being posted to Germany or Austria, I was told that if candidates were fluent in a particular language, they could be sure that the one place they would not be sent was a country where that language was spoken. Probably this discouraged many qualified people from applying to the Foreign Service.
This GLOP nonsense resulted in Ober, an expert in Russia, being posted to India for a few years. The policy of replacing professionals with dilettantes only stopped when Kissinger left in 1977 and the program was discontinued. But his legacy remains – “focusing on one or two countries and developing area expertise no longer enhances a career.” (pg 175)
As a professional diplomat, Ober naturally prefers letting the experts handle foreign affairs, and is skeptical of meddling by ideologues and outsiders. It comes as little surprise that he takes a highly critical view of Nixon-era détente, arguing for example that while it did help increase Jewish emigration from border areas such as Moldova, it achieved little for those living in Moscow and Leningrad. In the end, he argues, the decision to by-pass embassy professionals brought results that would prove short-lived.
Readers will come away impressed by the author’s decency and sound judgment. More pragmatic than ideological by nature, he has a natural affinity with Reagan’s Secretary of State George Schultz, who – like Ober – demonstrated that common sense and high principle could be joined in a successful career. If we had any doubt regarding Ober’s personal values, it is put to rest upon learning that, when given the choice, he preferred a posting abroad to one in Washington. And throughout his service in Moscow, he showed a healthy antipathy towards heavy-handed bureaucratic regulations emanating from D.C. that only served to inhibit contacts with Soviet citizens.
When traveling inside the USSR, Ober avoided being accompanied by the CIA as much as possible, hoping Soviet counterintelligence would then not follow him quite so closely. Entanglements proved, alas, unavoidable. A notable example, though by no means the only one, involved an experienced American journalist who behaved with uncharacteristic naiveté and ended up in a Moscow jail. In the Nick Daniloff affair, it seems there is plenty of blame to go around. Ober argues that both the FBI and CIA screwed up – the former in a bid to protect its reputation, the latter through the incompetence of one of its agents.
Ultimate responsibility, though, he places with the Reagan White House, which had initiated the whole disastrous series of events by “trying to make a general statement about Soviet espionage by arresting and convicting” one of their agents in the US “instead of tossing him out.” (pg. 365) That miscalculation led to tit-for-tat retaliatory measures which culminated in Daniloff’s arrest, imprisonment and eventual expulsion. Back in the West, the journalist aimed some barbs at the embassy, which Ober quotes with evident approval.
The witch-hunt for leaks in the embassy blinded us to the fact that the most damaging spies were 100% American traitors living and working in Washington, not low-level Russian staffers in Moscow. The White House, Congress and the press all blamed the embassy’s alleged lax security for leaks, whereas the true culprits were moles in the FBI and CIA. Moreover, while Reagan may have expelled Soviet spies from D.C., he failed to prepare for the inevitable retaliation, thus leaving our mission in Moscow short-handed and under-staffed.
Among the ambassadors Ober served under, Arthur Hartman wins the highest praise, in no small measure for the disdain he expressed for the White House and the US intelligence establishment. Hartman was well aware that his conversations in the embassy were bugged, but refused to let this unnerve him. Indeed, as he told Secretary Schulz, “90 percent of what I want to say, I can say right here… We want our message to get across to the Soviets, and this is one of the few ways we can get them to listen to us.” (pg. 297)
Ober displays such eminent common sense that it comes as something of a pleasant surprise that his career in the FSO was so long and successful. His memoir is not just an old timer’s lament that “things were better in my day,” but a well-reasoned, historically-grounded argument for “the kind of intensive training in language, culture and history that I received.” His summary: “It would be shortsighted if the department and the Foreign Service fail to maintain a cadre of knowledgeable Russian hands to serve in Russia and to contribute to policy making at home. Embassy sections and department desks led by amateurs or by professionals with little more than a tourist’s knowledge won’t do justice to our country’s needs.” (pg. 413) The sad truth is, even a distinguished expert like George Kennan would likely have a hard time reaching a senior rank in the Foreign Service of today.
Aside from the odd minor error – Lauren Bacall, for example, did not appear in “The Maltese Falcon” – this book would have been better if it had been a bit shorter. Particularly towards the end, the narrative grows somewhat choppy, as we get what looks suspiciously like highlights from the author’s appointments calendar. He provides us a summary of his daily activities, not all of which are consequential (see page 347, for example). The book’s title is also perhaps not the happiest choice, since the circle of those who recognize Tchaikovsky 19 as the address of the US embassy in Moscow is likely to be narrow.
On the whole, Tchaikovsky 19 should be read by those considering a career in the Foreign Service, or anyone interested in the history of US-Soviet relations in the second half of the twentieth century.
Related reviews at this site: Jonathan Brent: Inside the Stalin Archives; John Miller: All Them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening; Rodric Braithwaite: Across the Moscow River; Arthur Miller: In Russia; Kempton Jenkins: Cold War Saga.
© Hamilton Beck
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