We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot
It had been three years since the Bush appointee had yelled at me for “dragging the nation back to the rooftop of Saigon.” Back then, when the list was only a few dozen names long, it had seemed comically overwrought. But as 2010 began, when there were thousands of names and no measurable progress during President Obama’s first year, I was desperate to revive the lessons of the final months of the Vietnam War.
I waded through hundreds of pages of declassified “memcons”—memoranda of White House conversations—from the final weeks of the war, kicking myself for not having studied them earlier and alarmed by what they portended.
In early April 1975, as intelligence reports flooded in that signaled the imminent invasion of the North Vietnamese into South Vietnam, President Gerald Ford convened daily meetings with advisors with the hope of forestalling disaster. A last-second request for $722 million of aid to prop up President Nguyen Van Thieu and the South Vietnamese government was rejected by Congress, all but guaranteeing its collapse.
Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger instructed our ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, to supply him with the names of the South Vietnamese employees who would need to be evacuated. In discussions with the president, Kissinger estimated that there was an “irreducible list” of 174,000 South Vietnamese employees of the State Department, USAID, and the CIA, but he needed the embassy to produce an official list. In Saigon, the slow-moving Ambassador Martin appeared more concerned with the optics of openly conducting contingency planning than with the fate of our Vietnamese employees: creating a list would send a signal of distress. In the circular thinking of our ambassador, any planning would precipitate the very need for a plan.
Two young foreign service officers serving in Vietnam, Lionel Rosenblatt and Craig Johnstone, were furious about the lack of urgency in the embassy, so they struck out on their own and implemented an ad hoc operation to spirit Vietnamese employees out on departing military flights. When embassy officials discovered their efforts, they issued arrest warrants for both Rosenblatt and Johnstone, who had donned false identities as French businessmen. In the weeks before Saigon fell, the military ran an evacuation out of the nearby Tan Son Nhut air base, loading American civilians and thousands of South Vietnamese onto C-130s and C-141s, but there simply wasn’t enough time or planning to get all of our Vietnamese employees out.
Ambassador Martin described those pushing him to prepare for an evacuation throughout April as “mattress mice,” and in the final days, he denied a request to prepare an evacuation landing zone in the yard of the embassy compound; this would have required hacking down the massive tamarind tree that provided shade for his car, a step the ambassador refused because he thought it would create a sense of panic.
The contingency plan for the last Americans in Saigon was to listen for a code-phrase on Armed Forces Radio that signaled that final evacuation was under way at the embassy: “The temperature in Saigon is one hundred twelve degrees and rising,” followed by Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.”
When the code was delivered on April 29, the tamarind was hacked down as incinerators burned millions of dollars and classified documents. (They failed to destroy staffing lists of Vietnamese employees, though, which were soon snatched up by North Vietnamese forces.) Thousands of South Vietnamese realized that there wouldn’t be room for them on the small number of helicopters approaching the embassy.
Such was the contingency plan that emerged in the final moments of a long war: a lucky few managed to force their way past the marine security guards or over the fifteen-foot barbed-wire walls and into one of the helicopters. An army captain named Stuart Herrington shouted, “We’re not going to leave you! Don’t worry about it!” through a megaphone at some four hundred panicked local employees, and then made his way to a helicopter on the embassy roof after telling them that he was going to use the bathroom.
After these early mishaps, though, the Ford administration took command of the situation. During a White House discussion about where Vietnamese refugees might be resettled, a congressman suggested the island of Borneo, prompting Ford to interject, “Let me comment where they would go: our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don’t think these people should be treated any differently from any other people—the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union.”
The American public was not enamored with the idea of resettling a great number of refugees from a war that had torn the country apart, however, and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service pushed back with legal rationale against any large-scale evacuation. So the president addressed the country, declaring that America bore a responsibility to these refugees, and that “to do less would have added moral shame to humiliation.” Congress passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act a couple weeks later in May 1975, allocating an astonishing $600 million, and within a few months, more than 130,000 Vietnamese were airlifted by the military to our base in Guam, where they were processed before flying to the United States.
Within several years, nearly one million Vietnamese had been granted visas.
I was embarrassed. This wasn’t ancient history, after all. In my trial-and-error approach to prodding the government into acting more swiftly, I had not thought to harness the wisdom of those who had worked on the 1975 evacuation. I asked Frank Wisner, a retired ambassador who had helped implement the massive airlift, to join the board of the List Project to counsel me on strategy. He soon introduced me to others who’d been involved in the efforts, including Judge Mark Wolf in Boston, who had represented the Office of the US Attorney General during the airlift.
Two lessons had emerged from my conversations about the fall of Saigon: one, wishful thinking and excessive concern about optics led many of our employees to be left behind, and two, once the president of the United States stepped in, the myriad excuses put forward by the various bureaucracies fell away and lives were saved.
Abandonment was coded into every war’s end. No matter the continent, skin color, decade, or century, I found local collaborators facing post-withdrawal reprisals by their countrymen. The Hmong in Laos, trained by the CIA to fight against the Pathet Lao, were left behind when the Communists overran the country in 1975. The Harkis in Algeria, loyalists to the French colonial pieds-noir, who held the colony for 131 years, were strung up in the streets after a hasty withdrawal by their protectors in 1962; estimates approached one hundred thousand killed. A common tactic of vengeance upon these “traitors” was to force-feed them the medals bestowed upon them by the French.
For all of the facile comparisons made by journalists to Schindler and his list in articles about the List Project, I was utterly ignorant about our visa policies during World War II. I found my entry point in a Foreign Affairs article about bureaucrats who had defied orders during the Jewish refugee crisis. Its author, the legendary diplomat Richard Holbrooke, put forward a thought experiment:
Imagine that you are a consular officer in the middle of a diplomatic career that you hope will lead to an ambassadorship. There are two rubber stamps on your desk. Using the one that says “Approved” would allow the desperate person sitting in front of you to travel to your country legally. Using the other stamp, which says “Rejected,” could mean consigning that person to prison or death.
It sounds like a simple choice, but there is a catch—a very big one. The person in front of you is Jewish, and your boss has told you to devise ways not to use the “Approved” stamp. Your government does not want these people—these people waiting outside your office, milling around in the street, hiding in their houses—in your country. Approve too many visas and your career will be in danger. Follow your instructions and people will probably die.
Intrigued, I bundled up and trudged to the bookstore down the street in search of a book referenced in Holbrooke’s article, but soon stumbled upon Refugees and Rescue, a newly published collection of diaries and memoranda from the 1930s by a man I’d never heard of named James McDonald. I scurried back to my apartment and began to read.
McDonald, who chaired Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Refugees from 1928 until the end of World War II, dictated a diary entry to his secretary at the end of each day. Though the diaries were never intended for publication, McDonald’s daughter brought them to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which released the first of three volumes in 2007.
As I thumbed through the diaries, my heart sank. Though hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fled Eastern Europe in the late 1930s, the United States was wary of admitting them, turning ships filled with Jews away from our ports, often under the rationale that they posed a security risk to the homeland. President Roosevelt warned, “Now, of course, the refugee has got to be checked because, unfortunately, among the refugees there are some spies, as has been found in other countries. And not all of them are voluntary spies—it is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they have found a number of definitely proven spies.”
The president’s warnings produced immediate and stalling effects in the State Department. McDonald’s diary included a June 1940 memo to consular officers from Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state overseeing the Refugees Bureau: “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.”
Long’s cable effectively halted all immigration through bureaucratic tricks. I could have been reading from my own in-box when I found an exasperated letter from Rabbi Stephen Wise to McDonald a few months later, in September 1940: “With regard to political refugees, we are in the midst of the most difficult situation, an almost unmanageable quandary. On the one hand, the State Department makes all sorts of promises and takes our lists and then we hear that the Consuls do nothing. A few people slip through, but we are afraid, - this is strictest confidence, - that the Consuls have private instructions from the Department to do nothing, which would be infamous beyond words.”
Not only were the tactics and language similar, the success rate was nearly identical. Shortly after receiving Rabbi Wise’s letter, McDonald noted that 567 names had been given to the Department of State, but that after considerable time, only 15 visas had been issued. When McDonald passed along further documentation of visa delays to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she wrote a note to FDR: “They handed 2,000 names to the State Department and the consuls abroad have not certified more than 50 to come to this country. . . . I am thinking about these poor people who may die at any time and who are asking only to come here on transit visas.”
After Pearl Harbor, the prospects for Jewish refugees only worsened. In the conclusion of the McDonald diaries, the historian Richard Breitman remarked, “President Roosevelt moved away from humanitarian action. The war changed his views as to how much humanitarian spirit the United States could afford at a time of grave dangers abroad and perceived foreign dangers to national security. State Department officials, most of whom dragged their feet during earlier refugee initiatives, quickly found evidence and ways to reduce immigration. . . . The most restrictionist phase of American refugee policy—from mid-1941 to mid-1943—overlapped with the first two years of the Holocaust.”
The historical parallels were at once infuriating and empowering. After years of struggling with government officials, I had burned myself out of ideas. But in every war I researched, I found people who struggled on behalf of their own lists, against many of the same officials in the same bureaucracies. The people who held those positions were dead, but their titles and tactics lived on.
All my reading of history would be worthless if it wasn’t used to fuel one final campaign for the Guam option, the remedy I had proposed to Samantha Power on the eve of Obama’s inauguration and in every meeting since. I recruited a brilliant group of students from Vanderbilt University’s Law School who had started a List Project chapter to help Iraqis who had been resettled in the Nashville area, and we began to draft a historical, legal, and policy assessment of how a departing power’s withdrawal affects those who collaborated with it. We examined how our allies had used airlifts to evacuate their Iraqis as they withdrew in the late 2000s, and how President Clinton had airlifted twenty thousand Kosovar Albanians to Fort Dix in 1999 and seven thousand imperiled Iraqis to Guam in 1996. We extracted the lessons of Vietnam, Laos, Algeria, and World War II, making it clear that unless the president took ownership of the issue, the bureaucracies would never take it upon themselves to act boldly.
Since they had ignored my calls for a Guam option, I shifted my tactics: rather than politely asking the White House to preempt a predictable tragedy upon our withdrawal, I would get Congress to force it to begin contingency planning.
The idea of placing so much hope in a report seemed foolish to some of my friends, but I clung to the only strategy left in the quiver. While there was still time to improve the refugee resettlement process before the withdrawal, the situation was grim. Beyond the average wait of over a year for an initial interview, the Special Immigrant Visa created by the Kennedy legislation to resettle 5,000 interpreters each year was a shambles, granting visas to only about 150 Iraqis each month. Maddeningly, nearly 20,000 Iraqis were admitted through the traditional Refugee Admissions Program in Obama’s first year, but only 250 of them were from the list. Though they may have had legitimate persecution claims, the overwhelming majority of those who were granted visas had zero affiliations with the United States. And with a population of refugees in the millions, it was a given that only those in the most dire circumstances could be resettled to America. For every Iraqi on the list who made it in, though, there were fifty stuck in administrative purgatory. US government policy in the final phase of the war was Darwinian: survive your death threats for a year or two while you wait for an appointment for an interview, and we might consider granting you a visa.
Shortly before we released the report, I came across a strategic document issued by the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella organization that included Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The ISI and its member organizations were responsible for the assassination of hundreds of interpreters and other Iraqis. They prescribed “nine bullets for the traitors and one for the crusaders.” The ISI closed with an exhortation: “This won’t be an easy mission; we’ll have to confront both social and security obstacles, but it is a worthy struggle . . . just because the goals are difficult doesn’t mean we should abandon them.” As I read the pragmatism and discipline undergirding the lethal ambitions of our enemy, I was embarrassed by the shabby excuses offered by my government for its own languid efforts to protect the Iraqis on the list.
On the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the List Project released Tragedy on the Horizon: A History of Just and Unjust Withdrawal. We urged Congress to instruct the executive branch to produce a contingency plan for a Guam option. We also pushed legislation requiring the first-ever government-run assessment of just how many Iraqis had worked for the United States, how many had applied for resettlement, and the status of those applications. For years, in hearing after hearing, nobody in the government had a sense of this basic number: with estimates ranging between 30,000 and 130,000, I knew that my list of several thousand names was far from exhaustive. I wanted the government to make its own list.
The response to the report was immediate. Within a week of its publication, Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida and Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland invited me to speak at congressional hearings that they called to discuss how the Obama administration’s withdrawal would affect US-affiliated Iraqis. Hastings sponsored legislation requiring the executive branch agencies to produce a contingency plan and to determine the numbers of Iraqi allies at risk. While it didn’t order an evacuation, the preparation of such a plan would present the president with a tool to draw on in the event that a campaign of violence unfolded in the wake of our withdrawal.
My dad flew in from West Chicago to watch my testimony. Assistant Secretary of State Eric Schwartz entered the hearing room followed by a claque of staffers from the Refugees Bureau—among them the woman to whom I had given the very first copy of the list nearly four years earlier. After the secretary’s initial statements, Senator Cardin pressed him on the Guam option.
Schwartz leaned toward his microphone and let loose the dam of USGspeak:
You don’t have to remind me about the Guam program because I managed it at the National Security Council. . . . We take very seriously concerns expressed by many that there will be increased reprisals against Iraqis who have worked for us in Iraq. We currently have a range of robust resettlement and visa programs that benefit Iraqis, as you know. And I think we need to bolster them and strengthen them and increase contingent capacity in neighboring countries. We need to do all of that—think about ways that adapting these programs to changes in circumstances to enhance capacity to move people who are at imminent risk because our capacity to do that right now—we have capacity, but it’s limited.
The assistant secretary closed with a classic yes/no flourish: “At the same time . . . so while we don’t anticipate the kind of problems to which you allude and we’re certainly—you know, our plans and our efforts are in the absolute opposite direction; reconciliation, reintegration, and normalcy—we do need to look at options for the kind of contingencies that your question addresses.”
Put simply, the Obama administration did not foresee the kind of postwithdrawal bloodletting that I was predicting. Even though nearly every withdrawal throughout human history had been stained by reprisals, and even though at least a thousand Iraqi allies had already been assassinated, for some reason the White House thought things would be fine when we left.
I testified alongside Craig Johnstone, the former foreign service officer whose struggle to evacuate his Vietnamese employees during the fall of Saigon in 1975 was rewarded by the State Department with a warrant for his arrest. He recounted the lesson of Vietnam: “We stepped up to it too late in Vietnam in many respects, but we did step up to it, and we need to be sure that we are ready this time . . . and that we leave the situation honorably.”
I implored the Obama administration not to repeat the mistakes of the Bush White House in Iraq by basing its plans upon wishful, best-case scenarios. While “reconciliation, reintegration, and normalcy” were nice goals, the stigma borne by those who worked for us would probably last a generation. Why not plan to use some of the twenty thousand unused Special Immigrant Visa slots to bring them back with us?
Alcee Hastings’s legislation cleared the House within weeks of the release of Tragedy on the Horizon but stalled for nearly six months in the Senate due to the fight over the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
In January 2011, the Hastings legislation cleared the Senate as part of a major defense funding bill. I was exhausted from watching the little shrub of hope sprout and wither each year, but I approached the last year of the war in Iraq with guarded optimism. The challenge of raising funds for a cause related to a forgotten war had forced me to lay off half my team and halve the salaries of those that remained, but I knew that the List Project had to continue until the bitter end.
When Obama signed the bill, a 120-day deadline for the administration’s preparation of the Guam option was set into motion.