Day 267 - The CAG Who Wanted To Be A Novelist

Ken, one of the CAGs during the
renovation project, at the guard station

One of the Cleared American Guards (CAGs) during the renovation project, Duke*, wasn't all that well liked by his colleagues. But he was the darling of Fred, our Site Security Manager. Duke knew others didn't like him, but he seemed to accept that as evidence that he was just a bit better than they were.

The CAGs were required to keep an incident log to record anything they felt was worth noting for the next guard. There was at least one CAG on duty at all times. During work hours, they were kept busy checking out the people and materials that moved onto the compound grounds. But during the evening and on the weekends, things could get a little dull. Most of the CAGs wrote nothing in the log because life in that guard booth was, frankly, uneventful. But Duke seemed to use the incident log as his opportunity to complete his first draft of a novel. For the first half-hour of every one of Duke's shifts, he would write notes in the incident log. They went something like this:

Date: March 4, 1993. The temperature was just above freezing and the sky was dreary and cloudy at 3:45 p.m. as I left the Hotel Sebaco and walked the three blocks to the embassy. I observed an unknown individual walking on the opposite side of the street keeping pace with me, perhaps surveilling my movements. He wore jeans and a bulky black jacket, leather boots, and a black fur hat like every other Moldovan man wears in the winter. I took a detour around a block to detect whether he was in fact surveilling me. He didn't follow, but he was standing on the corner across the street from the embassy when I arrived. Seems suspicious.

Fred approved of Duke's excessive incident logging. He encouraged the other CAGs to add their observations in the log as they arrived each day, just adding to the resentment of the majority and Duke's puffed-up ego.

View of the front of the embassy. Note the
two windows on the ground floor at the far left and the
person in front of the window next to it.

Early one morning while we were still living in the Hotel Codru suite, at about 4 a.m., Duke called me to report that on his rounds inside the building he had found something suspicious in one of the offices within the embassy. I asked if he had contacted Fred, the person responsible for the overall security of the compound during the construction. Duke said he had already talked with Fred. I asked Duke what Fred had told him. Duke relayed that Fred had told him to call me.

With that much as background, it sounded as though Fred expected that I would go to the embassy to investigate. I didn't want to call Fred again in the middle of the night to confirm that assumption so Alex and I got dressed and walked to the embassy. When we arrived, I asked Duke to show me what he had found that was so suspicious. He led us to the office where the local political and economic specialists worked. The room had three desks with PCs on them, one against each of the three walls opposite and to the side of the door. There were two windows in the room overlooking the Alexi Mateevici Street. The windows were double with one set of panes opening inward and the other set opening outward with bars between the two sets to prevent someone from crawling through them into the building. The handles to open both sets of windows were inside. The space between the bars was large enough for an adult hand to reach through to the outer set to open the latch.

I saw that the windows to the office were open, a keyboard for one of the PCs was lying key-side down on the floor, and in the middle of the room a box that we used to collect change for donations to buy coffee was also lying upside down on the floor. That box, an elaborate cardboard container for a Christmas fruitcake I had ordered the year before when we lived in Barbados, normally sat on a ledge behind the photocopy machine which was in the corridor outside the office. It was not a non-descript generic box. It was one of a kind in Moldova. Duke intimated that he thought someone might have opened the windows from the outside and tossed the box into the room, possibly intending to do harm to the building or the people in it. Because I knew that no one outside of the embassy staff could have gotten their hands on the box that now sat in the middle of the room, I concluded that there was no real danger. It appeared to me that whichever of the CAGs had been on duty before Duke's shift might have contrived the scene just to get Duke excited. I thought it was equally likely that Duke set up the scene himself.

I headed straight for the box, intending to put the room back into order before heading back to our suite to get some sleep. Duke nearly jumped out of his skin and grabbed my shirt to pull me back. At that point, Alex found a yardstick which he used to reach into the room and flip the box over, proving that the box was empty. We then went into the room, looked more closely at everything. The keyboard was upside down at an angle that seemed impossible for me to explain as anything other than having been placed that way. Nothing was missing from the office. Nothing was damaged. Alex and I went home to get whatever sleep we could before we had to be back at the embassy.

That next day I told the ambassador that I felt Duke should be replaced because it was clear his presence was a distraction to others. Whether Duke set up the room the way he did or someone else did it as a prank, the solution was to remove Duke, not to punish the prankster. Fred was not happy with this decision, but he complied.

Once the CAGs left, the local Moldovan guards
took over the guard desk.

But it wasn't until many months later when Fred himself was leaving that I found out the rest of the story. As Fred was leaving at the end of the renovation project, he turned his files over to me. In those files was his report to Washington about the situation, a second report, not the one he showed me at the time of the incident. When Ambassador Pendleton asked me if I had seen Fred's report in the days after the incident, I told her I had. When she asked me if I was satisfied with it, I told her I was. She saw the second report. I saw a much shorter first report.

Duke had discovered the suspicious set up just after midnight when he came on duty. He did call Fred right away, not in the middle of the night. Fred decided that it wasn't necessary for him to go to the embassy right away based on Duke's answers to his questions. Fred said it could wait until morning, but Fred did tell Duke to call me "in the morning." Duke waited four hours and then he called me. I learned this from the incident log for the evening which was among Fred's files. Fred failed to tell me how Duke's actions deviated from his instructions by about four hours. In addition, Fred's report to Washington claimed that my husband had endangered himself and the entire embassy through his reckless actions as he poked at the suspicious box. Yet Fred himself had previously decided there wasn't any urgency in checking out the box. I finally understood why the ambassador had asked me if I was satisfied with Fred's report. If Fred weren't already on his way out of Moldova, reading his report convinced me that I should have suggested that the ambassador request his replacement, too.

*a name, not necessarily the right one