A disappearance (1977).

AuthorLesser, Larry
PositionSearch for Martin Forrest in Uganda - Essay

I.

Just a few days after I arrived in Rwanda, my secretary Melanie Webb (not her real name) asked to meet with me to discuss a very urgent personal problem--a life-or-death issue involving her boyfriend.

I was the Deputy Chief of Mission, American Embassy Kigali. The title was somewhat grandiose since it was a very small embassy-just a handful of officers, two American secretaries, two communicators, and a few dozen Rwandans working in the motor pool and the warehouse and doing other support tasks. I was the ambassador's second-in-command. We operated out of a nondescript single-story building that was sometimes referred to as the butcher shop because there were 'meathooks' on the wall of the inside corridor. I didn't know the history of the building, but no one suggested that we remove the meathooks; They were the most distinctive decorative feature of the simple building.

My boss was Ambassador Townsend Carrier (not his real name), a talented and ambitious career Foreign Service Officer just a few years older than me. I was the immediate supervisor for a young political officer, and for the post's young administrative officer, and for Melanie the more junior of the two secretaries. Melanie was around my age or a little older. She had grown up in small-town America, worked in clerical positions in the private sector for a number of years, and then, just a couple of years earlier, decided she'd rather have a life of adventure than her life of quiet desperation in the corporate world. She ended her marriage (no children), joined the Foreign Service, and volunteered to serve in remote places. She was attractive in a businesslike way: down to earth, very smart, very self-sufficient, and real good at adjusting to life in a challenging place like Kigali. Melanie would have made an excellent reporting officer instead of being a secretary, and if she had entered the Service a few years later that's no doubt what she would have done--not that she was complaining.

Melanie told me the details of her desperate personal situation. Her boyfriend was a South African businessman based in Kigali--I'll call him Martin Forrest --who was selling communications equipment in that region of central and eastern Africa: Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. (From what Melanie told me I was immediately mistrustful of Martin Forrest because legitimate businessmen for East Africa normally set up shop in the cosmopolitan city of Nairobi or possibly Dar es Salaam. Kigali was a backwater-and Rwanda was a very poor and undeveloped country; not an attractive market for communications equipment.) Melanie read my mind and told me she wasn't sure herself that Martin's business interests were altogether on the up-and-up. She shrugged as if to acknowledge that one could question her judgment in falling in love with Martin (which is how I interpreted her shrug).

Martin Forrest had gone to Uganda a couple of weeks earlier (before my arrival in Kigali) on what Melanie understood to be a routine sales trip. He had telephoned Melanie a couple of times after reaching Kampala. Then the calls stopped. Melanie didn't have a number to reach him. No one Melanie knew had heard from him. She didn't know where he was supposed to be staying. Martin had said he'd be away just a few days, but he had disappeared.

At that time the mad and thuggish dictator Idi Amin ruled Uganda. The U.S. had severed diplomatic relations; we shut our embassy down. Any necessary business was conducted through the Swiss who maintained an embassy in Kampala and agreed to handle American interests (for which the U.S. government paid a fee).

American citizens were officially advised not to travel to Uganda because of the security situation, and American officials like me were strictly prohibited from traveling there. (One time when I was on official business in the north of Rwanda we drove up to the border and looked across into Uganda. And another time my family and I no doubt briefly stepped across the unmarked Rwandan border into Uganda on a muddy mountainside inhabited by mountain gorillas but no people. We were visiting Dian Fossey's gorilla research station in the Virunga mountains.) Melanie told me that her boyfriend continued to include Uganda in his sales circuit despite the risky security situation. Martin must have been familiar with the culture of corruption and intimidation; more than that, he must have been good at operating in the shadows. It's easy to imagine that he was good at dealing with sleazy characters from inside the Idi Amin regime and sleazy characters who claimed to be well connected to the regime and sleazy characters who would try to outsmart him to get money from him. They might make promises. They might threaten that bad things would happen to Forrest if he didn't do what they wanted.

Because I have a cinemascopic mind it also occurred to me that Forrest might be an intelligence agent selling information to...

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