Senator Richard G. Lugar: A Lifetime of Diplomatic Engagement.

• Author: Asquino, Mark L.

Introduction

Almost fifty years have passed since the terrible day in 1971 when one State Department officer brutally killed another in the tiny, African country of Equatorial Guinea. What took place there is a lurid story of sex, madness and murder that almost every foreign service officer has heard about at one time or another. In many ways it's the State Department's version of the 1984 classic film, "Nightmare on Elm Street." However, the murder in Equatorial Guinea is a real-life tale of horror that continues to intrigue foreign service officers. Here are the basic facts of what happened.

On August 30, 1971, Alfred Erdos, the principal officer at the U.S. Embassy in Equatorial Guinea (EG), stabbed to death his administrative assistant, Donald Leahy. Based on a U.S. autopsy of Leahy's body, prosecutors alleged the men were having a homosexual affair. The murder weapon was a pair of standard-issue, U.S. government scissors. The crime occurred inside the embassy, and Leahy's body was later found in an unused office. On the day of the murder, Erdos made wild accusations over the embassy radio about a Soviet invasion of the country. Len Shurtleff, serving at the nearby U.S. consulate in Douala, Cameroon was asked by Lannon Walker, the acting chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Yaounde, to investigate the bizarre broadcast. Shurtleff immediately took a charter flight to Equatorial Guinea where he discovered the grisly crime.[i]

I first heard a version of the infamous Erdos-Leahy murder story during my entry-level officer training in the fall of 1978. By then, it had already become a foreign service urban legend. Little did I know that someday I'd serve as U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea.

But while the story has been retold and embellished in the process, few know the background leading up to the actual crime. By the time of my 2012 assignment to Malabo, articles had been published by those who witnessed the aftermath of the crime. I delved into these accounts as well as read numerous books about EG's sad, turbulent history. And then I lived in the country for three years and saw the house where the murder took place. All have provided me with the following insights on that tragic day in 1971.

Spain's Only Former Colony in Sub-Saharan Africa

Equatorial Guinea, which had been a Spanish colony since 1778, became an independent nation on October 12, 1968. The capital, then called Santa Isabel and later Malabo, was on the small island of Fernando Po, which would be renamed Bioko. A larger part of Equatorial Guinea is on Africa's mainland and shares borders with Cameroon and Gabon. With a land mass the size of Maryland, EG in 1971 had a population of about 300,000 people, making it one of Africa's smallest countries.

Francisco Macias, a minor bureaucrat in the Spanish colonial administration, was

elected through UN supervised polling in 1968 as independent EG's first president. Once in power, Macias unleashed a reign of terror on his people. By...