Although Ambassador
Prudence Bushnell was late returning from her meeting with Kenya's Minister of
Cooperatives in the building next door, the August 7 Country Team meeting commenced on
schedule at 10 a.m. in her office. Heads of all the U.S. Government agencies, as well as
chiefs of sections of the embassy, meet there every Friday to share information on their
activities and to thrash out common problems. I had just been introduced as the
newly-arrived director of the U.S. Agency for International Development's mission to
Kenya, and we were discussing how to make the August influx of newcomers to the embassy
feel more welcome and more secure, given the rise in Nairobi street crime in recent years.
A bang from outside stopped the conversation. “That's an explosion,” said one
of the U.S. military officers among us. I wasn't sure whether he recognized it as the
report of a weapon or whether it was something more innocuous, like a car backfiring in
the next street. But we resumed our discussion for another twenty seconds.
Then there was a roar all around us, and I was on the floor. I'm not sure whether it
was the shock wave of the blast or my own instincts for self preservation that put me
there. My first thought was for the wonderful family (two daughters, new wife, and
stepson) that Laurie and I had put together just one year ago, after the years of recovery
from our respective contentious divorces. It was all going up in smoke. That thought
probably took two seconds.
Then I waited for the building to collapse. It was eerily silent. But the fifth floor
didn't descend on the ambassador's fourth floor suite, and we weren't riding down onto the
third floor. I glanced up to see all the windows blown out and the rest of my new
colleagues prostrate like me. “Stay away from the windows,” ordered the
political counselor. “Everybody crawl through the outer office and to the
stairwell.” And that's what we did, quietly and in single file.
The stairs were dark and covered with debris, mostly chunks of cement plaster that had
been blown loose from the walls and ceilings. So it was slow going down four flights,
helping each other over the rubble. By this time, perhaps a minute after the blast, I was
no longer afraid that the building would collapse on us. But I did worry about succumbing
to smoke inhalation, and the stairs were too littered and crowded with refugees from other
floors to get down and out fast. Still, nobody seemed to be panicking, and we helped each
other over obstacles and out the front door to blessed fresh air.
People were pouring out of the embassy, but no one had the slightest idea what had
happened. A woman and her two children came running around to the front of the chancery,
but inside the iron security fence, screaming for help. They were trapped inside the
fence, and we could all see the clouds of black smoke billowing from behind the embassy. I
put my arms through the fence to help the little boy climb up and over the fence, while
others helped the woman and her daughter get out.
I looked for Amos, my driver, where my USAID car had been parked in front of the
Embassy. There was the car, with all its windows blown out, but no sign of Amos. A
Kenyan, his face streaming blood, was being carried away by colleagues.
What had happened? It was obviously some sort of bomb. Had it detonated inside the
embassy? Were we the target, or had striking bank workers blown up the National
Cooperative Bank next door? What should I do? Look for Amos? Go inside to see if anyone
needed assistance in getting out? Where were Laurie and my stepson, Matthew, who had
arrived in Kenya only fourteen hours before? They had planned to come into the embassy
later that morning after a first shopping trip. They hadn't been ahead of schedule, had
they?
Then the crowds started coming. Thousands of Kenyan onlookers streamed toward the
embassy from all directions. They didn't look menacing, but I had no idea who was
responsible for this explosion or why. Buff Mackenzie, a USAID colleague who had been in
the ambassador's office with me, beckoned. “We've got to get back to USAID.” His
car and driver were at the end of the parking lot next to the exit. We scraped some of the
broken glass off the car seats and sat on the rest for the drive across town. Buff
wouldn't know it until later that he was carrying a shard of the ambassador's window in
his back.
Two miles away at USAID Towers no one knew for sure what had happened, but everyone
knew that some kind of calamity had occurred. Amina Mohamed, secretary to the USAID
controller, had been out on her third-floor balcony smoking a cigarette when the ground
shook, and she saw a plume of smoke shoot up from what she knew to be the neighborhood of
the American Embassy. I sought out our executive officer, Mike Trott, who told me that the
only reports coming in over our American community radio system were that an explosion had
occurred at the embassy. No one knew if we had been targeted.
But I wasn't taking any chances. If this were a terrorist attack, USAID could be a
secondary target, and the building we rented was taller and not nearly as solidly
constructed as the embassy chancery. I told Mike to announce over the P.A. system that
everyone was to go home now for the weekend. I took the elevator to the eighth floor and
quickly tried to call Laurie at home. No answer. Damn. But, then, she was supposed to be
out shopping. I walked from office to office ushering out any lingering workers. There are
about 250 employees between my USAID/Kenya mission and Buff Mackenzie's regional support
office, and I worked my way down, floor by floor, through all of their offices until I got
to the ground level. “Go home everyone, and listen to your radio.”
By now a flood of refugees was arriving from the embassy, and Mike was working with
them to set up an emergency command center. Technicians were establishing satellite phone
links with Washington. No one had seen Laurie and Matthew; but then nobody knew what they
looked like, since they had only arrived in Kenya the previous evening. We heard that the
embassy in neighboring Tanzania had been bombed. So we, not the bank next door, must have
been the target here, too. But it also meant that we must have been the victim of
international terrorists, not of Kenyans, and that fact was a relief to me. I started to
help answer the telephones when in walked Judy Pike, our family sponsor,
who was to have picked up Laurie and Matthew for their morning shopping excursion and
visit to the embassy. “Your wife is upstairs in your office; you'd better go up
there.” Hardly a necessary suggestion, but a good one.
I dashed up seven flights. “Hi, honey,” greeted Laurie. “Where is
everybody? And what's all that dust on your suit?” She and Matt had been shopping at
the Sarit Center, parts of which were still being built, and the construction noise had
blocked out the sound of the explosion several miles away. They had no idea that there was
a crisis in full bloom. I located a car and driver to take them home, promised I would
follow as soon as I could, and rejoined the command center.
Ambassador Bushnell was there and in charge now, her lip slashed open from flying glass
in the Cooperative Bank building next to the embassy. The emergency operations center was
taking shape — communications technicians, a press center, a big chalkboard to record
arrival times of rescue teams from the U.S., Israel, South Africa. A signup sheet was
posted for manning the Ops Center over the weekend. I signed up for two six-hour shifts on
Saturday and went home to my family.
At home I was still oddly calm and collected. I spoke matter-of-factly about the day's
tragedy, the magnitude of which I could not yet comprehend. My one concession to my senses
was the revulsion I felt to the smell I carried — the smell of cement dust and smoke. My
clothes, my hair, my nostrils were full of it. I hung my suit and tie outside on the
veranda to air and climbed into a long, cleansing shower. But it wasn't until dinner time,
when we held hands around the table and I said the blessing, that I could break down and
sob.
It wasn't until I reported to the Ops Center the next morning that I had any idea of
the size of the calamity that had befallen us. Nine Americans dead so far and several more
still missing. At least two dozen Kenyan colleagues dead in the embassy and twenty more
still missing. The body count had been coming in since the previous afternoon. Teams were
dispatched to the city hospitals and to the morgue to identify our friends, our
colleagues, our family.
Over the following week, those casualty figures were to rise to twelve Americans and
thirty-four Kenyans killed in the American Embassy and 167 more Kenyans killed and 4,000
injured in the neighborhood. The Cooperative Bank had been decimated — every window blown
out and most interior walls destroyed — and the Ufundi House building next door had
collapsed, burying most of the inhabitants in twelve stories of rubble.
Those of us who had been in the ambassador's fourth-floor office, and who had escaped
with no more than a lung full of dust and smoke and a bad scare, had no idea, at the time
of the explosion, of the devastation that the bomb had caused. The 2,000 pounds of
explosives had sent a shock wave in an arc that hit certain floors of the surrounding
buildings at full force, bouncing between buildings and rocketing down certain corridors
at up to 18,000 mph. Some parts of the same buildings (like the ambassador's office in the
front of the embassy) were spared that level of force.
A handful of embassy employees who went to their windows at the back side of the
embassy to see what had caused that first explosion (a grenade thrown by the bombers at a
security guard) were virtually liquidated by the blast. Others were either saved or killed
at the whim of fate. One woman left her desk to fill her coffee cup and was unscathed,
while her colleagues at the adjacent desks were all killed. A man stepped out of his
office to go to the photocopier in the hall and was killed instantly by the blast force
tunneling down that hallway. His office, a few paces away, was almost undamaged.
In the following days and weeks, the rest of the world heard of the heroism,
competence, and generosity of those who came to help — the search and rescue squads, the
emergency medical squads, Nairobi's hospital staffs, the U.S. military who maintained
order at the rescue site and protected the new embassy at USAID Towers from any potential
additional threat.
What is harder to comprehend is the long-term damage that violence of this sort
inflicts on the survivors. It was relatively easier on me — newly arrived in Kenya —
since I had not met those who died. But some of my colleagues are dealing with the loss of
family members, many lost dear friends, and all lost esteemed colleagues. Most of us are
struggling with some sort of survivor's guilt. I will probably always wonder if I could
have saved a life if I had gone back into the embassy instead of taking care of my own
office across town. Others wonder why they were spared, when the colleague at the next
desk was blown to pieces. The American secretary in the embassy's security office wonders
why she, at age sixty, was uninjured, while a twenty-year-old Marine Security Guard, of
whom she was very fond, was killed. “I've had a good life; he still had his to
live.”
And the American public probably still doesn't adequately appreciate the fact that it
was Kenyans who suffered the most. Most of those killed were unintended victims in other
buildings near the embassy or in the streets adjacent to it. No terrorist act like this
had ever occurred in East Africa before, and the country went into deep mourning.
My work priorities at USAID/Kenya were clear when I arrived on August 1: help Kenyans
to build democratic institutions, help them develop efficient markets for agriculture and
agrobusinesses, help them spread the use of modern family planning methods, and help them
fight AIDS and malaria. But since August 7, two new priorities have taken precedence —
helping our staff to heal, and providing assistance to the Kenyan victims of the bomb
blast. Both will occupy me for the next couple of years.
So far only two American employees of USAID in Kenya have elected to cut short their
assignments because of the bombing. But most are hurting. Many haven't slept well since
the blast, and many will be a long time in returning to their former levels of
productivity. This is normal. We should all be progressing, at our own rates, through the
phases of denial, anger, negotiation, depression, and, finally, acceptance, that shepherd
victims through any great loss. We have set up counseling services for our employees, and
the President has authorized the use of administrative leave for those who need it. My
challenge, as a manager, is to keep people first, ahead of the press of daily operations.
My other new priority has been to provide assistance to the Kenyan victims of the
bombing. First we had to convince Congress to appropriate additional funding (about $37
million) for post-bomb assistance to Kenya. Now we are busy reimbursing Kenya's
impoverished hospitals for the costs of precious medicines and supplies used in saving the
injured victims, in funding rehabilitative surgery and psychological counseling for other
victims, and in reconstructing some of the buildings and businesses most damaged in the
neighborhood of the former U.S. Embassy.
But there is also another piece of unfinished business. The U.S. Congress has never
appropriated sufficient funds to upgrade U.S. embassies around the world to the safety
standards that it has approved for them. Embassy/Nairobi didn't meet the standards for a
100-foot setback from the road to protect it from car bombs. Now we'll get that new
embassy that Ambassador Bushnell had been pressing for since she arrived in Nairobi two
years before the bomb — but at the cost of 213 dead and thousands injured. It would help
a lot if Union College alumni were to write their senators and congressmen demanding that
sufficient funds be appropriated to bring all American embassies up to those safety
standards. Even peaceful Kenya is not beyond the reach of international terrorism.
For the persevering reader, let me tie up a couple of loose ends. Amos, my driver, was
fine. The blast knocked him off his feet and shook him badly. He hopped on a minibus as
quickly as he could and got out of the downtown area. Nevertheless, I worried about him
considerably until he reported in to USAID on Monday. And that suit and tie I had left
airing on the veranda? It was almost a month before I could bring myself to fetch them and
take them to a dry cleaner to rid them of the bomb smell. In the meantime, a vervet monkey
had made off with, and eventually lost interest in, the necktie, which I retrieved from
our roof. I am able to wear them both regularly now, without emotional trauma.
About the author: Carrying U.S. aid around the world
Jonathan “Jock” Conly '71 got his first taste of foreign development
while he was a student at Union.
Now mission director for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in
Kenya, Conly was an intern with the Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA) office while
an undergraduate. He helped manage the distribution of mechanical and agricultural aid to
Kenyan farmers, an experience that was so rewarding he decided to go into the Peace Corp
after graduation.
As a Peace Corps volunteer, he went to Sierra Leone, where he spent two years teaching
farmers how to effectively use water resources. Stationed in a rural village with no
electricity and running water, he was the only foreigner.
“It was a really significant experience for me,” he says. “Now I usually
live in capital cities, but I loved becoming part of the rural life of the village. I
probably grew up more in those two years than in any two years of my life.”
After finishing his time in the Peace Corps, he traveled through Africa for several
months before returning to the United States and choosing a career path. “I was
considering business or law, and worked as a legislative aide for half a year, but then I
decided to pursue a master of public affairs in development economics,” he says. One
of his classes included a guest speaker from USAID, an independent government agency that
provides economic development and humanitarian assistance to advance U.S. economic and
political interests overseas.
Conly joined USAID after graduation, and his first stop as an intern was Niger, where
he soon gained a permanent position as an assistant program officer. “Most employees
at USAID have technical specialties such as engineering, agriculture, and family planning,
but others, like me, are generalists,” he says. Therefore, his roles at USAID involve
strategizing and budgeting the agency's projects and choosing which programs to support.
This general oversight of the agency's work has allowed Conly to work for USAID in
different areas of the world. He has served in similar roles, with increasing authority
and responsibility, in Bangladesh, Egypt, Southern Africa, and Pakistan. Though Conly says
that he didn't travel often as a child, his father, Dick Conly '42, has always been
interested in history and geology and clearly passed that on to his son.
“The bulk of my work has been in cities because I often meet with diplomats to
discuss which proposals we will support, but I also get to visit some of the programs we
fund, which is great,” Conly says. “The chance to meet the people who are
benefiting from what we do is important. You see that you can make a difference in
people's lives.”
Conly returned to the United States in 1991 to take a post at USAID's headquarters in
Washington, D.C., where he spent three years as chief of the agency's program evaluation
division and another three directing strategic anlaysis and budgeting for new programs in
eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also attended the National War College,
which trains select military officers and federal officials in high-level national
security policy and strategies.
Recently, he took the post as USAID's mission director in Kenya. Conly oversees all
U.S. foreign program aid in Kenya — more than $19 million of assistance in economic
growth, health, and democracy. Conly and his staff of 125 work to promote democratic
institutions and a civil society in Kenya, introduce family planning to help manage
population growth, and promote increased commercialization of resources while respecting
the environment.
“Patience has its rewards,” he says. “Twenty-five years after I wanted
to go to Kenya with the Peace Corp, USAID sends me there.”
But just one week after he arrived, the Kenya embassy was bombed while he was attending
a meeting there.
Even with the chaos of the bombing, Conly doesn't regret the move overseas. “What
I like best about my job is that it gives me a sense of place; you're not quite so
insular,” says Conly. “Living overseas reinforces the breadth of humanity and
reminds you of what we all have in common.”