Franklin Pierce Huddle Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 5 of 8
In these various assignments that you had, is there any incident or event that was the most dangerous for you as a diplomat?
I've been in lots of dangerous posts. I was in the southern Philippines, and I was Number One on a hit list for four years -- it was two years for me and two years for my predecessor.
You had armed guards, I guess?
I had four armed guards. They had backed the car right up into my office, practically. But probably the most dangerous thing happened fortuitously, and it's sort of a memory of a memory now. But in '96, November, my wife and I were on a plane that was hijacked out of Addis Ababa and the hijackers, who were sort of nutty ...
And not political?
They were ... They were quasi-political. They ran the plane out of fuel. It crashed in the water, killing most of the passengers. We were literally thrown out with our whole seats and woke up floating in the water.
So you experienced a kind of terrorism firsthand.
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it ... although, I think ... I mean, I'm lucky. I think of all those people that never had a chance. It brought home, in a very personal way, what it was like. I don't like to dwell on it. It's an old story, but it does make it possible for me to get a little bit closer to the emotionality of the problem.
As somebody who was a diplomat, a former academic, a human being, as you dealt with that situation where you had an interval where you knew the plane was going to crash, what came to the fore, what part of your persona was most helpful in this period right before the crash?
Well, I'm somewhat of an action-oriented guy. Like many passengers, I'm sure, I was frustrated because one side of me wanted to charge after these guys, and you're sort of ... you felt helpless because you should be doing something. But at one point, I was able to stand up in my seat and say, "Don't inflate your lifejackets." The reason I did that was that my wife had heard a "pup-pup-pup-pup-pup" in the back of the plane. The passengers back there had all panicked and inflated their lifejackets while still in the aircraft. The pilot had told us we were going to crash in about five minutes. What happened was, the plane hit the water; it flipped over, broke into several pieces. But the big, main fuselage filled up with water and people were pushed up against the top of the plane inside the plane, and couldn't swim down to get out because they were so floaty with their lifejackets on, and they all drowned. In our business-class area, the people didn't drown because they didn't inflate their lifejackets.
It sounds like this situation became a problem which you analyzed as you went along.
Yes, to some degree. Although, let the record show that I was also nervous and probably cowardly. I had a very effective, take-charge wife. I'm trying to say, "Dear, I love you," and she's saying, "Shut up and put your eyeglasses in a hard case, and eat something, because your blood sugar will go down once you're out in the water."
So then, again, there were how many passengers onboard, and how many survived?
There were 175 total, including crew, and 48 survived.
Was there anything you learned from this that helped you as a diplomat or as a person?
I'm not sure. Life toughens you up in lots of ways. It probably made me a little tougher in meetings now. Sometimes I will say, "I didn't survive a plane crash to listen to you guys lie to us," or something. But it's ...
You move on.
Yeah. I pulled up my socks and moved on.
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