Up Close and Personal: A Essay on Travel Tension
by Lance Mason
Jomo Kenyatta Airport was halfway through a round-the-world trip I was making from New Zealand, my home at the time. On my way to Kenya, I’d had quick stopovers in the States, the UK, and Spain, all of which sounds exciting or enthralling today, but it wasn’t in this case.
My penny-pinching spending habits always put me in Economy, and navigating in and out of the cheap seats can be a scramble. Now, scrambling off, I was swamped by Nairobi’s steambath afternoon, a cliché of tropical climates. Michael met me at Baggage Claim, and his verbal welcomes were his usual business-like remarks, politely asking about my flight, my stopovers, and so forth. I’d have been stupid or self-absorbed, or both, to expect more, given what Carmella and he had been through.
I collected my luggage, which was more than bare-bones but less than overstuffed, considering the travel distance, and Michael’s credentials let us bypass Customs and fast-tracked me through Immigration, straight into the next cliché, a waiting black SUV, with driver. Michael took the passenger-side backseat, and I got in across from him, behind the driver. As we exited the airport grounds, I tried to merge my mind and emotions into the strange circumstances I’d entered. Looking for visuals of the landscape around us, I noticed the glass of the side-window was darkly-tinted and a bit blurry. Running the flat of my fingernails over its surface, I felt a rubber-like drag.
“Mike,” I said, “that feels weird. What’s on the window?”
“Kevlar,” he said. “Bulletproofing. It was Secretary Albright’s vehicle when she was here in August, after the bombing.” There was a sardonic note in his answer, like a verbal sneer. Later, I’d find out why.
* * *
Michael and I had met as college roommates in September, 1965, both of us raw onions a couple months out of high school. I was a bit wary, looking for friends, and unsure about my next step, though dental school had been my intention since I was 15 or 16. While a good student, I wasn’t driven, a bit lazy, and a sandlot athlete, at best. Mike, on the other hand, stood out in sports and was at Loyola on a mathematics scholarship, full of confidence, direction, and purpose. This would all change for him in barely a year’s time, but then come back to him in full when the chips were down. By contrast, while I was stable, it would still take a couple of years before I got my own feet on the ground.
Yet, this situation of how we met has always been curious to me. We didn’t know each other and, while I had no friends attending Loyola, Mike (though he prefers Michael) had at least two there with whom he’d played sports and studied, excelling at both. Still, instead of putting Mike with one of them, Loyola, a Jesuit institution in Los Angeles, had roomed us together in Rosecrans Hall—two single beds, two desks, two chairs, and two bookshelves. For years I’ve treated this crossing-of-our-paths as a random roll of the dice, though incredibly fortunate for me. Why hadn’t Mike signed up for a dorm room with Dan Claffey or Bob Hulse, both at Loyola, guys he’d grown up with?
At this late stage in life, I can make an educated guess—Mike had bigger fish to fry than stewing about a college roommate. Maybe he was waiting on a scholarship offer from Stanford or Harvard or Columbia that never came. Also, shortly after Mike began at Loyola, his parents and house full of younger siblings moved when his father was transferred Back East from Santa Barbara, where Mike grew up. Perhaps that had been on the cards when Mike was contemplating Loyola, and he had considered going with them.
Maybe—just maybe—by the time these hypotheticals played out, and Mike chose the Loyola scholarship, Dan and Bob had already agreed to room together in the dorms, so Mike had to take potluck. Whatever had been his decision cycle, we ended up as roommates in one of the great strokes of luck in my young life.
However, early in our second year, Mike would hit a rough patch, lose direction, leave Loyola, and move to Connecticut to join his family. He spent a few months in school there, met some people, and joined the Marine Corps, graduating top-of-the-class out of Officers Candidate School. He soon made captain, youngest in the Corps, and enrolled in a 52-week course in Mandarin Chinese. Again, he graduated first in his class. This was 1968, before all but a very few Americans imagined that language would have any importance in our future.
After military service, Mike married Carmella, and they moved west to Santa Barbara, where Mike aced his remaining undergrad classes and Yale offered him a full-ride to do a PhD in Asian Studies. No, he decided, time to go to work. He passed the Foreign Service exam first try, and spent nearly 35 years advancing through the Department of State (D.O.S.), finishing as US Ambassador at our Embassy in Hanoi. (Not incidentally, 20 years earlier, on the East Asia Desk in D.C., he had helped rehabilitate diplomacy with Vietnam.)
On his “road to Hanoi,” however, Mike had taken on some tough assignments, including Consul General, Moscow in the mid-‘90s, and Deputy Chief, Beijing in 2000 where, in 2001, he helped obtain the release of an American flight crew whose spy plane had been forced down on Hainan Island. He worked hand-in-glove in that negotiation with Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom we were delighted to meet later in DC when he signed Michael up as our Ambassador to Vietnam.
However, between his posts in Russia and China, Michael was serving in Embassy, Nairobi, our most important embassy in that region of the world, when it was bombed in August, 1998. I arrived two months later to assess the damage—to my friend, not the building.
* * *
There are myriad details to recall about these Kenya experiences as the guest of the head of a US Embassy recently attacked by committed terrorists. (Did I say “head of an Embassy?” I’ll get back to that.) There had been hundreds of deaths, thousands wounded. Were all the dead Americans? Alas, no. Twelve Americans were killed in the Embassy, three times that many Kenyans, and nearly 200 Africans died outside the Embassy, mainly in an office building next door. How did that happen, when most of those victims had zero to do with the US or with Al Qaeda’s act of extremist insanity? To the degree that it can be explained, I’ll try.
Picture an aerial view of the scene, a street intersection in downtown Nairobi. The main road runs east-west, crossing the side street which runs north-south. The intended target, the American Embassy, squats on the intersection’s southwest corner, facing the main road. This 3-4 story building stands over a ground-level parking garage, and is joined at the back by a large open parking lot. That lot is entered off the side street via a left turn about 50 meters before the intersection, and that entrance has a barrier manned by Kenyan guards. The guards are no doubt armed, employed as they are by the US Government in a region not known for political stability.
If you stand at that driveway barrier, with the parking lot in front of you and the Embassy to your right, on your left stands a 20-story office building housing the operations of a large bank, among many other businesses. On 7 August 1998, that building is full of people at the peak of this working day in steamy, tropical Nairobi.
As clearly as Michael knows and is able to describe for me (two months later, the two of us standing in the parking lot entrance), the Islamist murderers, a benign term for them, attempt to drive a vehicle laden with explosives through the driveway into the parking lot, no doubt heading for the garage beneath the Embassy. However, the Kenyan guards stop them at the entry barrier, refusing them access. As part of their backup plan, the killers set off a stun grenade or other low-explosive device, pulling many of the victims-to-be to the rear windows of the Embassy, and the front windows of the bank building. The killers then trigger the massive truck-bomb, causing extensive ballistic damage within the Embassy, killing dozens, but also collapsing, like a house-of-cards, several stories down the front of the office building, killing many more.
The fatality count in the Embassy is 46, mostly Africans. In the bank building, at the time of my October visit, the death count is 168. The wounded are many multiples of these numbers.
* * *
When the attack happened, I had been living and working in New Zealand for 10 years. At the news of the bombing, I could get little information from the US Consulate in Auckland due to a security lock-down, so I decided to travel to Kenya myself, with short stops on the outgoing leg, and Australia on the return. So, here I was, and Mike had taken me to the site to provide the details that he knew.
The next morning, as Mike was leaving the gracious old Victorian house where he and Carmella lived (inside a guarded compound with several other similar ex-pat residences), he said that he expected a busy day, and we may not see him at lunch. Carmella and I spent the morning at a very enjoyable, enlightening lecture by a member of an Anglo-African farming family. He had attended Cornell University for a degree in Rangeland Management, and spoke on the radical advantages of converting wholesale from cattle-farming in Kenya to various species of antelope, as they require far less water, eat native vegetation instead of artificial grassland, produce low-fat, high-protein meat, and defecate material far more harmonious to the soil than cattle do. Still, he was making little headway with the cattle establishment.
He also provided some shocking statistics on African population trends. Reliable research showed that the population of mid-19th century Kenya was less than 1 million, estimated in 1950 to be 6 million, with a census c.1998 showing more than 25 million. (The 2025 estimate is 57 million.) It was an illustration on the near-impossible task of feeding (much less employing) such an exploding population without radical changes in the country’s economy and agricultural production. These were genuine socio-economic matters about which Kenya was rightfully concerning itself, not issues pivoting around religious fanaticism.
Indeed, Michael didn’t return for lunch, and Carmella, with our driver, took me to Nairobi’s open city market, where I scavenged at least a dozen pieces of African handicraft, from carved masks to gourds incised with tribal designs, from textiles to figurines of stone, wood, or clay. At the prices I paid, I felt like a thief.
That evening at dinner, Mike explained why he hadn’t come home at lunch.
“You may have heard about the significant unrest in Sudan, another civil war and widespread famine. We were supposed to meet with the leaders of one of the factions to discuss a possible movement toward peace. Instead, another of the factions showed up, and they had a firefight on the steps of the International Hotel.”
Earlier in this account, I referred to Mike as the “head of the Embassy,” and said that I would explain why. His official title at the time of the attack was Deputy Chief of Mission. The DCM, always a State Department career employee, is second-in-command when an ambassador is on duty at that embassy. If it is a period when no ambassador is assigned yet to that embassy, or one is assigned but not on site due to travel abroad or similar absence, the DCM becomes chargé d’affaires (CDA), effectively head of operations.
From how things looked to this layman, Mike certainly seemed to be fulfilling that role in October, 1998. Not that an unranked visitor skating in from New Zealand should expect to see The Big Boss, but I interacted socially with perhaps half a dozen of Mike’s D.O.S. colleagues, and twice that many spouses in activities with Carmella, and heard no mention of Prudence Bushnell, the US Ambassador and titular Head of Embassy, or any reference to her regarding embassy operations. From what I saw, she was getting no mention around Nairobi.
Considering the scale of the crisis, it would’ve made complete leadership and organizational sense that Ambassador Bushnell was in Washington working to get coordination back on track between the State Department and operations in Nairobi, with all the diabolical complexity that would involve. That would have left Mike as chargé d’affaires (CDA) in Kenya, but today’s “official record” shows he took that role in early 1999 when, according to that same record, Amb. Bushnell left her post.
A great deal of controversy grew out of Bushnell’s repeated and well-documented notices to the D.O.S., backed up by numerous CIA reports, that the Nairobi Embassy was not only vulnerable to attack, but likely to be targeted by Al Qaeda, who had a malicious presence in Kenya. The friction that arose as a result of Bushnell’s warnings being ignored was the cause, one can conclude, of Mike’s dark-ish reference to Madeleine Albright. As Secretary of State, she was Bushnell’s boss, and in charge of any willful ignorance.
In any case, in the visible world, Mike was in charge by October, and was overseeing embassy operations being relocated to an isolated building on the edge of town. On the day he took me there, it was like being in a Mel Gibson cum Denzel Washington war-movie set in some combination of the outskirts of Baghdad and… the outskirts of Baghdad. The guarded roadway into the place was a gravel-and-dust serpentine lined with cement-filled oil drums, with heavily armed US Marines spread across the landscape.
The interim building itself was a block of charcoal gray concrete, perhaps three stories. Nothing was pretty, no gardens, no tended vegetation, no personnel on public reception duties. It was in a state of genuine lockdown, where putting your hand in your pocket could lead to a fatal misunderstanding. Looking back on it now, I don’t wonder that I have no photographs of the place or its personnel.
Michael and his overworked team were running America’s interests from this “position of transition” as he “negotiated” with the Kenyan “officials” for a permanent location outside the city center, where the US would build a new embassy with far better protection, matters Bushnell had harangued Washington about for a year or more. This is how the Michael I know had always worked (and still does today, in retirement): You do what you know to be right. You deliver more than what’s expected of you. If you have to cut corners, you don’t compromise what’s right, and you don’t tolerate people who do.
Earlier, I mentioned that another friend of Mike, Dan Claffey, whom he’d grown up with through grade school and high school, came to Loyola at the same time. Years later, after a decade in another career, Dan followed Mike into the Foreign Service of the D.O.S., and had challenging, rewarding postings from Malaysia to Australia and Fiji to Africa. In addition to Africa, I’d visit both Dan and Mike in far-flung ports-of-call around the world (Martinique, Borneo, Fiji, Hanoi, Mauritius, London, Kuala Lumpur), and occasionally meet coworkers in Dan’s company who had worked elsewhere with Mike. Invariably, they said the same thing: “He’s a demanding boss, but fair. If you do your job well, he’ll give you the best write-up you could imagine. If you don’t, don’t expect any favors.”
During Michael’s time in Nairobi, Dan was with the US Embassy in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria. Ten years before, he had taken his first State Dept. posting not far north of there, in Gabarone, Botswana, where I had visited him and Roz in 1988 as I was immigrating to New Zealand. We’d had a fabulous time together in Botswana, and would again when I headed their way on leaving Kenya this time. In between, I’d go tiger-fishing on the upper Zambezi River in Zambia and, due to nervous negotiations by the host at a backpackers’ lodge, I’d narrowly avoid being fleeced for bribes by armed soldiers there. I’d also pay my second visit to Zimbabwe, marking its continuing collapse under Robert Mugabe since I was there in ‘88.
These were the things—the knowns and the unknowns—that I was contemplating before boarding the flight out of Nairobi to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. Yet there was one more adventure, one more encounter, to mark my brief but intense experience in Kenya.
In his executive role in Nairobi, before the Clinton administration installed a permanent replacement for Bushnell as Ambassador, Mike had constant, unrelenting demands on his time and attention. Carmella, as spouse of the DCM in Kenya, was equally under demand for uncountable tasks in her so-called spare time. On the last night before my departure, Mike was expected to attend a meeting of political and military officials at the Intercontinental Hotel, along with Carmella. However, she’d agreed to another obligation, so I substituted as Mike’s guest at the meeting.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about our arrival—black SUV, driver, cloistered parking, side entrance into a large, well-guarded meeting room. It was the atmosphere and the personnel in the room that gave one the heebie-jeebies. Half of those present were representatives of various American government agencies and institutions: embassy employees, US Air Force Intelligence officers (a shadowy, barely recognized spy unit), and other visiting personnel from D.C.’s spook shops and related centers of power. The rest were a mix of African establishment political functionaries, mostly Kenyan but also a scattering from elsewhere, who, almost by definition, were allies of the US, or at least not her sworn enemies.
Except when shaking hands with someone whom Mike was polite enough to introduce to me, I stood aside, scanning the crowd. As a newcomer to the city, and a superficial observer of the post-attack landscape and climate, I realized that I was up-close-and-personal, in an enclosed building, with all of the people Al Qaeda had tried, and failed, to kill two months before.
Would they try again tonight?
No, they didn’t try again that night. They had, however, attacked our Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on the same day as Nairobi, and Al Qaeda affiliates would continue to direct or contribute to attacks on American assets—the USS Cole in 2000, the World Trade Center the following year—as well as dealing deaths and destruction across Europe up to the present time.
The D.O.S.’s self-appraisal of the 1998 bombings should have been a paradigm of truth and clarity, but was instead plagued by controversy, finger-pointing, and blame-laying. Far in advance of the attack, Amb. Bushnell had sent unequivocal urgings to Washington for more preparation and protection, and other US agencies had echoed these or related threats. Hubris, however, seemed to have held sway in some quarters of the Department, and its Secretary Madeleine Albright fielded criticism accordingly.
The US is not always blessed by unerring leadership in times of crises. Bureaucracy and politics form the very nature of governments, large and small, and are the enemy of efficient response. The more sway they hold in the higher echelons of authority, the less agile critical decisions will be. The most valuable assets of the US Government are not the power-brokers and pontificators of elected office, but those who have dedicated themselves, and their lives, to the betterment of our country, its people, and our future.
Nairobi was an illustration of why it is incumbent upon Americans to choose our leaders wisely—because history is not done with us.
BIO: Lance Mason's writing reflects both his farm-town origins and his extensive travel abroad. He has explored, lived, and worked overseas for decades, traveling the world by foot, bicycle, motorcycle, train, tramp steamer, and dugout canoe, about 15 years of which was spent living in current or former Commonwealth countries. These experiences that have both enhanced and interfered with Mason’s writing life. His work has appeared in 50+ journals, collections, anthologies, etc., was included in Fish Publishing's 2025 Memoir Prize (Ireland), received a Silver and 2 Golds in the 2024 and ’25 Solas Awards, and his fiction recently appeared in ShortStoryStack (Palisatrium), Eerie River's BLADES, and Cowboy Jamboree's PRINE PRIMED.