Terror for Diplomats

Sitting next to the wife of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Richard Nixon was commenting one night last week on the fact that diplomatic assignments, once so greatly sought after, have now become dangerous in many areas of the world. Indeed they have. The next day, the newly ap pointed U.S. Ambassador to the Sudan, Cleo A. Noel Jr., and the outgoing charge d'affaires, George C. Moore, as well as a Belgian diplomat were murdered by Arab terrorists (see WORLD). Noel thus became the second U.S. ambassador to be killed by terrorists in less than five years. In 1968, John Gordon Mein was slain in Guatemala while trying to escape from kidnapers.

Other such dramas have occurred recently, including the 1970 murder of the West German ambassador, Count Karl von Spreti, by Guatemalan guerrillas. Over the past five years, eight U.S. diplomats and embassy officials have been involved in kidnaping incidents. In January, Ambassador to Haiti Clinton Knox and Consul Ward Christensen were seized at gunpoint and released only after the Haitian government paid a ransom of $70,000 and freed twelve political prisoners.

Tragically for the men involved, such kidnapings carry their own catch-22: the more governments give in to save the victims, the more frequent they become. Ceding to blackmail demands, Nixon insisted last week, was unthink able. The threat, he said harshly but realistically, was "a risk that an ambassador has to take."

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