by Donald Kursch
A Bucolic Capital…
Bonn, Germany never stood out for its nightlife and was off the radar for most foreign visitors. Over the years, this mid-sized city on the Rhine, when noticed, had attracted attention for its university and the fact that it was the birthplace of Beethoven, who left permanently for Vienna as soon as he was able. Indeed, Bonn’s unremarkable quality was the reason it had been chosen as the capital of the new Federal Republic of Germany, created in 1949 by combining the occupation zones of the US, UK, and France. The founders wished to keep alive the hope of a reunified Germany with a capital in Berlin, then located well within the Soviet zone.
This hope seemed distant for the following four decades of the Cold War until the remarkable and unforeseen developments of November 1989 when the Berlin Wall was breached and the two German states began their rapid road to unification, completed less than a year later. However, Bonn was still very much the national capital when I arrived at the large US embassy in August 1990 to assume my position as minister counselor for economic affairs. Despite the continued presence of the German government, its ministries, the parliament, and the diplomatic corps, the city retained the character of a modest provincial city, a characteristic highlighted by John LeCarré in his classic Cold War espionage novel A Small Town in Germany.
During a Dangerous Time
In this comfortable and even cozy setting one could overlook the fact that Germany had been the location of numerous terrorist assaults on government officials, business leaders, and the US military over the previous two decades, carried out throughout the country mainly by members of the notorious “Red Army Faction” or “Baader-Meinhof Group”. The heavily armored cars used by many of my senior German contacts, as well as the US ambassador, were a reminder of this. Things became more tense after the US decision to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in early 1991. In general, the German public, strongly inclined towards pacifism, found it difficult to believe that the US would resort to military force to reverse Iraq’s forceful occupation of its small neighbor. A group of 50-100 protestors set up a vigil close to our riverside embassy with signs such as “No Blood for Oil” after allied attacks on Saddam’s forces began. However, these demonstrators, while occasionally noisy, were peaceful and non-threatening.
The Embassy Under Fire
It therefore came as a shock when, as I prepared to leave my office at about 6:30 p.m. on Ash Wednesday, I heard a crackling noise coming from outside the window, sounding something like a set of firecrackers. Almost immediately thereafter, my colleague and I saw tracer bullets coming into the office. Recalling our military training, we instinctively hit the floor immediately, I in the adjoining office of my secretary. The firing continued for perhaps another thirty seconds or so as I saw tracer bullets continuing to come in over our heads and one shot setting off a spark perhaps a foot or two away from where I was lying. It was not possible to tell where the firing was coming from, but I had the impression that the attackers were not very far away, perhaps immediately outside of the embassy’s fenced perimeter.
After the shooting ceased, we quickly evacuated the office and hastened down to the main lobby on the ground floor, which we correctly presumed was out of the line of fire. There, we saw members of our Marine Guard detachment, outfitted in their battle gear, preparing to go out to confront the attackers. We remained in this area for at least another two hours until the “all clear” signal was given permitting us to leave the chancery and go home, where I immediately broke my promise to forego alcohol for Lent and had a double scotch.
When I returned to the office the next morning to survey the damage, it turned out that the shots had been much closer to me than I had realized. Our side of the embassy had borne the brunt of the attack, having been hit with more than 75 rounds of armor piercing bullets, which easily penetrated the porous walls of the “temporary” chancery building that we had occupied for over 40 years, often going through the hallways and coming out on the other side of the building. One of these rounds had hit and destroyed my secretary’s computer, which was no more than a foot above where I had taken shelter. And while my decision to lower my profile by hitting the floor had been wise, the belief that I had protected myself by getting under the windows was overly optimistic.
Ambassador Vernon Walters came by to survey the damage in our office. A former army general, Walters “decorated” the fallen computer with a paper “combat” medal. He then turned to me and said, “Kursch, that bullet didn’t have your name on it.”
It turned out that our attackers had not been close to the embassy after all but had set up their equipment in an unused property on the other side of the Rhine River from where they sprayed their fire on us. The German police did a through ballistics investigation of the more than 250 armor piercing bullets fired, about one third of which had hit the embassy, but did not identify any suspects. However, they later determined that one of the weapons employed in the attack on the embassy was used two weeks later to kill the head of the German Treuhandanstalt, or State Property Agency, as he worked at his home evaluating the property assets of the former East German government that now belonged to the newly united German state, a finding which directly linked the attack on the embassy to the German terrorist movement.
Donald Kursch was a career Foreign Service officer from 1966-2003. He served as DCM in Budapest, Bonn and at the US mission to the European Union, as well as in Moscow and Zurich. After retiring, he worked for the Institute for Defense Analyses and as a senior advisor to the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism. He served in the US Marine Corps Reserve from 1964-1967. He lives in Washington DC and is the principal coordinator for the Foreign Affairs Retirees of Maryland and DC.