Episode 7. 40 Seconds That Changed Haiti Forever

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: [00:00:13] Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in conversations about their partnerships in tackling some of our toughest national security challenges. I am Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, the producer and host of the series. Today our focus will be on how the United States responded to the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010. The earthquake killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and led to the evacuation of thousands of Americans. Our guests are Ambassador Ken Merten and Lieutenant General Ken Keen, as they're both called. Ken, I'm going to refer to both of them by their title for the benefit of our listeners. Ambassador Merten is currently the principal deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of the Director General at the Department of State. When we taped this interview, he was principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. Ambassador Merten served as a US ambassador to Haiti from 2009 to 2012 and previously as ambassador to Croatia. General Keen is the associate Dean for leadership development at Emory University School of Business in Atlanta when he served as deputy commander at our Southern Command. He was made the commander of the Joint Task Force Haiti after the hurricane hit. He also, in his career, served in key positions all over the globe, including in Colombia and Pakistan. Gentlemen, welcome to our show. The earthquake hit Haiti on January 12th, 2010. I understand when it struck that you were by chance both together, at Ambassador Merton's home in Haiti. What happened next?

Amb. Merten: [00:01:55] Well, I believe we had just come from touring a couple of places, pretty rough sections of town where we had been doing some really good work with our colleagues from Southern Command and other elements of the US government. And we had sat down after a warm afternoon and sat down to have a Coke, as I recall. And there was this crazy noise. It sounded like, I don't know, I assumed it was a truck coming down the hill or something. I didn't really know. And it just got louder and louder. And then the place started to shake and we ran outside and it was an earthquake. It seemed like it went on for a couple of minutes. I think in the end it was something like 40 seconds all in but 40 seconds that certainly changed Haiti forever. I think shortly after the ground stopped shaking and I realized where my family was, we walked around to the front because General Keen had two of his colleagues were staying at the Hotel Montana, which you could see from the front of the ambassador's residence, and you couldn't see the Hotel Montana. You could only see dust rising from there. And that was actually very ominous for us.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:02:58] I remember seeing Hotel Montana. That was a rather large structure.

Gen. Keen: [00:03:01] Yeah. I mean, it literally came down within seconds as best we could determine from talking to the survivors. And interestingly enough, I was just by happenstance in Haiti. I had arrived that morning around 9 a.m. from the Dominican Republic as the deputy commander of US Southern Command. My responsibilities at the commander had asked me to do is to look at our disaster response throughout the region and make sure that we had plans prepared for principally the upcoming hurricane season that starts in June in the Caribbean. I was there in Haiti for about 36 hours.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:03:37] And you moved to implementing the emergency preparedness?

Gen. Keen: [00:03:39] Yeah, So we stayed for about four months.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:03:41] So you partnered to carry out the massive relief effort involving military and multiple government agencies. Who was in charge of what and how did you coordinate?

Amb. Merten: [00:03:50] I consider myself really lucky to have had someone like General Keen there because he knew exactly who to reach back to here in Washington and at Southern Command, also a terrific guy to work with. We worked out, I think, a modus vivendi immediately as to how we were going to not only deal with each other, but deal with the other elements, because there was a large contingent of folks from USAID. They were nominally in charge of the relief effort and they played a key role. But really it was the elements that General Keen was in touch with and was commanding that really made it all possible in terms of getting the air support. Remember, we didn't even know that the airport was going to be usable and that first night we couldn't leave my residence because there were so many rockslides and landslides. Trees had fallen. Et cetera. And we didn't know that the airport was going to be serviceable. The port we had heard had been badly damaged. And it was so we didn't know anything. We were fortunately able to get early in the morning eyes on the airport. The runways were fine, although much of the airport had collapsed and General Keen knew exactly who to reach back to that night to fulfill President Preval's wish to, number one, open the airport and start the flow of assistance.

Gen. Keen: [00:05:05] When you asked the question who's in charge, it assumes in these situations that the government would be in charge and the government of Haiti. But in. Perspective. Of course, we know now that 15 of the 17 ministry buildings were either completely destroyed or beyond use, and in those structures were either killed or severely injured, with 60% of the civil servants who worked for the government. So what little capacity Haiti had for disaster response and first responders, that kind of thing was significantly devastated. I mean, essentially the United Nations was there with a major force, but they were principally there on a stabilization security mission. And over 100 of the United Nations were lost, both the civilian structure headquarters of the United Nations to include its two senior diplomats and their military headquarters collapsed in the earthquake. So that was completely devastating. I mean, I was there taking cue off Ambassador Merten and the close collaboration with the team there. Really it was about, okay, how can we just sort of work together to move forward as best we can And daylight the next morning making our way down to the airfield to one verify for our military that we could, in fact, land planes safely. The first place I went was to find somebody from the UN and fortunately, we were able to walk in in a building at the airfield where they had one of their aviation unit headquarters, and they were actually on a VTC line with the United Nations headquarters and just trying to tell them what they knew at that point. And of course, we didn't know to the extent of the death and destruction, but we knew just from what we had heard overnight.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:06:50] And the embassy building withstood the earthquake. So you could use it as operations.

Amb. Merten: [00:06:56] Yeah, in fact, we were fortunate to have a new embassy compound, which was not only a relatively large building, but a reasonable sized compound as well, which had been built to California earthquake standards. And many of the buildings, including most of our colleagues residences, were either damaged or fell. But our embassy withstood the earthquake frankly just fine. And we were able to use that as a platform for a while until folks from Southern Command were able to get in more things like tents and temporary structures in for their operation. But it was really fortuitous. We were also not far from the airport, not far from what became the UN headquarters. So that all worked out well.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:07:39] So in this tragedy also, you had to be in charge of evacuating thousands of Americans where normally the Department of State is in the lead. Can you tell me about how you organized for that? I mean, obviously, it took assistance from Southcom as well. I would imagine.

Amb. Merten: [00:07:54] It is often the case in fast moving and tragic situations. We needed to rely on our colleagues in the US military who have obviously the airlift capabilities, but also who had the technical ability to do the air traffic control at the airport, which was one of the real challenges. We took an airport, which is basically one runway and an apron which saw maybe something on the order of ten flights a day and moved it. I think we were getting like 300 plus flights a day, which the US military was controlling and managing from all over the world. It was not just our own flights, but it was flights from Brazil, from France, from Canada, from you name it, all over the world. And that's how that worked.

Gen. Keen: [00:08:39] We really were supporting it from a logistical perspective. I mean, I look at humanitarian assistance. Disaster relief operations is more of a logistical challenge. And we were using the military's logistical muscle, whether it be in trying to control the airport and run the operation at the airport, but to provide the ability for all these NGOs and other countries to get there. But in the case of the civilian evacuations, as I recall, they evacuated over 16,000in the course of a couple of weeks of US nationals, as well as other third country nationals. And that was the Consular affairs sections really did all of that type of work. I mean, we were putting them on the airplanes and most of this was done during the hours of darkness because during the day we were getting a lot of the commercial flights from all over the world, whether it was NGOs or others. And we would try to only use our military aircraft because of their capability to bring in during the hours of darkness. And so we were sending back the American citizens on those flights, putting as many as we could and sending them back all over the East Coast to receive those evacuees as they went out.

Amb. Merten: [00:09:51] Yeah, we had a terrific support from consular folks who actually were able to be airlifted in through the US military to augment our colleagues at the embassy. But also there was no way out. Commercial airlines were not flying to Haiti. And the only way out for these, I think we just stopped counting at 16,000. I'm sure it was more than that was through US Military flights going back to CONUS.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:10:15] And you both had lost colleagues in the tragedy and your staffs performed enormous acts of heroism. I recall hearing about the actions of Assistant Regional Security Officer Carlson in saving several of his colleagues, including one buried up to her waist. Can you share with us a little bit those stories?

Amb. Merten: [00:10:35] One of the colleagues traveling with General Keen was at the Montana and did not make it. One of them did. And we were able to get him out and brought him to the house that night and gave him temporary treatment and were able to medevac him the next day. We lost a number of colleagues of local staff at the embassy, including one American colleague whose house fell on her moments after she got home from work. You know, it was very tragic. You speak about the assistant. So you have to keep in mind there was no way to communicate. Cell phones did not work. And I pat myself on the back that I had insisted at the embassy on having done radio checks and everybody at the embassy kind of rolled their eyes and said, Well, we need to do radio checks. We have cell phones now. And I kept saying, look, one bad hurricane is going to take out one cell phone tower and we're not going to be able to communicate.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:11:29] These are the old fashioned radios that we have in so many of our embassies, which we still use. Right.

Amb. Merten: [00:11:34] We still use. And I insisted that we do a couple of radio checks. And fortunately we did. And a lot of people had their radios so we could run a radio check from the embassy to find out who was safe or who was at least alive and where they were. Those people who didn't respond to the radio checks, the ARSO went out on his motorcycle and was able to visit those places where he found one of our colleagues and her husband, you know, buried up to their chest in their house that slid down the hill. And he was able to helpfully with some other folks, get them out and signal that they need some medical care.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:12:07] So commendable actions.

Gen. Keen: [00:12:09] Yeah, This was a brilliant example of leaders doing the right things where we work around the world in these very dangerous locations, whether they're combat or not, in countries that are susceptible to disasters and catastrophes. In terms of what actions are you doing to prepare yourself in these radios, I remember it was brilliant because we were getting in through the ambassador's radio, these calls. So we knew as well as people knew where the assembly areas were. One of them was the ambassador's residence. He said, You know, the members of my team were in the Hotel Montana. One of them ended up coming up to the ambassador's residence, severely injured, knew because the day before we had told him, if anything happens and you need to get a hold of us, this is where they're going to be. You need it. So he made his way up the hill, literally almost crawling to get there. And then that's when we knew that probably one member or team, lieutenant colonel, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Ken Borland, who is our equivalent of our military's regional affairs foreign area officer program, who was on our team, our sort of Haiti expert, if you will, was missing at that point in time. So you're dealing with families that are watching this on CNN or other networks literally live coverage and knowing that because he had been on the phone with his spouse literally minutes before this and then obviously his phone goes dead. So you've got family members calling, saying, you know, what's the status of my loved one in the country? And those calls are starting to come in to the embassy.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:13:38] And its leaders. You had to respond.

Amb. Merten: [00:13:40] We didn't know from where we were at the residence at that point because we had no access to television. We didn't initially have access, phone connectivity with the embassy. So it was only with the radio. That situation resolved itself in the course of the night, but we were very much flying blind early on there in the first few hours.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:14:00] And Ambassador Merten, since you have served before in Haiti on a couple of other important tours, diplomacy is about building long term relationships. How did those relationships help you in that moment of crisis?

Amb. Merten: [00:14:13] Well, it was interesting. I had developed a good working relationship with President Preval, which I was able to actually maintain until his death and with his ministers. And as I said, the phone service didn't work. There were three at that time, cell phone operators in Haiti. Two of them were completely dysfunctional. One of them was partially functional. And the president had access to one of those phones from that company. Neither of us did. And so when President Preval couldn't reach me via phone, he sent over the chief of police, the minister of interior, who had just written down from the top floor of his ministry, which collapsed. And it was a wooden building. So he survived and most of his colleagues did, but his ministry was destroyed and the minister of interior and the three of them came over, I think it was about midnight, I'm guessing, on motorcycles, on three wheeled all terrain vehicles to come talk to us. And they didn't know that I was fortunate enough to have. General Keen with me at the house, but they put me on the phone with President Preval and he was like, Ken, this is terrible.

Amb. Merten: [00:15:20] Are we going to have a tsunami? Was his first question. And I was like, Well, I don't know. I mean, I'll check with Washington and get back to you. I said, what is it that you need? What can we do for you? And he said, well, we have to get the airport open. I mean, is there any way we can get the airport open? And so General Keen and I spoke a little bit. He was able to very shortly thereafter get a hold of his colleagues back here. He knew that there was a team that assuming the runway was okay, that could perform the air traffic control services and guide the airplanes in within 24 hours of calling them. So you were able to get them deployed immediately. And that was really a matter of life and death for so many people in Haiti. So having those relationships was great. They knew where to find me. They knew how to contact me. I knew all the ministers and those relationships played out in the coming days as well.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:16:15] General Keen, I understand that while you were commander of Task Force Haiti, an old friend of Brazilian whom you had known since 1984, was leading the UN forces in Haiti, How did that help you and your mission? Again, relationships built over time through our military.

Gen. Keen: [00:16:30] When I talk about this to my MBA students now, I say relationships matter. So look on your right and left. They will matter as you go through life. And this one certainly did. Now, retired Lieutenant General Floriano Peixoto and I had served together in Brazil, as you mentioned, 1984, when we both were captains. I was there on an exchange program to the Brazilian Airborne Brigade from the 82nd Airborne. And so we spent a month jumping out of airplanes together. No better way for two paratroopers to bond but to jump out. So we had a great time. And then I went back to Brazil to attend the Brazilian Command and Staff College for a year and a half, and he became my unofficial sponsor. And of course, we kept that relationship. He came to the United States, taught Portuguese. His English is much better than my Portuguese. We stayed in touch over those intervening years at different times on different topics, and we would get together by chance. He was commander of the UN military Forces minister on the day of the earthquake, though he was not in Haiti, he actually had left for a few days and was in Miami getting ready to fly back into Haiti when the earthquake struck. His deputy, which was a Chilean one star general, Brigadier General Toro, was in charge and he was the first one I ran into at the airport the morning after the earthquake, who actually lost his wife, who was in Haiti in Hotel Montana. And so he was running the operation knowing she was missing. And then General Floriano Peixoto got on the phone and called Southcom. This is where relationships matter. Again, because he knew some folks. He talked to General Frazier, my boss, and said, can you get me into Haiti? Because obviously everything has stopped.

Gen. Keen: [00:18:10] And we were able to fly him through sort of a roundabout way and got him into Haiti in about 24 hours. And then, of course, I think the biggest thing is that we immediately trusted one another. So regardless of what negotiations may be occurring above us, we immediately said we're going to make this work on the ground. And I was able to tell him when he got there, hey, we're deploying a fairly large sized force. I know we didn't ask permission and we're not coming under the UN mandate and umbrella, but that doesn't mean that we're not going to be working in accordance with your mandate here and be totally transparent in what we're doing. And I'm not going to go anywhere without telling you what I'm doing. And he said, We will provide the security. You focus on humanitarian assistance. That didn't mean that we weren't securing herself, but it meant that we were very much relying upon the UN to provide the security umbrella, that we would provide humanitarian assistance. So what I like to tell our troops at the time is we are coming to Haiti to provide humanitarian relief through the outreach of an open hand, not through the barrel of a gun. And we are going to work side by side with the United Nations military and make sure you coordinate at the tactical level and get to know those community leaders and military leaders. So I think it did make a huge difference, obviously, and we would meet almost daily if we weren't physically linking up somewhere. We were talking by telephone about what was going on.

Amb. Merten: [00:19:35] And let me just say to that, don't want General Keen to sell himself short on the diplomatic skills. This was a very tricky, touchy issue. The UN had just had their largest loss of life of any peacekeeping mission they had ever had. I think it still is the largest loss of life, but they were sensitive to the fact that they didn't want to be bigfooted by the United States. This was largely Latin American countries who made up Minnesota, and they were very sensitive to the fact that we were going to come down and Bigfoot them. And General Keen, through his relationships but also through his diplomatic skills, was very good at reassuring General Pajota that this was the way we were going to work. This out and you stayed in very close touch with him. And that relationship couldn't have been better. We had no incidents of friction or problems with the UN. And I got to say the relationship was really collaborative and it provided a good lesson for us to show the Haitians that we were coordinated, working together in support of the Haitian people. So it was really a master class for all of us.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:20:37] Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about Haiti today. You both continue to be very engaged in the country. What are US interests today in Haiti?

Amb. Merten: [00:20:46] Haiti is a neighbor and a friend, and Haiti is a country that played a role in helping us secure our own independence from the British back 200 plus years ago. Haiti is a place that has suffered more than its fair share of bad luck through natural disasters, through obviously the earthquake, but also through successive hurricanes. It was bad hurricane in 2008. We even had a hurricane in 2010 that hit the southern part of the country. We had Hurricane Matthew that struck just in 2016, did a lot of damage. So Haiti still is subject to these challenges. We really want Haiti to become a more prosperous, more self-reliant country. And our goals through our diplomacy, through our development assistance, through our partnership is to encourage Haiti to continue to move in that direction. Obviously, Haiti has a lot of things working against it. It's a country that remains one of the poorer countries in the hemisphere. Events like the earthquake have not helped in terms of allowing Haiti to build up a group of experienced public servants again in these ministries. Many of them died. So they've had to get new people, retrain them to rebuild. So it's been challenging, but I think Haiti has definitely moved forward. Is it where any of us would like to see it be today? No. But I'm convinced that continuing to work together in partnership with friends and neighbors in the region, Haiti will get where it needs to be.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:22:13] General, You were describing earlier your engagement at the university, bringing down MBA students to engage and support companies down in Haiti. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Gen. Keen: [00:22:23] Through relationships that was able to maintain after leaving Haiti and obviously through the example set by Ambassador Merten and all the others from our diplomatic corps and various agencies within the government that were working there, when I arrived at Emory University, it was at a business school. I was immediately and have been impacted on my interaction with our student population, both our undergraduate, but particularly the MBA population I work with. And we had looked at various international and global programs that we have around the world, and many of those are with the countries that you would expect in the Western Hemisphere. We send students to countries like Brazil, Chile, Panama, those that are developing businesses. And so we talked a lot about and our students actually brought this to me and said, why don't we go and do something in Haiti? Because we could learn a lot in terms of the challenges of what the Haitian companies are encountering, but also what US companies that are trying to do business in Haiti. So we started that discussion. So this last January, working with a colleague in our full time MBA program who really works with a lot of global companies and looking at real world problems with MBA students trying to resolve those. We developed a program where we call Leading with Impact, and the MBA students really tackled it with tremendous vigor and we did a lot of things before we went.

Gen. Keen: [00:23:44] We worked with a company there that's Haitian owned, founded, and the idea is to help them create more jobs in Haiti for Haitians. And in this case, we were working with a company called Caribbean Craft to help them create an online business to augment what they were doing in other ways. And we will continue that program. Working with both a nonprofit and for profit company. And the students did this during the week of the anniversary of the earthquake because I wanted them to see that most of these companies, they have the post earthquake stories that they're telling. In this case with Caribbean craft, they were devastated by the earthquake. Everything they had was almost destroyed. And so we went to the Hotel Montana, went to a memorial ceremony on the eighth anniversary of the earthquake. When I got back with the students, I asked him, well, what was the most impactful part of it? And they said attending the memorial service and seeing the families and hearing their stories and feeling like they could contribute a little something to helping business create more jobs.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:24:43] Move into the future. Yeah, Well, after Haiti, Ambassador Merten, you became a US ambassador to Croatia. After leaving Haiti, General Keen, you became commander of the Office of the Defense representative at our embassy in Pakistan. What lessons did each of you take from working together in Haiti to the subsequent leadership positions?

Amb. Merten: [00:25:02] Well, for me, it was very fortunate. You know, Croatia is a country that's still recovering in some respects, at least psychologically, from the effects of the breakup of Yugoslavia. But they are very, very proud of the fact that they are NATO members and allies of ours. And I have to say that I think the best part about our relationship with Croatia was our military to military relationship. And I was really proud to be able to play a role in that. I think my experience in working with General Keen and his colleagues was helpful in that we were able to really build a terrific relationship with the Croatians on the military side, and I think it continues to this day and they are terrific allies. I think my experience with General Keen helped me understand the value of that.

Gen. Keen: [00:25:48] Well, and likewise working closely with Ambassador Merten understanding and watching him work with the government of Haiti officials, prime ministers, through a tremendous crisis event that really brought the country to its knees, enabled me when I went to Pakistan, because I arrived in Pakistan about a month after Osama bin Laden was killed. So our relationships were.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:26:09] Needless to say.

Gen. Keen: [00:26:09] They were pretty rock bottom, although as General Mattis, who was the CentCom commander at the time, reminded me, don't assume they can't get lower. And they did get lower about six months later when we had another tragic event occurred. But what I learned from my experience working with Ambassador Merten in the aftermath of the earthquake was that we just need to work with our partners. In this case, for myself in Pakistan was with the Pakistani military and finding common ground where we could work together regardless of all the difficulties and differences we had and what that might do in terms of helping us with what we were doing in Afghanistan, but also what we were doing. And sometimes that wasn't a lot of space there, but it was this idea of, okay, one, we need to get to know each other a little bit personally and spend time and investing with one another. Because I must say, the time in Pakistan was probably the most difficult time I had to spend in that type of environment. But it was in some cases, it gave me greater insight to the great work that our diplomats do in these extremely difficult situations. We find ourselves in.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:27:14] Well, as we move to conclude our discussion today, I wanted to ask you, you both obviously have been leaders in collaboration across our military and our diplomatic corps For those who are upcoming in the system, who will be the future leaders, what would you recommend that they do? I mean, obviously interact with each other. Et cetera. But is there any special thing that you think they should bear in mind in working together to, again, project our interests and protect our country?

Amb. Merten: [00:27:42] Over the past 20 years, we've seen how often we have had to work together in operations like in Haiti, but and also places like Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. And I think it has made the Foreign Service a better organization. Our interaction, because we have learned a lot in terms of how to look after our people, how to build a little bit more of a esprit de corps. That morale matters. And I think those are lessons we have taken from in many respects from our interaction with the US military. And I think that's helpful. I think we learn from each other and I think we do bring different skills to the table. I think the skills are complementary, complementary with an E, I would encourage any of my colleagues in the Foreign Service who have an experience, who have an opportunity to have an experience with the US military to do so.

Gen. Keen: [00:28:33] I would just double down on that, if you will, in terms of encouraging all of our military young leaders as they go up through the ranks to take every opportunity they can, whether it's through educational opportunities or assignment opportunities to work with other government agencies, particularly within our embassy country teams. What I found in Haiti and what we often talked about was it wasn't about command and control. We can do that pretty easily because we grow up doing that. It was really about your skills and your ability to collaborate, coordinate and cooperate, and then how do you communicate constantly to enable that to happen in sort of a seamless way in Haiti? As I remind our military when I talk about this, the United States Agency for International Development was the lead federal agency on this. The military may have had 22,000 troops there, but we were working at the direction and in support of, obviously, the ambassador and USAID who was orchestrating this. It was our responsibility to make sure that we were totally integrated and that we were doing so in a manner that would sort of bring a unity of effort to this problem set, I think, post 911. What I see with the military, because certainly in the early years we were exposing a lot of our very junior officers to a lot of this. But as we get away from that in the years coming, I think we want to keep those lessons that these are skills that are extremely important for you to be able to do well.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:30:00] You did a tremendous service to this combined collaboration, coordination and communication in the tremendous work that you did in Haiti. Thank you for sharing it with us. We really appreciate you participating. In our podcast series. This has been a new episode in the series. The General and the Ambassador, A Conversation. Thank you for listening. The series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find the podcast on all major sites and on our website. GeneralAmbassadorPodcast.org. We welcome input and suggestions on the series. Please let us know your thoughts via General.Ambassador.podcast@gmail.com.