Episode 41. The Ebola Epidemic in Liberia: Sending in the 101st Airborne Division with General Gary Volesky and Ambassador Deborah Malac

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy (00:00): From the American Academy of Diplomacy, this is The General and the Ambassador. 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. You can find all our podcasts and more information at thegeneralandtheambassador.org. My name is Ambassador Deborah McCarthy. I'm the producer and host of the series. This episode was recorded over zoom and we were very pleased that our guests could participate from their respective abodes. Today our guests are general Gary Volesky and ambassador Deborah Malac. Our conversation will focus on the deadly Ebola epidemic in Liberia in 2014 and 2015. Our guests were on the front lines. Ambassador Malac was the US Ambassador to Liberia and Lieutenant General Volesky was Commander of the 101st Airborne, which went to Liberia to launch Operation United Assistance. Welcome to you both and thank you so much for joining the series.

Amb. Malac (01:16): Thank you for having us.

Gen. Volesky (01:18): Thanks a lot. Great to be here.

Amb. McCarthy (01:19): I'm going to start with sort of an outline of events just to give our listeners some background before we launch into our discussion. In 2014 there was an Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. It began in Guinea and then spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and beyond. As deaths mounted and the virus spread, local governments took action including closing borders. The international health community began sounding the alarm and what was an epidemic far away soon touched US shores. For in the summer of 2014 two US missionaries who contracted the disease were medically evacuated to the US. Luckily they recovered. In the fall a Liberian who flew on his own to the US with the virus died. Later, two nurses who had treated him tested positive, so fear of Ebola spread in the US. Both Congress and the President were under pressure to act. In September, President Obama announced a major US assistance program for the region to include the deployment of US troops and in his words he said, "Ebola is now an epidemic of the likes we have not seen before. It's spiraling out of control. If the outbreak is not stopped now we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected. This is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security. It's a potential threat to global security." Ambassador Malac, General Volesky, you led the US diplomatic and military efforts to respond to this epidemic. If I can start with you Ambassador Malac, you have deep experience in Africa and also Ebola. What kind of disease is Ebola? How does it spread?

Amb. Malac (03:00): Ebola is actually a very difficult disease to catch, despite the fact that we saw a lot of spread across Liberia and West Africa. It requires really up close and personal contact with an infected individual, so in some ways that makes it a little bit easier to protect yourself from infection. But nonetheless, what we saw in Liberia is Ebola in an urban setting, which had never been seen before. Previous outbreaks elsewhere on the continent happened in remote rural villages that were very easy to isolate and to shut down so that this disease did not spread widely. But once it got to an urban setting in Monrovia it had free play and free run of slums and other areas where people were in close proximity.

Amb. McCarthy (03:54): Can you give us a sense of what it was like on the ground? I mean, I've read at one point that Liberian troops fired on people who were trying to break out of quarantine.

Amb. Malac (04:03): The first few months were a very interesting and difficult time. When we had our first cases outbreak in late March of 2014 we very quickly worked with the World Health Organization, with the Ministry of Health. We brought in some CDC technical expertise along with Doctors Without Borders in order to treat the cases that we had. At that time. It was outside of the capitol city and in a much more remote area, so it was still difficult and quite challenging to respond. Well, we thought we had beaten it back and by May the number of cases had gone to zero, or so we thought, and suddenly in June the cases started to reappear. We had them in Monrovia, two cases initially that then very quickly multiplied. At that point, we realized that whatever efforts we had undertaken earlier in the year really had not been effective. It just simply had kept spreading without us being aware of it. So once it hit Monrovia and we saw these large numbers of infected people on a daily basis, it became a much more real situation for everyone, including our staff at the embassy. It became a very difficult environment. People were obviously scared because at that point in time we had no ability to evacuate people. We had no treatment other than to provide supportive care for people who became infected. And if my staff, for example, had become infected with Ebola in June or July or even in August, they would have gone to the Ebola treatment unit along with everybody else. And in those days we didn't have nearly enough beds to care for sick people. So understandably dead bodies in the street, dead bodies in the backs of trucks, people not really knowing what their options were. It was pretty grim in July and August and well into September.

Amb. McCarthy (06:01): And I gather people, as you said, were fleeing the city NGO's were also leaving the country. It took a while for alarm bells to start ringing in international circles. Can you tell us a little bit how you warned U S national security officials that this was a looming danger, that it was spreading rapidly, not only within the region, but it had potential beyond?

Amb. Malac (06:23): From the beginning? We were reporting back to Washington, both through official channels, through front channel cables, as well as through email and phone conversations in order to try to generate some interest, to generate support for the response and to see what we could do. By the middle of the summer, certainly people were focused on the fact that this was a problem and that the numbers were growing rapidly. The challenge for us was, in that summer, if you remember, there was also planning underway for the first US Africa leadership summit, so there was a lot of focus on how that was going to take place, and people not wanting anything to really detract from this very historic event that was about to take place. So you had people on the technical level trying to look at what the US could do to respond to the Ebola outbreak. But meanwhile, everyone, it was all-hands-on-deck planning for this huge leadership summit that was bringing all the African leaders to Washington. It made it a bit difficult for awhile to get people's attention in a very, very focused way.

Amb. McCarthy (07:31): And I assume that summit was canceled, correct? Or did it take place?

Amb. Malac (07:35): Absolutely not. The summit went ahead at the beginning of August. So of course that was, if you look at the timeline in Liberia, was the time when we were perhaps at one of our darkest points. We had the two cases. We had Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, the first two Americans to be infected with Ebola. The good news out of all of that distress over having those cases was that that enabled us to prove the concept that the State Department had been working on, to develop this capacity to evacuate infected individuals back to the United States in order to provide them with treatment.

Amb. McCarthy (08:15): Those were the two missionaries that recovered, correct?

Amb. Malac (08:17): Yes. That is true. That helped to focus people's attention in Washington because once you had Americans affected, obviously it became much more apparent what a threat this could present not just to Liberia, not just to West Africa, but to Europe and to the Homeland.

Amb. McCarthy (08:35): And when the President made his decision to send help including assigning the 101st Airborne Division, General Volesky, I think you told me when we were talking yesterday you were preparing as Commander of the 101st to deploy to Afghanistan, not Liberia, so there was a complete change in mission. Can you talk a little bit about how the 101st was chosen for the mission and how your men and women got ready for this new, very different assignment?

Gen. Volesky (09:04): The division had just gotten back from a deployment seven months prior and was in the process of changing personnel and I had just taken command when this issue started about 30 days prior, you know, we were available and that's basically how we got chosen. As you highlighted, it was a different problem set that we were going to go support and so what we had done previously for all of our assignments or deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, we ran at academics where we brought in subject matter experts for the country that we were going to go to to really educate the division staff and the leadership on the nuances into that operating area that we're going to go into. And so I had asked the Army to help us run a quick academics, about two days, where they brought subject matter experts in from the Department of State, the CDC, and we got the opportunity to speak with Doctors Without Borders on a video teleconference ,and you know, my time in Iraq and Afghanistan, they really didn't want to talk to us. So they clearly were key components or key players in that academics. And so what that did is helped us understand not only the environment we were going into, or going to deploy into, but the virus as well. I mean, when you read what Ebola was in the media in the States, you know, I got the impression it was like a zombie apocalypse and once, as the Ambassador laid out, how difficult it was to get the Ebola virus, we understood that force health protection would be the key and educating our soldiers on how to operate in that environment was going to be essential. What that did was help get the soldiers aware of kind of what protections they'd have to take and really knowledge was really important for us to be able to go there and operate, in a good way. We sent some liaison officers pretty quickly to United States Army Africa. When the President first called out the support, you know, Major General Williams was already there and so he did some great groundwork for the 30 days he was on the ground to kind of set up infrastructure that we could fall in on. So our LNO's [Military Liaison Officers] that we deployed there kind of set that link, that communications link, from Liberia back to our headquarters, to really allow us to start the preparation. And then finally, the Army let me take soldiers from all across Fort Campbell. You know, the 101st was given the mission, but there were engineers that I didn't have in the organization at the time, medical professionals, a number of those resided at Fort Campbell. And so the Army said, "Hey, regardless of what unit they belong to, if you need to, take them." And that helped us deploy much, much more rapidly than we would have. That's really kind of the focus of that preparation. And after we got formally tasked to go, 30 days later we were sitting in Liberia. So it was a pretty quick response. We got some pretty clear guidance from the Department of Defense on what we could and couldn't do. I mean we really were going to provide some command and control, some logistics support, engineering capacity, to build Ebola treatment units and then sustain it. And the big piece is, I talked to the AfriCom Commander before I went to Liberia. He said, you know, what I want you to do is bring speed, flexibility and confidence to the Liberian people. It's the first time in all my deployments that we had not been the lead agency, and so that really frankly helped us, you know, our soldiers had been used to deploying and we would drive that operation, but during our preparation up there we said, look, we are not the lead federal agency. We're going to support USAID. And that helped us really recalibrate our mind. You know, we weren't going into a combat environment. The relationships that we had built on previous deployments were going to matter. I mean the PRT lead in Iraq when I was a brigade commander was Alex Laskaris who ended up being the Ambassador in Guinea. So the network that we had developed on the Department of State side during those deployments, we could leverage as well. And so while the mission set was different, treating people with dignity and respect, helping with the lead federal agency, really the Ambassador, giving us kind of the directions that they saw needed to be done, we were all there to support. And so that's really kind of the way we went about getting ready to deploy.

Amb. McCarthy (12:39): And then on the ground when you got there, I understand there was like the fog of data on infections and deaths. So how did you go about working together on where to put the ETU's [Ebola Treatment Units]?

Gen. Volesky (12:49): You know, I'll let the ambassador talk about ETU placement because it was really done by USAID and the government of Liberia. But when we started to deploy, you know, normally the Army or my units would go on a classified network, we call it SIPR and that's how we operate. Well, when we saw what we were going to do and what we were tasked to do, we realized that there wasn't a threat per se, that we needed to have classified networks to resolve. So we went in right up front knowing we were going to use our unclassified network and we went to the Department of the Army and asked them permission to use our distributed common ground system. DCGS-A, which is an intelligence network. They allowed us to use it unclassified. And what that enabled us to do is get our analysts who are good at analyzing the enemy networks to look at this network of Ebola and take all of this data and put it together and really do some analysis to see what the trend line really was. And I remember Hans Rosling, who was over there, you know when we first threw that into this system and started to breaking down these numbers and all of this data and he saw the utility of it and we sent some folks over to work with him to really help collaborate and set one common operating picture on what this disease was doing. And that was utilized throughout the time we were there. What we also did was we put USAID liaison officers inside my operation center so that they could see exactly what we were seeing. And what we learned from Haiti, I think from the after action reviews I read, was it would be absolutely essential for us to share information real time with all of the stakeholders. And so we put all of them on our accounts. They had complete access to what we had. That really enabled us to speak with one shared understanding and then you know when the Ambassador had our nightly meetings with CDC USA and the rest, we all came from a common ground of information that we could discuss. So I think that as we looked at that in hindsight, going to an unclassified [inaudible] we could bring these systems that we use to manage this data was a good lesson learned that I think we should continue to leverage.

Amb. Malac (14:50): Having the capacity that DoD brought was really critical. We also relied heavily on their logistical and planning capacity, which was really helpful in helping to coordinate across so many different partners. We had CDC, we had USAID, DART [Disaster Assistance Response Team], the Embassy and DoD working, but we were also coordinating with the government of Liberia with multiple other entities, UN agencies, nongovernmental organizations. Having an entity like DOD who had the ability to both and analyze data very quickly to put out , to disseminate that data and to also help in the logistical planning of moving things across the country. Not them doing it necessarily themselves, but helping get people on a common framework was absolutely critical.

Gen. Volesky (15:41): The information that we had and getting it to those folks that needed it most. So I'll give you an example. When we talked about, you know, moving blood tests or blood samples from the field to a test lab, we were not going to be able to do that based on the parameters put on our mission. But in the system that we use to develop this common operating picture, my helicopters could fly anywhere in Liberia in two hours and land and we had the dimensions for the UN helicopter so we could make landing zones anywhere we landed and put this into this tool that we were using on the network that everyone has access to. So if the UN were going to fly one of their helicopters into an area, we already had a surveyed landing zone for them. That was just an example of how we tried to get everybody on the same network with the same operational picture so that they could use it and access it. And then when we left, we left that there so they could continue to use it and we updated it every day. And I think that that was just one example of how you can bring capacity that one organization has and share it with everyone to make it relevant to all of the key stakeholders in a response.

Amb. Malac (16:45): One of the other things that DoD was asked to do by DART and by some of the other actors was to help us train care providers. As General Volesky said, normally Doctors Without Borders doesn't want anything to do with US government, much less the US military, right? For a lot of different reasons. But they came to me and said, this is what we need. And then when General Williams came down in that sort of initial deployment right after the president's announcement, we had an amazing two hour meeting with MSF and all of the members of this military team sitting there going over very carefully what was required in an ETU. How do you design this? What are the things we need to watch out for? I mean an unprecedented sort of cooperation that you would not normally see, but underscoring the seriousness of the situation and the need to be able to get things done. So when DoD did deploy, one of the things that they did bring as part of their mission was to set up a training facility where could train Liberians, NGO workers, anybody who came, as a result of this, to move through in a very accelerated manner, to be trained to work in an ETU. That doesn't get focused on very often, but I think it was absolutely critical as we were ramping up dead space to make sure that we also had the health personnel to go along with it.

Amb. McCarthy (18:13): A lot of times in a moment of crisis and disaster assistance ,when tons of agencies on the US side arrive, there are often disconnects on who's on first, who's in charge of what, and obviously guidance is needed from those who were in the leadership positions. What disconnects were there between the US participants in the whole assistance effort?

Amb. Malac (18:34): Certainly from my perspective as Ambassador, we had very few of them across an interagency basis on the US government side. Our largest disconnect frankly, was with Washington. We worked very well together at the ground level. I didn't give people much choice about whether or not they could work together. They pretty much had to get behind us, but you know, it didn't take much convincing because I think we all saw the scope and the magnitude of the problem and just wanted to be helpful in some way and figure out how we could tackle the problem. Were there differences of opinion sometime about how to accomplish certain things? Definitely, but they were always worked out in a very collegial and cooperative manner with lots of frank discussion and conversation. The challenge was with Washington, I think, you know, people who wanted to be helpful within the broader Washington interagency and making decisions or trying to decide what would work best on the ground when we were best placed to make those determinations. And I don't want to paint it as some huge rift, but it was clear that sometimes we just had to do what we needed to do on the ground because we knew it would work or it would make, it made sense and not necessarily pay a lot of attention to what Washington might think we should or shouldn't be doing.

Gen. Volesky (19:58): When I first got there, the military tasking matrix and the authority to approve missions that USAID needed to have done that required military assets was being held at a really high level. It was approved at, higher than me. And so when I got on the ground, I talked to the operations officer at AfriCom and said, I understand the intent that you're giving us, letting us operate within that. So we were able to come to an agreement of what requests I could approve out of hand and what ones I had to go back up to ask approval for. So I think initially we could have responded a little bit faster with some of that delegated authority. But again, after I got there and I talked to the team, they delegated that to me and I think that enabled us to do a lot more rapidly. I agree with the Ambassador that we didn't have any issues. I think her meeting that she had every night with the key players, all the key leaders there really helped kind of establish the priorities not only for the next day, but kind of make sure we were on track. There was really no end state. I mean everyone, we wanted to contain the virus or alleviate human suffering. The plan that I was told is, hey, we're going to deploy the a hundred first for six months and you're going to have another six month deployment behind you with another two star headquarters and maybe a third one, because no one really knew what this virus was going to do. You know, we recognized pretty early, probably at about the three month mark that things were going well and we needed to continue to work our way out of a job. And my commander told me when I got there, he said, don't establish anything that you can't sustain. And so one of the challenges was who's going to pick up these things after the military mission goes? Because what we didn't want to do is create a capacity that relied on the military to do it. And so some of those discussions of who's going to take over the sustainder and logistics help? Well, the World Food Program. There's a lot of discussion of how we're going to transition this big effort. I felt like the Ambassador and I were the continuity for everything because USAID changed people in leadership every two or three or four months. We stayed for the duration. So you know, I had a number of different DART team leads. So you're trying to build a team and if we see that in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of services deployed in different timelines. So it seems like there's always a transition of people. And so one of the things we recommend and we came back is when you set the date people got to stay. Those key leaders have to stay because you're always in transition if you don't. And so that was probably the military tasking matrix authority I thought we could have done a little bit better on. The continuity of key leaders and staying there for the duration I think would be important. What I thought we did really well and I tip my hat to the Ambassador, is her ability to make sure that we understood who the supported agency was and she just helped us, you know, work across the interagency to make sure that we were putting the right resources at the point of need and I thought that her efforts to make sure we were all collaborating and sharing information, that really went a long way. And I think that if somebody were asking me, what lessons do you learn for continued operations, that is the key one, transparency and collaboration, and just making sure, if you don't care who gets the credit, you can do anything. And I think that's kind of the mantra that we live by during that deployment.

Amb. McCarthy (22:53): I wanted to turn and inject something else into the conversation and that is the cultural and political context in which this large assistance effort took place. Liberia was established by freed slaves from the United States. It is English speaking, predominantly Christian, and democratic. It's president at the time, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was close to the United States and many of the top leaders are US educated. On the other side, there are local customs in the country, that included customs related to burial practices, taking care of the dead, which made it difficult to protect people from the Ebola virus. So can you tell me how this cultural context helped and or hindered the US assistance effort?

Amb. Malac (23:39): Obviously one of the biggest challenges was the burial practices and the fact that when people went to funerals or they had a dead family member, people would wash the body, would embrace the body. When you have Ebola and you have a dead body where it's immediately deceased, it's the highest level of viral load that you're going to find. So it's highly, highly, highly infectious. So you can see quite easily that if someone has a funeral for someone who has passed away from Ebola, it's a perfect storm of spreading the disease. Extra care has to be taken on how you dispose of those bodies. They have to give them a safe burial to avoid the spread of the disease. And when the numbers became unsustainable, when we had tens of tens of tens of new infections in Monrovia every day, there were just too many bodies to be able to provide a safe and dignified burial for that. President Sirleaf made a very difficult but necessary decision that they would move automatically to cremation, which is something that's practically unheard of in Liberia, but there was no other way to be able to deal with the numbers of bodies. This was in August when this decision was made and she was roundly criticized for that decision, but it was the right one and she took that advice from our CDC personnel, from health personnel with the UN, from technical experts who understood the environment, but understood that there was also a need to be able to deal with this in a way that didn't prolong the outbreak, which we knew was going to last for a while in any case. They very quickly created a situation where they were able to take a very small crematorium that had, was used by the very small Indian population and turn it into a larger operation and they were burning bodies at night because they had so many to dispose of. Once we were further along in 2014 we were able working with the government to identify a space for a cemetery where bodies could be taken and buried in a safe and dignified manner. So after a number of months of continuing to cremate bodies, by 2015, they were able to start to bury them and to lay out an Ebola cemetery, if you will, where people could at least go and know where their family members remains were. The other part of this on the positive side, I would say, is because Liberia is very close to the United States. Because of that good relationship, there was a proclivity and a willingness on the part of our own government to be responsive in the face of this huge outbreak, which no one had ever seen before. We knew that Liberia didn't have the capacity to respond. We knew that they were going to quickly be overrun in terms of their health system. There was never any question that the US government would be helping. I still remember the morning after President Obama's announcement that the military was deploying to Liberia. There was a complete change in the air and the atmosphere. We had been in a very, very dark place in Monrovia because of all the increasing numbers of deaths, the numbers of cases, the lack of spaces to treat people, but there was a palpable change in the environment and the atmosphere overnight. On my way to work that morning, people were honking horns. They were waving. They were giving me thumbs up. Just, I mean it, I didn't have that long of a commute to the office. It was really amazing because people felt like someone had heard them that they would be okay because we were coming to help.

Amb. McCarthy (27:30): There were a number of ties because some of their military leaders have been trained in the States. And then also if I'm correct, we have the Michigan National Guard that deploys to Liberia regularly, so there were ties there that would have helped addressing some of the cultural gaps.

Gen. Volesky (27:45): Michigan has a state partnership program that they do and we talked to them as part of our academics to kind of get their read on that. I think the people took a very active role in changing their own cultural norms. I'll give you an example. I had a driver that was a gentleman from Monrovia that was driving us to the city because clearly we would never have survived trying to drive ourselves. I was glad I had him. He could get me to and from. He's a great, great man, but I asked him one day, I said, I've been there probably three or four days. I said, Hey, how do you say good morning here? Because you know I go to Iraq or Afghanistan. I know the greeting of the day. He goes, well, I can't show you. I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, we greet each other with a handshake, but we're not shaking people's hands here. And I was thinking, you know, I come from Spokane, Washington, if I told 180,000 people don't shake hands anymore, how successful would I think I'd be? I'm not sure I would be. But they were, everybody was all in. I mean when you went to a venue, a store, whatever, you wash your hands, people got their temperatures checked. I mean everyone was all in on that. And so I think to be able to change their own cultural norms, the President's example and the things that she put in place, people embraced. And I remember taking the Minister of Defense on the helicopter ride with me. He said, you know, I've lived here my entire life. He said that in the months you've been here, you've been to more places in Liberia because you can fly. I said, well, come with me. And so we were flying on the helicopter he said, you know when President Obama said that he was going to deploy the military, we got hope. But the second I saw your helicopters flying in Liberia, I got confidence that we could beat this thing. And so as the Ambassador said, we were the action figures, frankly, there were a lot of people doing a lot of things. So that active symbol that we were in it with them. I think that meant a lot for them. You know, for our soldiers, we got a great, great sense of satisfaction out of this as well. You asked me earlier, you know, how do you change your mindset from a combat deployment to this one? We've gone to Iraq and Afghanistan a number of times and we knew there was always going to be somebody coming behind us to fill up. But this is one time that those soldiers accomplished that mission and they felt very, very gratified with it. And so we talked to a few of them periodically and they always bring that mission up, about how successful, how much, they have a lot of personal satisfaction out of it. You know, they got to meet great people in Liberia, they got to work with great teammates, they got to make a difference. And so I think it took everybody at every step of the way to solve that, but I give a lot of that to the people themselves for being able to change their own cultural norms to get ahead of that virus.

Amb. Malac (30:01): It really came down to the leadership of President Sirleaf, her modeling the behavior that she wanted people to model. I mean there were bleach buckets for washing hands and temperature checks at the door of her office. People understood that they were doing it then they needed to do it too. We played an important role as well as the US mission, from the outset, we were providing clear, accurate, science-based information, public health information about behaviors and things that people needed to do and the government really appreciated that because they knew nothing about this disease when it first broke out, they had never confronted anything, they didn't have this basic information. We put our public affairs section on it, making banners, producing posters, distributing them free of charge, linking our websites to the government of Liberia. They were referring people to the embassy as the place. They called us The Castle on the Hill because our embassy sits up on top of the hill in Monrovia and they watched us and they saw that we stayed open throughout, that while everybody else was fleeing in a panic, the US mission stayed.

Amb. McCarthy (31:18): Well, I wanted to ask you a bit about the concerns of your teams. In other words, the health and welfare of both the embassy team and the soldiers deployed. I gathered there was concern particularly for the soldiers that they would bring the virus when they came home. How did you handle these threats to their health and allay the concerns of both team members and the US public?

Gen. Volesky (31:41): We knew we had to communicate that to three different audiences. Our national, our family audiences back at Fort Campbell, and then the international audience. Ambassador Malac has said, you know that public affairs component wasn't just about briefing how we were doing and supporting USA to the government of Liberia, but also how we were taking appropriate force health protection measures for ourselves. Then when we got to Liberia, we started taking our temperatures and recording them twice a day. We took all cases of illness that we had and we kept pretty detailed records of that. And what it showed us was the impact of really focusing on force health protection as the number one priority. I knew that we could accomplish our mission in containing Ebola, but if one soldier got that disease, we failed. And so that was the number one priority we had. And my Command Sergeant Major, my senior enlisted advisor, that was the thing he did for the entire six months we were there, he made sure we were ruthlessly enforcing those health protection measures. And the result was we didn't have any soldier come down with Ebola, frankly, because we were washing our hands and having our temperature taken all the time. I held a few town halls virtually with the families back at Fort Campbell to let them know how we were doing, giving them kind of a window into what was going on in Liberia. And then as you heard, we did controlled monitoring over in Texas for three weeks, and that was less about making sure we didn't have a bowl of and it was giving confidence to our families that their soldier was coming home healthy. I mean we had soldiers that deployed and their wives were pregnant and they were going to come back and there was a brand new baby in the household. So when people were discussing why, whether we should or shouldn't, then comparing, well you know doctors are coming right from Liberia without having to go through controlled monitoring, why are you. It was for our families and you know, I got a number of spouses that called me afterwards and said, hey, we know it was painful but we are confident that our soldiers are coming back healthy.

Amb. Malac (33:29): From the Embassy side, obviously in the early days people were scared. I mean I'll be the first one to admit, when I got the phone call in March that we had a case in Liberia, I had my momentary minute of, you know, fortunately it was a Sunday afternoon and I was home alone, I could like scream at the walls and go, oh my God, we're all going to die. Because I didn't know much about Ebola other than what had been in Hollywood movies, but information is key in situations like this and so we spent a lot of time in the early weeks and months educating our people, so not just our American staff, but our local staff as well. We pushed out information immediately internally and externally about what we knew about the disease, what people needed to do to keep themselves safe, and we had multiple opportunities internally within the mission, through town halls and private meetings for people to ask questions to just get their fears out. I couldn't have been prouder of my team. It took some people longer than others to come to grips, to process the information. Some were fine in 24 hours, 36 hours, others, it took a few more weeks, but we basically had no one who asked to leave and everyone was happy to take on new responsibilities. We did eventually get to the point in early August, we went to order departure for family members, not out of fear for getting Ebola, but because there were no longer very many flights in and out of Liberia, and if we needed to medically evacuate someone in an emergency, particularly a child, it would have been very difficult. The hysteria in the US at the time was such that family members were calling back to our staff, you know, say you're going to die. When are you going to come home? You need to leave. I mean, it made it more difficult to them obviously, but to their credit, they understood that we had a job to do and that we needed to finish the mission. And we were lucky, we made it, we had no cases in our broader embassy community, within our local staff, and we had people living in parts of the city of Monrovia that by all rights should have been exposed to the virus just because of how pervasive it was across the city. But we gave them the tools to protect themselves and they became proselytizers for the accurate messaging as well in their communities.

Amb. McCarthy (35:53): Well, I want to ask you to wrap up here, as we are facing the new epidemic, what did you learn in Liberia that could be applicable today?

Amb. Malac (36:02): Particularly as leaders in a crisis situation, right, which is really the focus of our conversation today, I think the absolute criticality of taking ownership of the issue, communicating clearly and honestly from the outset. If you build that trust that you're providing accurate information and saying you don't know when you don't know, there's nothing wrong with that. I think for me that was the biggest lesson, is that making sure people had an opportunity to get the kinds of information that they need. And secondly, I would say is keeping your eye on the end point. What's the mission? What is it that needs to be solved? And then looking across agencies across talents to figure out how you can get there and get there as directly as possible. And that requires putting aside egos, putting aside who's going to get credit for X, Y, and Z.

Gen. Volesky (36:57): Those are all really great points the Ambassador has made. I would say transparency is one thing that you've got to do. You got to share information and, you know, knowledge is power and you've got to get that power to everybody that is a key stakeholder in solving the problem. I think you've got also over-communicate, saying something one or two times is not going to hit the entire audience and you've got to over communicate where you're at and where you're going to go. And then as the Ambassador says, you just gotta be honest when you've got to change stride because the environment is changing, the conditions have changed. Finally, you have to have a unified message. Anytime, you know when the media, those media that did come, because I had helicopters and a lot of equipment, everyone wanted to gravitate to what I called the army action figures. But anytime I had a media event, I always made sure the Ambassador and the USAID DART team lead were with me so that we always were together and it was one voice, one message. So they knew there was no space, we were shoulder to shoulder on that. And I think the consistency of that message and the transparency and the over-communication where we were was absolutely essential to mission success. And then the other piece is, well USAID was the lead federal agency. There was somebody in charge. I don't think we ever lost sight that the government of Liberia was really who was in charge. As you said earlier, it's a sovereign nation. While we had our ways of thinking, how to do it, the take a right and you'll get there. If they wanted to take a left and we knew we could get to the end state, that was just okay. So as the Ambassador said, you know, who cares where the credit is? Let's get to the end state, whatever route we can get there that's efficient and achieves our goal. Let's just do it that way. Let's all roll well, together.

Amb. McCarthy (38:32): I want to thank you both for these great words of advice and also I want to thank you for your leadership, how you lead your teams in a critical moment. And last but not least, for sharing your inside knowledge and what it takes in these critical moments with our audience. So thank you very much for participating.

Amb. Malac (38:51): My pleasure. Thank you for having us.

Gen. Volesky (38:53): Thank you. And it's great to see the Ambassador again. Ma'am, it's great to see you again.

Amb. Malac (38:58): Same here. I'll come see you in Alabama.

Amb. McCarthy (39:00): And you can zoom to set it up.

Gen. Volesky (39:03): Thank you, Ambassador McCarthy, for putting this together. That was great. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Amb. McCarthy (39:10): This has been an episode in the series, The General and the Ambassador. Our series is a production of the American Academy of Diplomacy with the generous support of the Una Chapman Cox foundation. You can find our podcasts on all major podcast sites and on our website, generalambassadorpodcast.org. We truly welcome input and suggestions for the series. Please contact us general.ambassador.podcast@gmail.com. Thank you for listening.