Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [117]
In 1996, the Hutu and Tutsi were slaughtering each other again. More than 150,000 Burundians had already died. And when Tutsi paratroopers took up positions at key government outposts, the capital city’s television station, and its radio station, the Hutu president of the country, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, knew he couldn’t cling to power much longer. Burundi didn’t have much history of peaceful transitions of government—both of Ntibantunganya’s predecessors had been assassinated. To avoid the same fate, the president headed for the U.S. embassy and into the arms of Steven Fox, who says he was then a young State Department officer.
The United States agreed to give Ntibantunganya sanctuary, and it became Fox’s job to figure out how to get him safely out of the American facility. For eleven months, Fox worked out the logistics of the former president’s new life: Where would he live? How could he be kept safe? The American ambassador secured a commitment from the new military government that Ntibantunganya wouldn’t face prosecution if he left U.S. custody—and even more important, that the new Tutsi leadership would guarantee his safety.
With that assurance in hand, Fox’s work came down to the little things. Fox found a house that had been owned by the local Heineken brewery. He arranged for cars. He worked with Ntibantunganya on security, settling on a thirty-man detail of trusted former officers and men from the Hutu tribe. But the ex-president balked at moving into his new home, announcing that he didn’t approve of the furniture the government had agreed to provide for it. Fox scrambled to find suitable furniture from the embassy’s own surplus, and obtained approval from Washington to have movers install it in the new home.
Fox and Ntibantunganya passed long hours together. The cooped-up, bored ex-president was happy to have someone attentive to talk to. Over the months, he gave Fox a tutorial on central Africa, from the inner workings of the coffee industry to Burundian politics.
The episode was a success, as such things go. Ntibantunganya was transferred from the American compound into the former Heineken house. He was not killed, and he began a new life in exile. In 1999, he published a memoir in French, whose title loosely translates as A Democracy for All Burundians.
Fox was moving on as well. After the stint in Burundi, he transferred to the U.S. embassy in Paris. Although Paris has always been a favorite posting for American diplomats, Fox found it stifling. He also found that there wasn’t much for him to do. Soon he applied for and was accepted by the prestigious INSEAD MBA program in Fontainebleau, France. That city, just under an hour’s drive south of Paris, is the site of the celebrated château of Fontainebleau, which was built by French kings and used as a home by Napoleon. In 1999, Fox spent a year there, as a member of a 300-person class that included students from forty countries. Some of the people he met there form the core of his European business contacts today. He didn’t know it yet, but his experiences overseas were laying the groundwork for an excellent résumé in the world of international financial consulting.
Fox briefly left the government to work on an Internet start-up, but after 9/11 he decided he had to get back into government service. He still held his security clearances, which made it relatively simple to reapply to the government. He says he worked as a State Department desk officer on Israeli-Palestinian issues and counterterrorism. Fox went to Algeria in 2003, after its civil war, running the political and economic section of the U.S. embassy. There, he roved the North African country in an armored Chevy Suburban with two bodyguards.
But soon Fox left the government again. This time, he did a stint in the New York office of Diligence, learning the ropes of the private intelligence