Before he retired, my uncle John Cogdill worked as a foreign service officer at US embassies. 

“I was what’s called a criminal investigator. Sort of like an FBI agent-but for the Foreign aid program,” he tells me over zoom call from his house in Bethesda, Maryland. “And so we had to find out if people were trying to steal our money by bribing people to win contracts, or trying to have goods made in places like India or China instead of in America. The foreign aid program has money, and people will always try to find ways to get their hands on that money.” 

He recalls an instance when colleagues of his at USAID traced a spike in Peruvian infant deaths to a man paying a bunch of teenagers to carelessly manufacture oral rehydration salts in a New York Basement.

Another time, John investigated a man who used ten different bank accounts to bribe a foreign service national US embassy employee to give him millions of dollars worth of contracts for building and supplying schools and hospitals in Bolivia. This man’s crime was so severe that John and a colleague had to trick him into flying to America so that they could arrest him and put him on trial. “We had an FBI agent with us to help arrest him.” John recalls, “And as soon as our other colleague walked off the plane right behind this man, we said to him, ‘Oscar, you’re under arrest.’ And he was taken away in handcuffs and put in the federal jail in downtown Miami.”

During my uncle’s employment with USAID, John and his wife Linda lived overseas in four different countries: Honduras, Senegal, Kenya, and Egypt. 

“My title was called regional inspector general for investigations,” John says, “I had responsibility for investigations in 10 or 15 different countries. So if I was in Senegal, I would have to go to the Ivory Coast or I would have to go to Liberia, or I would have to go to Guinea.”

While John was employed with the US embassy, Linda worked as a teacher in the International schools, which were modeled after traditional American schools and were usually attended by the children of American and foreign diplomats.  Both John and Linda also had to pass top secret security clearance and a rigorous physical examination before John was even hired. 

“When I started at this in the mid-1980s, there was no internet, there were no cell phones and the landline was not very good-especially if you were trying to call from one African country to another.” says John. So the embassies used something called cable communication, which was similar to a telegraph, to send encoded messages to other embassies and set up meetings. It took a day for messages to be delivered, and these meetings often had to be set up a week in advance. “They may still be using cables,” adds John. “There are a lot of times when you don’t want to say things on the telephone, because in all of these countries, somebody may be listening.”

“And before both of us went overseas,” Linda interjects, “We had terrorism training. Every day we had to check our cars for ‘soap box’ bombs, and we had to learn how to avoid groups of Africans who would stop us on the road to carjack us. It’s not that the people are bad, it’s just that…”

“Everybody in the world thinks that we’re all millionaires,” adds John. 

I ask if living overseas for so long changed John and Linda’s perspective on the world. 

“Well, it showed me really how there’s no one right way to do things,” says John. “We may think that our way is the best way to do things, or the only way to do things. But you realize that there are a lot of different ways to do things that can be better. 

“For example, when I worked in Senegal, the people in my office would come in and greet every other employee every day and shake hands with them. And we think it’s crazy.”