Proceed to Peshawar. George J. Hill
to the trip after it was over, which we will see later. There was a lot else going on in Afghanistan that was of concern to Engert, and he and his wife and daughter were in India, two of them sick with typhoid, just before the trip began. He would not have wanted to admit that the trip happened without his knowing it, and he was good at bluffing his way through things. In fact, his entire life as a diplomat was never quite what it seemed to be, but it was, nevertheless, a remarkable career. It was only after he died that his granddaughter pieced together the facts of his life.50
The Honorable Cornelius Van Hemert Engert (1887–1985), CBE, was the first U.S. diplomat to serve as a resident chief of mission in Afghanistan. Engert was the envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary in Kabul in November to December 1943, at the time the Enders-Bromhead-Zimmermann mission was proceeding in the NWFP.
Engert was born in Vienna, 31 December 1887, the son of John Cornelius Engert, who was of Dutch origin but a Russian citizen, and Irma Babetz, a Hungarian Jewish physician. Jane Engert says that her grandfather, Cornelius Engert, falsely claimed that he was a great-nephew of Alexander Francis Charles Engert, who was from Hamburg, Germany, and that the Dutch and German Engerts were separate lines from the seventeenth century on. Furthermore, although Cornelius claimed California as his boyhood home, he did not grow up there. His birth name was Adolf Cornelius Van Hemert-Engert. His father had immigrated to St. Petersburg and married for the second time in 1881; he adopted Russian citizenship and died a year later. His wife, Cornelius’ mother, went back to her native Hungary, although she also may have returned from time to time to St. Petersburg. After many attempts to have the first name, Adolf, deleted from the official record, he apparently had succeeded by about 1924.
He had gone to school at the K. K. Oberrealschule in Gorz (then Austria-Hungary, now a town divided between Italy [Gorizia] and Slovenia [Nova Gorica]). He traveled to America with his mother in 1904, attended high school in California, and became a naturalized citizen. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1908 and a master’s degree in 1909 from the University of California, Berkeley, and he was a law student there from 1909 to 1911. He was a Le Conte Memorial Fellow at Harvard in 1911–12, with a scholarship awarded by UC Berkley. He did not matriculate at Harvard, but he nevertheless struck up a friendship with President A. Lawrence Lowell and they continued to correspond for many years. His granddaughter said that from his perspective, “the more times he and Harvard were mentioned in the same sentence, the better.”51
Engert started working for the U.S. Foreign Service as a student interpreter in Constantinople in 1912, and he was American vice-counsel in Chanak in 1914. He was vice-consul at Constantinople, February 1915; vice-consul and interpreter at Baghdad, August 1915; on detail at Constantinople, September 1915 to December 1916; and on detail in Syria and Palestine, December 1916 to April 1917. He was attached to Viscount Ishii’s mission to the United States from Japan in San Francisco. Engert then served as assistant to and secretary to the American legation at The Hague from August 1917 to September 1919. He served as second secretary to the legation in Tehran from 1920 to 1922.
In May 1922, when he was chargé d’affaires in Iran, he became the first American diplomatic officer to visit Afghanistan. His letter to Robert Woods Bliss on 2 September 1921 requesting the trip included the comment that he had made to the Afghan minister to Persia, suggesting “that it would be a good thing for this country if some American oil experts could be allowed to sniff around a bit and see if there was anything in Afghanistan.” Bliss replied on 12 December 1921 that Engert could make an “entirely informal and unofficial” visit to Afghanistan on his way home, at which time he “would doubtless be able to gather much information which would be useful to this and other Departments of the Government.”52
To reach Afghanistan, Engert traveled to Kabul via ship from Persia through the Persian Gulf to Karachi, by train from Karachi to Peshawar, and by car through the Khyber Pass from Peshawar to Kabul. He was received with great courtesy, and was told that only two Americans had ever been there before him. While he was in Kabul, he heard that Lowell Thomas needed help securing a visa, and he nudged the emir to offer a visa to Thomas. Engert submitted a “Report on Afghanistan” to the State Department in 1923, more than two hundred pages long, which became the department’s unofficial guide to the country. Engert then served at the State Department in Washington, DC, from October 1922 to September 1923. During this time, he worked on a deal securing oil concessions from the Iranian government for American oil companies. He was, however, always somewhat controversial. Jane Engert called him a “social climber.” She said his efficiency reports commented, “Engert had never been taught in his youth the enormity of false and inaccurate statement.”53
Engert met his future wife, Sara Cunningham, in San Francisco. She was from a wealthy and well-connected family and had been a nurse in Europe in World War I, for which she received the French Médaille de la Reconnaissance. In September 1923 Engert began eight years of service in Latin American countries, beginning with Cuba, San Salvador, and finally Venezuela. Their first child was born on 10 December 1924; the little boy died at ten hours of a cerebral hemorrhage. Sara had two more children: Roderick (who was interviewed for this book), born in 1925 in El Salvador; and Sheila, born in 1929 in Venezuela.54
Engert served as first secretary to the American Embassy in Peiping (now spelled Beijing), China, from June 1930 to June 1933. After serving in Cairo from June 1933 to July 1935, Engert was named consul general and resident minister at the American legation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Engert and his wife were instrumental in saving the personnel of the U.S. mission from rioters during the collapse of Ethiopia as it fell to Italy, and he and Sara were commended by FDR. As a result, he developed a personal relationship with the president, which he utilized outside of State Department channels.55
In January 1937 Engert was named consul for the legations in Tehran and Kabul, and in August 1940 he was posted as consul general in Beirut and Damascus, where he served during the invasion of France. The minister to Iran, Louis Dreyfus, was accredited by Washington to represent the interests of the United States in Afghanistan. On 28 January 1941 Dreyfus was directed to visit Kabul, and he was expected to make the trip when the weather was good enough in the spring. He was told that “an American diplomatic mission had not been established [because] our interests in Afghanistan continue to be slight.” Dreyfus reported to Washington on 27 June 1941 that “the Afghans have a sincere and deep rooted desire in the absence of a friend or neighbor to whom they can turn to have a disinterested third-power friend to assist and advise them and they have always hoped that the United States would be willing to fill such a role.”56
Over the next several months, the Afghans and Americans negotiated over what the senior U.S. diplomat would be called. It was difficult, because travel and message traffic was slowed by the war. The break in negotiations was made by FDR personally, who wrote on 16 March 1942, “Why not name the regular Minister to Afghanistan now and get it over with.” Nine days later, Sumner Welles recommended Cornelius Engert. Charles Thayer was given approval by the Afghans to move to Kabul on 22 April, and he opened the U.S. legation on 6 June 1942. Engert presented his credentials to the king on 25 July 1942.57
At the same time, the India issue was a problem. It would always be there in connection with Afghanistan, whether India was unified or divided. At the time, it appeared that India would be unified after independence, but as we will see below, Engert was considering a “Pakistan” solution. FDR was concerned about India, too. He wrote to John G. Winant, who was ambassador to England, on 25 February 1942: “In the greatest confidence could you or Harriman [W. Averell] or both let me have a slant on what the Prime Minister thinks about new relationships between Britain and India?”58
On 2 August 1942 Enders sent a warning telegram from Peshawar to Engert in Kabul. It shows the ease with which Enders moved across the border, and that he worked for G-2 in New Delhi as well as in Kabul. Enders visited the Valley of Tochi in Waziristan, and he would visit it again on the trip to the NWFP.59
There is nothing in the trip reports that suggest that Donovan or the OSS had any role in the initiation of the Enders-Zimmermann trip, or that Engert recorded anything about the trip in his notes, or that he made a definite statement about it after it was over. There was, however, in Engert’s correspondence