In the glass-walled first-floor breakfast room of the Beach Cove Resort in coastal South Carolina, I’ve come to listen in on a group of old spooks and spies. We happen to be sitting just now in the path of Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm that is threatening to submerge the lower floors of this North Myrtle Beach resort’s twin sixteen-story towers. Over our coffee cups we can see violent waves crashing on the white sand outside.
“Don’t park on the ground floor of the garage,” a young woman at the front desk advised when I arrived last night. This morning, even as the electricity shuts down and, after a dark pause, the generator kicks in, no one seems too concerned. An earnest young waiter’s priority is finding hot sauce for my eggs.
The former spies and their relatives have come from all over the country to this rain-smacked hotel for the 2024 All-Kagnew Station Reunion. Decades ago, Kagnew Station was a U.S. military base in the Horn of Africa, near the city of Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. Operational from 1943 until 1974, by which time Eritrea had become a province of Ethiopia, the base was one of the premier “deep space” listening posts of the Army Security Agency (ASA).
My ID badge, strung around my neck on a white shoestring, reads, in red, special access – all areas. Below that: “Ann (Harnish) Neumann, ‘Kagnew Kid.’” Rodney Harnish, my father, had been stationed at Kagnew in 1966 and 1967. The designation “Kagnew Kid” feels not quite right, but I won’t quibble. I was conceived and born stateside after my father returned from Africa; to those who do quibble, true Kagnew Kids were born there.
Also on the badge is an image I’ve known my whole life, a white shield with a braid of blue along the lower borders. At its center is the head, in profile, of a red gazelle, the emblem of Kagnew Station. I still have an original patch my father brought back from Kagnew, slightly faded and stained, with the same red gazelle, forever facing west.
The Gathering Storm
Though many of the specifics of the Kagnew mission are still classified—my dad never talked about what he did there—we know that Kagnew’s servicemen were charged with intercepting and translating signals from Russia, collecting information about the Soviet Union’s military and space missions.
The project began two years before World War II concluded. A second lieutenant with the U.S. Army found his way to the sweltering desert of Eritrea in April of 1943. As investigative journalist James Bamford tells it in his book Body of Secrets,
Tests showed that Eritrea, just north of the equator and with an altitude of 7,600 feet, was practically an audio funnel, and an intercept station was quickly set up, as was a large relay facility. Operational spaces, containing ten-inch-thick bombproof concrete walls, were built underground.
In the early 1960s, Bamford reports, six thousand tons of steel were transported to the secret base. Two massive satellite dishes were set up, one eighty-five feet in diameter and the other 150 feet wide—“possibly the largest moveable object ever built” at the time—with the intention of picking up signals from space.
Coming out of World War II, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had separate units of codebreakers. By 1949, the combined Armed Forces Security Agency was created, which absorbed the ASA. But it wasn’t long before government officials decided that the AFSA was “a step backward.” As Bamford recounts, in October of 1952, in the waning days of Harry S. Truman’s presidency, “Truman issued a highly secret order scrapping the AFSA and creating in its place a new agency to be largely hidden from Congress, the public, and the world.” This was the National Security Agency (NSA), which over the years grew into the global surveillance behemoth we live with today.
The Kagnew veterans who gathered for the reunion at Beach Cove Resort had seen the early growth of the Cold War surveillance state, as well as the declining power of the British and American empires in the Horn of Africa. I wondered whether the passage of time had given them a way to understand their work, or the ever-changing role of the United States in the world.
I’d also driven ten hours from New York City—despite the storm, despite not being a true Kagnew Kid—for a more personal reason. My father died nearly twenty years ago at the age of sixty. I didn’t have a chance to really understand how he felt about his military service. I thought maybe I’d see something of him in the men who gathered at the reunion.
Glory Days
On the second floor of Beach Cove Resort, the Hospitality Room was the main gathering place for attendees. In the past, organizers Tom Daly (who served at Kagnew from 1970–71) and Dan Minchen (1969–71) had filled attendees’ schedules with local tours and events. But feedback told them that what Kagnew veterans and their families really wanted was more free time to sit together and talk.
That’s the first time Eritreans were sold out by a pact between Ethiopia and the West.
This room—set up with large round tables; a raft of snacks and drinks (including boxed wine); printed photos, souvenirs, books, and a computer slide show of photos—was their response. Another table was covered with items for a silent auction, the proceeds to go to Wounded Warrior, a New York-based nonprofit that supports veterans. (The silent auction raised $450.)
I arrived at Beach Cove with the goal of finding three people: someone who knew my dad, someone who knew the author Paul Betit, and someone who knew my father’s old army buddy Tom McCandless. Paul Betit was a former Kagnew intelligence analyst who wrote a potboiler about a murder in Asmara titled Kagnew Station. He later became a newspaper man in Maine and died in 2020. Betit’s book had been instrumental in helping me to imagine what life was like on the base, and it brought the geopolitics of the time into relief:
“Our ability to continue to operate the facilities at Kagnew Station must not be jeopardized,” Hilton told Murphy. “Earlier this year, the North Koreans captured the Pueblo, a U.S. Navy ship doing the same kind of business as our people out at Tract C. That was embarrassing, to say the least. If we were to lose our facilities here, it would be devastating.”
My dad’s friend Tom McCandless was known as “Mac.” They met at Kagnew and stayed in touch over the years. Mac had reenlisted, married, and had a little girl. I vaguely remember the three of them visiting us in the hollow where we lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. My stepmother, who didn’t like anyone, really didn’t like them. I don’t think it was a warm visit for anyone. After my dad died, I wrote to Mac to let him know, but I never heard back.
Conversation in the bright Hospitality Room was as winding as the famously serpentine road from Asmara to Massawa, a port on the Red Sea. One person would leave a chair, and another would sit down, bringing new stories, redirecting the talk with new questions.
Johnny Corbin (1970–74) launched into a tale about riding his 360 Yamaha Enduro when he saw another service member run off the edge of the road, risking a sheer drop of hundreds, if not a thousand, feet. Unable to get the bike back on track, the rider continued until the gravel ran out and laid the bike over on its side. “That was me!” Hugh Norris (1970–72) yelled.
Corbin and Norris matched up a couple of details: where they were on the road; what the model of the bike was; the direction the rider fell. It turned out that it hadn’t been Norris, nor was it on the road to Massawa as Corbin thought. But the feeling of shared experience was real. I have photos of my father riding a Matchless motorcycle on this road. When his service ended, he crated it up and shipped it home, where it sat in the corner of his shop until he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 1995. The down time gave him a chance to get the old Matchless running again.
Jack Creamer (1970–72), who was at Beach Cove with his wife Kay, had arrived at Kagnew after my dad left, but he thought Dad’s name sounded familiar. When I asked about McCandless, Creamer laughed. He’d bought Mac’s white 1960 Chevy Corvair from him before he left the African continent. It was “affectionately known as a Nader nightmare,” Creamer emailed me a few weeks after the reunion, because, like the title of Ralph Nader’s 1965 book—written early in Nader’s career as a consumer advocate—the Corvair was “Unsafe at Any Speed.”
Jim Bezy (1968–70), a tall and gregarious septuagenarian in shorts and an ASA hat, told me that he had known Paul Betit, the author of Kagnew Station. Bezy and I made fast friends at breakfast. He and Betit had served together at the ASA radio facility of Phu Bai Combat Base in Vietnam before being transferred to Kagnew. But Bezy didn’t know my dad. Nobody here did.
The Horn of Africa was considered vitally important to American security in those days, Bezy told me, but it was “even more so now.” Ethiopia receives one of the largest amounts of U.S. aid each year, after Afghanistan and Israel. Tensions today, because of Israel’s disastrous war on Palestine, have limited shipping on the Red Sea, the site of 30 percent of the world’s container traffic.
Since October 7, 2023, Palestine-loyal Yemeni Houthis have attacked international tankers traveling the Red Sea more than eighty times, sinking two vessels, seizing one, and killing four sailors. “They’re not far from us,” Bezy said. It took me a beat to realize that by “us,” Bezy meant Kagnew Station.
Long and Winding Road
When my father died, I wanted to know more about the years he’d spent at Kagnew. Just months after my sister Malinda and I had spread his ashes at the edge of a corn field in Pennsylvania, I made my way across Russia and down the Adriatic coast to Egypt and on to Ethiopia. I’d hoped to get to Asmara and whatever was left of Kagnew Station.
Whatever information the dishes scooped from the communiqués of Russia and its allies, servicemen like my dad sorted, prioritized, decoded, and translated it, passing on relevant tidbits to the appropriate U.S. agencies.
It was September of 2007 when I arrived in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia, which uses the Ge’ez calendar, was celebrating Enkutatash, the New Year. It also was the turn of the millennium; proudly, the nation still spins around the globe seven-and-a-half years behind the rest of the world. The Black Eyed Peas were on their way to the Addis Hilton for celebrations, and expat Ethiopians had streamed in from all over the world. But rumors of bomb threats and talk of heightened tensions with Eritrea were everywhere. Rather than traveling on to Asmara, I stayed in Addis, captured by the calendrical regression, imagining it was the year 2000 and my father was still alive.
When Ethiopia and Eritrea normalized relations in 2018, almost twenty years after the disastrous border war of 1998–2000, I convinced my sister to travel to Asmara with me. We traipsed around the capital, two middle-aged white women, conspicuous as we sat in cafés drinking sweet tea and eating donuts, waiting for our mandatory hotel registrations and travel permits and eyeing Eritrea’s aging freedom fighters.
We gawked at Asmara’s famous stock of Italian-built architecture, which the World Heritage Foundation describes as “an exceptional example of early modernist urbanism at the beginning of the 20th century and its application in an African context.” And then we made it to that site of perfect listening conditions. We walked through the unguarded gates of what was once Kagnew Station, now used by vegetable and housewares sellers as an open-air market, and around the grounds of what had been, briefly and impressionably, our father’s old stomping ground. The massive antennae were long gone, sold for $6,000 to a local merchant who cut them up for scrap.
After that, we rode white-knuckled in a ramshackle van down the switchbacked road to Massawa. We took photos of each other sitting in front of the crumbling Banco d’Italia, a colonial-era bank that has been sitting in its own rubble since Russian and Ethiopian bombs destroyed it during the 1991 war for Eritrea’s independence. Our credit cards could not be used anywhere in the country; we appealed to my sister’s husband to wire us cash.
These visits cemented my need to stay abreast of what was happening, culturally and politically, in the Horn of Africa. The region was no longer an “exotic place” where my military father had once served, but a part of the world that I was compelled, by my own history and by my country’s actions there, to care about. In 2020, when the current government in Addis Ababa began a war with Ethiopia’s northernmost province, Tigray, which shares a border with Eritrea more than a thousand kilometers long, I traveled to Ethiopia to report the story.
The war was an example of shifting loyalties; Eritrea and Ethiopia, newly reunited, worked together to subdue Tigrayan leadership. The two-year war was characterized by horrendous atrocities, the death of a staggering half million people, and the sexual assault of at least 120,000 women, according to Genocide Watch. Local journalists were indiscriminately jailed; international journalists were deported. Days after I left Ethiopia, my fixer was detained for six weeks; once released, he fled to Rome to seek asylum. I traveled to Rome in October 2023 to document his journey to becoming yet another Ethiopian expatriate.
Mixed Signals
During these years, I learned more about American involvement in the Horn of Africa. “Eritrea’s course was to be shaped by the whims of topography and climate,” Michela Wrong writes in I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. The discovery that radio signals from as far away as Finland, Brazil, and Australia could be picked up on the Hamasien plateau, where Kagnew Station was built, was to forever change the course of Eritrea’s development.
There was a lot of beer, motorcycles, and “four floors of whores,” the reunion vets told me.
The story of how Americans came to establish a base near Asmara begins with Italy’s colonization of a new territory they named Eritrea in the late 1800s, after promising sovereignty to Ethiopia in exchange. That’s the first time Eritreans were sold out by a pact between Ethiopia and the West. The Italians poured resources and people into the colony, building roadways and a railroad, the Littorina, from the seethingly hot port at Massawa to a new capital on the plateau, Asmara. There the weather was temperate but dry, the air crystal clear. Along with the colonial investment of infrastructure, Eritreans were given a few rights—including limited municipal employment and meager education for young children—but largely lived in a segregated society defined by racism.
In early 1941, during World War II, the British, who were part of the Allied coalition, fought the Italians, an Axis power, in Eritrea and succeeded in taking control of it. The British initially favored “granting” Eritreans their independence. But in the spring of 1943, a U.S. Army second lieutenant named Clay Littleton, who was looking for a site for a radio station, landed in Asmara, where he found what remained of Radio Marina, used by Mussolini to communicate with the Italian naval fleet. That site became Kagnew Station.
Soon, Eritrean independence was ruled out by the Americans, who saw working with Ethiopia, a nation with which they had already established good relations, as more politically expedient than trying to negotiate with Eritrean independence fighters. Landlocked Ethiopia petitioned hard for governance of Eritrea in part because it would allow them access to a port. The United States supported their bid because they weren’t about to risk losing, as Wrong wrote, “one of the best places in the world—some have ranked it the best place on earth—from which to receive and transmit radio signals.”
The United States latched onto Kagnew and consigned Eritreans to the subjugation of Ethiopia’s feudal and ruthless government, a step back in time after the small rights conferred by colonial Italy. That’s the second time Eritreans were sold out by a pact between Ethiopia and the West.
The site proved indispensable to the U.S. Army almost immediately, intercepting and decoding a transmission of Germany’s dispositions in 1944 that was sent from the Japanese ambassador to Germany to his superiors in Tokyo. General Eisenhower got just what he needed for a successful Normandy invasion.
In 1953, the United States signed a twenty-five-year “base-rights” agreement with Ethiopia’s leader Haile Selassie, consigning Eritrea to colonial rule for another four decades. The Eritrean Liberation Front solidified a handful of years later. In 1966, a young Isaias Afwerki joined the ELF, yet Eritrea remained under Ethiopia’s governance until 1991. Isaias—stubborn, sly, and spry—still leads Eritrea today.
Kagnew was initially used by the Army and Navy for strategic communications (STRATCOM and NAVCOMMSTA, respectively), according to a classified NSA document released in 2007. In 1962, the construction of a site that could intercept Russian telemetry information was begun at Kagnew, named STONEHOUSE. The objective of the huge satellite dishes at Kagnew was to not only gather information about Russia’s space launch technology and apply it to American deep space endeavors, but to track developments in Russian weapons technology in order to advance America’s own military.
Whatever information the dishes scooped from the communiqués of Russia and its allies, servicemen like my dad sorted, prioritized, decoded, and translated it, passing on relevant tidbits to the appropriate U.S. agencies. In exchange for this access, Selassie knew he could extract weapons and more weapons. If Selassie wanted the United States to pony up “solid gold Cadillacs” as rent for Kagnew, then “he could have it that way,” the Pentagon told an incoming ambassador in the early 1960s, according to Wrong.
Selassie continued to worm his way deeper into the United States’ good graces, sending a thousand Ethiopian troops to assist in Korea. Over time, the United States grew to see Selassie as a stabilizing force in the region, so close to the Middle East. As Wrong writes, a “Christian ruler hemmed in by Moslem regimes, the emperor was clearly a natural ally.” To the Americans, Selassie was a bulwark against the spread of communism on the continent, an extra vote in the United Nations, and the level-headed founder of the Organization of African Unity, guaranteeing that the old colonial borders on the continent would remain right where they were.
By the 1970s, the operation of many of the U.S. intelligence collection sites was interrupted by revolution or closure. “STONEHOUSE was the only NSA-operated facility in the proper location to receive the data from Soviet deep space vehicles,” wrote Dwayne Day at The Space Review in 2022. But it began to unravel with the overthrow of Selassie in 1974. Kagnew’s days were numbered: the Army left soon after, while Navy service members stayed on until 1977, when the ELF threatened their safety. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam—the new ruler of Ethiopia and a communist allied with the Soviet Union—ultimately forced them out.
A 2021 post on Station Hypo, a website dedicated to Naval Cryptology, notes that the lessons of STONEHOUSE and other telemetry-intercepting sites are codified in subsequent treaties with the Soviet Union, SALT I and SALT II: “These provisions [in the treaties] attested to the value of the information gained by both parties through the use of TELINT [telemetry intelligence] from each other’s missile and space developments.”
Kagnew, some sources say, was the name of the warhorse of a well-known Ethiopian general, Ras Makonnen, who was also the father of Selassie, the country’s last emperor. But according to Bamford, the name comes from an Ethiopian word that means “to bring order out of chaos.” Maybe both versions are true. But Kagnew, in the Hospitality Room at Beach Cove, carried a different meaning. It was shorthand for an era of American excellence, the glory days of the aging veterans reminiscing around me.
Hometown, USA
Social life was a large part of the Kagnew experience. There were photo clubs, ham radio clubs, and every kind of sports club. A TV station had kids’ shows (Captain Kagnew!) and sports shows, and it broadcast Mission Impossible and the Apollo 14 rocket launch. There were drinking clubs on base, like the Oasis Club, where my dad was a member, but also garage parties off base that Tom Daly, one of the reunion organizers, would host.
There were also two R & R centers that Kagnew service members and their families could visit. One was in Keren, the second largest city in Eritrea to the northwest of Asmara, and one was in Massawa, where waterskiing—“parting the Red Sea with two sticks”—was a highlight. “I had two sticks, and Moses only had one,” Bezy told me with a laugh. I have photos of my father parting the Red Sea too, wearing swim trunks and hanging onto a rope as he raced over the clear water.
“You can’t describe to somebody all that was going on,” Daly told me. “It was kind of like small-town Americana. If you see some of the pictures, it looks like hometown, USA, especially the officers’ housing. It was one of those special places.” At breakfast the prior morning, Bezy had used the same word, Americana, to describe life on base.
But there were hijinks too. The military referred to the ASA men as “yellow-clawed chicken fuckers” in reference to their shoulder patches, which depicted a snowy eagle grasping two bolts of lightning in its claws. There was a lot of beer, motorcycles, and “four floors of whores,” the reunion vets told me. They grew beards and wore uncommonly casual clothes while on duty. Wrong credited these antics to a sense of superiority among the men, writing, “Throughout their special training back in the United States, they had been told they were the ‘top 10 per cent,’ valued for their superior intelligence, problem-solving capacities and communication skills.” The Kagnew vets I met were deeply proud of their work; I imagine that pride can look and function like something else on a cocky twenty-two-year-old far away from home.
By Friday night of the Kagnew reunion, the hurricane was long gone. News of its destruction farther north and east trickled in with arriving attendees who had been delayed by the weather. I hitched a ride with Jack and Kay Creamer to Legends, a theater on Hollywood Drive off Highway 17. Tickets had come with our registration for the reunion, and though attendees had little idea of what was in store, we knew there would be impersonators.
Our group occupied two or three rows in the center section, and when the lights dimmed, a steady stream of entertainers took turns on stage: mulleted Rod Stewart, black-suited Blues Brothers, a male country music singer in too-tight jeans that none of us had ever heard of, Whitney Houston, and, of course, Elvis.
First in a leather jacket, then in a sea of rhinestones on royal blue, Elvis crooned through enormous sideburns, over licentious hips and a throbbing leg, that he was all shook up, a hunk of burning love, caught in a trap. Karate kick. It was too good and too campy to be cynically dismissed. Halfway through his crowning set, the King paused to recognize the Kagnew veterans, somehow knowing they were in the house. He asked them to stand as he belted out “God Bless America,” as only Elvis could. The veterans were deeply moved by the honor of recognition, serenaded by one of America’s best-known entertainers, applauded by the rest of the audience.
The Afterlives of Others
The United States’ surveillance work in Ethiopia didn’t end when personnel pulled out of Kagnew Station. Today, some of the same features characterize the two nations’ relationship: a one-way flow of military aid to Ethiopia in the name of counterterrorism, maintaining Ethiopia’s status as strategically and religiously a natural ally of the West, and a vast surveillance apparatus that has been used by Ethiopia for its own oppressive domestic purposes.
In 2017, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that the United States had set up counterterrorism listening posts in Ethiopia, based on NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. Starting in 2002, Ethiopia had used these posts to spy on neighboring countries Yemen, Somalia, and Sudan.
Once the uniting force of the region in America’s eyes, Ethiopia has become a divider, while the United States—deeply implicated in the carnage in the Middle East as well as Ethiopia’s repressive capabilities—has no moral authority to push for peaceful solutions.
The U.S. army trained Ethiopia’s military and security agency in surveillance techniques in exchange for local language capabilities and well-placed intelligence operations centers, HRW’s Felix Horne wrote. “This wasn’t just U.S. intelligence analysts sitting in Ethiopia. . . . It was the NSA actually training and transferring this technology to the Ethiopian army and government.” These resources were later used to commit extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, and mass arrests in the Ogaden region, the southeastern province of Ethiopia, in 2007 and 2008, according to HRW. Other regions were also surveilled by the state, per the HRW report, the Ethiopian leadership seeking to brutally crush dissent.
Although the Snowden papers note an end of the agreement between the Ethiopian military and the United States in 2010, the HRW report speculates that it continued after that date. The Intercept’s Nick Turse wrote, also in 2017, that Ethiopia was engaged in the common practice of using the cover of counterterrorism efforts to violently quash domestic dissidents, sometimes torturing and otherwise abusing Ethiopians under the guise of thwarting the Islamist militant groups al-Qaeda and Shabab. Turse notes that Snowden-leaked NSA documents from 2010 state, “NSA-Ethiopian SIGINT [signal intelligence] relationship continues to thrive.”
Over the course of the twenty-first century, as America waged its war on terror, dissatisfaction and dissent had been growing across Ethiopia, with protests and demonstrations in various regions. Ultimately, the ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, was forced out of power in 2018. That year, after some internal jockeying, Abiy Ahmed became prime minister of Ethiopia and initially promised to liberalize the government’s approach to protest. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for making peace with Eritrea, and the world welcomed what looked like a new stable era in Ethiopia. But soon, Abiy embarked on the war in Tigray. Subsequent federal efforts to violently silence protest in other provinces, like Oromo, Amhara, and Benishangul-Gumuz, followed.
Today the Horn of Africa is still in turmoil, and Abiy seems determined to make it worse. Talks with Egypt regarding a massive dam that Ethiopia is completing on the Blue Nile, which contributes 85 percent of the water in the Nile River, fell apart when Abiy and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi couldn’t agree on conditions for filling the reservoir. Turkey, a NATO member, has hosted negotiation talks between the two countries, to no avail. Sudan, the nation the Nile flows through on its way to Egypt, was caught in between just as it erupted in a horrifying civil war, ongoing today.
For several years, Abiy has also worried neighboring nations with statements about Ethiopia’s need for a port on the sea, which the nation lost when Eritrea became independent in 1991. He has said that one of the most populous nations on the continent—Ethiopia is home to over 125 million people—deserves its own naval port. On New Year’s Day 2024, Abiy made the first step toward getting one. He signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the breakaway Somali territory of Somaliland, promising recognition of the territory’s independence in exchange for a port on the Red Sea. Somaliland has sought independence since 1991, but is not recognized by either the Somali government or any other global nation. The MOU inflamed relations with Somalia, which shares a roughly thousand-mile-long border with Ethiopia.
Meanwhile, as Houthis in Yemen attack shipping on the Red Sea in response to Israel’s war in Gaza, the United Arab Emirates are becoming increasingly militarily involved in Horn politics. Loyalties shift, and conflict swirls. Once the uniting force of the region in America’s eyes, Ethiopia has become a divider, while the United States, deeply implicated in the carnage in the Middle East as well as Ethiopia’s repressive capabilities, currently has no moral authority to push for peaceful solutions—if it ever did.
The Way We Were
While my dad didn’t talk about what he did at Kagnew, it was clear to us that he had some uncommon skills. When his service ended, he kicked around Europe—Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Sweden. I know exactly where he went and when because, in the same box where he kept his old Kagnew Station patch with the red gazelle, he saved all his train tickets, airplane boarding passes, and a Caltex map of Europe on which he’d inked his path across the continent with a blue pen.
I was born soon after he returned to the United States, and my sister was eighteen months behind. Dad took over a business that he had worked for briefly before Kagnew, adding lightning protection to church steeples and tall buildings, redirecting electrical strikes to the ground. Soon, he expanded the work to include radio and TV towers: inspecting, painting, erecting, and dismantling them. He aligned satellite dishes on them to relay communications signals. Some days, he’d climb as many as a thousand feet, straight up.
As kids, we’d used a retired satellite dish as a swimming pool, caulk smeared over the bolts that held it together. A few years later, we could watch every satellite station in the world. Dad mounted a dish on a pad of concrete on a rise above our small garage, and, using a dial on top of the downstairs TV, we’d rotate it to find whatever station we wanted. Each spring, he would go up into the woods to cut down the trees that threatened the dish’s clear view of satellites closer to the horizon, clearing a path to heaven’s electronic stars.
After he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Dad recovered enough to make a final trip to Eritrea. He stayed at the Nyala Hotel on Sematat Avenue, where all of Asmara can be seen from a rooftop bar, and traveled around with Gebre, an Eritrean friend who had once worked at the U.S. base and was employed by the Asmara airport. He came home with all of his receipts (many of them for Melotti beers at the Nyala Hotel bar), rolls of film that he had developed into hundreds of photos, and perhaps some satisfaction that he got to see the place again before he died.
After he returned from Asmara, Dad received a letter from Gebre asking if my father could get a visa to the United States for Gebre’s son. I don’t know if he ever responded; he was sick, dying, and maybe at a loss for how to help. Gebre was likely desperate to get his son out of Eritrea because Eritreans face mandatory, indefinite national service, including military conscription, and high youth unemployment. Nostalgia for an independence movement whose promise has soured into entrenched authoritarianism is widespread.
The years that my father and the Kagnew reunion attendees looked back on so fondly were, for Eritreans and Ethiopians, something very different. The reason that Asmara’s trove of modernist colonial architecture still exists, crumbling around the city’s inhabitants, is because there is virtually no development in Eritrea, which ranks 175th out of 193 countries on the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index. The work that was done at Kagnew helped to build the American intelligence apparatus, but it also helped to create the current conditions under which Eritreans and Ethiopians live.
In Dad’s boxes of ephemera, then, there is something more than a record of small-town Americana in the Horn of Africa: the story of a place used and then forgotten, one that many Americans have never heard of and few will ever see.