Power of Personal Diplomacy

Under a searing African sun last July, Eritrean rebels burst into a U.S. naval radio station near Asmara, Ethiopia, and seized Steven Campbell, 27, a civilian technician, and another American, James Harrell, 41. The kidnapers' apparent motives: extort ransom from the U.S. and end American aid to Ethiopia. They dragged both men across 100 miles of desert in twelve days to a tent outpost. There the guerrillas held them virtually incommunicado on a diet of rice and canned vegetables.

On hearing the news, Campbell's father Len, 54, of Bettendorf, Iowa, started an epic one-man campaign to win his son's freedom. An imposing, 6-ft. 6-in. man who works as a parts Inspector at an International Harvester tractor plant, Len Campbell first prodded the State Department to negotiate for his son's release. Officials told him of the U.S. Government's policy of not bargaining directly with or paying ransom to terrorists, but assured him that everything possible was being done. This was not enough for Campbell, who now says: "I never thought the State Department would do anything."

He began to shower letters and phone calls on some 100 bureaucrats and politicians, including Congressmen and Senators--with little response. He tried to phone President Ford and Henry Kissinger but never got through. He made four personal pleas to the rebels, including a radio appeal that Radio Ethiopia never broadcast. He went on U.S. local television more than 30 times for interviews and personal entreaties. When the rebels threatened to execute his son last fall unless the U.S. handed over $5 million ransom and dismantled its military bases in Ethiopia, he stepped up his appeals to the State Department, but it would not pay.

Fed up, Campbell pushed his own diplomacy. Early this year he raised $4,800 from folks in his home-town area and borrowed $6,000 to help pay for a trip for himself and another son to the Sudan, where he hoped to meet with the rebels. He speeded up his plans when the guerrillas announced that they would kill both captives at the end of April unless they got $3 million in ransom. Campbell finally reached Khartoum late in the month accompanied by two British journalists, who had befriended Steve in captivity, while covering the rebels. The newsmen brought along a documentary film they had made on the Eritreans. Campbell's bargaining ploy was a promise of publicity for the rebels in the U.S. The journalists showed the film to the guerrillas, and apparently they were impressed.

Sewer Pipe. Last month, on the day that Campbell was to meet with them, the guerrillas released his son and Harrell in Port Sudan. No money was passed. The State Department apparently played no role in the release, though it now says cryptically that it carried on "unremitting" efforts to free the men by negotiating through governments that have contact with the rebels. Harrell returned to his family in Milwaukee. With his Ethiopian wife, Steve Campbell flew home to Bettendorf and exulted: "I feel like I've died and gone to heaven. I had no idea there could be so much love." But all the battles that Len Campbell had fought left him weary and cynical. As he said: "I feel like I've been dragged through a sewer pipe and met all the rats along the way."

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