OUR MAN IN SINGAPORE

U.S. Ambassador - »

‘There are two separate Koreas?’

By JIM ANDERSON

WASHINGTON (UPI) - Ambassador X, a product of the American Midwest, looked quizzically at his staff members in the U.S. Em- bassy somewhere in Southeast Asia.

“Did you say there are two separate Koreas?” he asked. “How come?”

Staff members. also swallowed hard when the ambassador said, “You

mean there has been a war between India and Pakistan?”

Another stopper shortly after his arrival was, “What's Islam?”

Ambassador X is cited by the author of an article in the Foreign Service Journal to point up charges President Carter has not kept his 1976 campaign promise to stop paying off political debts with diplomatic assignments.

Neither Ambassador X nor the author, who served as the ambassador's deputy for eight months, is iden- tified in the journal, which is published by the American Foreign Service Association.

But United Press’ In- ternational has learned the ambassador is Richard Kneip, a former governor of South Dakota who is now serving as U.S. envoy to Singapore. State Depart- ment sources said the author is Edward Ingraham, a respected career diplomat now on temporary assign-

ment at a Midwest university. The article says Am-

bassador X is an example of the “true political appointee, those who have no visible qualifications for the position and ... who have been selected for reasons that have nothing to do with

the conduct of foreign policy.” The article says the

ambassador had never heard of: Gandhi, Nehru, Sukarno, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Chian Kai- shek, to say nothing of such other notables as China's Deng Xiaoping and French President Giscard dEstaing.

Kneip, 47, is owner of a wholesale milk equipment

distributorship in South Dakota, his official biography says. He was

governor of South Dakota from 1971 to 1977 and served as chairman of the Democratic Governors and as chairman of the Mid- western Governors Con- ference.

The article describes him as “a decent man whose only real fault is that he is a fish out of water and who can be

cniucized only for volun- tanly leaping out of the pond.”

The author is sharply

cntical of Carter for raising expectations that his ad- ministration was going to change the practice of using embassies for political payoffs. About 70 per cent of

the current 150 U.S. am- bassadors are career diplomats, but the author

said some of the political appointees are “of stunning unsuitability for the job.”

One of those, the article said, is Ambassador X, who sometimes averaged less than 21 hours a week in his office and would = drop everything to. entertain visiting friends, occasionally entertaining them in_ his office while he conducted business.

“One day,” the author said “] found to my alarm that one of them (a visitor) was actually sitting in on a rather highly classified country team (official) meeting.”

The author concludes, “It seems quite clear that the present administration, despite the brave words of 1976, is no more ready than its predecessors to take the vow and swear off the use of

ambassadorships_ for political patronage and reward.”

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