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This year marks the thirty-ninth anniversary of the murder of U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph “Spike” Dubs in Kabul. He was appointed Ambassador to Afghanistan in 1978 following a coup d’etat. On February 14, 1979, Dubs was kidnapped by armed militants posing as police.

According to ADST, documents later released from KGB archives in the 1990s showed that “the Afghan government clearly authorized an assault on the kidnappers despite forceful U.S. demands for peaceful negotiations and that the KGB adviser on the scene may have recommended the assault as well as the execution of a kidnapper before U.S. experts could interrogate him.

FSO Bruce Flatin was the Political Counselor in Kabul at the time of Dubs’ assassination. He was interviewed by ADST’s Charles Stuart Kennedy in 1993. Read more from his oral history interview in The Assassination of Ambassador Spike Dubs — Kabul, 1979. Bruce K. Byers who was USIS Press Attaché at U.S. Embassy Kabul from 1978-79 wrote Remembering Ambassador Dubs, and the Future of Afghanistan for American Diplomacy in 2009.  Ambassador Dubs is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Most recently, David Langbart, an Archivist in the Textual Records Division at the National Archives at College Park posted  in The Text Message blog his Tribute to a Fallen Diplomat that includes a 1979 cable about Ambassador Dubs:

While the outline of his career covers all the bureaucratic bases, it does not reflect the ambassador’s achievements nor does it reveal the man.  The editors of the WASHINGTON STAR asked Warren Zimmerman, a former subordinate of Dubs at a posting in Yugoslavia and then working in the U.S. embassy in Paris, for a contribution about the ambassador.  In response, he prepared a draft under the title “Portrait of a Diplomat” that he sent to Washington in the following telegram, from the Central Foreign Policy Files (NAID 654098).

Clips from the Zimmerman’s February 1979 cable below. Click here to read the entire cable via NARA.

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