Going the Last Mile … and the End of the Road

Abstract

I rarely sleep on planes, and was scarcely likely to do so on that night flight to London. I felt tired beyond belief and my thoughts were of unrelieved gloom. From that very first telephone call late at night in Vienna, sixteen months earlier, I had known that to accept the Angolan assignment was a massive gamble, in which the odds were stacked against me. For that very reason I had thrown into it everything I could. Hardest to bear was the fact that, on a number of occasions, we had to come so tantalisingly near success: I thought particularly of the triumph of the elections in the face of daunting obstacles. Even the Abidjan negotiations had come within a hair’s breadth of total agreement on the 38 points of the draft Protocol.