A series of tough breaks
Volunteer service didn’t go as planned for Franklin Pierce “Pancho” Huddle, Jr. in 1966.
He arrived at his site in Tunisia to find “the end of the world, or you could see it from there.” It was the third country the Peace Corps had trained him for, after Ethiopia and Libya, and the circumstances were not in his favor.
Images: Medenine square (l) courtesy of Tunisia Travel Inspiration & granaries (r) courtesy Michael Kaplan at Facebook.
For one thing, he was deployed without the ten weeks of French language training the other volunteers had received, a required language in Tunisian classrooms. For another, his Tunisian boss denounced him as a spy.
The Peace Corps pretty quickly ushered Huddle out of the country, then retained him less than two years later for his talent with linguistics, hiring him for two seasons to direct Arabic training.
It was surreal. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, dozens and even hundreds of people would follow me downtown. Never could pay for a meal. (Pomegranates and camel head soup brought my weight from 195 to 155). Soon thereafter, the principal took away my classes saying in Arabic: “You are a spy from the spies of Egypt!” He was a Francophile and I was the Arabist enemy. Cue the laugh track.
This provided an invaluable lesson about resilience in navigating government bureaucracy, material that served him well as Ambassador to Tajikistan in 2001. There he stood up a platform from which to deploy secret operations, arms, and money into Afghanistan immediately after 9/11.
What else would you expect of someone who survived an airline hijacking ending in a crash on the Indian Ocean, killing 125 other passengers?
Profiles in Service – More about the forthcoming book (Moonshine Cove Press, Dec 2025).
A Spy of the Egyptian Spies – Pancho’s Peace Corps experience.
Ben East Books 
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