In the mid-1960s a young American teacher in a small central African country became involved with a group of political rebels — former government ministers mostly — who had been active in the struggle for independence. They had fallen out with the authoritarian prime minister, objecting to his dictatorial style. The country was newly independent, hardly a year old. The men advocated democratic elections and feared that the prime minister would declare himself leader for life in a one-party state.

Fluent in the local language, obscure because he was a teacher in a bush school, and easily able to travel in and out of the country on his United States passport, the American performed various favors for the rebels, small rescues for their families, money transfers, and in one effort drove a car over 2,000 miles on back roads to Uganda to deliver the vehicle to one of the dissidents in exile. On that visit he was asked to bring a message back to the country. He did so, without understanding its implications. It was a cryptic order to activate a plot to assassinate the intransigent prime minister.

Within months the plot was set in motion, but it was quickly foiled, all of the intended assassins captured and hanged; other suspects were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. The American was threatened with detention, then expelled from the country as an undesirable alien and prohibited immigrant.

I was that American. I was 24. The country was Malawi, the prime minister, Hastings Kamuzu Banda. My expulsion meant that I was kicked out of the Peace Corps (“early termination”), heavily fined by it for engaging in covert political activity (“unsatisfactory service”) and compelled to undergo an extensive interrogation (“debriefing”) at the State Department. This interrogation took place in the Bureau of African Affairs, where the scowling Jesse MacKnight scolded me before a roomful of bureaucrats, and then rather touchingly softened his tone and implored me to give him details about the underground rebel movement in Malawi.