Window Seat on the World Read online

  Officers can accelerate the process, or their prospects for landing a plum future post, by serving special Unaccompanied tours. These are typically one-year stints in dangerous places such as Kabul or Baghdad.

  Each is considered a hardship post because officers can’t be accompanied by their family members while serving in those locations. The separation is eased with three months of vacation over the course of the yearlong assignment.

  The State Department also covers all the officers’ housing and meal expenses while they’re hunkered down within walled compounds, such as those in Kabul’s Diplomatic Quarter or Baghdad’s Green Zone.

  _________

  FOR ALL THE RISKS and hardships faced by Foreign Service officers, there are plenty of rewards that make the State Department consistently ranked as one of the top places to work within the United States government.

  For example, officers get free language training. For students attending the Foreign Service Institute, it’s a full-time job, meaning their only demand from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. is to study a foreign language.

  Officers living abroad also get free housing and free education for their children, as well as free or cheap domestic help. FSOs are known to flip through binders of various US-owned homes around the world, looking at pictures to choose their future accommodations.

  The fact that the government covers most normal expenses allows officers to rent out their homes back in the States, and to bank what they’d normally spend on rent or mortgage payments while they live abroad in free housing. And their children often attend highly rated international schools akin to private academies.

  The inducements are so rich, Foreign Service officers usually do better financially living abroad than at home.

  The State Department eases their transition in either direction by covering their moving expenses. It also gives them vacation allowances, letting them pack and unpack on either end without having to go to work.

  The three-year tours, the constant requirement to move up or out of the hierarchy, and the need to court future bosses create a unique culture within the State Department.

  You can barely walk down a hall in Main State without hearing a worker rattling off their entire acronym-filled résumé to a colleague. Acquaintances are often introduced by their geographical pedigree: “Glen, this is Mike. We started together in EUR before he went to WHA, and I went to EAP. Now we work together in SRAP.”

  In addition, the relatively short duration of assignments, and the need to find a next posting, can inhibit worker productivity.

  People end up worrying more about their careers than their jobs.

  The first year in a three-year assignment is typically devoted to learning the job. The second is spent actually doing it. The third year is focused on looking for the next assignment and readying to move to it.

  Members of Kerry’s senior staff felt this acutely when it came to dealing with members of the Line. This is a highly selective team that travels in advance of the secretary and sets up his hotels, motorcades, and official meetings.

  No sooner had a Line member learned how to arrange a room, organize a news conference, or place flags than they were heading off to their next assignment. That meant spending time each year training a new group of Line officers—and sometimes correcting the same mistakes before the new members learned the old lessons.

  It also meant that when the secretary’s staff found a particularly adept Line officer, we tried to find a way to ensure they were sent on the most demanding advance trips. We also explored ways to extend their service.

  We didn’t want to keep reinventing the wheel.

  State Department culture is also infused with vertical envy.

  The secretary and his team work at the top of The Building. Accordingly, employees seek to work in or gain favor with those stationed on “the 7th Floor.”

  A top official at the Foreign Service Institute once told a meeting of Kerry-era employees they had to understand the perception of the State Department bureaucracy they were commanding.

  “They are scared of you,” she said of her colleagues.36

  She went on the explain that employees in this “caste system” would embrace members of Team Kerry to the degree they were perceived as close to the 7th Floor, or “how close you rotate to the sun,” in another analogy she used.

  While she defended her explanation by saying, “You need to understand the culture people are working in,” it left some newcomers shaking their heads at the fickleness of the relationship.37

  Another senior State Department official once chuckled as he offered his own description of his colleagues in the Foreign Service. He made the comment as we discussed our annual senior staff retreat and the Chiefs of Mission Conference, when all ambassadors and chiefs of mission are brought back to the State Department to ensure everyone’s diplomacy is in sync.

  “We’re like border collies,” the official told me. “Incredibly smart and take direction well, but if we’re left to our own devices, we end up digging in the garden or knocking over the flower pots.”38

  Spring is a particularly angst-ridden time in the Department, because it’s when annual evaluations—employee evaluation reports, or EERs—are filled out. These performance reviews are the basis for promotions and upward assignments, so they command an inordinate amount of attention.

  Workers actually fill out their own reviews, prompting many to exude a healthy respect for their work. In one employee-focused newsletter, The Daily Demarche, the writer joked that some reports contain phrases like “When Dick is not walking on water, he is busy turning it into wine.”39

  Supervisors must review and comment on the EERs, knowing what they say can make or break an employee.

  After employees bid on their next assignment, potential bosses review their résumés and EERs and make final decisions about whether to bring them onto their team.

  One veteran Foreign Service officer who worked with the S staff described the death knell for any applicant: when a potential boss emails a colleague who’d previously been the applicant’s supervisor and asks for their opinion of him or her.

  If the colleague writes back, “Can I give you a call?” the conversation is largely unnecessary. The potential boss knows their colleague doesn’t want to put their criticism in a written document like an email.

  On the flip side, there’s State-Speak for those destined to get the assignments they want.

  First, they get a “kiss,” meaning an informal acknowledgment they’re likely to get the job. That’s followed by a “handshake,” the term meaning the job is theirs but for the formal paperwork. Officers are frequently seen hugging their friends after they’ve gotten their kiss or handshake.

  Most officers are deserving of what they get.

  Despite the perks, the job requires long hours of work, often far away from their hometown friends and family. An FSO’s kids can be uprooted like Army brats, and their family forced to flee on a moment’s notice if a host nation’s security situation deteriorates.

  They’re targets for foreign intelligence agents and harassment by unfriendly host governments. A car being driven by a Defense Department attaché, who works in an embassy, was buzzed by a Russian Hind helicopter that flew just feet over its hood as he and his State Department colleagues drove between Murmansk and Pechenga, Russia, in July 2016.40

  Many FSOs work their way up the ladder, steadily building expertise over the years in a given geographical or subject-matter area. They’re the go-to contacts for a president, secretary, or member of Congress seeking a quick answer. And they can be founts of wisdom for families in need.

  Once during John Kerry’s term, two young women from Massachusetts were killed in a horrific traffic accident during a flight layover in the United Arab Emirates. Their car split in two after it hit a light pole while they rode with two men they’d met on their plane from the United States.

  The local police called the US embassy to report their deaths, and an F
SO sat in the morgue with their bodies until their families arrived days later. The US ambassador to the UAE wept as she spoke to me about the violent nature of the accident and the dedication of her staff members.

  Another time, I saw a longtime Civil Service employee carefully placing china creamer pots in a microwave oven for a few seconds before a bilateral meeting in the Secretary’s Conference Room on the 7th Floor.

  When I asked him why, Ken Matthews, who once played college basketball at North Carolina State for famed coach Jim Valvano, explained he didn’t want the guests’ milk to curdle when they poured it in their coffee.

  The career goal for Foreign Service officers, the Top Guns of the State Department, is to land a chief of mission assignment as either an ambassador or a consul general.

  An ambassador runs an embassy and is the chief US contact for a host government and its leader. A consul general runs a consulate and is similarly atop the food chain, although just for a geographic region in a country.

  Ambassadors live in a “CMR,” or Chief of Mission Residence. Their top FSO assistant, the deputy chief of mission, lives in a DCM residence.

  Both places are the unspoken gems of Foreign Service life.

  The Chief of Mission Residence in Paris is a gilded structure just doors from the Élysée Palace, where the president of France lives. The one in Rome is called Villa Taverna and has exquisite gardens and a vast wine cellar. The CMR in London, called Winfield House, borders Regents Park and has the second-largest yard in the English capital.

  The first is across town—the backyard at Buckingham Palace.

  The beauty of these homes, many bought decades ago at pennies on the dollar, is why a president often awards such ambassadorships to key political supporters. It’s payback for helping them raise money for their campaign or supporting them when others felt they were political long shots.

  Not all great CMRs go to presidential patrons, though. The one in the Cubanacan neighborhood of Havana largely fell off the radar while the United States had no diplomatic relations with Cuba.

  That meant the chief of mission job went to a Foreign Service officer subsequently entitled to live in a two-story mansion covered in coral limestone, decked with marble floors, and accented with a pool and tennis court on grounds stretching for five acres. Local lore is it was intended to be a winter White House for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Some Foreign Service officers winced when President Obama normalized relations with Cuba and then stayed at the CMR while he and his family visited the island in March 2016.

  They were happy with the policy, but guessed future presidents would realize the quality of the posting and its home—more than half the size of the White House—and reserve the ambassadorship in the future for a donor rather than a career diplomat.41

  _________

  SECRETARY KERRY’S CONNECTION TO the Foreign Service and the lingering emotions following the Benghazi attack prompted him to pay close attention to diplomatic security throughout his tenure.

  He vowed to do all he could to avoid a repeat of that tragedy, and started nearly every day’s 8:30 a.m. senior staff meeting by asking his undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, about the safety and security of US missions and diplomats serving abroad.

  Kennedy himself had a special sensitivity to the questions, having overseen embassy security as M for Secretary Clinton.

  Kennedy was revered within the State Department for his mastery of the budget process and seeming ability to get anything done, but he became a Republican bogeyman following the Benghazi attack.

  He was accused of ignoring requests for additional security resources from Ambassador Chris Stevens before the attack, and then protecting Clinton during congressional investigations that followed. He also was a focal point for investigations into her use of a private email server while at the State Department.

  Despite his emphasis on employee and outpost safety, Kerry regularly conceded he couldn’t eliminate all risks. That was especially true when diplomats stepped “outside the wire” and worked directly with locals living beyond embassy and consulate gates.

  Famed World War II journalist Edward R. Murrow, who later went on to head the US Information Agency, once underscored the necessity of such expeditionary work.

  “The real crucial link in the international exchange,” he said, “is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.”42

  Anne Smedinghoff’s first steps toward those final three feet began with her choice of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as a college and international relations as her major.

  As she neared her senior year, a friend encouraged her to take the Foreign Service exam. She did and saw the application process through, including a day of tough interviews in May 2009. Her friend opted instead to head to the Peace Corps, a common feeder for the State Department.

  Smedinghoff spent the summer after her graduation riding a bike four thousand miles across the country to raise money for charity. In December 2009, she received a letter confirming her acceptance into an A-100 class beginning the following February.

  She arrived during a 2010 storm dubbed “Snowmageddon” for the eighteen to thirty-two inches it deposited across the region. The city was paralyzed by one of the top five snowstorms to hit the area since government record keeping.

  Smedinghoff graduated from the Foreign Service Institute and, in August 2010, lucked into her first choice for her stint as a Consular Affairs officer in Caracas. She used her Spanish-speaking skill while interviewing Venezuelans seeking visas.

  Less than two years later, Smedinghoff put in for an assignment she felt was more vital to US foreign policy interests: a slot as a Public Diplomacy officer at the US embassy in Kabul. By April 2012, she’d been selected. In July 2012, she reported for duty.

  “She seemed very comfortable sort of operating in a foreign culture, just getting around day to day and navigating the logistics,” Tom Smedinghoff said of his daughter during an interview with the Chicago Tribune after her death.43

  Service in an Unaccompanied posting such as Kabul can be challenging, even for those like Anne Smedinghoff, who didn’t have a spouse or children.

  FSOs spend virtually all day, every day in a walled compound, their routines subject to change if a siren blasts out a “duck-and-cover” alarm. More senior people live in apartments, while others are housed in so-called hooches: stacks of shipping containers outfitted with a desk, TV, bed, and bathroom.

  The closet contains a Kevlar helmet and flak jacket, while illustrations taped to the walls explain the meanings of the different alarms and the most direct routes to safety bunkers.

  There is free food, as well as decent gyms, a pool, and a bar ringed with protective sandbags affectionately called The Duck and Cover.

  The close quarters force people training for an annual marathon to run repeated circles around the inside of the compound walls. They also create extremely tight bonds between coworkers who spend virtually all waking hours together.

  Smedinghoff engendered such endearment from her colleagues, despite being just twenty-five years old and only two years into the Foreign Service.

  “Everyone will tell you that Anne Smedinghoff was a rising star in the Foreign Service, and that she was smart, savvy, and strategic. All of that is true. But Anne was also witty, irreverent, and stylish,” one friend, Stephenie Foster, told me. “She was virtually never still and strode across the embassy compound with both flair and purpose.”44

  Secretary Kerry’s first visit to Kabul followed earlier stops in Israel, where he joined President Obama on an official visit, and Jordan, a friendly Arab nation the secretary viewed as pivotal in a task assigned to him by the president: renewing peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.

  Amman, the capital of Jordan, also served as the staging area for trips by the secretary to Baghdad, as well as across the snowy peaks of Afghanistan en route to Kabul.

 
; A short helicopter flight later, the secretary landed in an Afghan soccer field used as a heliport for the International Security Assistance Force. He was greeted by General Dunford, a fellow Bostonian who commanded the NATO-led ISAF military force.

  The two rode in an armored convoy across the street to the US embassy, where Kerry set up shop in the living quarters of Ambassador Cunningham. A big focus of his meetings was the ongoing number of US troops in Afghanistan, something President Obama had pledged to cut.

  Smedinghoff led the way for each of the secretary’s movements, as she would the following day through the women’s job fair and the helo flight back to Kabul International Airport.

  She smiled as she posed for a photo in front of the secretary’s plane before he took off on March 27, 2016, for France and the return flight to Washington.

  Eleven days later, she was walking with the group in Qalat when she was killed by the suicide driver’s bomb.

  The news reached Kerry as he motorcaded to Andrews Air Force Base for his next trip, that first around-the-world journey to Turkey and onward through Japan.

  “Everything that our country stands for, everything we stand for, is embodied in what Anne Smedinghoff stood for,” Kerry later told the staff at the US consulate in Istanbul.45

  Recognizing the sacrifices they all were making, he added: “It is important for us to be able to help to bring stability and rule of law and alternatives to this kind of nihilistic violence that simply destroys and steals lives without offering any other constructive purpose whatsoever.”46

  Kerry reprised his role as the Department’s chief consoler just over a week later when he asked that his plane make a stop at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago while he wrapped up the round-the-world trip beginning with the news of Smedinghoff’s death.

  When the plane rolled to a stop, the normal group of Air Force security officers stayed onboard, instead of going down to the tarmac. The same was true of the Diplomatic Security Service agents, who usually formed a ring around the secretary wherever he went.