The political officer stood back, looked at the ceiling, and tried to clear her mind. She gave the dial one last try, pulled the steel lever, and heard the heavy ka-dunk that sounds the same at every post. The drawer screeched open, and she grabbed the hard drive. At last, her day could begin.
But on that morning, she wouldn’t write her cable. The WikiLeaks scandal had broken the day before, stunning not only Washington, DC, but embassies, consulates, and other U.S. diplomatic installations. The impact was so profound that foreign service officers the world over were wondering how they would ever write—or be allowed to write—cables again. Could they ensure that confidential information never fell into the wrong hands? How could they perform what they considered to be the most important part of their jobs—providing subtext, context, and details that Washington policymakers would have no other way of knowing? On that Monday morning, nothing was clear.
The irony was not lost on the officers. All the cypher locks, combinations, steel safes, and marines were not enough to prevent the theft from within of a staggering number of cables—251,287, to be exact. In one of the more surreal elements of the breach, officers were forbidden from clicking on the WikiLeaks website, because the U.S. government insisted that the material (which the officers themselves had written) was now stolen property and still classified. Protests that foreign journalists and governments were voraciously reading the cables made no difference.
That Monday, officers huddled at every embassy around the world, trying to make sense of what had happened, to assess the damage, and to think what to do next. A culture with deep respect for protecting data and sources had suddenly blown wide open, revealing for all the world the careful, sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking details written for the tiniest of audiences.
CABLE LORE
The stolen cables had a long pedigree. Letters, early telegrams, and cables run like a seam through more than 235 years of American diplomacy. In the external world of England’s Whitehall, France’s Quai d’Orsay, and scores of other foreign ministries, diplomats attend meetings, present their government’s position, and carefully negotiate. In their internal world, they try to make sense of what they see and hear for themselves and convey it to Washington through the quieter and more introspective act of writing telegrams for the official record.
Telegrams are old-fashioned, but irresistible. They serve a well-worn function in literature, largely because they are reserved for life’s most important events. In period dramas, the arrival of the telegraph boy on his bicycle triggers suspense. Will it be news of a death, announce a visitor’s unexpected arrival, or provide the vital clue to a murder mystery? An actor has only to open the envelope to transport the audience.
When telegrams are clothed in diplomatic lore, they become the game changers in power plays and secret plots. Diplomatic dispatches, a phrase that summons images of the British Empire and frantic messages from colonial outposts, bespeak a time when communications were not instantaneous but perhaps more considered. Secrecy was an essential part of the process, and writing and reading were time-consuming chores involving ciphers, codes, and transcriptions. This secrecy feeds notions of diplomacy as a world of elegance on the surface—with subtlety and calculation swirling underneath.
American diplomats have been writing home since colonial times, starting with America’s first diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, who spent nine years in France (1776–1785) before being succeeded by Thomas Jefferson. Their missions—to get military help against the British and to obtain recognition as an independent nation, respectively—were not so different from the upstart states of today. Franklin, who never planned to stay for nine years, performed the job remarkably, and with notoriously poor French. Jefferson, who served in Paris from 1784 to 1789, seemed to enjoy it more before returning home to become the first U.S. secretary of state in 1790. The correspondence of these two men, which predates the advent of the telegram, forms the bedrock of American diplomatic history.
American diplomats also have been known for not writing home. Jefferson, by then president, became exasperated with one of his uncommunicative diplomats, and in a famous line that leaves harried modern diplomats longing for the good old days, wrote, “We have not heard from our Ambassador in Spain for two years. If we do not hear from him this year, let us write him a letter.” 1 Jefferson had cause for concern. He was caught up in the Louisiana Purchase and had need of Ambassador Charles Pinckney’s help to secure the deal.
No one would be allowed to be so dilatory as Pinckney ever again. The advent of the telegraph had, by the 1860s, slowly transformed diplomacy, reducing communication time from weeks or months (or years, in Pinckney’s case) to a single day, giving governments the opportunity to issue instructions and demand answers, seizing the reins from freewheeling ambassadors and quickening the pace of diplomacy. For envoys used to autonomy and leisurely reflection, the instantaneity was a rude awakening. Stories of their institutional resistance read like comedies of manners. Technology-averse diplomats dug in against typewriters in favor of quill pens and copperplate calligraphy; they argued about whether correspondence should be kept folded or flat for filing and conspired against the intrusion of telephones in their offices.2
In a historical sense, the WikiLeaks release is not unprecedented. The tradition of governmental control of post and telegraph offices meant virtually all diplomatic correspondence was routinely intercepted. Gentlemen were indeed reading one another’s mail. Leaks have been around for a long time, as have frustrated diplomats who believe their point of view is not heard back home. The advent of the telegraph office, a logical extension of the post office, opened a new era in intelligence gathering, with resulting requirements for both encryption and code breaking. Every advance in encryption was countered by an equal leap in deciphering, to the point that diplomats reverted to human couriers as a means of subverting this new and seemingly uncontrollable technology of their era.
Sometimes the content of a diplomatic telegram was so momentous it changed the course of history. For impact, it’s hard to beat the Zimmermann Telegram, written in 1917 by German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann and sent to the German ambassador in Washington, DC, who was to forward it to the German ambassador in Mexico. The telegram instructed the German ambassador to meet with the Mexican president and propose Mexico’s entry into World War I on the side of Germany, in exchange for Germany’s help in regaining Mexico’s lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
The Germans were about to resume unrestricted submarine warfare and knew this action would likely bring an outraged United States into the war. The telegram was deciphered by the British and given to the Americans, who now had two reasons to be angry at Germany. Given their own expertise in telegraph decoding, the Germans should hardly have been surprised that the British were reading their messages.
Another telegram that made history was Consul General Archer Blood’s cable sent from the U.S. consulate in Dhaka on April 6, 1971, famous for being “probably the most blistering denunciation of U.S. foreign policy ever sent by its own diplomats.” 3 Blood and his staff described the slaughter of Bengalis by the Pakistan Army and denounced the U.S. policy that allowed Pakistan to continue this genocide unchallenged. The famous cable was part of a stream of urgent accounts of atrocities sent from the consulate, all of which were met with silence from Washington. The cables were leaked, by an unknown source, to the New York Times and to Senator Edward Kennedy, giving him ammunition against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy. The series of reports out of Dhaka culminated in what became known as the Blood Telegram, the famous dissent cable signed by twenty officials at the Dhaka consulate and endorsed by nine officers working on South Asian issues within the State Department.4
Dissension from U.S. foreign policy while serving as a diplomat is a long and protected tradition—at least in theory. The State Department has a dissent channel, although few officers use it to express policy disagreement. The recept
ion of Blood’s cables is telling. Upon receiving the April 6 message, Secretary of State William Rogers was alarmed enough to call National Security Advisor Kissinger. “The telegram was ‘miserable,’ ‘terrible,’ and ‘inexcusable.’ It was bad enough that they ‘had bitched about our policies,’ but the real problem was that ‘they had given it lots of distribution so it will probably leak,’ railed Rogers to Kissinger.” 5 Blood was soon transferred, as were many of his colleagues.
But even Blood’s courageous telegram has not had the enduring influence of George Kennan’s Long Telegram, setting out the U.S. containment strategy for the Cold War era. Several generations of American diplomats and scholars of diplomacy view Kennan’s cable, written on seventeen single-spaced pages not counting corrections in February 1946, as an aspirational ideal. The cable was later revised and published as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 under the pseudonym X. Even today the impact and reach of Kennan’s cable astounds. What lonely foreign service officer, sitting in some forgotten outpost, has not dreamed of setting out for Washington’s benefit the next containment policy? But many officers do not realize that Kennan, serving then as deputy chief of mission in Moscow, wrote partly in frustration. He felt his viewpoint was not reaching policymakers in Washington. It appears the disconnect between the field and Washington is indeed an old story.
Alas, Kennan’s Long Telegram is remarkable for its uniqueness. No diplomat today, however ambitious, will be making policy from overseas. Even those who serve in Washington find themselves seated around crowded interagency tables that include an expanding list of members of the foreign policymaking, intelligence, and defense communities. Kennan’s time is long past, and the opportunities for a talented foreign service officer to make a similar impact are as historical as the containment policy Kennan authored. But that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped writing.
THE DIPLOMATS: WHO THEY ARE AND WHY THEY WRITE
Everyone has fun defining diplomacy. Some see it as a politer version of espionage, making it the world’s so-called second oldest profession. Other half-serious definitions dwell on duplicity, such as Sir Henry Wotton’s: “An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.” Thomas Pickering, one of the highest-ranked American diplomats and a seven-time ambassador said, “In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known.” Another famous quip, attributed to Caskie Stinnett, suggests that there is something not so nice about diplomacy: “A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.” Like all aphorisms, these exist for a reason. They attest to the art of subtlety.
American diplomats may or may not be guilty of all the traits ascribed to them, but they most certainly are analysts and writers. The arduous selection process, which can take up to two years, ensures that most diplomats write well. The fallout from that morning in November marked a rise in their stature. WikiLeaks, if nothing else, earned diplomats the respect of journalists, who often write about the same countries and issues. At the Guardian, one reporter mused, “Who knew American diplomats could write so well?” New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger said the cables were “often eloquent and occasionally entertaining,” while his colleague Executive Editor Bill Keller found them to be “written with wit, color, and an ear for dialogue.” 6 They wowed Slate’s Christopher Beam, who thought they read “like their own literary genre, with an identifiable sensibility and set of conventions.” 7 Fareed Zakaria, writing in Time, found they showed “an American diplomatic establishment that is pretty good at analysis,” and British scholar Timothy Garton Ash celebrated accounts “almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh,” with writing that he found to be astute.8
According to the most recent Agency Financial Report, the State Department employed about 73,000 people worldwide in 2015. The roughly 7,900 foreign service officers (FSOs) are only a small fraction of the U.S. government’s overseas workforce, which also includes about 5,700 foreign service specialists and 49,000 locally employed staff, along with others from affiliated agencies such as USAID and the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture. The FSOs populate the five traditional career fields: consular, administrative, political, economic, and public diplomacy. The specialists cover twenty-two functions ranging from office management to information technology to medical fields. Locally employed staff are the backbone of any embassy, spanning drivers in the motor pool all the way up to economic and political analysts, some of whom have PhDs. Given the two- to three-year tours of most FSOs, the local staff provides invaluable continuity, contacts, and historical perspective.
At any given time, about a third of all foreign service officers are assigned to Washington, DC, meaning that nearly all the reporting for cables that later appeared in WikiLeaks was done by about 5,500 FSOs serving in some 270 diplomatic missions overseas.9
Foreign service officers tend to be older than one might think—the median age of a newly hired FSO is thirty-one, but many begin this career in their forties or later. Virtually all have bachelor’s degrees; more than half have master’s or professional degrees. Some are former Peace Corps volunteers; others have served in the military. Some come from academia, some from private industry, some are lawyers, some are linguists. An increasing number have significant overseas experience, running exchange programs, working with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or reporting for news media. Nearly all have held jobs in which writing was important. They join the foreign service to serve their country, out of a sense of adventure, and with a desire to observe other cultures. The relatively short tours for most posts mean that their observations are fresh and rarely become routine.
All foreign service officers write cables, although the ones that garnered the most attention in WikiLeaks tended to come from political officers. By convention, cables are signed on the last line by the ambassador, or in his/her absence, by the chargé d’affaires, the acting ambassador who covers the gap until a new ambassador arrives. In point of practice, very few ambassadors do the actual writing, apart from first-person official-informal (OI) cables. Most diplomats aspire to become ambassadors, and some 65 to 70 percent of ambassadors are career diplomats who rise through the ranks, garnering years of experience at embassies, consulates, and domestic tours in the State Department and other agencies. The remaining 30 to 35 percent, usually sent to Western Europe or to countries of enormous significance, such as China or Mexico, are political appointee ambassadors.
Some political appointees are former elected officials or distinguished public servants, such as former senator Max Baucus, ambassador to China, but others have come under fire for having minimal qualifications beyond financial support of the winning presidential candidate, a factor that sometimes puts Washington and career officers at odds in a way that long predates WikiLeaks. One group of ambassadorial nominees that appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for confirmation hearings in January 2014 was apparently so underprepared that Senator John McCain began correcting their erroneous statements. Hollywood producer Colleen Bell, nominated to be ambassador to Hungary, stumbled badly trying to articulate U.S. strategic interests in that country. “Great answer,” McCain said, his sarcasm readily apparent. At the end of an embarrassing hearing for Bell and two other political ambassadorial nominees, McCain looked disgusted. “I have no more questions for this incredibly highly qualified group of nominees.” Career FSOs may have grimaced inwardly but held their tongues.
If writing cables is not a fast track to an ambassadorship, why do diplomats write? In part because it is irresistible. FSOs seek careers that will transport them far from home. But that distance can be confusing, and reconciling Washington’s policies with truths on the ground is frustrating. Diplomats make meaning of their surroundings by writing about them. For many officers, the process helps them make sense of new experiences. They often write private journals or blogs in addition to their official writing duties. A few write
books upon retirement, especially memoirs. But some also put great effort into making their observations part of the historical record. While there will never be another George Kennan, there are plenty of opportunities to recount a conversation, to describe a political development, a crisis unfolding, or even a trip to the hinterlands. Diplomats jump at penning these tiny pieces of history that will be part of the official record.
THE ART OF DIPLOMATIC REPORTING
Every day hundreds of cables flood into the State Department from its missions around the world. Dozens of bureaus are filled with personnel assigned to read them and take action. Mandatory reporting requirements mean the number of cables continues to increase, but too often foreign service officers are writing for a distracted audience of one: an overtasked desk officer who spends the usual two years in the assignment, discouraged from bringing any but the most noteworthy telegrams to the attention of busy superiors.
Understanding the flow of diplomatic reporting to and from Washington is a story of both too much and too little, and often not at the right time. Too much, because the daily tranche of cables guarantees an overwhelming amount of data; too little, because it is impossible to know and report on everything. At the wrong time, because of the speed at which Washington decision makers must function. While yesterday’s diplomats waited for mail packets to be shipped across the Atlantic and for telegrams to be deciphered, today’s can barely be out of the office for an hour before an urgent communication might arrive.
Knowing by instinct when and what to communicate back home is what makes a good diplomat. Their reporting must walk a line between loyally carrying out assignments from Washington, while making essential, sometimes contradictory, points to a foreign policy establishment that does not always want to hear them. In a tragic example of this disconnect, Ambassador Prudence Bushnell famously wrangled with the State Department over the security deficit at Embassy Nairobi in the months before the 1998 bombing that destroyed it and several surrounding structures. She sent multiple cables and pleaded for assistance, but with the State Department budget cut to the bone, security was expensive and subject to lengthy congressional consultations. “When I returned to Washington on consultations in December of ’97, I was told point-blank by the AF [Africa Bureau] Executive Office to stop sending cables because people were getting very irritated with me. That really pushed up my blood pressure.” Bushnell had the grim satisfaction of being right, as she stood at attention, still injured herself, alongside the flag-draped coffins of her colleagues following the al-Qaeda bombing that had left 213 dead.10
To the Secretary Page 2