AF/EX Post management officer, A and M special assistant. 2002-2005.
We returned to Washington in the fall of 2002. As soon as our tenant vacated the apartment we embarked on a major refurbishment project, resurfacing the hardwood floors, painting throughout, and a complete renovation of the kitchen. Meanwhile, the DC sniper was terrorizing the District and we were wishing we were back in West Africa. I had developed a nasty little habit of smoking cigarettes over the past several years, since grad school in St. Louis, about a pack a week, nothing too intense, and decided to use the DC sniper craziness as an excuse to quit once and for all. Cold turkey. Piece of cake.
That autumn we moved back to Washington and I would take on a post management officer (PMO) job in AF/EX — Anglophone and Lusophone West Africa, as originally assigned. But upon arrival, the deputy executive director told me I would be covering countries in East Africa, which included Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mauritius. My prior assignments, Bissau, Luanda, and Accra, had all been west, so this region would present a new, unexplored set of challenges. I rolled up my sleeves, little knowing that, later, in retrospect, I would consider it my favorite all-time assignment and the most productive period of my foreign service career.
At work, I sat out to master the ropes of the Washington bureaucracy. We had major projects underway: new embassy buildings under construction in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; re-establishment of operations in Khartoum; and potential New Office Building (NOB) site search and selection projects for Djibouti, Asmara, and Antananarivo. In meeting after meeting, I came to understand and appreciate the thoughts and contributions of my counterparts in the Office of Building Operations (OBO), Information Resource Management (IRM) and Diplomatic Security (DS), and before long we were able to pick up the phone and unstick things, solving problems before they reached anybody’s notice.
In the Spring I traveled with Under Secretary for Management Grant Green to Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam for the new embassy openings, then broke away for site visits to Khartoum, Asmara, and Addis Ababa. I was scheduled for visits to Antananarivo, Kampala and Djibouti, but the Iraq war had started by the time I got to Ethiopia and my boss phoned and told me to return home immediately in case flights got stopped.
We spent quite a bit of time back in the office on Khartoum. Early on the deputy director, John Sheely (a fabulous guy and a great boss, by the way. We were all lucky to have him as our immediate supervisor and mentor) directed me to re-generate a series of weekly meetings, cross-departmental, to come up with a strategy to restore full operations to Embassy Khartoum. Since evacuation and shutdown in the 90’s, American staff in Khartoum had been assigned to Nairobi and only made TDY visits to Khartoum, even though the local staff was still assigned. The situation worked very well for USAID, which was principally engaged in South Sudan (still part of Sudan at the time, though at war), a short flight from Nairobi.
During those weekly meetings, I managed to forge even stronger working relations with colleagues from DS, IRM, and OBO. The weekly meetings were always well attended, and I stayed late or came in early the next day to draft and send the meeting minutes and to-do items out to various offices.
One of the weekly meetings was particularly rousing: we were coming close to closure on a way to restore unclassified and classified e-mail at the Khartoum chancery. Thanks to ideas from AF/EX IT and logistics guru Steve Deutsch, we had a number of excellent ways forward to consider. Nonetheless, organizational lines were crossing and tempers were flaring.
As host and erstwhile moderator, I found myself losing control of the meeting due to all the bickering and turf defending between and across the various groups. Suddenly, without warning, I slammed my hand on the conference room table and said, in a firm and convincing voice, “We, here, today, in this conference room, must decide if Embassy Khartoum is going to be an Embassy of the United States of America, or a hole in the wall.” The room got silent. You could have heard a pin drop. And slowly, cooler heads prevailed and we found a way forward that satisfied the requirements of DS, OBO, IRM and AF/EX. There is nothing like bureaucratic success, or, as a Quaker friend always says, “the truth is in the room; you just have to allow it to emerge.”
That fall of 2003 we moved to 18th and G so our suite could be renovated. It would be the first ever renovation of AF/EX since the building was built in the 50’s. My boss, Jamie Agnew, masterminded the project from start to finish. I really came to admire Jamie and I enjoyed working for her. She remains one of my all-time favorite bosses, and being a PMO in AF/EX remains my favorite all-time jobs. I got a lot done for my posts and I learned a lot about the inner workings of the State machine, especially HR, OIG, OBO, and the A Bureau, bureaus whose operations affect people at post the most.
A few days into my second trip to the region, Ops found me to let me know about a death in the family, my aunt, Rebecca Hairston. Aunt Beck stepped in and became our mother figure when my mother died unexpectedly in 1975, so she had served as a mother figure for a longer time than did my actual mother. I was in Asmara when the call came, and luckily there was a flight to Europe the very next day. I changed my itinerary and returned home.
The second year in AF/EX was the year of evacuations. Abidjan, Bangui, Kinshasa, and Nairobi evacuations kept us all very busy. The Nairobi evacuation went on for almost six months! We nor any bureau had ever had an evacuation that lasted so long, and it created a number of complications for our office, for folks at post, for people assigned but evacuated, and for people “caught out.” Through our efforts we got changes made to the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) during and after the Nairobi evacuation to better accommodate evacuated families, their allowances, and their choices of safehaven. It was quite an accomplishment. The bureaucracy doesn’t like to change the FAM!
After the evacuation ended, we expended a lot of shoe leather on the Embassy Nairobi build-to-lease housing project, Rosslyn Ridge. OBO, Embassy Nairobi, and AF/EX were strong proponents. The AF Front Office was not on board, however. And DS waivered and for good reason – potential bad guys had line of sight access to the housing compound from a nearby airstrip. Ultimately, a risk management regime was proposed, the project was approved, and Rosslyn Ridge eventually became the choice location for residential housing at Embassy Nairobi.
It was a very busy and eventful second year. But we had a great crew! My fellow PMO’s, Henry Kaminski, Doug Brown, and Barbara Gates were all just super people. Our deputy director, John Sheely, gave us all the guidance we needed, and lots of encouragement. And we got great support from the folks throughout the executive office, in the budget shop, in HR, the IT guys, and the GSO shop. I look back with fondness on my time in AF/EX; it was an extremely productive time in my career. Again, I will always maintain that being a post management officer was my all-time favorite job at State!
Bureau of African Affairs – Executive Office (AF/EX) – East Africa posts
Domestic Assignment - Special Assistant A, M. 2004-2005.
This point marks the end of the first twelve years, the nucleus and the core of my foreign service career. I was one year away from retirement eligibility, assuming 50 years old and taking my military time into consideration. But in fact there would be nine more years of service before my retirement at the end.
The final nine years of my foreign service career were pretty stellar until the very end. We can compress it to a single paragraph. It began with assignment, in 2004, as special assistant to the Bureau of Administration Assistant Secretary and includes assignments as special assistant to the Under Secretary of Management, Arabic language training at FSI, deputy management counselor in Cairo, chief of staff in Baghdad, DCM and Charge d’affaires in Damascus, NEA/RMA office director, and, last but not least, NEA deputy assistant secretary. I call my overseas tours during this period the Islamic Levant Trifecta because it is not often one gets the opportunity to serve, back to back, in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.
Going to the Bureau of Administration as a special assistant was a natural progression for a bureau post management officer. In the A front office, I covered competitive sourcing, a new Bush initiative focused on outsourcing core business practices, the Information and Publishing Services (IPS) Office, which included the Ralph Bunche Library, FOIA services, and all printing services (the first candidate, by the way, for competitive sourcing), the Small and Disadvantaged Businesses Office, and the Office of Procurement. It was a good, though not sexy combination of offices.
Through IPS, I found myself drafting a decision memo for the Under Secretary to standardize intranet and later internet branding across the Department. The Under Secretary was eager to sign said memo, but we needed to get all parties with equities on board. Consular Affairs had their own branding. Diplomatic Security had theirs. Of course, A Bureau had their own. And Public Affairs was the largest voice in the room as they had had their intranet branding the longest, or so they thought.
So, coming off my success bringing together Khartoum folks from all around the Department to solve problems, I offered to call a meeting and try to get everybody together on one memo. My boss ok’ed it, as we had what folks called a “split memo,” i.e., some agreed with its premise and some didn’t. No principal likes to sign off on a split memo. So I attended representing A’s equities and I was accompanied by the M executive assistant, Dick Shinnick, a friend and mentor at the time who would later betray me.
Consular and DS were actually cool and open to discussion, as was A. But Public Affairs quickly became defensive, as if the idea to blend brandings somehow took something away from them. At length, the full brunt of their ire got directed at the M executive assistant. It was personalized. A woman shouted, “Why are you even here?” And further, she said, “you shouldn’t be here, why don’t you leave?” The temperature in the room rose perceptibly. The M executive assistant got up and walked out. We never got agreement on the memo. The memo died, split.
Halfway through the term I got called up to serve as special assistant in M, Undersecretary for Management. It was somewhat of a promotion. But before leaving the A Assistant Secretary gave me some critical advice. He told me to not shy away from management positions requiring long-term language training, and that at this point it would not necessarily affect my promotion prospects. And he told me to seek assignments that would get me “across the threshold,” that is, into the Senior Foreign Service, and to not focus on my next promotion to FS-01 as it was coming anyway. His advice led directly to my bid for the Cairo Deputy Management Officer position.
In M I covered Consular Affairs, the Director General’s Office (HR), Medical Services, and Western Hemisphere Affairs. I attended all the senior staff meetings and reported back to the Under Secretary and his executive assistant. The first SARS pandemic threat arose and I represented M on the task force. It was a crash course for me in pandemic response. Lucky for us, the whole thing blew over.
I spent some off time working on a white paper, “HR in 2025, A Revolution in Diplomatic Affairs.” I have it buried in a blog somewhere. I found it! We came up with some pretty outlandish proposals (not really) to standardize and even incentivize HR functions. It also died as most good ideas do, but not before I shared it with several folks holding the director general position over the intervening years.
As M special for medical services, I represented M on the Avian Flu Crisis Task Force, covering what we thought may have been an earlier version of a pandemic threat. The Avian Flu virus threat never materialized in the U.S., but there was some concern that it might have affected people and embassy staffs overseas. The antibiotic/antiviral of choice was a product called Tamiflu, but it was in short supply worldwide, meaning it would have to be rationed and “non-essential” staff and family would have to be evacuated, or as the term of art, face ordered departure from post. Then there was the issue of how it would be distributed. Of course, the military had access to sufficient stocks to take care of their people. But what about everybody else? There was a big issue in the Tamiflu supply chains about the length of time it took to “grow” antiviral stocks. All these issues went away when the threat never materialized, but I can only imagine some smart people are reviewing those notes for the present coronavirus pandemic threat that obviously has materialized.
We had an acting Under Secretary for a few months. He came up with what we all thought was a hair-brained idea to convert the Ralph Bunche Library to office space and store all the books and papers offsite. Not sure why, but I got tasked with drafting the decision memo. I took personal offense that this idea would erase the only place in the State Department named for an African American. So what did I do? I talked with the librarians and decided to quietly bury the memo. I confess my sins before God and Holy Mother State. And guess what? It never came up again.
We started long-term Arabic training in 2005 in preparation for our Cairo assignment. Nine months later we were packing out for Cairo with a hard-earned 2/1 in Egyptian Arabic and a coffee shop exposure to the Egyptian dialect, Aamiya, thanks to my tutor, Fatma Assef.
Deputy management counselor, Embassy Cairo, Egypt. 2006-2008.
“Of all the nations of the world, the Egyptians are the happiest, the healthiest, and most religious.” — Herodotus
My fear that opting for long term language training would make me less competitive for promotion that year to FS-01 turned out to be unfounded. I was promoted to FS-01 during language training. FS-06 to FS-01 in 13 years was good progress. And perfect as I was headed to an FS-01 job.
I learned before my arrival that my prospective supervisor, Admin Counselor Steve White, had been drafted to Baghdad, and that as his deputy, I would be acting admin counselor until a replacement could be identified. The NEA Bureau assured me they had full confidence in my ability to do the job. I would hear a version of that when a replacement was finally named.
Some said my boss, the DCM, was a screamer. I never found him to be so. Maybe high spirited, but not a screamer. We had weekly meetings and oftimes chats in between. I was always well-prepared for these weekly sessions and he allowed me to speak freely. I listened to his opinions and took his viewpoints on board. My direct reports were great and cool people. We had a weekly staff meeting all together and weekly one-on-ones.
In 2006, Cairo was the largest “normal” U.S. mission worldwide. I actually looked up the numbers, the size of USG staff and the number of federal agencies represented. Bangkok was a close second, and Bogota a close third. Of course, numbers are fluid, but I came up with a theory that the size of the US mission was correlated with the significance of the country and the region to US foreign policy. Well, as for theory, I once theorized that the only counties that “mattered” in the big scheme of things were those represented on the CNN International weather report. So much for theory.
My very first job when reporting as acting management counselor at Embassy Cairo was to devise and execute a policy on the feral cat feeding problem tearing apart the community in embassy housing. There were feral cat haters who just wanted to shoot them all, and there were feral cat feeders who wanted to feed and love them. Cairo is known for its feral cat populations. They are worse than gangs. And there were theories about the existence and advantages of having feral cats in terms of their own sense of territory and keeping other feral cats away. Then there was the rising cost of tetanus service when folks inadvertently got scratched or bit by the feral cats. Ultimately, the ambassador signed off on a policy I drafted and cleared that provided for both the feral cat feeders and the feral cat haters. It was not perfect, but it was a solution. A feral cat feeder/sympathizer watched my comings to and fro, sneaked into my office, logged on my computer and sent out an email blast that tried to make me look like the problem. Needless to say, she was discovered and removed from the office.
Side note. Baghdad and Kabul were significantly larger than Cairo by the same criteria, but they were both in their own category of super embassies. In retrospect, every embassy is likely larger than it needs to be and many functions, especially administrative functions, should probably be housed stateside. But that is a whole different kettle of fish. An interim solution to embassy size inflation might be a type of regionalization, but that would bring into question the whole idea of universalism, i.e., having a US Embassy in every country in the world. Things to stay up late at night and think about.
Cairo was a busy embassy and issues constantly emerged. We had a huge interagency and as acting management counselor I presided over the International Cooperative Administrative Support Services (ICASS) operation whereby agencies were billed for goods and services they received, such as rent, utilities, carpool services, warehouse services, etc. Many of the issues were fundamentally the same as the ones I faced as administrative officer at Embassy Luanda, just expanded to over 40 subscribing agencies in Cairo versus three or four in Luanda. So, it was all a matter of scale. There were many efficiencies to be improved upon; we focused for the most part on the “low hanging fruit,” consolidation of services across agencies. We had some successes and sometimes we fell short.
Cairo was also a post for many high level visits. Every cabinet secretary found his or her way to Cairo, most notably, the Secretary of State who made frequent appearances. At one point, the Cairo powers-that-be-decided to spread the wealth outside the capital, and we hosted SecState visits to Alexandria, to Luxor, to Aswan, and to Sharm as-Sheik. We had an excellent supervisory general services officer, Kevin Blackstone, and he built an outstanding team, so the logistics of visits, in Cairo or out, were always a breeze. We all had to work, mind you, and we all put in long hours, but we had a machine, a network connecting motorpool, hotels, other internal administrative services that made each visit requirement a cinch to pull off.
I managed to brush up on my Arabic by contracting with a local tutor, Rafa’at. Apparently I learned a lot more than just conversational Arabic from my tutorial sessions. I would write later in a poetry class,
There is a progression here that I recognize from studies with my Arabic tutor in Cairo (who, it turned out, was a closet Sufi sheik (teacher)) many years ago. As a progression, it informs the perpetual initiation that Emily Dickinson was undergoing and that inspires her poetry writing in what is almost obviously (when you look at it) a Sufic style.
Stage 1. The soul stands over as an “imperial” friend, a higher level being, (hence, imperial) guiding the “self”s” (Ego) actions, discriminating good from not-so-good actions (Like Freud’s Superego, kinda, sorta).
Stage 2. The soul “can” be an agonizing Spy, making suggestions leading to bad decisions based on human desire) like the snake speaking to Eve, or the Id in Freudian terms).
Stage 3. When the “Soul” is properly aligned with the “self,” there is no fear of “treason.”
Stage 4. If Stage 3 prevails, the “self” (Ego) becomes the decider, the “Sovereign” power.
Stage 5. When Stage 4 holds, the soul serves and “stands in Awe” of its attached “self,” (Ego) the person, which could be Emily herself.
So, how does this all tie in to my Arabic lessons? Because that is an important part of my concept (conceit) of all this. Rafa’at, my tutor, used chapters from the Qur’an to demonstrate Arabic grammar. Verses of one chapter he used stayed with me, The Sun.
“By the Soul, and the One who fashioned it –
and inspired it as to what makes it iniquitous or reverent –
Indeed he prospers who purifies it –
and indeed he fails who obscures it. (1)
Important to note, almost exclusively the actor in this poem is the “Soul.” The self, the Ego, is referred in the poem as “itself” directly in three places. It appears that the pronoun “it,” mentioned three times in the poem, refers in each case to the antecedent, “the Soul.” But this pronoun-antecedent relationship appears to perhaps have some fluidity.
Cairo was a very family-friendly post, the quality of which came mostly under the management counselor’s purview. Housing, schools, shopping, outside-of-work activities and tourism were big ticket items at what was then the largest “normal” American embassy in operation. There were always glitches requiring a personal hand, like my first big challenge, peaceful relations between the feral cat lovers and the feral cat haters at embassy housing complexes. We found resolution but it was not easy. Foreign service officers and their families have a sense of entitlement overseas that surfaces in interesting ways and that always has to be figured in to every calculation. In many cases, the higher the rank of the person the more interesting their demands and their sense of entitlement that those demands be met.
A evening ride on a felucca with friends. Cairo, 2007.
Another interesting aspect to work at Embassy Cairo that made it unlike previous administrative assignments was the “sense of being” of local employees. Employees were not necessarily more professional or more highly trained or even more motivated than employees I had worked with, say, in Luanda or Accra. But there is something to be said for continuity when an embassy has been in operation for over 100 years. We had employees whose parents and even grandparents had been embassy employees. For them it was the family business, so to speak. They had seen Americans come and go, and issues rise and fall in importance. One such employee showed me a turn-of-the-century cemetery, closed off and unkept, that once served the American expat community in Cairo, mostly missionaries but a few diplomats. I cleaned the place out and took some photographs of headstones. I hope my successors continued the practice.
After the first year things became pretty much routine and under control. I decided to devote my evenings and weekends to the Army War College Master in Strategic Studies distance program. I applied, got accepted, and got through four or five courses before heading out to Baghdad. I decided I’d take a year off because Baghdad was crazy long hours. With my promotion across the threshold while in Baghdad, I never got back to it.
Here is a memory worth preserving. The month of Ramadhan in Cairo was exotic enough, but fasting in my neighborhood, Zamalek, was electric. The main drag through the island, 26th of July, the primary shopping area, pretty much died during the day, but at sunset it became the center of bustling activity, and that activity continued until sunrise of the following day. A famous belly dancer whose name I cannot recall set up tables in the median in the center of the road and served the fast breaking meal. It was local cuisine, but it was five star, and this aging belly dancer (who must have been sitting on a bundle of cash) spared no expense. It was free to all comers, especially all fasters. I would show up alone or with one of the FSO’s from the neighborhood, maybe three or four times a week.
Starbucks wanted to set up a kiosk in the Embassy courtyard in advance of opening their first coffee shop in Cairo. The embassy staff was all for it but the ambassador thought it’d be a bad look. So the idea died. On the other hand, we got great front office support for contracting out the commissary and exchange services to AFEES, especially after AFEES offered to sweeten the pot with a transfer of a percentage of profits through the employee association to fund community activities. I drafted several iterations of an MOU until we got something that all parties agreed on. There were a few bumps in the road as adjustments were made to inventory, but nothing show stoppable. Although the flow of funds began small, it didn’t take long before reports came in of more money than the community could program. By now, fifteen years later, I imagine either the percentage amount has been decreased or a huge endowment for the employee association has been established or both.
The photo below is from a CLO-sponsored trip down the Suez Canal on a Navy ship, the USS Saipan LHA-2, a gator freighter transiting the canal. We made it to the drop-off point with no incident and I got a chance to replay my Navy days underway.
On the “Gator Freighter” USS Saipan. Canal of the Pharaohs - Suez. 2006.
In somewhat of a fitting farewell to Cairo I wrote in my notes at the time:
Finally, I want to stress that leadership is about much more than merely doing one's assigned job, even when assigned to a leadership position. Sometimes the call to lead requires one to step outside of or beyond one's traditional job description and comfort level for the good of the organization. I have been fortunate to find several such opportunities here at Embassy Cairo. It is in that vein that I volunteered to serve as overall control officer for a complex set of VIP visits. It is in that vein that I have opened my office door (and my e-mail inbox) to provide advice and mentoring to any officer or specialist who knocks, not just the ones in my cone or in my chain of command. It is in that vein that this month I volunteered to serve in Baghdad, outside of the traditional management cone and in a senior policy/program advisory position with the Office of Provincial Affairs, starting in January 2008. I am excited about the opportunity to work with the Provisional Reconstruction Teams and about the prospects of being involved directly in perhaps the greatest foreign policy challenge of our time.
I returned to the U.S. that November for pre-Iraq training, which included interagency Provincial Reconstruction Team training and special security training, known affectionately as “Crash and Burn,” due to the offensive and defensive driving and counter-surveillance training. It was fun. Then, returning to Cairo to close out, we took a trans-Sahara flight via Tripoli and Dakar to Guinea-Bissau, where we spent the Christmas holidays.
The Cairo-Tripoli leg was late departing Cairo, by several hours, and we feared we’d miss our connecting flight. We would shortly learn that African airlines had their own logic and the delay in Cairo would be equaled and exceeded by a delay in Tripoli. At length we arrived in Dakar, late in the evening, where Tim and Lori Giles picked us up and put us up overnight. The next morning we departed for Bissau, my first return since finishing my tour twelve years prior.
We spent the holidays in Rubane, one of the islands in the Bijagos chain off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. It was rather rustic but there was electricity and hot water, and sun and great food! I remember carrying a book with me which I completed for my Army War College distance course, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. When we returned to the mainland we convinced ourselves we had had enough of Bissau and rebooked our return flight, opting for Cairo’s New Year’s Eve celebration.
Poem from the period
Sonnet #37 Return of the Muse – Cairo, Egypt
Your spirit left me long, long years ago
Your presence left me longer. I forgot
The forms, the rhythms of your loveliness,
The peace and calm you brought me, the silence
And the loneliness we shared. I lost track,
Misplaced the way back, through the years, of all
You taught me about words, and songs, and notes,
And rhymes, and meter, and measure…and love.
Oh daughter, oh sister, oh spirit, deep,
Who sent you back to me? What force or power
Conjured you up and breathed into you life?
And why? Why here and now? And to what end?
It matters not. I worship at your feet.
I hear and I obey; I write, I write . . .
Cairo, Egypt August 2006
Chief of staff, Embassy Baghdad, Iraq. 2008-2009
Includes transcript of hour-long end of tour interview with the Joint Center for Operational Analysis on Civilian-Military Cooperation.
Everything about the arrival in Baghdad was militarily regimented. Hurry up. Wait. Hurry up. Wait. I wouldn’t wish that treatment on my worst enemy. But I had endured it when I was in the military and I would endure it now. Somehow my office arranged for helicopter passage from the military airport in Baghdad to the Green Zone. The only other option was a heavily fortified bus that went through downtown Baghdad. Not quite the welcoming committee one would desire.
I spent three weeks as senior advisor in the Office of Provincial Affairs (OPA), the job to which I had been officially assigned. My boss, Phyllis Powers, call me to her office and asked me if I’d be interested in working for the DCM as chief of staff. “Well,” I said to her, “that’d be quite a field promotion.” She said I had been identified as a candidate and she could arrange a meeting with the DCM, but I should not meet with her if not totally interested in taking the job. I gave her my assurances after getting her blessing to leave OPA. I later learned that the Embassy management counselor, a long time friend and colleague, had also been instrumental in putting my name forward. I took the job. Perhaps it was the plan all along.
Reading through the computer files at my new desk two ideas jumped out at me. I made the observation early that, based on personnel rotation, it appeared that although we had been in Iraq for five years at that point, in terms of bureaucratic and administrative organization, despite the explosive growth, we had been in Iraq, figuratively and metaphorically, for one year five times. Notwithstanding the slow but steady progress in the field, so to speak, the operation of the embassy appeared, at least to me, to be an eternal groundhog day.
My predecessors in the chief of staff position had all been civilian political appointees who had arrived with political agendas. As a follow-on to that observation, the DCM confided to me that the chief of staff position was not to be as a policymaker, that was her job. She needed me to “make the trains run on time.” I fully understood that metaphor and accepted my role in fulfilling it. I would supervise and coordinate the efforts of four staff assistants, three folks in Congressional liaison, five in the badging and accreditation unit, and fourteen in the Office of Language Services (translators and interpreters). And on occasion, I would “unstick” things that got “stuck.” All together we were known as ExecSec, the Executive Secretariat.
So I arrived in mid-January and changed jobs by early February. By late February I came down with a bad case of what folks in the know called the Baghdad crud. It was like the flu, only more debilitating. One of my guys, Keith Kluwe, a Marine veteran, walked with me to sick call. I was dizzy and weak and might not have made it there on my own. Turned out I was severely dehydrated and the prescription, after getting pumped full of saline solution, was bed rest. I got a ride to my hooch (house trailer surrounded by walls of stacked sandbags) in Embassy Estates. Rich Houghton from Congressional Liaison brought food to my hooch for the next couple of days. There is something to be said for the kindness of strangers. I finally regained the strength to at least get to the DFAC (dining facility) under my own power.
Hanging out with some diplomatic security guys in the land of Ur.
In early March the “Spring Offensive” began. Daily rocketing into the Green Zone. By April we were all required to move into the Palace as the workplace was hardened against rocket attacks and the hooches only had walls of sandbags for protection. We saw examples of how the hooches crumpled like aluminium foil when hit by an incoming mortar round. When a colleague died from such an attack, the higher ups began to take notice.
Living at work was one continuous nightmare from which I may still be suffering PTSD. The Palace was not equipped to serve as a hotel. There were no showers, for example, so I would sneak back to my hooch after nightfall to get a shower and change into clean clothes before the bombing runs resumed just before midnight. I always managed to get back before the rocketing started. The restrooms in the Palace were overused and filthy, especially if you needed to use one in the middle of the night.
By late April, the Ambassador made a command decision to move people into the new hardened apartment buildings on the embassy compound grounds still under construction. I don’t know if it was because of my rank or my position or just luck but I scored a one-bedroom suite all to myself. As a rule, apartments were shared even though they only had one bedroom.
By mid-May I came up on my fourth month and my first of two R&R’s. I returned to Cairo and Filomena and I escaped on one of those Nile cruises south of the Aswan Dam. It was very relaxing and we made friends we’d be in touch with for many years. We packed up everything in preparation for a packout and departure from Cairo Filomena would eventually complete on her own. I returned to Baghdad.
Thanksgiving at the DFAC. 2008.
My second R&R was back to the States and coincided with the 2008 election in November. I would return for good in time for the Obama inauguration. We were Obama supporters even though that support did nothing for us later when the chips were down.
My work with the assignment cycle was a great success. The year before, many jobs went unfilled in Baghdad, some 40 positions. The result was a threat by the Secretary of State to force people to take Baghdad assignments, also called “directed assignments.” I was one of those 40 who volunteered. As chief of staff, I discovered that lots of jobs went unfilled because of blundering, i.e., inefficiencies and pettiness at post, in the NEA Bureau, and in assignments in the HR Bureau. My boss, Pat Butenis, wrote in my annual evaluation,
“Attracting quality bidders to Iraq is no longer such a challenge, thanks in part to Ray’s ability to convince post and Washington to tighten up the assignment process. Targeting Baghdad’s own delay in deciding on bidders, Ray drafted a protocol to work through conflicted bids and to serve as a basis for making decisions quickly. He then convinced Embassy sections, bidders and the Bureau to adopt the protocol, making the case that recruitment goals would be reached more quickly by using his disciplined, pragmatic approach. The unanimous adoption of the protocol resulted in jobs being filled well ahead of schedule.”
We achieved a variety of history-making goals as a team in 2008. I wrote in my notes:
The Executive Secretariat has been extremely successful as a team in support of Front Office operations. As such, we stake our claim to the many successes Embassy Baghdad has achieved over the past twelve months: surviving the daily rocketing and mortar rounds of March and April, 2008; planning and supporting the various transitions that accompanied the culmination of CPA 17 and the restoration of Iraq sovereignty; and finally, supporting the passage of the Security Framework Agreement and the Security Agreement of 2008. None of these successes bore the fingerprints of the Exec Sec staff alone, yet they all bear our fingerprints, our sweat and our tears in ways that only true insiders to the process will ever know.
We moved into the new apartments in April, 2008 and into the new embassy building in early November, 2008. Many continued to eat at the Palace dining facility (DFAC) because the new compound dining facility basically served only salads and cold cuts. Eventually everything moved to the new compound.
Here’s another memory. I got promoted across the threshold (into the Senior Foreign Service) while in Baghdad. A “wetting down” celebration was called for. With the help of local employees I catered the first big party in the common area of the new apartments. Halfway through I led any willing participants in a modified wetting down, a Naval custom when you get promoted, except it wasn’t going to be enough to provide everybody drinks. We went all the way and dove into the swimming pool, just across the street. Fully clothed (as is tradition). There were five or six of us who took the plunge. I’m sure there are incriminating photographs somewhere out there. Afterward we put on dry clothes and returned to the party. There was food (the translators brought in from local Iraqi vendors in the green Zone) and music and dancing until the wee hours. When I crashed (ever the lightweight), folks were still partying!
Several of us rotated out in mid-January 2009. We had a huge farewell party the day before our departure. The DCM gave me a proper sendoff at her residence. The best photo I could find from that period was this one with the front office staff on New Year’s Day.
*************************************
Some poems from the period
Baghdad nights
It was a long-assed day.
We had dinner at the DFAC
and returned to the office.
Finally knocked off around 9pm.
The mandatory protective vest
weighs heavy on my
already tired shoulders –
while the strap connecting the two sides
cuts into my waist as I try to balance
their weight on my
already tired hips -
I lumber on to my
tin-foil hootch
in Embassy Estates on the
the Republican Palace grounds…
It is late. I shower and
turn on Fox News,
the only station that works.
“In California today, Senator Clinton
said President Johnson
was more important
than Dr. King
to getting the Civil Rights Bill
passed.”
I fall asleep reading “Certain to Win,”
one of those Army War College texts
from the Strategic Studies program
I am falling further and further behind in
with each passing Baghdad day.
2am. The witching hour.
Time for target practice.
I'm awakened by the sound
of the Duck and Cover alarm.
The concrete reinforced shelter is 100 meters
away from my tin-foil hootch –
100 meters as the crow flies . . .
Nope. I’ll sit this one out – and pray –
Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
The alarm sounds.
I hear people stumbling,
some drunkenly staggering –
to the safety of the shelter.
I shelter in place and
start my usual prayer
(I skip a lot of drills –
and pray a lot - these days):
“The Lord is my Shepherd,
I shall not want.
He maketh me . . . .”
SWOOOOOOSH!
A mortar round flies over
the tin foil roof
of my tin foil hootch –
“. . . . lie down in green pastures.
He leadeth me
beside the Still Waters….–“
THUMP.
The round hits the nearby ground.
Maybe it is another dud.
I continue my prayer:
". . . . He restoreth my soul ---“
KABOOOOOM!
It was not a dud.
But I pinch myself and
I am not dead.
I finish my prayer:
“And I will dwell
in the House of the Lord,
forever.”
Back to sleep.
There is still more night.
And tomorrow
is another Baghdad day.
****************************
Addendum:
Attached, please find the transcript (unedited) from your interview with the team from the State Department and the Joint Center for Operational Analysis for the "Comprehensive Approach: Iraq" study on civil-military cooperation.
Most importantly, thank you for your participation in this process. The study seems to be going well, and everyone involved seems pleased with the progress thus far.
Ray Maxwell, USM-I Chief of Staff and Executive Secretary (in Baghdad 1 full year)
Q. What is your position and mission?
A. As Chief of Staff, I’m responsible for the bidding cycle for bringing in new people on an annual basis, designing the marketing strategy, and implementing it in coordination with Washington offices. Additionally as Chief of Staff I supervise the office of language services, the office of legislative affairs, the badging unit, the protocol office, and the executive secretariat—which consists of four staff assistants. As Executive Secretary, all the papers that comes in from the various offices, bureaus, agencies to the DCM and the Ambassador come to the Executive Secretariat—come through me and my staff— and a big part of our responsibility there is maintaining access to information by all the different offices so they know how to communicate with the DCM and the Ambassador in ways they want to be communicated with. And also we have a gate keeping function, in the sense that if a paper comes up and it hasn’t been properly cleared—i.e., if all the agencies that have equity haven’t signed off on it—sometimes we’ll stop and say maybe USAID has to look at this, for example, or maybe MNF-I needs to take a look at it or the RSO. So we make sure that when it gets to the DCM and Ambassador it has been properly and thoroughly vetted.
Q. What has been your biggest challenge?
A. The biggest challenge is actually coordination across all the various offices, bureaus, and agencies that are here. Sometimes it is civil-military, but that’s a whole different and higher level of coordination, if you will. Often it’s between people/agencies who have program funding to do things and other people/agencies who are in charge of their oversight. And that’s an ever present and constantly recurring challenge.
Q. What about successes?
A. My main mission in life was to make sure that we didn’t have last year what we had the year before last in terms of attracting and landing bidders (DoS employees to Baghdad). The year before last a lot of jobs went unfilled—they had the Town Hall in Washington—it was a huge mess. I came here with the mission that we would not have that kind of situation this year.
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Q. Could you explain the “mess”?
A. In the military and civilian surge to staff our mission in Iraq, the military stepped up and the civilian agencies were supposed to step up, but the civilians in those agencies did not step up. There was a Town Hall meeting at the State Department in Washington to discuss Baghdad staffing and there was blood all over the decks with people saying ‘we’re not going to go, it’s a death sentence, etc., etc., etc...’ There were some forty jobs left unfilled by late October, and I was a part of that forty State employees who stepped up and filled those last jobs—there were threats of directed assignment - mainly because of our outrage at the way our colleagues behaved when asked to volunteer. So this year with the Ambassador’s concordance, and in fact he had some really good ideas, we got an early start on marketing. We made video vignettes of people who were here, we reached out to career development officers, we reached out to colleagues, to the posts we came from, we went back on R&R and did brown bag lunches in Washington—it was a full marketing blitz.
A big problem the prior year, we later discovered, was indecisiveness on the part of Baghdad offices because several people would bid for several different jobs and there would be internal squabbles over who would get what person, and in the process of having the squabble, people backed away and we lost bidders. Sometimes offices at Embassy Baghdad held out for the perfect person and lost three or four people who would have been good enough because there weren’t rules or protocols for making decisions. So we set up a working group and established protocols for breaking ties and making decisions early about bidders even with minimal information so we could get the decision done and move on to the next set of assignments. And we were successful— and leading that process has been my greatest success.
Q. Given the Baghdad Embassy’s unusual size and the complexity of interagency coordination required—including with the military—what types of process and structures were set up, and should they be considered for future “best practices?”
A. In so many cases what happens is that issues and problems in civilian military coordination worked their way up to the top of two separate stove-pipes, and then the Generals and the Ambassadors try to work it out—and the Generals and the Ambassadors can’t solve problems. What we’ve discovered is that if we can get the Majors talking to the FSO-3s and Colonels talking to the FSO-1s, if we can get people at the working level talking to one and other and working out wrinkles before it gets elevated to the top—then it needn’t get elevated to the top. And one of the things we tried to promote is that it’s in our interest at the working level to solve these problems because our bosses have plenty of big things that they need to solve, and they don’t need to get all tied up with routine things that can get solved at the working level. But the key is to the build those channels of communication at the Major level/the Colonel level—those mid levels. That hasn’t happened as quickly as I would like, but it’s starting to happen.
Q. How have you pushed that cooperation? Is there a process for building those channels of communication at the lower levels?
A. What I’ve been doing as Chief of Staff is calling meetings with people who we identify as being pertinent to certain issues and getting them in the same room and saying let’s resolve this. And hopefully as we do this—and at the very last one I invited my successor so he could see the process—hopefully as we continue that practice it will evolve into a bilateral culture. We had one (of these meetings) just last week.
Example. Now we are an Embassy, not a forward operating base (FOB) or the Palace. Embassies have rules for carrying weapons. The military guys were used to being on FOBs where their weapon was part of their uniform; they weren’t eager or anxious to give up the power to carry a weapon. The RSOs (regional security officer) have to implement a policy that says people don’t carry weapons in an embassy. It went up
to a two star on the military side and a three star on the Embassy side, and they couldn’t resolve it because it has to be—you need buy in at every level. So I called a meeting with the RSOs and a couple Chiefs of Staff at the Colonel level and we just talked about it—not only the weapons policy, but the general policy of how military guys behave on U.S. Embassy grounds. Frankly the military guys don’t know—most of them have never been involved in an Embassy and so they assume things are just as they were before, but things are not. So that’s one concrete example. The whole idea is that as we duplicate the conversation we’ll find ways to find solutions at the working level.
Q. Do you feel the need to formalize the results of such meetings in an MOU, frago, etc, or is it merely the act of getting people together to talk about problems?
A. No, that’s the military way. But it gives me an opportunity to give you my worldview on the whole Mars and Venus thing. A friend of mine wrote that paper “State is from Venus, DOD is from Mars” and I think that is a fair analysis but false dichotomy. It’s not all about Mars and Venus, love and war—that’s the false dichotomy. The way I choose to look at the greatest distinction between the military and State, and for that matter the military and any civilians is that the military is digital. It’s 0 and 1, all or nothing. ‘If we’re going to do a thing, let’s do the whole formal process.’ And that’s fine for military things. The State Department is analog—it’s like ‘where on the range from 12 noon to 11:59pm is this purpose best served? Let’s find out the best solution among a multiplicity of hypothesis if you will.’ Another analogy is—I was in the Navy, a machinist mate on submarines for six years, so I know a lot about pumps and valves. The military is like a gate valve—open and shut. The State Department is like a needle valve—it’s got a mechanism that you can screw down or screw up to just the right point for precise throttling of fluid flow. Speaking with my State Department hat on, in some respects the gate valve is the best thing, but in some respects you need to be able to throttle your response or your solution, you need to be able to measure it so it is just right.
Now extending that to the culture—we had a case, for example, when we had a credible terrorist threat on Christmas eve, we couldn’t run the shuttles, and one particular military group that was living at the palace but working at the NEC screamed bloody murder because the shuttles were going to stop at midnight, and their people couldn’t be transported back and forth. What they said was, ‘we’ve got 200 people that need to be moved, so the shuttle has to run every hour.’ I called a meeting and after everybody calmed down, I asked, ‘how many people are on the night shift tonight that actually need to move to man the shift that night?’ And it turned out it wasn’t 200, it was 13. So we didn’t need shuttles running every hour. We needed two, shuttles, one to take the people in and one to take the people out who were getting off. So again, we can have an all-or-nothing solution that says if 200 people can’t show the whole thing is going to shutdown or you can have a situation that asks what do you really need and how can we measure our response to meet just the demand. And frankly, I think Foreign Service Officers are better at that measurement; at doing just what’s required to get the job done, not a lot more, not a lot less. It’s biased because I’m in the State Department, but it’s informed because I was also in the military.
Q. What are solutions to this digital-analog gap? Have there been efforts to try to bridge? What do you recommend?
A. I’ve given that a lot of thought actually. What we have here is a series of collisions between State and DOD, between civilian and military. What happens in all these collisions, to use a pool table analogy, the ball of the military is so huge and the ball of the civilians is so small that when they collide, the military absorbs the blow and does all in its might to make the State Department like them. That’s not the solution. You can’t militarize diplomacy any more than you can diplomatize the military. There needs to be a kind of mutual appreciation of what each side is bringing to the table and a willingness to work things out from both perspectives or from one or other that everybody agrees to.
What happens here in Baghdad, in these compounds, is that the military and State come together, and the military is so huge that they succeed in getting us to speak in military lingo, think in terms of military solutions, think in terms of the way the military would do it if we would just put on uniforms. Sometimes that works in the short term, but it doesn’t get buy-in over the long haul because sooner or later people who are not in the military will wake up and say, I’m not in the military, this isn’t what I signed up for, I’m not going to do it that way. So there’s got to be a mutual appreciation, almost equality of appreciation, and mutual buy-in from both directions. It’s going to
be hard, because the military’s got all this might, strength, muscle, but that’s the way forward.
Q. Did close relationship between Petraeus and Crocker permeate their organizations, help these issues?
A. I’d better drink some Kool-Aid before I answer that question. No. I will agree that Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker said the right things at the top and to each other, but the fact of the matter is it didn’t work its way down the organizational chain. The military is a hierarchy, and when they want something – for example, I was in the Navy, and in 1979, when a couple of planes missed the aircraft carrier and went off into the water, it turned out all these pilots were on drugs. So the Navy started a zero-tolerance policy on drug use, and they came up with a slogan, “Not on my watch, not on my ship, not in my Navy.” This is just an example – when the military decides at the top that they want to do something, it works its way down uniformly. If the military says they have decided at the top that they want to do something, and it doesn’t work its way down uniformly, they have not decided. The decision has not been made. Because if they have decided, they can impose it, they can make it happen. Now, Gen. Petraeus is a war hero, and he’s written a book on counterinsurgency, this is all on the table. The fact of the matter is, we ran into glitches with unity of effort, things that we tried to accomplish. And being from the military, I know that if the guy at the top says it, and means it, he can make it happen down. If it’s not happening down the hierarchy, it’s because the guy at the top really doesn’t say it, or really doesn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I know the military, that’s the way it is.
Q. Are there any changes in process that explain recent improvements in Iraq?
A. Sure. Yes. I’m going to be digital. (laughter) We started last year doing joint staff notices, signed off by Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker, and promulgated throughout both sides. That was good. It’s better to have it come down from both to all as opposed to coming down through separate channels, saying “we agreed to it at the top, trust us.” That was a good thing. These notices were on broad policy, like security. For example, when we had the incoming IDF, and everyone had to wear PPE and helmets whenever they went outside, a joint statement came out to military and civilians saying, until further notice, we all have to do this. It was a good thing; normally, the military’s a
bit stricter with its folks than the State Department was, sometimes it’s just the opposite. The operation of the PRTs is a good example of civilian-military cooperation; but it’s not ideal. In theory, the PRTs are out there, they’ve got a civilian head and military deputy and it’s hunky-dory, but if you look closely it’s not like that at all. And so in many cases, the civilian team leader wants to do something, but unless the military provides the resources and assets to do it, it’s not going to happen. In a lot of cases, the resources and assets to actually perform a thing are not provided (by the military) upon request. That’s their leverage.
I think we can do a lot more in educating each other at the working level about how we look at things. For example, a situation came up just last week, the military guys who were running the Joint Coordinating Committee on implementing the security framework agreement and security agreement, the military was having a problem with its translators, most of whom are Iraqis, local employees. The issue was, because the Iraqis now need to follow Iraqi law, that they need to pay local taxes. The military solution to that was, let’s bring this into the security agreement and say they
to pay taxes. Well, that’s kind of the military way of looking at things, but the fact of the matter is, we have this thing called the Vienna Convention for Diplomatic Relations that’s been in existence for 40, 50 years, and at every Foreign Service post in the world we deal with locals and taxes. The military guys at the colonel level should have had some exposure at some point to the Vienna Convention, but clearly they hadn’t. If they had, they would have known that this was a Vienna Convention issue, this is something that the Embassy would handle, we don’t need to worry about it.
Q. Is there a mechanism for resolving such a problem?
A. Well, it came through on the classified side, and I was CC’ed. I responded to one of my counterparts that worked for the General that raised the issue and I said all of the above with the hope that he would push it up to his General . . . . These are informal ways—informal ways of doing things are dependent on the person being knowledgeable, energetic, and being willing to do to it—so these are intangibles and imponderables, if you will.
Q. What are your recommendations to close the Civil-Military Gap, especially in the cultural differences?
A. I think that the leaders on both sides need to be trained and educated. And then they have to push it down the organization. That is a structural thing, and we have tried to do a joint senior leaders training, but we weren’t able to pull it off because so many other things came up. There was a change of command and the new Commanding General had a billion things he wanted to do, and we weren’t able to do it. The civilian and military leaders need to be trained; preferably they need to be trained together on doing things jointly—not doing things the military way, but doing things jointly. Maybe once a week or once a month, we need to get everybody into one auditorium and talk about things in multicultural harmony and peace (laughing).
Q. Are responsibilities between MNF-I and USM-I clear or blurred—who is responsible for what, etc?
A. No, it’s blurred. It’s blurred probably for a good reason. There’s no easy or simple answer but in the final analysis we are a nation that maintains civilian control over the military, even if it’s just the President over the Secretary of Defense or the SecDef over the JCS. Anyway you slice it; we are a nation that prides itself in civilian control over the military. What we find in a lot of these instances locally in a kinetic war state where you are also trying to do diplomatic relations you don’t have civilian control over the military locally, you have two coequals, a dualism. Any time you have two things and nobody locally to resolve those two things there are going to be conflicts. I think in Baghdad Ambassador Crocker should be in charge for all things non-kinetic, non-battle engagement, and whatever combatant commanders there are should be subordinate to him—that’s my personal opinion. Whoever is the civilian representative of the President in this country should be at the top the hierarchy, and not at the top of two equal peaks. I think that would resolve some things. As things now stand, there’s no civilian in Baghdad that can override the Commanding General. And the Commanding General from time to time overrides the civilian representative here, but in my opinion that shouldn’t be because we are a nation, again, that prides itself on civilian control of the military.
Q. Over the past year, as the security situation has improved and the emphasis has shifted to reconstruction and development, has the balance of power shifted from the Commanding General to the Chief of Mission?
A. No, I don’t think it’s shifted. The White House would have to say ‘he’s my guy, he’s in charge.’ If the President doesn’t say it, it is not done.
Q. How are “orders” conveyed and enforced on the civilian side in the Embassy (in comparison the military side)?
A. We have the Country Team, and the Country Team is made up of representatives from every civilian agency at an embassy. In the case of Baghdad, we have military members representing their agencies on the country team. I came from Cairo. In Cairo we had the defense attaché and the head of the defense cooperation office that were on the Country Team. The Country Team meets once a week and the Ambassador gives his guidance on the state of affairs that week, the DCM talks about the operational things, and everybody has a chance to share their contributions. But at the Country Team it is acknowledged that the Ambassador is at the top of the pinnacle. The Country Team is not a pyramidal hierarchy as such—it’s not like one guy, and then two guys, and then four guys. It’s like one guy and then a flat organization with one guy who sits at the top. There’s no question that the Ambassador is calling the shots. Every once in a while —and I’ve seen this in a few Embassies—there will be a little flail between the Ambassador and the Chief of USAID Mission. . . . And there have been historical precedents where the Ambassador was the President’s representative but the USAID representative had all the money, ran all the programs, and had all the recognition outside, and used that to marginalize the Ambassador.
Q. Has Ambassador Crocker had problems conveying his efforts to improve civilian-military cooperation within the Embassy?
A. I guess the question is: has he directly confronted the issue of civilian-military cooperation? And the answer is: No. It hasn’t been a theme. It’s something that’s constantly mentioned in the sense that we’ve got to include them, they’ve got include us. But in terms of making it the theme, something that’s really established and reinforced, I don’t think it’s been a central topic. And I think it hasn’t been a central topic, possibly with good reason because it will just result in clashes because there is no clarity about how it should go forward.
Q. So it has been handled on a cases-by-case basis, but not systematically?
A. Yes. I think that’s fair to say.
Q. Do you mean there’s no clarity on the Iraq operation as a whole, or just within the civilian side there’s no clarity on civ-mil cooperation?
A. What’s not clear to me is that there an objective on the State side to civilian-military cooperation in Iraq. If we all knew what the objective was in State, I think we could push towards that. I don’t think it’s been enunciated, clarified—Where are we heading to? What is it going to be? Part of the reason it hasn’t been is because of the nature of the war here. The Security Agreement and Security Framework give us a kind of a structure, but it’s still not exactly clear what is going to be the end state.
Q. Has the Embassy’s relationship to Washington and the many Agencies within the Embassy reporting to their own home offices complicated coordination? Have you developed any particular processes and structures to manage that?
A. That has complicated things. In the perfect example, embassy communication between the agencies and their headquarters would come through the Ambassador. That doesn’t always happen. There may be an informal notification. But there is not always a funneling of information through the Chief of Mission, or even to him when people communicate to their HQs in Washington. Maybe there’s not enough time in the day for him to read all that stuff—that could be a consideration. The other piece of it is: it’s pretty hard to have sound interagency cooperation in Baghdad if we don’t have sound interagency cooperation in Washington. I’ve worked in Washington and I know that the only interagency cooperation that exists, exists overseas at posts. There’s none in Washington, it’s just a huge monster. And the government’s getting bigger. It’s not getting small, it’s not getting tight, it’s not getting more organized, and it’s not getting more efficient. I fear for my country (laughing).
Q. What is your feeling on flexible civilian hiring practices designed to fill needs and expertise—especially the 3161 hires?
A, The 3161 was invented as part of the civilian surge. We beefed up the military, we beefed up the civilians, but there weren’t enough people who worked for foreign affairs agencies to fill all the jobs that needed to be filled, so they created this mechanism to bring subject matter experts in to do these jobs. These 3161s are on a one year contract, they don’t get evaluated, they don’t have a work requirement statement, they don’t have standards of performance. Someone in Washington decided that they were subject matter experts and they came to Baghdad. Some of them are, some of them are not. That’s one part of it. The weirdest part of the 3161s is that it becomes a self-fulfilling thing where 3161s come to Baghdad, they may or may not be suitable for some jobs, they find ways to gravitate from one 3161 job to another 3161 job, and they just stay in Baghdad. Some of these people should go home. And there must be tighter oversight over 3161s from some Washington office to make sure that they are still the subject matter experts that they claim, that they are still required for the subject matter expertise that they have, and that it’s still a useful thing. That oversight doesn’t exist. The 3161s come here, they float from job to job, they get overtime—tenured FSOs don’t get overtime—they are doubling their salaries and some of them are not even working— there are several 3161s that I just don’t see what their work output is. But we don’t have oversight over them. There needs to be oversight here in Baghdad as well as from Washington.
The third point is that the military surge started, it reached a crescendo and it shrunk, The civilian side needs to reach a crescendo and shrink, but it isn’t shrinking—it’s not shrinking. The 3161s should follow that natural cycle, but that natural cycle has been adulterated. There are lots of good reasons: the domestic economy is bad and they can’t go back and find jobs, so why should they leave a $300,000 a year job in Baghdad where they work part time and pad their overtime? Why should they leave this and go back home to unemployment or $65,000? — It’s rational that they would try to stay, but it’s not efficient.
Finally, as we normalize, the 3161 positions have to become a part of the normal Embassy staff. We beefed up, we brought extra people, and we couldn’t get Embassy people, FSOs, or civilians for that matter to come. Now we’re at the point—we had a very successful marketing campaign—we had more people (apply) than jobs last year. So the tide has clearly shifted and we’re at a time right now where we clearly don’t have a deficit, we have a surplus of people who want to come here. Plus the alternative to Baghdad working its way through peoples’ minds is increasingly Afghanistan, and people would rather come to Baghdad where it’s kind of nice and the war has been won, than go to Afghanistan where it’s cold and they don’t have good food, good housing, and the list just goes on and on. If the tide has turned and we have plenty of FSOs why are we still bringing in 3161s? We should ease them out and fill those jobs with FSOs or people employed by civilian agencies.
Q. Have you had any success bringing in military personnel with the types of expertise you might need in the Embassy to fill staff positions?
A. There are sections that have military members, and where they exist, it has been successful. I don’t think it exists on a wide scale or a wholesale basis. We have a military advisor to the Ambassador—Colonel Mozillo —he’s excellent. He gets a lot of things done for us that you need that inside military knowledge to do. There are DOD people in the Political section, DOD people in the CETI cluster of agencies, but I don’t think it’s widespread. But again it happens in other agencies, it happens in offices in the State Department. The office I’m going to run in Washington for my next assignment has foreign and military members in it and by all indications it works well.
Q. What recommendations would you make to change the structure and organization of the Embassy as it becomes a more “normal” Embassy if you could write your own “Kennedy” report?
A. I think a good start would be a unified org. plan. Right now we have an MNF-I org. chart and an Embassy org. chart. One org chart for the whole mission would be useful to see what the boxes are. Once we got everybody together on once piece of paper we could see all the boxes, talk about moving some things around, doing some consolidation, doing some elimination. When we were in the Palace for example, we had Strategic Effects doing the same thing the Economics Section was doing, we had sections of MNF-I doing the same things the Political sections were doing. We were totally duplicating each other’s efforts. The place that it was most telling was not the Palace because we all kept ourselves sequestered away from each other. The place where it was most telling was in the Iraqi Ministries where the Iraqis were constantly being bombarded for appointments from civilians and military guys and they were being asked the same questions on the same topics. And it got to the point—this anecdotal because I don’t get out a lot—where Iraqis couldn’t get their work done because they were being bombarded by so many different groups of Americans asking them the same questions. So again, if we could get one org. chart on one piece of paper—it could be a long piece of paper—we could actually look at and identify the areas of duplication and then work on some consolidation. There’s going to be resistance to that because there are people here who want to stay—there will be resistance on both sides, but I think that would be a good first step.
Q. We have heard quite a lot about the Joint Comprehensive Plan (JCP), but you have suggested that on the organizational side there has not been the same type of unified efforts. Are we making too much of the JCP?
A. I have shied away from engaging with the JCP. The State Dept. has its own planning structure called the Mission Strategic Plan. In Baghdad the Mission Strategic Plan had been give short shrift because the JCP is the thing. I think that’s wrong, but that’s the way it’s done. As the situation normalizes we’ll see a lessening of emphasis on the JCP and an increase in emphasis on the Mission Strategic Plan. For example I coordinated the Mission Strategic Plan for Cairo before coming here, and Cairo was the largest normal embassy. We certainly managed to get military input as well as civilian input to the Mission Strategic Plan. It’s an unclassified document; it’s posted to the internet. The JCP is a Top Secret document that nobody can see—nobody can keep it on their desk because of the classification, so you keep it locked away in a box with a combination on it. Just that alone says to me that it is not a working document . . . but it generates a lot of work (laughing).
Q. Do you think the embassy staff is overwhelmed by the efforts to coordinate with the military or there is not enough?
A. It would be worthwhile for a group of very smart people to sit down and figure out what is the best coordinating device and adopt that, as opposed to this multiplicity of different things that suck away a lot of time, and at the end of the day don’t make a big difference. Of course that’s not going to happen because people get a lot of mileage
on authoring a coordination device and putting their name on it and saying this is the one that they came up with. And as long as we have that proliferation—we have nuclear proliferation of coordination devices (laughing). They just give birth to each other—it’s like rabbits. I think we need one good one that everyone agrees to.
Q. Do you think that coordination is missing at a particular level?
A. The Country Team is it. The Country Team is the joint interagency.
Q. At what level does the military participate on the Country Team and who do they represent?
A. We have a couple of two stars who come to Country Team. They represent the Commanding General. Well, I’ll be frank. I think they’re there to report back—which is a good thing too. There purpose is less to bring things in than to take things back—which is a good thing too, again.
Q. When a problem comes to your desk about military coordination, etc. do you have a counterpart at MNF-I that you contact or do you pursue problems to specific offices/ commands?
A. The idea came up that we should have a collection of Chiefs of Staff, and I farmed it around to some of the military guys, and you know, interestingly enough, what I was told was, we already have our collection of Chiefs of Staff and you’re more than welcome to join it, which was a fine response. But again it was like “you can come and be like us.” What I was looking for was is there some middle ground, where we can come and meet as equals, and at the time there wasn’t. And I have plenty of other things to do, so I didn’t pursue it—that was my deficiency. I think if I had this job to do over again, I would start at the very beginning by setting up that body of Chiefs of Staff and of Deputy Chiefs of Staff on the civilian and military side. Mind you the Chief of Staff on the civilian side is a new creation, and the Chief of Staff on the military side has had a long, long history. Nevertheless if I had this job to do all over again I would create that body of Chiefs of Staff to vet things, and weigh things, and resolve things at that level before it gets bumped up.
Few other embassies have a Chief of Staff, only Baghdad and maybe a few others. It’s very unique. In fact when I tell people I’m Chief of Staff they kind of giggle because they think, what is that? It’s going to kill my career progression (laughing). Normal embassies don’t have a Chief of Staff because the DCM is the Chief of Staff.
Q. What is your analysis of the difference between your expectations when you arrived in Baghdad versus your experience over the past year?
A. Well, I didn’t come here to be Chief of Staff. I came here to be senior policy adviser in OPA, the Office of Provincial Affairs. And after 3 weeks I was drafted into this job—you don’t tell the DCM, “no I won’t come and be your Chief of Staff,” So I said yes. It [the job] has definitely been an eye-opening experience; you see a lot of stuff. The most frustrating part of this job for me being a management officer is that I’m used to project managing. I’m used to conceiving a project, planning and starting the thing, implementing it, finishing it, writing the lessons learned. Or contracting—you advertise, you go through the whole process, you administer, it reaches an end, you do it again. In this job I start a lot of stuff, and it’s not my job to finish a lot of stuff. I start it when, for example, the DCM says call a meeting of a working group on the use of commercial air, and I’ll gather all the people who have some equity in commercial air and I’ll facilitate the first two or three meetings and then organic leadership will emerge among the experts and they’ll take it, and my role is over and I’ll go to the next project. So I start a lot of things but I don’t finish a lot of things. That’s less than satisfying but that’s the nature of this job.
Q. Any other issues that you would like to raise?
A. Just as we talked about training military guys in basic things like the Geneva Convention, civilians should be trained in military things. FSOs come here and they don’t know the rank structure for the various services, they don’t understand the organizational differences between the Army and the Air Force and the Navy. There are embedded organizational cultural differences between the uniformed services—learning these things should be a general part of FSO training, not just something that prepares people to come to Baghdad, and people in general should know these things. And if the training process starts early then we’ll all grow up in our careers with an appreciation for each other and that will make for better cooperation when the time requires it.
Acting deputy chief of mission, acting charge d'affaires, Embassy Damascus, Syria. 2009
Includes: Post-Baghdad PTSD Insomnia at Waikiki: Reflections on War and Peace – My Twelve Months in Iraq
It is easy to omit the four months we spent TDY in Damascus. But in retrospect it contained elements of future events that should probably be unpacked.
Also, having the Damascus experience would qualify me for what I’d come to call the Islamic trifecta: Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus. There used to be a saying “Cairo writes. Beirut publishes. Baghdad reads.” For me, Damascus would be close enough to Beirut for government work.
I intentionally did not bid early on my next assignment while I was in Baghdad. I felt I needed some time off, I was returning in the off cycle, and I had several months of home leave and annual leave stacked up. So I planned to chill from January until August, recuperate, and get past my un-diagnosed but strongly suspected Baghdad post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Shortly after returning home from Baghdad we flew out to Hawaii for a week, a nice break from everything. I took Filomena on a submarine ride, a tourist thing, we saw lots of sights on the Big Island, and I stocked up on shirts and Hawaiian coffee. I had a huge case of insomnia that whole week, though, and spent my nights writing. I may include one of those pieces as an addendum here.
Anyway, we got back, and I enrolled in an FSI course, Critical Conversations, where I ran into my old friend, Valerie Dumas. While in the course, I received an email from the NEA Assistant Secretary, Jeff Feltman, asking if I had any interest in a short temporary duty (TDY) opportunity as DCM in Damascus. I told him I’d check with my wife and get back to him.
Filomena had relatives in Syria she had never met. We decided to go for it.
I had lots of catch up reading to do before our departure for post. ELA (Egypt and the Levant, the office that covered Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon) had most recently been involved in a new Obama initiative to schmooze Syrian President Assad, led by John Kerry. A charm offensive that fell flat in the face of published articles written by think tanks since 2005 predicting Assad’s imminent demise. Kerry and his wife had recently traveled to Damascus to wine and dine Assad and his wife, seeking to jump-start a new regional initiative. (Nobody wants to remember that those days or that effort!).
ELA gave me a desk and stacks of cables to read. I supplemented it with think tank articles, and most significantly, oral histories where I learned that many Department luminaries had done time in Damascus at various points in their career. And I would reunite at post with old Ops Center buddies, Tim and Tracie Pounds, already assigned to Damascus.
We arrived. I made the rounds to offices in the chancery and to Public Affairs three blocks down the street. There had been a type of ongoing cold war with the Syrian government, I would come to understand, as a result of US military bombings of Syrian government facilities near the Iraqi border. I would also learn that the Embassy had no advance warning of said bombing. The first retaliation by the Syrian Government was to close the American School in Damascus, which meant all diplomats with school age children had to leave post. The second retaliation was the literal shutdown of all, well, most lines of communication between the American embassy and the government of Syria. We were only able to speak with the head of protocol and the culture minister and all our business with the Syrian Government had to be funneled through those two offices. The third retaliation was the virtual shutdown of all internet services, though we found ways around the blockages via VPN’s and third country routes.
About a month in, A/S Feltman came to post for meetings and consultations and also to announce that Charge Maura Connelly would be called back to a DAS position in DC and I would succeed her as Charge until a replacement could be identified and broken out of his or her assignment. Filomena smelled a rat over the obvious bait and switch. There was a rat, but we didn’t know the full story.
Embassy group touring Damascus. 2009.
Apparently, a political appointee had been identified by higher up politicos to be put in the position I was assigned to as office director of Regional Affairs. But the Bureau thought the position was too critical to be filled by a campaign contributor’s family member (or something) and the deputy position required someone who would do real work, not just showboat. Sticking me in Damascus gave the Bureau time to sort the whole thing out, I suppose.
At the three-month mark, with a self-purchased ticket reaching its expiry date, Filomena returned home. By that time, though, a permanent replacement had been identified and I agreed to remain for one more month.
Our most significant visitors came in that final month over the same week time period. First, Fred Hof and Senator George Mitchell came to Damascus for a round of talks that culminated in a group audience with President Assad that I attended as Charge. While I’m not absolutely certain, this may have been the last official meeting to date between Assad and American officials. In the days afterwards I would brief two different groups of resident ambassadors, basically reading down my notes from the Assad meeting. Of course, everybody wanted to know what kind of guy he was and by what logic he reached his conclusions. I found him to be a personable guy, maybe a bit cagey. Definitely politically astute, sophisticated. There is a cable floating round somewhere that also details our meeting.
The same week, President Carter came with staff from the Carter Center to meet with President Assad. President Carter had had a warm and productive relationship with Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad. We had hopes he could make some progress on helping us get the school reopened.
Debriefing President Carter after his meeting with Bashar Al-Assad. Damascus, 2009.
We spent a lot of shoe leather on efforts to reopen the American School. We did not succeed, nor would we succeed. Relations have only deteriorated to date, though pundits continue to predict, as they have since 2005, Assad’s demise. We just don’t get it. Although we are approaching our semiquincentennial (250 years), we have only been considered a world power since the late 1890’s. The Syrians, on the other hand, have boxed above their weight class for several hundred years, and the ruling ethnic group, the Alawites, have managed to negotiate a peaceful coexistence with Jews, Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Muslims for generations. There is a saying in Portuguese, a land that the Syrians ruled from afar for over 700 years, that translates “in the market, nothing changes.” Which is to say, they can outsmart us every time. As Americans we would be well advised to heed that adage and respect Syrian sovereignty accordingly.
There were internal problems I tried to resolve in my limited time at post. I wished I had been stateside for a couple of weddings and funerals I missed, the very human cost of living overseas. The local employees were wonderful people and I dreaded leaving them in the end, though there was faint hope at the time that I might someday return. I acquired a taste for unflavored shisha, just straight up granulated tobacco. I yearn for that taste again.
I have poems I wrote about loss, about Michael Jackson’s untimely death while we were in Damascus, and about the trip to Aleppo that never materialized. My time in Damascus, while short, left an impression on my soul that will never be erased or removed.
Three poems from the period:
Sonnet #38 – Damascus Sonnet
You lose some things you cherish as you pass
Through life’s transitions. Letters you received
May not survive a flood — first drafts of poems
You wrote get lost in shipments — coffee mugs
Disappear, book collections may not stay
Intact when divorce or death part the waves
Of time. Friendships and associations
You thought would be there in your grayer years
May only survive a season, or not —
And reasons for a friendship come and go
Like tides that flood and ebb and flood again.
The things that last a lifetime, then, are rare
And few, and even random . . . . so enjoy
The fleeting now, breathe deeply, smile freely.
Aleppo
We never made it to Aleppo.
There was property there to inspect,
a perfect reason to take a day off
and drive up, get away from all
the random sameness of Damascus.
But we kept putting it off.
The first time I listened to Zooid
I could hear traces of Arkestra
wafting through – the juxtaposition
of high-pitched and low tones,
the improvised piano keeping the rhythm,
the pizzicato of the bass strings
gave it all away.
But we kept putting it off.
Then, we returned home, still assuming
we’d return at some point and trek
up to Aleppo to see the remains
of an ancient civilization.
So when Threadgill said Sun Ra
was one of his important influences
it only confirmed my suspicions.
The remains of an ancient civilization.
Now it might be too late.
Sonnet #39 (without punctuation) - For Michael
We mourn the setting of a brilliant star
Who blazed a path for many, then burned out
At first he sang sweet songs of puppy love
He later sought through song to heal a world
His passions lifted us before his fall
As children we adored his boyish ways
We grew, became adults with his success
As men and women we thought we knew his pain
His stardom overswept us like the dust
That sweet melodic voice became a rasp
On our subconsciousness, his call to heal
Was crowded out by bills and laws and hate
And so we mourn a man who paid the price
And hope that lesser lights will now suffice
*****
Addendum -
Insomnia at Waikiki: Reflections on War and Peace – My Twelve Months in Iraq
“It is not about funding. It has never been. It is about our professional capacity to help bring about the peaceful resolution of conflicts. It is about peace-making.”
(Note: This may be dated by history and things may have changed. This was my reflection returning home in early 2009, on vacation in Hawaii, and suffering from insomnia and possible PTSD.)
My service in Iraq, from January 2008 to January 2009, was a complex sentence that had, for me, several significant punctuation marks. A semicolon marked the pause of my early transfer from the Office of Provincial Affairs to the Front Office; a series of exclamation marks accompanied the March and April bombings in the International Zone (IZ) and on the Palace grounds; tentative commas marked our move from the “hootches” to the NEC apartments starting in May and the intense heat of the June through August summer months; repetitious question marks from September through November caused us all to wonder whether the Iraqis would actually accept the terms of the Strategic Agreement and the Strategic Framework Agreement; the period, full stop, of December ended our occupation of the Republican Palace; and the exclamation mark of our January move to the new chancery coincided, altogether, with some measure of restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and the establishment a new US-Iraq bilateral relationship. Through it all, the exceptional courage and the tireless sacrifices of fellow foreign service officers, foreign service nationals, third country nationals, and contractors left me in a state of awe and with a deep sense of humility, of the privilege that was mine, to be there in service with them.
Service at extreme hardship mega posts, like Baghdad and Kabul, demands great courage and sacrifice, as does service in less heralded but equally demanding smaller hardship postings, such as Luanda, Monrovia, and Khartoum, to name a few (I betray here my AF background and professional lineage). The point, however, is that success in tough places requires personal courage and sacrifice, both of FSO’s and of their families. And the sacrifices are not equal – our families and loved ones pay far more, far more. Much of the human costs of our political success in Iraq, or in any of these places, such as it is, goes unpaid.
Shifting gears quickly, a great American diplomat once confided that perhaps we pay too much attention to direct compensation, such as hardship pay, danger pay, special differentials, etc., and not enough attention to the appeal to a sense of duty and the possible achievement of patriotic success so rarely experienced in a long career. It may be that we have lost faith in such intangibles, such outmoded values, and that we place more faith in the details of the Service Recognition Package. That loss of faith in our core values, quite frankly, identifies us less as diplomats and more as mercenaries, soldiers for hire, and we sell ourselves short, cheaply, at that.
And what is to become of our Foreign Service? That’s a question that came up often in Baghdad conversations where it was evident and obvious that traditionally diplomatic functions, once the province and the domain of the Department of State, were and are slowly being taken over by a far better resourced, better trained, and better equipped Department of Defense. Many studies have been and are being conducted on the militarization of diplomacy (just google the words and see what comes up) and the more euphemistic “civilian-military cooperation.”
Baghdad was a huge laboratory for such studies. Military units named Strategic Effects and Strategic Communications leveraged the massive resource imbalance between Defense and State to spring themselves into former State-dominated areas of political and economic reporting and public diplomacy efforts. Regional and combatant commanders became the equivalent of ambassadors and chiefs of mission, outside the traditional inter-agency setting, but with far more resources and more robust means of budget execution. The Country Team was just another joint interagency task force, among many. Fortunately for us, I guess, Defense showed no taste for administrative or consular work, State’s traditional and historic stepchildren, so State’s monopoly was safe there, for the time being.
Where did the Foreign Service lose its soul, its purpose, its identity? We allowed the lines separating foreign service professional service from military professional service to be blurred. But there are important differences between us, more than the false dichotomy espoused in the phrase “State is from Venus and Defense is from Mars.” We are both from Earth, but there are differences in the way we think, the way we approach problem solving.
Military professionals, in my view, and having been a naval officer, see things digitally, zero or one, all or nothing. Situations, problems to be solved, are black and white. For them, enough technology, be it smart bombs, smart tanks, or smart powerpoint presentations, can win any debate or resolve any difficulty. Military professional have little regard for or patience with the workings of international law or agreed upon conventions.
Foreign service professionals, by contrast, are trained to be analog, and to focus on problems between nations as a range of issues, with a range of solutions, some more appropriate than others, some less. Situations are shades of gray, not just black and white. For us, technology is useful, but might doesn’t mean right, right means right. Correspondingly, foreign service professionals are more inclined to support and promote abiding by international law and conventions.
In a different analogy, from my own military engineering training, Defense is a big gate valve in a system of large pipes. Closed gate valves are strong and hold well against incoming pressure. Open gate valves offer minimal resistance to fluid flow. But gate valves only work in the fully open or fully shut position. Measured flow is not an option. State is a needle valve that provides throttling where needed and can distinguish between, say, two gallon of flow per minute, and 35 gallons of flow per minute, by raising or lowering the valve stem. There are large needle valves for large applications, and there are microscopic needle valves for nanotechnology applications. But they all provide measuring capability.
In yet another analogy, Defense is like the stern planes on a submarine that provide for large depth excursions, say from the surface to four hundred feet. State is like the fairwater planes on a submarine that allow for precise depth changes, say from 200 to 150 feet, and enable a fast attack boat to do underhull surveillance of other ships and surfaced submarines, maintaining a six-inch depth excursion band. As an aside, I remember once studying a class of Russian submarines that did not even have fairwater planes. Up and down, only.
Finally, diplomacy — true diplomacy — can prevent war and all the attendant physical and human losses and has done so. But the the tools of diplomacy, falsely, inappropriately or unprofessionally applied, have a high probability of failure. Diplomacy has come to be seen in recent times as simply the prerequisite and prelude to war. The noted military historian, Geoffrey Blainey writes, “many historians, in explaining the outbreak of war, argue that ‘the breakdown in diplomacy led to war.’ This explanation is rather like the argument that the end of winter led to spring: it is a description masquerading as an explanation.” Where war, the noted historian Barbara Tuchman writes, is the unfolding of miscalculations, diplomacy is the precise calculation itself, and the accurate reporting of solutions to correct calculations that eliminates the need for war and all its corresponding horrors. State’s core competency is diplomacy to prevent war. Defense’s core competency is war itself.
Where do we go from here? We start by unequivocally defining ourselves and our core competencies. It is not about funding. It has never been. It is about our professional capacity to bring about the peaceful resolution of conflicts. It is about peace making. War has brought us a limited economic development, followed by financial disaster. Peace brings a much broader and more widespread prosperity. History, you be the judge. Blessed are the peacemakers . . .
Office director, NEA regional and multilateral affairs (RMA) 2009-2011
MFO multilaterals in Rome, 2010.
Early on we renamed ourselves, from Regional Affairs (RA) to Regional and Multilateral Affairs (RMA), to encompass the important multilateral efforts the office was charged with conducting and upholding.
I wrote in my EER notes: As office director, I considered my primary and principal accomplishment to be the maintenance of a work environment that fosters and nurtures high achievement, productive output, and professional growth on the part of the action officers I supervised. Simultaneously, a top priority we achieved was to keep the Front Office informed and apprised of the activities of the office and how our work impacted and complemented the work of other offices in the bureau. And by seeking out opportunities to showcase individual achievements by the staff, we accomplished a double goal -- strengthening the self-confidence and presentation skills of our action officers, and raising the profile of the office as a place where talent is developed, where qualified bidders may want to bid, and where high achieving officers may want to be assigned.
Key positions in the office were vacant when I began as office director. At first glance I thought to myself, “either I am being set up for failure or this is a fantastic opportunity!” Fortunately, I had learned over the years of my military and diplomatic professional careers that attitude is everything. I chose the later option, fantastic opportunity, gathered the remaining staff, and began the rebuilding process. With knowledge of human resources methods from previous Washington and overseas assignments, within months I had led our staff in filling all vacant positions, some with temporary officers on training or assignment gaps, others with new employees we found through the normal hiring process.
We covered a range of transnational issues over the period, 2009-2011, issues that crossed boundaries in the Near East region. I worked closely with action officer Rina Chatterji on global issues reporting requirements in human rights, religious freedom and human trafficking. Reporting on human trafficking was often contentious, because of the nature of the criminal activity, and, unfortunately, the misalignment between NEA and individual embassy policy goals and the overarching policy goals of the Department human trafficking goals. The human trafficking people were more often correct than not, in retrospect.
Considerable media attention had been directed toward the treatment of expatriate labor in the Middle East, primarily South and East Asian construction and domestic labor, much of which was legitimate economic activity. Unfortunately many countries in our region were neither the point of origin nor the point of destination of illegal and trafficked labor, but a transfer point into European labor markets to the north. Efforts to manage the Bureau’s trafficking in persons portfolio, in conjunction with the Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons (G/TIP), were a big success for RMA but it required a tight coordination between our interests in the region and those of G/TIP offices. Both offices shared a common goal of eliminating human trafficking, but from time to time we differed in the means by which the U.S. government pursued its objectives.
Many of the Administration’s new foreign policy initiatives, such as nuclear non-proliferation, climate change and environmental concerns, science and technological cooperation, and economic and commercial diplomacy, once fully implemented, found their way into the Office of Regional Affairs as they were cross-cutting issues not confined to national boundaries. Though office space was a limitation, we managed to make up for it with flexibility when it came to staffing. We reconfigured the available space to create new work stations to bring on new staff to cover these and other emerging policy areas.
One of my initiatives was to forge stronger working relationships with regional affairs directors in other regional and functional bureaus. I suggested, encouraged, and supported policy outreach efforts to EUR (Europe) and AF (Africa) bureaus, and steered efforts to strengthen links between NEA (Near East) and SCA (South and Central Asia) and EAP (East Asia and the Pacific) bureaus. We submitted a memo outlining a new framework for “third party” consultations with countries in other regional bureaus that have NEA policy links. Similarly, I reached out to counterparts in EAP for assistance in duplicating their highly successful efforts to provide an interactive, bureau-wide “Communities at State” website providing desks and offices a forum for the display and discussion of cross-cutting issues in the region.
Jill Shaunfield was our senior civil servant and had been working the multilateral technical assistance programs between Israel and her Arab and Gulf neighbors dating back to the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the Oslo Accords of 1993. As an aside, on a work trip to Madrid (Spain had EU leadership in many of the Israeli-supported water projects), Jill took me to the best museums and galleries that housed all the top Picasso collections.
MFO was not a UN peacekeeping operation. It is a trilateral effort between Egypt, Israel and the United States to maintain peace in the Sinai Peninsula. Its stated mission was to supervise the implementation of the security provisions of the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace. Additional countries provided troops and financial and logistic support but their participation was not automatic. RMA exerted great effort in coordination with desk officers covering the various countries to raise funds through contributions and to insure a steady flow of troop power for the observer force. When action officer Michelle Cloud left our shop for a graduate education opportunity, we found ourselves hard-pressed to replace her. Luckily, one of our recent hires, Melissa Mangold stepped up to the plate and filled in (both, then civil service hires, are presently full-fledged foreign service officers).
I was lucky to have a highly skilled and hardworking deputy, Brian Grimm. Brian provided leadership on the labor-intensive budgeting portfolio and the econ/commercial issues and served as my first mate in a variety of ways. Below, left to right, Brian Grimm, deputy director, Dr. Peter Howard, resident scholar, and me, office director.
Towards the end of my tenure, the war in Libya resulted in the shuttering of our embassy and the requirement to have a third country conduct our affairs with the Government of Libya. The term of art was “protecting power” and as a transnational issue, it fell to RMA to run the paperwork once a protecting power was identified. First we went with Turkey, a NATO ally still resident in Libya. Ultimately Turkey shut down operations and we went with Hungary for the duration of the period.
I was scheduled to return to the Bureau of African Affairs for my follow-on assignment. Instead, while on a vacation trip touring Spain and Portugal I got an unsolicited call from NEA A/S Jeff Feltman with a job offer to remain in the NEA Bureau as deputy assistant secretary for North Africa. I thought I was through with NEA and I should have kept it that way. Instead, I went for the okey-doke and took the NEA assignment and would live to regret it.
postscript. I almost forgot to mention the educational and professional enrichment activities I engaged in during this period. In the weeks before starting the job I was enrolled in a required course for those promoted into the Senior Foreign Service, Senior Executive Seminar at the Foreign Service Institute. I don’t have a real clear memory of it. We did the Myers Briggs test (again!) and discussed how our archetype changed, or not, over the years of our service. We did some small group work, and some speakers came in. The Senior Seminar was once a year long and only for a select few. The three week version was available for everybody. I think that may have been an innovation of the Powell years.
Simultaneously, almost, I took the six week Acting for Business Professionals course offered by the Shakespearean Theatre. It was a lot of fun and I got to meet a different group of folks, lawyers and other civil servants, mainly. I hadn’t read a play in years. We read and studied plays, acted out parts from them, and learned acting exercises and method acting techniques useful in the business place.
In the second year of my tenure, State selected me for the MIT Seminar XXI program. Top names in foreign affairs and international security addressed us at dinner meetings at the Cosmos Club and the National Press Club. There was a weekend-long session at Airlie House down in Warrenton, VA, again with top names from the international affairs and security profession. I confess I haven’t done much networking with the mostly military crowd with whom I did the program, though I support and attend the annual alumni dinner meetings.
MIT Seminar XXI. Class of 2010-2011
Poem from the period
Rome Museum
I spent a leisure afternoon
at Galleria Borghese
and saw some human faces —
carved in stone —
that gave me pause…
There was Bernini’s David, biting
his lip in keen determination
to land five smooth stones
on his chosen target. And I recall
that lip-biting determination
’cause I have bit that lip once or twice…
And Pauline Bonaparte, resting reflectively
on a mattress of marble
whose flowing wrinkles and
living indentations showed the
slight weight of the subject
in dynamic detail.
And look, there’s Daphne fleeing Apollo,
preferring to turn herself into a tree, rather
than live the life of an object
of passionate pursuit.
Apollo, uncaring, feels her heart
still beating as her flesh turns to bark,
as her arms become branches.
And Hermaphroditus, lying in repose,
hiding her passion and her bisexed parts.
And finally, perhaps Bernini’s greatest
work of art — Aeneas and Anchises.
Sadly, I recognize homeless Anchises’ look of worry.
And sadly, I know Aeneas’ burden
as he flees the ruins of his native city.
Sadly, so sadly, I know these faces.
October, 2010
NEA deputy assistant secretary DAS. 2011-2012
This chapter is pretty much an editorialization of the time I spent as Near Eastern Affairs deputy assistant secretary. I actually got a lot of stuff done in the job, with travels to the region and domestic travel to California and Nebraska to promote the work of the Department of State.
On official trips to Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, I met with students and NGO representatives, briefed groups of journalists, and had formal meetings with government officials. People were often curious, given what they had read about racial discrimination in the U.S., about how a black guy rises through the ranks in the diplomatic corps, especially considering that ethnic minorities in their own countries couldn’t dream of pursuing such a career path. I recall accepting it as my obligation, in addition to briefing folks on American foreign policy, to share with them bits and pieces about myself. Nobody at State told me to do it, and no one even hinted that personality is a tool in your diplomatic toolkit. But I think people figure it out as they rise through the ranks.
In the end, though, everything was overshadowed by the end. I may try to correct that in the writing. And I may leave it just as it is.
I summarized it all into this note I sent to a long lost prep school classmate:
After Bissau, Luanda and Accra, I returned to DC to work East Africa issues. Then I took a job in Cairo. Cairo morphed into Baghdad. Baghdad morphed into Damascus. The Islamic civilization trifecta. I started to wonder how I would survive without hearing the call to prayer throughout the day! Finally I am back in DC. There is no call to prayer in DC, only the low frequency rumbling of the federal bureaucracy, grinding human souls into inanimate dust.
It all ends with my last assignment, 2011-2012, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Maghreb (North Africa), a position from which I was unceremoniously but conveniently, shamefully, ingloriously and inaccurately removed on December 18, 2012 as part of an over-zealous Department response to unfounded fears of Congressional fallout from the Benghazi ARB report.
The one bright light of this period was taking an online poetry course, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo) via Coursera and University of Pennsylvania. I was able to do the course work on weekends and still maintain my day job. Most importantly, ModPo gave me a pathway, an avenue to rediscover a long lost passion, reading and writing poetry. We formed a local group that met weekly in the community meeting room of my building to discuss the week’s selections, eventually that group relocated to Politics and Prose bookshop, and ultimately, to Zoom. My creative side was able to re-blossom.
Here is a note I wrote to my poetry group, The Breakfast Club, in late December, 2012:
“Dear Breakfast Clubbers: I thought about you all as I poured the second cup of french-pressed goodness and decided to share in this forum some life reflections. I have had a lot of free time since my dismissal at State on December 18. Still on the payroll, but with no desk and no secretary to order my life, I have been free to take long morning walks, hit the DC think tanks after breakfast, and work on writing projects in the afternoon. The passage of time has given me a clearer understanding of the whole administrative process that envelops me. It (this administrative leave period) was only supposed to last for a few days until Clinton could testify before Congress. But she got sick and had to postpone so my release was delayed until after her testimony, now scheduled for January 24.
My actual piece is this whole Benghazi drama is actually quite small. I was responsible for North Africa, but because Libya was so sexy, several more senior folks carved parts out, including people VERY well connected to the Clinton machine. Of course, they couldn’t be fingered, so it rolled down to me, unconnected me, in a most undignified and uncollegial way.
In a letter to the senior politicos who made this decision, leaked my name to the press, and executed this decision, I told them the way they treated and were treating me was shabby, thuggish and third worldly, and that I actually held the third world in a higher regard, having spent most of my career there. They didn’t like that. But my, wasn’t it poetic!?
The whole thing is further complicated because my small part has become a chink in Clinton’s armor, and, consequently, in Obama’s armor, since they both “signed off” on the findings of the Benghazi ARB, whose official unclassified report, by the way, mentions neither my name nor my position as deputy assistant secretary for the Maghreb. Unfortunately for me, any effort to extract me from this mess, to exonerate me, to clear my name, risks exposing Clinton and Obama managerial weaknesses, not to mention policy flaws that the political opposition would love to exploit.
The Clinton machine is focused on 2016, already. The Obama machine, as it has for the past four years, lacks any true foreign policy focus. This is Washington, baby. The buck never stops; it never even slows down. I have decided to share with the Breakfast Club, and any ModPoers who lurk therein, this inside view of Washington policy making.
I will get through this: they use tough, resilient material to make the Maxwells and Hairstons down in Piedmont North Carolina. There will be poems written, and memoirs, and maybe even a slick movie. Yeah, a Spielberg slick movie.
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” –Omar Khayyam.
People have asked me if my demise were somehow racially determined. The question they should have asked was if it were politically motivated.
I have never “traded” on my race inside the State bureaucracy. I never had to. I grew up in a very nurturing community, an “African village” of sorts in Greensboro, NC. We lived less than an hour’s drive from the farming and rural communities where my parents, and their parents, and their parents, and their parents were raised.
All the way back to Great Grandaddy Caswell Maxwell and Great Grandmama Emily Weatherly and 2nd Great Grandaddy Frank Pritchett and 2nd Great Grandmama Hannah Weatherly and Great Grandaddy Dick Rankin and Great Grandma Mary and 2nd Great Grandma Harriot on Daddy’s side, and Great Grandma Sallie and Great Grandpa Tom Douglas and 2nd Great Grandma (Big Mama) Rhodie and 2nd Great Grand Papa Nelson and 2nd Great Grandpa Sonny and 2nd Great Grandma Mariah on Mama’s side and everybody in between all lived their lives and died right there in Guilford County, NC, in Rockingham County, NC, and across the NC/VA state border in Pittsylvania County, VA.
The farms and plantations where generations of my enslaved ancestors lived and labored are also inside that one-hour radius. One could say, from a spiritual level, that I grew up under the watchful eye of multiple generations of African ancestors. It feels sometimes they are still watching over me. May they all rest in peace.
For me, doing the work was always sufficient, beginning in my village in Greensboro, then on the track and in the classroom at Woodberry and extending over a succession of submarines and ships where I proudly served and institutions where I studied. I never claimed victimhood nor projected guilt onto others.
I am of African descent and my affirmation of both my African and my American identities have worked out more to my benefit than to my detriment over the course of my life and professional career. Uniting me with my ancestors, both heritages have given me confidence and strength and developed in me a well-built internal honor code. I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors. I stand – on holy ground. That’s my opinion and has been my guiding principle. I have always been “black and proud.” But race in and of itself is a merely a social construct, plain and simple. There is always greater genetic variation within a so-called race than across races. Don’t forget it.
We live in an extreme racially-charged atmosphere. In most election years we watch evidence emerge of forces that display and give rise to divisive tendencies in society. Politics reign. Stir up and excite the masses to get their vote. It seemed more intense in 2020 but that is because of widespread opposition to the government in mainstream and social media. Information warfare is being waged in every town and hamlet, in every city, at every internet node.
For better or for worse, the State Department and the Foreign Service do not exist in a vacuum. The same ills that exist in broader American society are normally distributed across all USG agencies and institutions, including the Foreign Service. To believe otherwise is being naive, if not intentionally dishonest.
That’s it, y’all. That’s all she wrote.
Bow-Tie Day in the NEA Front Office
Many years later, reflecting on my time as a DAS in NEA, I would post to one of my poetry blogs:
“In full disclosure, I have a deeper interest in Algeria. I worked for a couple of years in my former career with the Algerians and Moroccans trying unsuccessfully to resolve the conundrum (what’s a better term for a permanent state of war) known as Western Sahara. The way that job ended left a bad taste in my mouth that still remains. We thought we were doing important work, but it turned out both sides were competing to see who could make the biggest contribution to the Clinton Foundation, expecting political favors when she became President. The New Diplomacy. Soft Power. A big fraud to raise millions for the Clinton machine.”
*
If it is customary to get a third party to write a closing statement bosses at State may have been good candidates. The acting Assistant Secretary, a second generation foreign service officer and a career ambassador (and a close friend of the ARB chair according to journalists’ gossip), escaped unscathed but probably un-confirmable for any future position inside the Department. The PDAS similarly escaped unscathed but un-confirmable, assigned to a plush European post to finish some unfinished “diplomatic” work. I will not even mention their names here and I certainly haven’t invited them to this memoir project. Their story is theirs to tell. I wrote in my final fitness report:
“I am shocked and dismayed that my immediate supervisors, aware of the provisions of 3FAM 2444 Curtailment of Assignments in the United States, did not exert their responsibilities and duties as my supervisors to at least ensure that my rights were protected under the law. Perhaps it was in their individual interests to remain silent, but their responsibility should have outweighed their interests. That they chose to remain silent, and that they failed to even inform me of my rights, constitutes, in my view, a colossal moral and professional failure of leadership.”
Lots of people simply kept their heads down and towed the party line. I burned those bridges. Something similar will happen again and people will behave again as they behaved before. It’s part and parcel of the organizational culture.
As I progressed through stages of grief, of anger and denial, my outlet was long walks along the Potomac River, composing poems and sonnets in my head, and rushing home to put pen to paper. The walk took about 40 minutes - plenty of time to clear my head - across Memorial Bridge, down to Key Bridge on the Virginia side, then across over into Georgetown and to our Foggy Bottom home.
***************
Addendum
A pawn in a high stakes damage control exercise (and key letters I wrote to Department principals while on administrative leave)
May 16, 2013
I was a pawn in a high stakes damage control exercise, nothing more and nothing less. It took me several weeks to arrive at that conclusion, but acceptance is the final stage of loss and it took me several weeks to arrive at that final stage.
To tell this story properly, we must go back to Madrid, and to early August, 2011. My wife and I were on a two-week long bus tour of Portugal and Spain. En route to Madrid, my IPhone battery died. Too many photographs of castles and cathedrals. As soon as we arrived at the designated hotel in Madrid I started a battery charge. An e-mail appeared from NEA Assistant Secretary Jeff Feltman.
Never mind. It's all too insane to even be believable…
Upon return to the U.S. in late August 2011, I reported to the Near East bureau (NEA) and assumed the Maghreb deputy assistant secretary (DAS) position I had not sought instead of the Bureau of African Affairs deputy executive director position I had sought and been assigned to.
Libya was high on the list of US foreign policy interests at the time, in fact, at the very top of the NEA list of priorities. Now, does anyone think that the State Department and the US Government would all of a sudden entrust the totality of Libya policy making to a newly-minted DAS, a management officer who had just weeks before been making preps to take the AF/EX deputy executive director position? Does it make sense? Really? Of course not. It would have been the height of Department managerial incompetence to have done so.
The principal deputy assistant secretary (PDAS), Liz Dibble, told me she would maintain the lead on Libya, since she had covered it since DAS Sanderson's departure in late July and also covered it from the European perspective in her previous position as EUR DAS. Special envoy for Middle East transitions Bill Taylor would carve out a major share of Libya governance and assistance business. PolMil (PM) bureau assistant secretary Andrew Shapiro would have a major slice of Libya policy with weapons transfers and MANPADS. Counter-terrorism (CT) director Dan Benjamin would carve out the huge counter-terrorism slice. I would be left with the remainders: regional issues and border issues. Economic (EB) under secretary Robert Hormatz and Energy assistant secretary Carlos Pascual would cover Libya’s large energy and finance sectors.
(Note: there is no intention here to locate or divert the responsibility for Libya to other offices, but to demonstrate the diffusion of responsibility throughout the building. End note.)
In short, I would be concentrating my time on the other countries in the Maghreb, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Western Sahara. I remember feeling just a bit put off by the whole scenario, but I knew from experience there was no success to be achieved in fighting that particular type of turf battle. So I let it go.
I came late to the game, and the office director for the MAG office had long before established the practice of the daily phone call to post. I understood clearly that he was looking to pad his evaluation with Libya stuff in order to get promoted across the senior threshold and wanted to maintain ownership of that daily phone call. Everybody does that. I told him not only would I allow it, but I would make sure that, through the EER process and the award process, I would do everything possible to make sure he got promoted in the 2012 cycle. My only request was that he brief me on the contents of the calls and copy me on his e-mails to the assistant secretary and the PDAS. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn't. No real cause for alarm.
Many events happened in the Maghreb over the next year. I maintained my focus on Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Western Sahara, visiting all three countries where we had posts, making stops in Germany en route on each separate trip to consult with AFRICOM colleagues. Over the course of 16 months we pulled off successful strategic dialogue events in Washington with all three countries.
With the exception of the injured Libyan fighters hospital visit to Boston for treatment, the disposition of Qadafi family members in Niger and Algeria, and a series of meetings on border security I led that affected Tunisia and Algeria, I steered clear of Libya issues. Everything had been carved away and parceled out. It wasn't my turf. "Let Libya embellish their EER's," I thought to myself of all those people who "owned" various slices of Libya. (If I were a lawyer, I'd find a way to subpoena EER's and award nominations to see who took credit and who got performance pay for "doing" Libya.)
I would suffice myself with doing the best job I could with what countries I had left, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Western Sahara, work closely with the desk officers and the MAG staff, and develop relations across the building and in the interagency on those country's issues. And there was plenty to do.
(Note: I never visited Libya as DAS. Nor did I ever attend international meetings regarding Libya. The NSS had a Libya director, Ben Fishman. Most, 99% of Ben's interactions were with the MAG office director and the NEA PDAS. None of this is news, everybody in the Libya business can attest to anything mentioned here. End note.)
In December 2011, after being courted by a functional bureau and actually flirting with the idea of leaving NEA to take a PDAS position, I decided I would remain in NEA but retire in the summer of 2012 to explore interests outside of State. I had over thirty years of service and I was over fifty. It was time. I spoke with then A/S Feltman and PDAS Dibble about a July departure, which later morphed into a mid-September departure. In July 2012 I submitted my paperwork to HR and was paneled for the October 2012 Job Search Program and a final retirement date of November 30, 2012. I negotiated with the front office my final day in NEA as September 21, 2012.
We got reports, early in the day on September 11, 2012, that the embassy in Cairo had been attacked by protesters. Later in the afternoon, we started receiving reports of attacks on the compound in Benghazi. Then there was a lull in the reports, a weird, eerie lull, followed, late in the evening, by reports that an unidentified communicator had been killed, then by reports that he had survived the attack, then reports that he had in fact been killed. The acting assistant secretary, Beth Jones, called EUR first, because Sean's family was in the Netherlands. Then she called the embassy in The Hague. Ultimately, the DCM at the embassy in The Hague made the call to inform the family. Details on Chris remained very sketchy throughout the early evening. But by 10 pm, we started to fear the worse, that something awful had happened and we would never see Chris again. I went home just after midnight.
Friday of the following week, September 21, 2012, was my final scheduled day in the NEA bureau. I went into PDAS Liz Dibble's office early on Monday, September 17, 2012. I told her that the bureau and the North Africa office were in a state of total disarray because of what had happened in Benghazi. I told her I had some career plans, but nothing that couldn't be postponed, and that if the Bureau needed me to stay on the job, I was willing to stay. She said she wanted to consult with Beth first and would get back to me. I saw her again around 10 am that same day in the corridor. She said she had spoken to Beth and asked me would I please stay. I agreed to stay until the next Job Search Program cycle in March, 2013.
*
Once the Accountability Review Board (ARB) was established, I started seeing my former boss Dick Shinnick in the corridors. I had worked for Dick when I was a special assistant to the Under Secretary for Management in 2005. We also knew each other from my days on the Watch (1997-1998) when he was S/EX executive director. On one particular day, a couple of weeks prior to my interview, I saw Dick at one of the elevator banks. "How is the ARB going?" I asked him. Dick said, "Ray, the ARB is not getting very much context from the interviews. When you come up, try to provide some context." I said, "You know I don't have much to do with Libya, but I will try to provide what context I can."
A couple of weeks later, on November 20 to be exact, I arrived at work in the morning and discovered an 11 am ARB interview had been placed on my Outlook schedule. So I went. Alone. Without an attorney. I never received the letter that says you can bring an attorney (we did receive such a letter for the group interview on October 4) and couldn’t have arranged for an attorney in a day's notice anyway. Following up on Dick's request, I attempted to provide "context" to the discussion that we had. The non-disclosure agreement the ARB had me sign precludes any further discussion of what was they asked me and what I responded. It ended after about an hour and a half and I went back to my office. At that point, I had no idea I was on anybody's hit list. In fact, I don't think I was.
December 18, 2012, was the day the ARB Report was released. I came back to my office after lunch and there was an e-mail from acting assistant secretary Beth Jone’s OMS that I should meet with Beth at 2 pm. I went to her office at 2, but she was late getting back from a 7th floor meeting, so I returned to my office. I got a call around 2:20 that Beth was ready to see me, so I went to her office. She invited me in and closed the door. She told me the ARB report had been released and that it was not complimentary to the Department, to NEA, or to me. She said the PDAS, Liz Dibble, was reading the classified report in the SCIF, and that she had not yet seen it. Then she said she had been instructed by Cheryl Mills to relieve me of the DAS position, that I was fired, and that I should have all my personal belongings out of the office by close of business that same day. She said Liz would identify a place where I could keep my things temporarily, and that I would stay in the Bureau as some sort of senior adviser. She said the Bureau was going to take care of me and that I didn't need to "lawyer up." Those were her words.
I waited in my office to hear from Liz Dibble on the temporary office space per Beth’s promise. No phone call, no e-mail, no face darkened my doorway. At 6:30 pm I put my few personal belonging in one of those paper grocery bags, departed the building, and started the walk home. The bag tore before I reached my building, and my belongings spilled out onto the sidewalk. Luckily, a neighbor passed me on the street and offered to return with a box.
I later learned that folks on the seventh floor scrambled that day (Tuesday, December 18) in preparation for both the release of the report and the Thursday congressional testimony by Deputy Secretaries William Burns and Thomas Nides. They feared a strong congressional backlash if they didn't name some names of people they could say were responsible for security lapses in Benghazi. To avert that backlash, Tuesday night the Department of State leaked my name to the press, along with the names of the two DS agents. Then the Department press briefer, Jen Psaki, officially confirmed our names the next morning. The unclassified report did not name names or identify positions, it only identified the NEA and DS bureaus. So if it wasn't in the ARB unclassified report, I concluded it must have been State who leaked the names. (Note: I later learned that members of Congress also had access to the full report. It is possible that that’s where the leak occurred.)
*
The cloud caused by the immediate negative press coverage in mid-December had a one silver lining: my inbox overflowed for several weeks with hundreds if not thousands of emails and Facebook posts expressing outrage and support, from sitting and retired ambassadors, from former bosses and subordinates, from FSN's at posts where I had served, from FSO colleagues the world over, from old girlfriends, old Navy shipmates, relatives, foreign diplomats with whom I have served, and many, many others. I remain deeply grateful for those expressions of outrage and support.
*
I learned that Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland also confirmed my name to the press as one of those who had been removed as a result of the Benghazi ARB report release. Reports of my firing, followed by reports of my dismissal, followed by reports of my removal from the DAS position appeared in press reports throughout the United States and abroad, in the Middle East, in West Africa, in Asia, and in Europe. My name was cited, and my photograph was circulated. I remember feeling quite devastated at the time, humiliated, shamed. My family in North Carolina and my wife’s family overseas both suffered humiliation and embarrassment due to the inaccurate press coverage.
I was officially placed on administrative leave on December 18, 2012. I received a letter of instruction on December 21, 2012 directing me to hand in my building pass and blackberry and to vacate the premises. I refused to sign that letter of instruction because I felt it was punitive and I had committed no crime nor violated any regulations nor done anything warranting such treatment. After sending an e-mail complaining about the criminalizing tone of the first letter, I received a second letter on December 27, 2012 placing me on administrative leave “to allow sufficient time for the Department to evaluate appropriate action,” but without the requirement to vacate the premises or surrender my building pass. At that point it wasn’t clear to me if I were watching reruns of Amos and Andy or The Three Stooges. HR was a complete mess.
Two months went by and no one contacted me officially to tell me why I had been summarily removed from my job and why I was sitting at home without an assignment. I had occasional contact with my “handler,” then Director General (DG) Linda Thomas-Greenfield, meetings where she made promises to restore me to normal status as soon as possible. But it was pretty obvious she had no real control in the matter. In mid-February, 2013, I rescinded my retirement notification, already paneled for April 30, 2013 (to include a customary two-month transition period which would have made my last day in the Department February 25th), because I did not want to end my career on a dishonorable note and under a questionable status.
On February 25, 2013, I wrote a letter to the Department requesting the factual and legal basis for my continued unassigned status. In that letter, I requested a response by March 8, 2013. On March 15, I emailed a second request for a response to the Department. I finally received a response from the DG’s office on March 22, 2013, almost a month later from the original request, indicating that the Department’s evaluation had not yet been concluded, and detailing the procedure for initiating a grievance. Again, Amos and Andy or The Three Stooges? I couldn’t decide but it was definitely slapstick comedy dealing with these people.
On April 3, 2013, I submitted a grievance package to the HR Front Office as recommended by the Director General. In that grievance package, I expressed my belief that I had been improperly removed from the DAS position, based on the Department of State’s own rules for involuntary curtailment from an assignment, and I requested reinstatement to my assignment or a comparable assignment.
On April 16, my American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) attorney requested access to the pertinent portions of the classified ARB report to include as a part of my grievance case.
On May 29, 2013, over five months after I was curtailed from my assignment, my attorney and I were allowed to view the pertinent classified ARB paragraphs. The same passages were declassified to SBU later in the day on May 29, 2013, in advance of House committee testimony by Pickering and Mullen. This is the first time that I was made aware of the alleged basis for my removal from the DAS position. Had I been confronted with these allegations earlier and given an opportunity to respond, I do not believe I would have been removed from my position or summarily placed on leave for more than five months. My AFSA attorney was allowed to review the entire classified ARB report on July 12, 2013.
On August 19, 2013, I received notification to terminate administrative leave and return to the Department on August 20, the following day. I sent an email to friends and colleagues (including some folks from the press) with the following announcement:
All: I received a memo from HR today advising me that my term in purgatory (admin leave) had reached its end and directing me to report for duty tomorrow. No explanation, no briefing, just come back to work. Tomorrow.
So I will go in tomorrow.
Thanks to you all for your friendship and support during this period.
A luta continua!
Ray
*
On the allegations presented in the now declassified paragraphs of the ARB report, I offer the following amplifications:
1. The reporting chain for security issues at State, on the regional bureau side, goes up through the executive office, in NEA, led by Executive Director Lee Lohman. That office, which is overall responsible for staffing, budgeting, buildings and security, and the Executive Director, reports directly to the PDAS, Elizabeth Dibble. DAS’es are seldom involved in decision-making discussions regarding security. On security issues, the DAS level in the regional bureau is not where the rubber meets the road. As an example, when I was a post management officer in the Africa bureau (AF) executive office, we were involved in getting approval for a new housing compound in Nairobi. Serious security questions were raised because of the threat level in Nairobi at the time. Meetings included the executive director (my supervisor, I attended as her notekeeper), the Overseas Building Operations director, a senior Diplomatic Security representative, and the AF PDAS. Final decision memos went to the Under Secretary for Management for approval. The DAS who covered Kenya from a policy perspective was never included in these decision-making meetings on security considerations because it just wasn’t her or his job. It was the job of the executive director and the PDAS. The same bureaucratic structure exists in all regional bureaus.
2. In my ARB interview, I mentioned that I had stopped going to the morning intel binder reading. A fuller account, had I been offered the opportunity to provide one, was that I stopped attending the daily morning NEA SCIF intel reading around June, 2012. Most of the reporting was circular or merely regurgitated Embassy reporting we already had access to through normal channels, so I did not find it very useful for my regional responsibilities. My supervisors, acting A/S Jones and PDAS Dibble, did read the intel binder every day, so anything that I may not have seen, they would have.
3. I regret that the ARB did not seek to understand or even draw out the full and proper context and significance of remarks I made during my interview, especially in light of the fact that I appeared before them without legal counsel. It certainly would have been appropriate for the ARB to have recalled me for a subsequent interview, if they were going to include such a crucial determination in the final report. That said, several senior Department officials have stated and/or testified that there was no actionable intelligence the reading of which might have prevented the Benghazi attack.
4. In any case, I was “read in” to two specific SCI-classified programs that had regional Maghreb significance. Whenever there was special or actionable intelligence, an analyst from INR would phone me and I would meet him in the SCIF for the reading. I also kept up with classified cables from my posts via classified OpenNet.
*
I was an expendable pawn in a damage control exercise. No more, no less. The person or people from the 7th floor who ordered my removal didn't know me from Adam. They knew nothing about me or my work. They didn't have the courage to call me up to the 7th floor, face me, and ask me to fall on my sword and/or take one for the team. Until I see the classified report, I will continue to doubt they even had the evidence to remove me. There was no due process as required by law and custom. There was just a purported 7th floor need for a scapegoat and the unbridled ability and capacity to act overzealously, impulsively and with impunity. What is truly unfortunate is that my scapegoating and removal resolves none, not a one, of the NEA or Department managerial deficiencies identified by the ARB.
*
What They Got Wrong on Benghazi
“You are taking this all too personally, Raymond. It is not about you, it is about Hillary Clinton and 2016.”
Those words were uttered by State Department ombudsman Shireen Dodson in January 2013 in an apparently well-intentioned attempt to simultaneously admonish and console me. Her assessments probably were right.
The attack on our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 and the resulting deaths of four U. S. government representatives were horrific. The American people deserved a complete and accurate account of those events. However, the investigation conducted by the State Department’s Benghazi Accountability Review Board (ARB) into the events was woefully incomplete and consequently misleading. Perhaps most importantly, the ARB failed to interview a number of key officials who had a direct role in decisions regarding Libya. Among the officials not interviewed by the ARB were three high-level political appointees: Thomas Nides, Deputy Secretary of State and the official with overall responsibility for management of Department resources in Libya; Andrew Shapiro, Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs and the Department’s point person for ensuring (to the extent possible) appropriate employment of the thousands of US-provided shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles in Libya; and Ben Fishman, the National Security Council (NSC) Director for Libya.
(Side note. Speaking of the National Security Council, we were constantly on the phone with the White House Situation Room from the NEA Front Office that fateful night in September. Only insiders know, however, that President Obama was AWOL from the Sit Room. The senior officer present was the VP. End side note.)
Also limiting the ARB’s investigation was the fact that the Board, despite its claims to having unfettered access to documentation, experienced – perhaps unknowingly – the same problems gaining access to emails, memos and similar materials that Congressional committees later faced. The Board’s difficulty in gaining access to information was not accidental, it was by design. When the ARB issued its call for documents, the executive directorate of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) was placed in charge of collecting all emails and other relevant documents. However, once the documents were gathered and boxed, a select group of NEA staffers spent a weekend in a basement operations center pouring through the entire collection.
Despite its claims to being independent, the ARB was anything but. Sworn Congressional testimony revealed that ARB co-chair Admiral Michael Mullen made phone calls to Cheryl Mills to report on the fitness of a potential Congressional witness who had been interviewed by the ARB. When questioned about that September 2013 testimony, ARB co-chair Ambassador Thomas Pickering said he would not have “said that.” His response was carefully parsed diplo-speak. What he did not say was that he would not have “done that.” Because of the casualness of the remark that Admiral Mullen made and the oblique reference Ambassador Pickering made to it, we have every reason to believe that communications between the ARB and the Secretary’s staff was on-going during the ARB process. Even if contact occurred only that one time, that is NOT being independent.
Despite claims to impartiality, several officials involved in the Benghazi ARB, and in the overall damage control process following the events of September 2012, had possible tracks to cover from previous fatal attacks of U. S. diplomatic facilities, specifically the bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998. In the 1998 East Africa bombings, 224 lives were lost, including those of twelve Americans. Susan Rice, currently President Obama’s National Security Advisor and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 2012, was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in 1998 and consequently in the direct chain of command that declined then-Ambassador to Kenya Prudence Bushnell’s request of additional security funding. ARB co-chair Thomas Pickering was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in 1998, also in that chain of command. Dick Shinnick, a member of the Benghazi ARB committee, in 1998 was then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s Executive Director. Current Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy was the acting Under Secretary for Management in 1998. I remember those officials and their positions in 1998 because I was a watch stander in the State Department’s Operations Center in 1998 and was on watch the night of the bombings. No-one was held accountable in 1998, which generated increased pressure to assign responsibility and name names after the Benghazi attack.
Lest we forget, our facility in Benghazi was not a consulate. That would have required Congressional approval and direct funding. In fact, the U. S. government presence in Benghazi was not primarily a State Department operation at all. It was, as has been reported widely in the media, a CIA operation. Did the ARB question why the CIA did not provide better security? Was anybody from the CIA held accountable? Was anybody from the CIA even interviewed by the ARB? No, no and no.
Finally, the ARB report completely let Congress off the hook, assigning no specific blame to Congress for the security funding decisions it had made. Almost certainly, this aspect of the ARB report was specifically designed to persuade members of Congress to find the report’s findings palatable. It worked. The chairperson of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time of the report’s release focused solely on the status of the four people named in the classified section of the report. “Why can’t they be fired?” she asked. “What is being done to discipline them?” she demanded. Never did she ask, “Did they receive due process?” Or even, “Are we sure the findings are correct?” State Department political leadership played Congress like the hard-to-tune viola I played in my youth.
Let’s face facts and call the Benghazi Accountability Review Board by its proper name. It was a disgrace. It perpetrated a disservice to the memory of the U.S. officials who lost their lives on September 11, 2012. The ARB inquiry was, at best, a shoddily executed attempt at damage control, both in Foggy Bottom and on Capitol Hill. I am confident that history ultimately will judge the ARB report to be a flawed product and will conclude that the entire ARB process, unfortunately, was little more than an exercise in misdirection and political theatrics.
*
This is a letter written in response to the first Administrative leave letter I received on December 21, 2013. An amended letter was provided on December 27, 2013 that was significantly less criminalizing.
12/23/12
to: Linda Thomas Greenfield, Cheryl Mills, Patrick Kennedy, Thomas Nides
I am writing this letter to inform you that I cannot in clear conscience sign the administrative leave letter Executive Director Lee Lohman delivered to my residence Friday night.
Although it is described as an "administrative" action, giving up my building pass and blackberry and cutting me off from access to friends and colleagues whose support I actually need during this crisis would be tantamount to a disciplinary action, a punishment. Yet, no one has informed me of what rule I broke or what sin I committed to deserve such a punishment.
To sign this letter would be to accept what amounts to punitive action, and acceptance of that punitive action would be an admittance of my culpability in all of this. For me to say that I had any involvement in security, or the funding for security in Benghazi, would be telling a lie. I cannot tell a lie.
This whole series of events has brought shame and harm to my family in the small North Carolina city where generations of Maxwells and Hairstons have lived honorably, poorly, but honorably, since long before emancipation. It has caused my wife agitation and worry, and it has given me a few sleepness nights.
A friend told me, "Ray, the way they are treating you is shabby, thuggish, and third-worldly." I frankly have a higher regard for the third world, having spent the bulk of my career there. The silver lining to this cloud are the thousands of emails, facebook messages. letters and even Christmas cards we have received from scores of sitting and retired ambassadors, friends and colleagues, FSN's, former bosses and subordinates, and navy buddies, expressing support, incredulity and outrage.
Additionally, please review the sections of 12 FAM 030 that deal with witness rights and personnel recommendations. Several process fouls have occurred.
I will not bore the other addressees here with a list of my career achievements. It is public record. But you know where I have served and how often I have responded to the call of duty.
My friends, and people I don't even know, say this is no way to end an illustrious career of sacrifice and service. Young officers, scores of mid-level officers I have personally mentored, are especially appalled at this spectacle.
Chris was my friend, and frankly, we haven't even had time to deal properly with our personal grief and loss. My last official act before being asked to leave the premises Tuesday, in disgrace, with all my stuff in a paper shopping bag, was cobbling together Chris's award nomination for the Richard Holbrooke Award. Because the office was short-staffed, I promised S/P that I would do it myself. Now, for my family members to have to hear from their co-workers and co-church goers that Ray is the reason why those people died in Benghazi, is just beyond comprehension.
To recapitulate, I can't sign the letter because it would be telling a lie and I cannot tell a lie. If the building needs to punish me for not signing a letter, that is a penalty that I will have to endure. Greater men have suffered indignities for lesser faults.
Ray
*
February 25, 2013
Dear Ms. Bernicat:
This letter is in response to your undated letter which I received, delivered by NEA/EX Executive Director Lee Lohman to my residence, on Friday, December 21, 2012, which was later amended by a letter from Acting DG Hams Klemm, dated December 27, 2012.
We are now entering the third month of administrative leave resulting from the Benghazi ARB report release (the NEA Acting Assistant Secretary relieved me of my duties as DAS in NEA, effective close of business on December 18, 2012, under the direction of Cheryl Mills, or at least so she informed me. I count December 19, 2012 as day one of administrative leave). The dated letter referenced above stated that the purpose of the administrative leave period of paid, non-duty status “is to allow sufficient time for the Department to evaluate appropriate action.”
I have carefully, patiently and faithfully complied with the administrative leave terms. I have cancelled FSI courses in the absence of resolution of my status, including the four-day Retirement Seminar scheduled to start February 26, 2013, and the Job Search Program scheduled to start March 4, 2013. Because of the uncertainty of my status resulting from the administrative leave continuation, I felt compelled to rescind my retirement notification of April 30, 2013, for which I was paneled in September, 2012 (after postponing retirement on September 17, 2012 to stay on with the NEA Bureau during the confusion and disarray accompanying the deaths of American employees in Benghazi on September 11, 2012).
There has been no official documented action since the December 27th letter referenced above. Accordingly, I would like to take this opportunity to make the following formal petition:
1) Please provide me information about the legal and factual basis for initiating administrative leave last December, 2012;
2) Please provide me information about the legal and factual basis for continuing the administrative leave status, now going into the third month;
3) Please provide me a description of my rights, under the Foreign Affairs Manual and under standard HR guidelines for the Federal Government, to challenge the continuation of the administrative leave status, including legal limitations on the length of administrative leave and actions following it if no resolution is found or appropriate action determined.
Please acknowledge receipt of this letter to my personal e-mail address, raymond.maxwell@gmail.com.
I respectfully request a full response by Friday, March 8, 2013.
Thank you.
Respectfully submitted,
Raymond Douglas Maxwell
**********************************
Poems from the period.
ModPo prompted flashbacks…
The three of us,
me, Annie, and the Chinese Wave
returned to the barracks
after a late Saturday night
dancing to loud reggae music
at a smoky club in downtown New London
called Cool Runnings.
The sun was rising –
it was almost time for breakfast.
I played Mahjong –
to kill some time –
with the Chinese Wave
who spoke with a deep Bostonian accent –
while her roommate, Annie,
Sweet Annie from Boligee,
carefully read my palms and
told me my fortune with playing cards –
I recall my fortune and Annie was gentle
and sweet, but I can’t remember
the Chinese Wave’s name.
My Feet Spoke to me…
One day walking home from work
my feet spoke to me. They said:
“Ray, we don’t want you sticking us
in your fancy brown custom-made
dress shoes from Portugal.
They are tight, and our toes
can’t move around freely.”
“OK,” I said, “let’s try an older pair tomorrow,
something more worn, more broken in.”
My feet said, “OK, but if we don’t like it,
you won’t like it either.”
I said, “OK, tomorrow we will wear the ECCO’s,
the Baghdad ECCO’s
that are well-worn and broken in.”
The next day my feet spoke to me again.
They said, “Ray, we don’t like the ECCO’s either.
We discussed it among ourselves and decided
we want the brown leather Saucony’s,
you know, the running shoes.”
I said, “but I can’t wear running shoes
to work with a Suit.”
They said, “If you don’t, we won’t like it.
And you won’t like it either.”
So Sunday night I cleaned up
the Sauconys and gave them
a good buffing with cream polish.
Monday morning my feet were smiling!
Invitation
The Queen’s Henchmen
request the pleasure of your company
at a Lynching – to be held
at 23rd and C Streets NW
on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 –
just past sunset.
Dress: Formal, Masks and Hoods –
the four being lynched
must never know the identities
of their executioners, or what/
whose sin required their sacrifice.
A blood sacrifice –
to divert the hounds,
to appease the gods,
to cleanse our filth and
satisfy our guilty consciences.
Arrive promptly at sunset –
injustice will be swift.
There will be no trial,
no review of evidence,
no due process, and
no accountability.
Dress warmly –
a chilling effect will instantly
envelop Foggy Bottom.
Extrajudicial.
Total impunity at the top.
A kangaroo court
in a banana republic.
B.Y.O.B.
Refreshments will not be served
because of the continuing resolution.
And the ones being lynched?
Who cares? They are pawns in a game.
Our game. All suckers, all fools,
all knaves who volunteered to serve – us.
And the truth? The truth?
What difference at this point does it make?
In case of inclement weather,
or the Queen’s incapacitation,
the Queen’s Henchmen will carry out
this lynching – as ordered, as planned.
The Wizard of Oz
The wicked witch of the East?
The old, decrepit, ancient East?
She dead.
House fell on her ass during the storm.
Feet all shriveled up.
That witch ain’t going nowhere!
Ain’t gon bother nobody!
But the wicked witch of the West?
The new, modern, amoral West?
She’s alive and kicking.
Causing all kinds of trouble.
Done signed a deal with the Wizard –
the lying Wizard.
Dorothy has her hands full with those two.
And the lion ain’t got no courage.
Trapped in a purgatory…
“The top of the pyramid – the organization is composed of Technologists who only pretend to have power, although they are only actors in the theater of mirrors. When the mirror is broken they die, because the internal drive of their actions vanishes.” – Svetislav Basara, The Cyclist Conspiracy
Trapped in a purgatory
of their own conceit…
The web of lies they weave
gets tighter and tighter
in its deceit
until it bottoms out –
at a very low frequency –
and implodes.
It may be just
a matter of perception –
they can’t undo their wrongs
for fear it’d undermine their
perceived authority –
an authority they think
they require to stay in charge.
Yet all the while,
the more they talk,
the more they lie,
and the deeper down
the hole they go.
There’s nothing I need
to go back to –
nothing to re-litigate –
nothing to defend –
and certainly nothing to prove
to the unworthy.
Just wait….just wait
and feed them rope.
Man and the expanding universe: art
moral courage dies
and corruption’s stench prevails –
lies erase the truth –
my LinkedIn friends keep endorsing me
for Government. But me and Uncle Sam
are a shrinking universe. I’m leaving
the troop that errs, the team that lies,
leaders who destroy lives for sport, as art –
themselves a crime, a sin, a plague. Farewell.