HOW TO VISIT A U.S. EMBASSY WITHOUT THE SECURITY CLEARANCE
Embassy Magazine, Canada
Sept 6 2006
Book Review
By Christina Leadlay
It’s more than just white guys at cocktail parties: This little
reference book sheds light on the often-misunderstood job of foreign
service officers who work in the world’s largest embassies.
It’s a surprisingly pretty and colourful cover on the paperback 2005
edition of Inside a U.S. Embassy, portraying an idyllic scene of
the world’s peoples coming together in front of an American foreign
mission. The chancery is a stately building in the neoclassical
style-reminiscent of the old U.S. embassy building on Wellington St.
across from Parliament Hill-with its tall, black iron gate open
welcomingly on top of a stylized map of the world. Fluffy, rosy
clouds rise above the building, which, coupled with the gates,
give a sort of heavenly image. The concrete bollards and security
cameras-ever-present features of the new U.S. embassy compound on
Sussex Drive-are omitted thanks to artistic license. It’s a much more
playful-looking book than I was expecting.
Open the pages and the content is presented informally, the typesetting
and tone harkening back to a student’s handbook. And there are some
handy references to be found, including a map and accompanying chart
of all the U.S. State Department missions around the globe and a
flow chart neatly showing who reports to whom and what they’re
responsible for at an embassy. The back pages include lists of
technical abbreviations and acronyms (my personal favourite is
"LABATT", the Labor Attache).
In between all of that are profiles of foreign service officers from
every position and rank (from ambassador in Colombia to Marine security
guard in Armenia), some diary-style entries chronicling a day in the
life of various people who work at U.S. embassies all over the map,
and personal tales from the field, reporting some of the more exciting
and dangerous situations diplomats have found themselves in over the
years. Bruce Byers recalls being the press attache at the U.S. Embassy
in Afghanistan when his ambassador was kidnapped and assassinated
in 1979, while Suzann Reynolds writes about her month-long stint in
Kabul in 2002, reopening the U.S. Embassy after a decade of neglect.
"I think a lot of people don’t know what the role of an embassy is,
don’t have a very good sense of what the job of a diplomat is,"
says Shawn Dorman, the book’s editor, by phone from Washington,
D.C. "They have a very outdated picture of white men at cocktail
parties and don’t think of it as the sort of front line, dangerous
kind of work that it often is, especially today. So it’s nice to give
some real stories of real people who are actually out there doing it
that makes it come to life,"
A former foreign service officer herself, Ms. Dorman is also
the associate editor of the Foreign Service Journal, the monthly
periodical published by the American Foreign Service Association
(AFSA), a professional association and collective bargaining group.
Ms. Dorman says she took over the editing of Inside a U.S. Embassy:
How the Foreign Service Works for America in 2003. The book was first
published in 1995 and is in its third printing. Ms. Dorman says it
was updated in 2005 to include the U.S. diplomatic presence in Iraq.
Economic Officer Stephen Newhouse’s honest diary from Baghdad is
just over a page long, but in a few strokes gives a sense of the
challenges of working in a war zone, such as donning body armour for
routine meetings.
"One piece of AFSA’s mission is pubic education about embassies and
letting people know what the role of diplomats is, so [this book] fits
in exactly with what the AFSA mission is," explains the soft-spoken
Ms. Dorman. "It’s been a very useful tool for letting people know
about the role of diplomats. It’s probably the same in Canada, but
people don’t seem to have any idea what a diplomat is and that there
are all these different jobs, so that’s the point of the book."
Ms. Dorman says Americans who are interested in a career in the
foreign service, such as students of international relations, are
the book’s main readers. People preparing for the annual foreign
service exam also rely on this book, she says. "There isn’t very
much information out there about what this business is, so it’s been
a source for that kind of person." She concedes that diplomats from
other countries might be interested in Inside a U.S. Embassy, to have
a peak into the scale and scope of goings on at what are often the
largest foreign missions in the world.
No one from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa made the cut this time around,
but Ms. Dorman says it’s time to start thinking about another edition.
Inside a U.S. Embassy Edited by Shawn Dorman American Foreign Service
Association 136 pp. $12.95 (US)