Hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee- Effective Diplomacy and the Future of U.S. Embassies

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Hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee- Effective Diplomacy and the Future of U.S. Embassies

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REP. STEPHEN LYNCH (D-MA): Just brief remarks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank the ranking member as well. I thank our esteemed panelists for coming before the committee to help us with our work.

I am one who over the last few years has come to spend a lot of time in our foreign embassies. I deeply appreciate the work being done by our State Department, Treasury folks, Defense Department folks. But -- and I believe that it's really investment in personnel that will cause the greatest improvement in our foreign policy.

But there is definitely a need to provide a secure environment for our folks who work in our embassies, one that provides security but also allows diplomacy to occur, and to get out into the communities in the cities and countries in which we are located. And I'll rely heavily upon you to tell us how do we accomplish both of those goals.

And again, I appreciate all the experience that's on this panel before us this morning and I'm very interested in hearing your remarks.

Thank you.

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REP. STEPHEN LYNCH (D-MA): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Naland, it's ironic that you mentioned Ambassador Crocker. I was with him last week in Baghdad, and he mentioned as well that he was stationed in Beirut when the Marine barracks were bombed.

So while you emphasize the need for some flexibility for the ambassador to move around, there's also some instances -- glaring instances -- of a need for greater security.

I wanted to talk to you about, or ask you about, the idea of these American presence posts. This is an initiative that's cited in the report "The Embassy of the Future." I gather it's an initiative begun under Ambassador Felix Rohatyn. And this is what an American presence post is, is the establishment of a small office with one diplomatic officer and a number of small -- I'm sorry -- a small number of locally hired staff in more -- placed in more remote areas in some of these countries.

And having just come back from Lebanon and Afghanistan and Pakistan, I'm concerned that these APPs -- it's just another word for hostages. It would be, I think, extremely, extremely risky to use something like this given the current environment. And I just -- I just have some real misgivings about this and I'm hoping that you could help me with this -- any of you who have former embassy service -- especially Ambassador Pickering. You've had a fair share of it yourself. How do you think this thing would work?

MR. PICKERING: Mr. Lynch, I'm glad you raised the question and it's an important one.

I was an early supporter of it. I worked with Mark Grossman with Ambassador Rohatyn in setting up the posts in France. If you asked me: Should we do the same in Iraq or Afghanistan? I would say no. I would be certifiably loony to do that. But there are a number of places around the world where the threat is more moderate, where we have large cities.

When I served in Nigeria, we had something like six cities over a million -- no one American could name even three of them, but they were extremely important for what was going on in the country. They helped to set the political tone. They stimulated the economy. There are cities in China, many of them like that, where we have almost no contact.

Ambassador Rohatyn proceeded with this and we, in fact, used that particular approach which was low key. Apartments in upper stories, connected with a small office, basically very few office calls on the individual. The individual was out and around, but the mayor knew them. The head of the local French department knew them. The business community knew them. The NGO community knew them. The American community knew them. And they were extremely important. We gave them no classified work to do. If they had anything that was classified, they could take the train to Paris and spend the day at the embassy.

I wanted to do that in a number of places in Russia where we had very low coverage. I faced the problem that in order to do that, we had to come to the Congress to set up a consulate. That was a year- and-a-half or two-year proposition, and soon as we mentioned that, I had 35 American agencies who all wanted to assign people to that one- man post.

We've gotten away from those. We would obviously watch the security very carefully. We would train the individual, as Mark's report has discussed, in the best security practices of the U.S. government wherever they are -- as John Naland said, drawing on some of our colleague's training from the intelligence community. We would use the local employee to help us understand, and there would be absolutely no prohibition on the individual leaving, going to ground or finding other premises if there were a peak up in security problems. And that would be something we would watch very carefully with the intelligence community.

And we think that in two-thirds of the world -- at least all of those places where we are not now restricting, say, families for security reasons -- these kinds of posts would do a great deal. And Ambassador Rohatyn put it very, very clearly. He said, I am willing to give you the people from my embassy complement, because I feel that these are 100 percent more productive than they are working here in the embassy compound in Paris. And indeed, that has been the significance of this. It's the reason why we have supported it.

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REP. LYNCH: I'd be remiss if I did not say how proud I am of our folks in the State Department and the wonderful work they're doing in some pretty dangerous places around the world. I think that they are a shining example of what is best about America. And I agree that they are under paid for the work they're doing and that we need to figure out how best to train them and given them some more help.

I would like to ask one question about assignment, and that is, how are we handling -- and now, Mr. Naland, maybe you'd have a pretty good read on this. My understanding is that there's a -- there's a pretty good rotation going on now in terms of folks that, you know, might want a shot at the embassy in Paris instead of Baghdad. And I know for awhile there, some folks would get reassigned to one place for multiple years and that would, sort of, cause a logjam in the system so that anyone new coming into the system had to pick -- you know, Kenya or, you know, Somalia, or some other place where there was a high risk, versus having a chance at a somewhat more normal assignment, maybe in a European, Western European country.

How is that being handled right now?

MR. NALAND: Well, sir, what needs to be understood is that the normal assignment now is a hardship post. Two-thirds of the overseas Foreign Service posts are now hardship posts. Paris has been cleaned out repeatedly. James Baker cleaned it out to send -- to open up the Central Asian embassies when the Soviet Union collapsed. Secretary Rice has cleaned it out to send people to India and other places. And so the idea that Foreign Service members are all sitting around Paris and London -- it's just absolutely no longer the case.

In fact -- and this is only a little facetious, to get there now you basically have to serve in a provisional reconstruction team in Iraq, and have one of your top five picks guaranteed. And that's how, after serving and surviving a year in Iraq, you can get a three-year tour in London or Paris. But the Foreign Service has changed a lot. It's now mostly hardship posts. When I joined I went to Bogota, which, with Beirut, was the only unaccompanied, or limited-accompanied post. Now we have something like 27 unaccompanied posts, or limited- accompanied posts.

And so -- and then we have the staffing deficit. This whole Iraq fiasco -- from a couple months ago, the reason that they didn't automatically, immediately have all the volunteers is just that there's a 21 percent staffing gap at the mid levels. And now Afghanistan -- I don't know, this probably not public, but there's a -- you know, there's an interest in providing more Foreign Service and other staffing for Afghanistan, but from where? From where?

So we just need more people. And allegedly -- or we'll see with the president's budget request -- apparently, the president's budget request next week will ask for a lot of those people. But my point of view is that the president's budget request a year ago asked for 254 -- or 256, I believe, additional Foreign Service positions that weren't funded.

So please fund the additional positions, the staff -- to hire people to staff these places.

REP. LYNCH: And in yielding back my time, I just want to say I wasn't suggesting by any measure that folks are sitting around London or Paris. My question was more towards is the rotation system fair so that some of our folks who are in those hardship assignments right now get a chance to rotate, over time, to something less perilous, I guess.

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