The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

Then he hung up the phone and ran down more than 50 flights of stairs to safety. The Watch alerted Executive Secretary Maura Harty and Secretary Powell’s party in Lima immediately, and fol- lowed up when the second attack made it clear to all that it was terrorism. Harty convened the initial task force, the first of what would be five separate task forces set up over the next month to manage the State Department’s response to the terrorist attack. This bit of recent history points to the importance of the otherwise little-known and often underestimated Operations Center in the State Department. Command and Control The Operations Center, consisting of theWatch and the Crisis Management Support unit, is the nerve center of the Executive Secretariat, which was established in 1947 by Secretary of State George C. Marshall. The former gen- eral sorely missed the tightly coordinated conduct of affairs that characterized his military command experiences. The secretariat proved critical to organizing decision-making at State as the U.S. emerged as a superpower and principal guarantor of the peace following World War II. At that time, the amount of time secretaries of State spent abroad rose dramatically and the department workforce expanded from 1,128 in 1940 to 9,000 by 1950. The Watch and CMS work in tandem to play the cen- tral role in crisis management for the department. They constitute a command-and-control system for the secre- tary of State and his or her principals: tracking breaking international developments with an eye for events of immediate concern to the U.S. or potential crises, and then organizing and supporting the response at the appropriate level, coordinating both within the department and with the inter-agency community. Staffed 24 x 7 by a team of five to seven individuals, the Watch is a small group with a large responsibility. Part of the Watch’s work is fulfilling the mandate of Presidential Directive 27, which charges the Department of State with “coordinating the government-wide decision-making process for all non-military incidents with foreign affairs implications.” The Watch alerts and briefs department principals on relevant immediate, breaking developments. Twice a day (at 0530 and 1530, local time wherever the secretary is, so not exactly on 12-hour cycles), and more often when a crisis erupts, the Watch produces a one-page brief of up-to-the-minute happenings around the world. Watch officers are in touch with embassy personnel around the world to keep abreast of breaking events. The Watch also arranges telephone calls for the secre- tary and deputy secretary and other department principals with senior U.S. officials and foreign leaders — including setting up the calls, and then monitoring and accurately transcribing those made to foreign leaders for the histori- cal record — and maintains communications support for department principals when they are traveling. TheWatch processes and distributes highly sensitive cables (the com- puterized AMADS system distributes routine precedence cables with no intervention needed by theWatch) between Washington and the overseas posts. It helps establish task forces and monitoring groups, and prepares briefing docu- ments, logs and memoranda for the secretary and his or her deputies. Crisis Advisor The Crisis Management Support office is the “crisis advisor” for State’s senior officials. CMS officers, who work regular hours but are on call round the clock to launch task forces or undertake other crisis management tasks, focus on crisis monitoring, contingency planning, task force support, evacuation coordination, and training. By contrast with the Watch, which gathers and relays information to department principals on break- ing events of potential consequence, CMS looks ahead and forecasts potential trouble spots, bringing them to the attention of the policy-making audience. CMS reviews broadcast media, Internet news sources and LiveWire as well as the Watch products and e-mail and incoming cable traffic. To determine whether a tenu- ous situation constitutes a crisis, CMS seeks out the rel- evant department experts — the post management officer, a country desk officer, an officer in the Overseas Citizens Services office in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research or, perhaps, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s Office of Intelligence and Threat Analysis. CMS produces weekly reports and spot reports on sig- nificant developments. CMS identifies posts that may want to consider a mis- sion drawdown because of a critical security and/or politi- cal situation, and sends heads-up cables providing guid- ance on steps to take before a crisis reaches the evacuation stage. If a mission drawdown is requested, CMS assists the F O C U S 18 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 3 Susan Maitra is Associate Editor of the Journal .