42 MARCH-APRIL 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL On a jet-black winter night the cold mud on the edge of the landing strip oozed over my ankles and seeped through my socks. It was January 2018 and my last assignment as a Foreign Service officer. A C-130 had just dropped me off in rural northeast Syria, where I would spend much of the next two years embedded with Green Berets and other Special Forces elements. I quickly realized that I needed to put aside my current job title as a deputy envoy helping with the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS William Roebuck retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in November 2020. During a 28-year diplomatic career, he served as U.S. ambassador to Bahrain and completed postings in Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Tripoli; he also did political reporting in Gaza while posted in Tel Aviv. Ambassador Roebuck received the State Department Distinguished Honor Award for his work in Syria. The work of a political officer requires moral clarity in highly ambiguous situations and an acceptance of mortal risk and the personal costs of exile. BY WILLIAM ROEBUCK FEATURE (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and go back in time rapidly, to a time before my previous assignment as ambassador in Bahrain and before I worked in the interagency trenches in Washington. I would need to go back to earlier days when I was a more junior political officer assigned to U.S. embassies and reporting on unrest and turbulence, elections and political maneuvering, in volatile places like Baghdad, Tripoli, and Damascus and their far-flung hinterlands. The work of a political officer is said to be a kind of “secret sharing,” to paraphrase the famous 19th-century writer Joseph Conrad. He had his own intentions for the phrase in his short story, “The Secret Sharer,” with its focus on the personal costs of exile, the rewards of professionalism in a demanding vocation, and the requirements of moral clarity in highly ambiguous, sometimes even duplicitous, situations. For me, secret sharing usefully describes my efforts in the field over the years, recording my sense of the realities, possibilities, and personalities, and sharing that with Washington. Secrecy is a function of the discretion needed, and I was sharing my observations and insights with a small circle of readers in THE SECRET SHARER William Roebuck shakes hands with Suwar Civil Council CoPresident Mushan Abdullah, in Suwar, Syria, August 26, 2018.
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