The Foreign Service Journal, March 2011

M A R C H 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 21 other diplomatic feats. What struck me about this creative writing exercise was its realistic jab at our culture of self- congratulation. Do our training and our promotion systempush us to weave tales of how our talents are indispen- sable to negotiations and political pro- cesses? Do we go overboard or engage in hyperbole to show results when they do not seem to come fast enough for Washington’s demands? While on a leave of absence this year, I served as a volunteer foreign pol- icy lecturer at an international univer- sity in Rome. TheWikiLeaks phenom- enon has been a big topic of discussion here across academic disciplines, not only among colleagues in the interna- tional relations department. I expected my students to side with Julian Assange and to champion his call for complete freedom of information, but they didn’t. Many of them said that the public did not need to know the granular details of ongoing negoti- ations or U.S. diplomats’ assessment of the idiosyncrasies of foreign leaders like the hard-partying Italian Prime Minis- ter Silvio Berlusconi. The students were, however, in- tensely curious about diplomacy in ac- tion — why internal diplomatic communications are secret and how they are written, and how FSOs build relationships and make deals behind the scenes. As a public servant, I am annoyed by Assange’s bravado and his smug sup- port forWikiLeaks’ right to disseminate stolen government correspondence to the public without consequences. And as a public diplomacy officer, I am frus- trated by the damage the release of S P E A K I N G O U T What WikiLeaks has done is not whistleblowing. What evil or illegality is the flood of American diplomatic cables revealing?