The Foreign Service Journal, March 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2017 49 The rapid growth in size and responsibilities at DS has brought challenges in terms of policy, personnel and training. Here is an inside look at some of the issues. DIPLOMATIC SECURITY: THE ROADAHEAD Donna Scaramastra Gorman is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor . The spouse of a DS agent, she has lived in Amman, Mos- cow, Yerevan, Almaty, Beijing and, currently, Washington, D.C. “ W e’re at a cross- roads,” says Bill Miller, leaning for- ward as if to emphasize the urgency of the task at hand. “Diplomatic Security is changing culturally. Are we paramilitary? Are we law enforcement?” As the principal deputy assistant secretary for the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security and director of the Diplomatic Security Service (who stepped in as acting assis- tant secretary for DS on Jan. 20), Miller leads an organization that is constantly adapting to keep pace with—and whenever possible, stay ahead of—events around the globe. A 30-year veteran of DS, Miller not only leads 2,100 special agents, but also engineers, investigators, technical specialists and civil servants. The largest bureau in the State Department, DS has become more influential and, in many cases, indispensable, as diplomats engage in an increasingly uncertain world. FOCUS SECURING DIPLOMACY “The complexities of our job are exponentially greater now than when I started,” Miller explains. So are the expectations. Over the past three decades, DS has grown in terms of size and budget, developing along the way into a premier global secu- rity force with a complex and evolving mission. Such rapid growth brings challenges in terms of policy, personnel and training. And while it’s difficult to find consen- sus within DS on how best to solve these issues, all agree on the basic mission: to continue to move confidently in conven- tional diplomatic circles while preparing agents to succeed in the smoke and haze that follows a terrorist attack, political coup or natural disaster anywhere in the world. A Global Outlook “I helped evacuate American citizens from our embassy in Beijing after protests were forcibly put down in Tiananmen Square in 1989,” says Kurt Rice, the deputy assistant secre- tary (DAS) for threat, investigations and analysis. Back then, if a place got too dangerous, “we simply closed the post and pulled everyone out,” he says. “But that way of working funda- mentally changed after 9/11.” Today DS has to safeguard diplo- matic efforts in such posts. This has caused tension between DS agents, with their perceived desire to shut operations down in dangerous places, and Foreign Service officers who need to go out into a dangerous world to get their work done. “It’s easy to protect everyone if you always say no to every- thing,” says Rice, but he insists DS doesn’t say no as often as people think. DS is sometimes “painted as the folks who say BY DONNA SCARAMASTRA GORMAN