The Foreign Service Journal, April 2022

40 APRIL 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL This diplomacy primer introduces the people of the U.S. Foreign Service to a worldwide audience. BY DONNA SCARAMASTRA GORMAN THE LITTLE BOOK THAT COULD Inside aU.S. Embassy , Telling the Foreign Service Story forMoreThan a Quarter Century Donna Scaramastra Gorman’s articles have appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Washington Post , the Christian Science Monitor and the FSJ . A Foreign Service spouse, she has lived in Amman, Moscow, Yere- van, Almaty, Beijing and Northern Virginia. Formerly an associate editor for the Journal , she recently returned to the D.C. area with her family after her husband, Embassy Moscow Deputy Chief of Mission Bart Gorman, was expelled by the Russian government. “I t was serendipity,” explains Kelly Adams-Smith of her involvement in the creation of a second edition of Inside a U.S. Embassy: How the Foreign Service Works for America in 2003.The American Foreign Service Association, publisher of the first edition in 1996, had decided it was time to produce a new edition of the same title. Adams-Smith, now deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Mission to the European Union, was relatively new to the Foreign Service in the early 2000s. She’d just finished a stint at the State Depart- ment Operations Center and had some time before moving on to Embassy Tallinn with her FSO husband, Steve. “I was really interested in Foreign Service stories,” she explains. Concerned that the State Department didn’t have a domestic constituency, she decided to spend her free summer gathering stories about what Foreign Service officers in the field do, hoping to place these stories in “hometown papers” outside the Beltway. She pitched the idea to Ambassador (ret.) R. Niels Marquardt, then the special coordinator for Secretary Colin Pow- ell’s Diplomatic Readiness Initiative, and he invited her to work with his office to get these stories told. At the same time, The Foreign Service Journal ’s Shawn Dor- man, a former FSO, was beginning to collect stories for a new edition of Inside a U.S. Embassy . Niels Marquardt heard about the book, connected the two writers and—serendipity. Adams- Smith and Dorman spent the summer forming an advisory group and seeking out the ideal mix of people to tell the story of the U.S. Foreign Service. The advisory committee selected people to profile from almost every type of Foreign Service job in every region of the world, aiming to paint a picture of who does what and what goes on inside an embassy. AFSA solicited diplomacy and develop- ment “Tales from the Field” as well as day-in-the-life chronicles to help readers understand life and work in the Foreign Service. The second edition, published by AFSA in 2003 and revised in 2005, features profiles of officers, specialists and locally employed staff across the globe, from entry-level to ambassador and from commercial officer to USAIDmission director. Each profile of someone in a particular post aims to bring readers inside the world of diplomacy, to get to know the practitioners. FEATURE