The Foreign Service Journal, May 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2015 35 the years. Subjecting our visitors to searches andmetal detectors, and requiring them to leave their electronic devices at the door had become routine for us “on the inside.” But when I went to work for the American University in Cairo and returned to visit my former colleagues at the U.S. embassy there, I experienced those same layers of security “from the out- side.” Gaining entry to a U.S. embassy, even as a recently retired U.S. diplomat, was a real ordeal; it reminded me of a cartoon that ran in the FSJ following the release of the Inman Report. It showed a walled compound with no doors or windows, only a U.S. flag rising from within. Two puzzled locals are walking the perimeter. “How do you get in?” one asks. “You don’t,” the other Everyone understood that being secure, by itself, could never be any mission’s primary goal. I am not sure we all share that consensus anymore. replies. “You must be born in there.” My former colleagues, however, could easily visit me at AUC, even though it, too, was a “high-value target” for those opposed to any U.S. presence in Egypt. The U.S. government continues to pour large amounts of grant money into the university and other NGOs to run programs that Foreign Service personnel formerly would have managed. The difficulty in gaining access to embassy or USAID compounds is not, of course, the only reason for outsourcing; but it surely is an argument for working through outside partners. When I returned to Washington, I signed up to work as a When Actually Employed reemployed annuitant. In late 2012 the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs asked me, along with several other WAEs, to help staff our embassy in Tunis, which had been on “ordered departure” since a violent mob attack on Sept. 14, 2012, that had left both the embassy and the nearby American School seriously damaged. The embassy’s core chancery building, recently built to Inman Commission standards, had kept the mob out, and not