The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

44 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 0 “Thrown to the Wolves” But with the integrity of his de- partment now threatened, Powell had run out of patience with Mary Ryan. “We all loved Mary, [and] she was really beloved by the consular officers, but she was starting to cause me difficulty with the Hill,” he said later. “She really was not … re- sponding flexibly enough to the po- litical and bureaucratic demands of the post-9/11 period. Changes were necessary, and we had to be a little more contrite about what we were doing in order to save it.” At the meeting with Ridge, he had ordered her to keep quiet, saying later that “she was about to have a nervous breakdown over the issue. She didn’t get the message that it was no longer business as usual.” On July 8, 2002, Ryan’s immediate boss, Under Secre- tary for Management Grant Green, called her into his of- fice and told her it was time to step aside. “Mary was very good. It’s just that at a time when everyone in town was trying to point a finger and level blame, consular affairs was very susceptible to taking that blame,” Green said. Later that month, the newU.S. ambassador to Saudi Ara- bia shut down the Visa Express program, writing in a cable back to Washington: “I am deeply troubled about the pre- vailing perception in the media and within Congress, and possibly the American public at large, that our current prac- tices represent a shameful and inadequate effort on our part.” The next year State would end the practice of waiving personal interviews for low-risk visa applicants, and Con- gress followed by enshrining mandatory interviews in law. Ryan’s dismissal outraged her friends and colleagues in the department, who fired off a series of e-mails accusing Powell of cowardice in the face of McCarthyite tactics. At her retirement ceremony, “Powell never acknowledged Mary at all,” complained George Lannon, her deputy. “His presentation was basically, ‘Well, oldMary’s decided to hang it up,’ as opposed to ‘We’ve thrown her off the sled to get the wolves off us,’ which is what it was. He would never ac- knowledge that she took the hit. I was livid. I was appalled.” Powell, too, has nursed a grudge. While he didn’t save Ryan’s job, he bucked the White House and won Senate confirmation for Maura Harty, a Ryan protégé and among her closest friends and allies in the department. “Whether they liked it or not,” he said, firing Ryan “was necessary to ... save the consular corps. And I have always had a little bitterness that I had to get that kind of abuse when, in fact, I kept the consular corps from going to DHS.” Mary Ryan died of bone cancer in 2006, four years after leaving the State Department, and her saga has left lasting scars on the consular service. In the aftermath of the at- tacks, as all agencies of the govern- ment embraced the new mission of protecting the United States from another terrorist attack, the number of visas issued plum- meted. In 2003 the State Department issued fewer than five million visas, down from more than 7.5 million in the year before the 9/11 attacks. By 2008 that number had climbed back to more than 6.5 million, before falling again during the deep recession of 2009. But even before the economy faltered, overseas travel to the United States had never quite recovered, even as it was booming in the rest of the world. The consular service continues to struggle to marry the need for security with its traditional mission of encouraging visitors to the United States. It has poured resources into the timely processing of student visas, fixing one of the biggest problems of the 9/11 aftermath. More recently, sig- nificant changes were made to the background checks re- quired for foreign scientists and engineers, a procedure that had created delays of many months for Indians and Chi- nese working for American universities or companies. The new procedures should speed up approvals without dimin- ishing security. But the department has been reluctant to advertise those accomplishments too loudly, afraid that crit- ics will again accuse it of being soft on security despite the much tougher procedures — such as mandatory finger- printing of all visa applicants — in place today. As Dianne Andruch, one of Ryan’s former senior aides, puts it: “Prior to 9/11, we were under a lot of pressure to have people processed for visas in an expeditious manner. The basic attitude was that these countries were our friends and the United States should do everything possible to fa- cilitate travel. That’s what Mary Ryan was trying to do, and that’s what she was under pressure to do—until something happened, and then everybody ran away from that position.” Nearly nine years later, the consular service is still try- ing to find solid ground on which to stand. ■ F O C U S Some in Congress still want to strip the State Department of the authority to issue visas and hand it over to the new Department of Homeland Security.