The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2014 23 Yet the challenges to reporting officers in the field today are particularly acute. Technological change strains the nexus between form and substance, and overseas posts must com- pete for the attention of Washington audiences focused on their email inboxes. On top of that, the unauthorized online publication of purported cables has greatly undermined our interlocutors’ trust. And a work culture that emphasizes lead- ership and managerial skills can inadvertently marginalize written communication skills Are Cables an Anachronism? Remember airgrams? They were typed informative reports from overseas missions sent by diplomatic pouch back to Washington as a means of alleviating overtaxed telegraphic systems. Over time, they earned a reputation for containing more information than intended audiences had time to read. As telegrams—or “cables,” as they are commonly called— came to dominate State Department reporting and analysis, airgrams were phased out as a form of official communication in 1991, almost 50 years after they had been introduced. Are reporting and analytical cables going the way of the airgram? In 1946, then-Chargé d’Affaires to Moscow George Ken- nan wrote perhaps the most famous of diplomatic cables, the “Long Telegram.” This 8,000-word message sought to explain the sources of Soviet (mis)behavior while recommending a pragmatic policy of containment. In his Memoirs , 1925-1950 (Little, Brown and Company, In the tiny fjord village of Igaliku in southern Greenland, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (far right), Greenland Home Rule Deputy Premier Josef Motzfeldt (center) and Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Møller sign an agreement in August 2004, paving the way for upgrading the early warning radar system at Thule, the U.S. air base in northern Greenland. Assisting Sec. Powell is Foreign Service political officer Dan Lawton (second from right). For the first time, Greenland was a party to the century-old defense agreement between Denmark and the United States that governs U.S. defense activity on the island. The three parties signed two additional documents, one providing for economic and technical cooperation between the United States and Greenland, and another to protect the environment. Jonathan M. Berger