The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

Felix Bloch in 1989 — has been publicly charged with doing so. Still, it is fair to ask whether the Foreign Service takes security seriously enough. Consider three humiliating lapses that came in quick succession during the late 1990s. In the first incident, a man recalled only as wearing a brown tweed jacket strolled into Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s outer office, picked up her pouch of highly classified daily briefing material, walked out — and was never seen or identified again. Not long afterward, a laptop computer that reportedly contained an enormous range of highly classified arms control information dis- appeared from an INR office, never to be recovered. Finally, the Russian Embassy reportedly bugged a 7th- floor State conference room using a sophisticated lis- tening device that apparently required insider access to install — yet the mole was never officially uncovered. In a State Department town hall meeting on May 3, 2000, Sec. Albright made clear her displeasure at such episodes and declared that anyone who was not “pro- fessional about security” was a “failure.” (Curiously, however, in her 2003 memoir, Madame Secretary , Albright makes no mention of those incidents.) More stringent rules soon followed, including a requirement for annual security briefings for all State personnel and a beefing-up of security training at FSI for all overseas- bound officers, extensive restrictions (later slightly relaxed) on access to State by retired department per- sonnel, and the inclusion of security awareness as a cri- terion in every employee evaluation report. Just months later, Martin Indyk, the high-profile U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv, was revealed to have han- dled classified information on an unclassified laptop. Indyk, a former NEA assistant secretary and NSC offi- cial, was a key figure in the Middle East peace process, but at the height of the talks, his security clearance was suspended and he spent an extended period in limbo. While permitted to return to post, he had no official ability to act in his normal diplomatic capacity, even though the peace talks were approaching their climax. He did eventually get his clearance back. But the word was out: handling classified material was no longer a casual matter. Meanwhile, the August 1998 bombings of Embassies Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the 9/11 attacks three years later, rein- forced fears that the basic physi- cal security of the Department of State and its overseas missions around the world was at stake. (The 1983 truck bomb attack on Embassy Beirut had briefly energized similar concerns, but was eventually dismissed as a fluke prompted by local circumstances rather than some- thing requiring a systemic, global restructuring of State’s institutional culture.) But it would take the hor- ror of 9/11 to produce fundamental change. Diplomatic Security to the Fore While organizational charts do not automatically confer bureaucratic power and personnel numbers do not define policy, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security has become increasingly prominent over the past genera- tion. In 1970 it was buried as a subelement within SCA (the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs). In early 1985, there was a deputy assistant secretary (one of six) for security in the Bureau of Administration, renamed later that year as the Bureau of Administration and Security. By early 1987, Diplomatic Security was an independent bureau with three deputy assistant secre- taries overseeing 11 offices addressing, inter alia, the full range of internal security, physical protection, over- seas operations, anti-terrorism and policy coordination. Organization charts immediately following 9/11 showed a bureau that still had three DASes, but had expanded to 15 offices within the department and an array of eight regional offices (including a presence in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, as well as Washington, D.C.). The current reali- ties have resulted in a new structure: three DASes, three assistant directors (domestic operations, interna- tional programs and training), an executive director and a senior coordinator for security infrastructure. They manage 17 offices with a bewildering array of F O C U S 24 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 There can be little doubt that the Foreign Service has become significantly more security-conscious over the past few years. David Jones, a retired Senior Foreign Service officer, is a frequent contributor to the Journal .