The Foreign Service Journal, September 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2014 39 how important it was for the ambassador to hear them. Throughout the Vietnam War, many FSOs had consider- able difficulty getting their reporting telegrams approved and sent if they dared to express any doubts about U.S. policy. This added to a sense of frustration and deep disappointment. I still recall walking down an alley in Saigon with another junior officer who was literally in tears. His vision of an honest, open Foreign Service reporting system had proven an illusion, and he was considering resignation. I felt similar pressure two years later, in 1972, when I was stationed along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. There I observed the very first steps by the radical Khmer Rouge as they began taking over parts of Cambodia. By interviewing refugees who fled across the border and carefully reviewing other reports, I pulled together the first-ever detailed account of the group’s genocidal policies, which they would later inflict on seven million Cambodians. My analysis also documented that the Khmer Rouge were not controlled by Hanoi, which was an article of faith within the U.S. government and intel- ligence community. To his credit, the U.S. consul general in Cân Thö did not hesitate to send my well-documented report to Washington as an airgram, which received wide circulation. But the response from Embassy Phnom Penh was to tell me to desist from fur- ther reporting on Cambodia, and virtually every other analyst reacted by saying I had it all wrong. (Twenty-five years later, Henry Kissinger—who was the U.S. national security adviser when I submitted the report—pulled me aside at a reunion of National Security Council staffers to squeeze my arm and say he thought it was brilliant.) The Foggy Bottom 46 In April 1974, after six years in Vietnam, I was assigned to the staff of the National Security Council. This was just as Watergate was closing in on President Richard Nixon, and the “decent interval” before the collapse of South Vietnam was drawing to an end. Internal turmoil led to the creation of the Secretary’s Open Forum, of which I was one of the co-founders and vice chair. When we had our first meeting with Kissinger, now Secretary of State, you can imagine the startled look on his face when he realized that a member of the NSC staff was also leading this new organization. Two years later, I became a special assistant to Richard Hol- brooke, the new assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs. As much as I loved my job, many mid-level colleagues shared my dismay that seventh-floor political appointees were making policy and personnel decisions without any input from the career Foreign Service. A few of us began meeting in the EAP conference room to talk about the situation and how to rectify it. In 1977, 46 of us (known as the “Foggy Bottom 46”) drafted and signed a statement of our concerns, which I hand-carried to Executive Secretary Peter Tarnoff along with a request to meet with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. By the time the meeting was set up, more than 500 FSOs had signed the petition, including several sitting ambassadors and assistant secretaries. The response from Embassy Phnom Penh was to tell me to desist from further reporting on Cambodia. Amb. Kenneth Quinn, fourth from left, on the ground in Cambodia during a POW/MIA search for evidence of missing U.S. servicemen. DCM Carol Rodley is to his left. Embassy Phnom Penh