The Foreign Service Journal, September 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2017 43 T he first message in the Dissent Channel came from the consulate general in Dacca, East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. In March 1971, the central government’s armed forces began a wave of killings of Bengalis in East Paki- stan in what proved to be a vain attempt to suppress separatist sentiment in that distant province. The cam- paign horrified the American consul general, Archer K. Blood, who sent a series of cables urging Washington to take a public stance condemning the atrocities. Unknown to Blood, or to Secretary of State William P. Rogers, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was using Pakistan as the go-between in the still-secret U.S. opening to China. For that reason, among others, Blood’s appeals were ignored. On April 6, 1971, Blood’s staff sent a message via the Dissent Channel saying that America had to act “to sal- vage our nation’s position as a moral leader of the free world.” Consul General Blood did not sign the dissent, but appended a note endorsing it. Kissinger believed the message was written to be leaked, and said that Secretary Rogers thought it “outrageous” that his diplomats were writing petitions instead of reports. Blood was recalled and his career thereafter stunted. Like his earlier messages, the dis- sent had no effect on U.S. policy. AFSA gave Archer Blood its Christian Herter Award for Constructive Dissent in 1971. To his credit, Secretary Rogers presided at the ceremony (“I think he was a little embarrassed,” Blood said later.) Howard Schaffer, one of the signers of the dissent message, became ambas- sador to Bangladesh in 1984 and served until 1987. In 2015, U.S. Ambassador Marcia S. Bernicat presented an official copy of the Blood telegram to the government of Bangladesh, where Archer Blood is remembered and revered as a friend of the country. —H.W.K. was intended for individual employees engaged with an issue, whose views could not be transmitted through regular channels because of what the Foreign Affairs Manual calls an “inability to resolve concrete differences of opinion.” Hundreds of messages, on average about 10 a year, have passed through the channel since its inception, but only a handful have had an effect on policy. “The Dissent Channel,” says Hannah Gurman, “made it possible for the State Department to formally encourage dis- sent, while … deflating the most serious threat posed by internal dissenters,” namely, public repudiation of adminis- tration policy. Had it been in place at the time, the Dissent Channel would not have contained the Cambodia statement. That statement had no precedent in the Department of State, but it had plenty of precedent in the country at large. Fury over Vietnam swept across the country in that spring of 1970: protest marches and The Foreign Service and the Department of State do not exist in a social vacuum. demonstrations in more than 200 cities and towns; violence at Columbia and Syracuse universities; a march on Washington; construction workers taking clubs to demonstrators on Wall Street; and the fatal shooting by National Guardsmen of four student protesters at Ohio’s Kent State University. The Foreign Service and the Department of State do not exist in a social vacuum. The dissent on Cambodia would not have taken the form that it did, and would probably not have been offered at all, in the absence of this national wave of protest. The statement was less a reasoned argument for the losing side of an in-house debate (which the Dissent Channel was structured to protect) than a political statement that was a product of its time. The Sequence of Honesty In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, too, the sequence of honesty was thwarted from the beginning. On the central The Blood Telegram