The Foreign Service Journal, November 2018

30 NOVEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 1992: “Hub and Spoke” System. The Courier Service begins establishing additional hubs around the world so that individual couriers can make brief visits to one or two sites at a time instead of lengthy multination trips from the three regional divisions. By 1999 there are hubs in Miami, Manama, Seoul, Pretoria, Abidjan and, for several years, Helsinki. 2008: First Female Courier Director. Deborah Glass, a security engineer, is named the first female director of the Diplomatic Courier Service. 2016: Real-Time Logistics. The Classified Pouch Modernization Effort brings logistical best practices to the Diplomatic Courier Service, including a courier mobile applica- tion for smartphones, scanner applications for inventorying pouches, a customer portal, a centralized mission planning tool and management dashboards. 2018 and Beyond: Current Courier Opera- tions. Today the Diplomatic Courier Service operates regional divisions in Washington, D.C., Bangkok, Frankfurt and Miami, with hubs in Seoul, São Paulo, Manama, Dakar, Abidjan and Pretoria. There are approximately 100 couriers, about 25 percent of them female. As they have done ever since the found- ing of the nation, diplomatic couriers continue to oversee the movement and delivery of sensitive pouches and materiel to U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. n This timeline was assembled by Vince Crawley, a public affairs writer with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security from 2014 to 2018. For more on the history of the Diplomatic Courier Service, see bit.ly/DiplomaticCouriers. Follow DSS on Facebook and Twitter and Flickr.