The Foreign Service Journal, December 2007

agencies. You try to resolve these things at the lowest possible level, but you can kick it all the way up to the National Security Council.” Greenlee says he made a point of ensuring that either he or his deputy returned to Washington once a quarter to make the rounds, both at State and at other agencies with missions in Bolivia. “You don’t want to get so separated from Wash- ington that you don’t understand that people at the Defense Depart- ment might be pushing on something.” In that sense, he says, it’s critical to understand the pressures that are being brought to bear on State by other agencies in Washington. “What’s harder to know is when you ought to stop pushing in Washington. Some battles you’re just not going to win, and you realize in some cases that it’s not where you want to break your spear.” Greenlee agrees: “It’s one of those things where as ambassador you could get out the letter and say, ‘By God, it’s my call,’ but you want a good relationship with other agencies.” Working it out diplomatically — so to speak — is best, of course, but when something egregious occurs, it’s crit- ical that an ambassador take a stand. Staples says that it’s simply unacceptable “to have any kind of operation in the country without the chief of mission’s knowledge. It just cannot be. If you ever have an instance when something is done behind your back and it blows up and causes a serious incident, you as chief of mission are perfectly within your rights to raise hell with the agency back in Washington and the individual at post.” That said, Staples insists that such instances are extremely rare and that “99 percent of the time agencies work hard to maintain the trust of the ambassador.” When that’s the case, non-State personnel can prove a boon through the monetary and reporting resources they bring to bear. Numerous ambassadors interviewed for this article noted instances where a Foreign Agricultural Service or Foreign Commercial Service staffer, who had funding to travel the country, was able to provide valuable reporting back to the embassy about conditions far afield. Pifer, who served in Ukraine during the Y2K transition, called on Peace Corps Volunteers to report back the night of the new millennium. “I thought, ‘Here are 250 people who can tell us what’s going on around the country,’” he recalls, adding that their reports proved “some of the best information we received.” That, of course, is the best-case scenario. In other instances, the camaraderie at post can be over- taken by parochial concerns and interagency battles rooted in Washington, which then spill over into agency freelancing overseas. Ambassadors can be caught in the middle as they attempt to repair the damage such free- lance projects can do to the bilateral relationship. Turf Battles Ambassadors say that clashes can arise from the sim- plest of problems, such as an agency that provides its overseas staff with better funding than State does. Or mistakes can be made due to ignorance of diplomatic methods and procedures. Then there can be grander challenges that cut to the heart of embassy authority. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, for exam- ple, suggests that the threat of terrorism has spawned just that, as the Bush administration has allowed Defense to exert more independence at overseas missions. As a result, conflicts have arisen over everything from public diplomacy to security assistance. In one Islamic country visited by the committee’s investigators, Defense public affairs officers wanted to feature a prominent Muslim cleric in a U.S.-produced program. State op- posed the plan, arguing that it risked tainting an inde- pendent moderate with Western approval. The investi- gators found similar problems in both humanitarian assis- tance and security programs run by the Pentagon. In Uganda, for example, a military civil affairs team went to the northern part of the country to help local communities build wells, erect schools and carry out other small development projects to help mitigate the consequences of a long-running regional conflict, the report said. But local nongovernmental organizations speculated that the military was there to take sides in the conflict. In Ethiopia, similarly, military humanitarian action teams were ordered out of the region near the Somali border, ostensibly due to Ethiopian sensitivities that their presence could spark cross-border hostilities. 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 / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 7 Freelancing and overaggressiveness by FBI investigators or DOD Special Forces can needlessly destroy diplomatic relationships.