The Foreign Service Journal, December 2011

D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49 F OCUS ON THE B REAKUP OF THE S OV I ET U NION S ETTING U P S HOP IN THE N EWLY I NDEPENDENT S TATES “Normalizing” the New Posts New Post Support Unit, Embassy Bonn By Mike Tulley M ost Foreign Service people today will give you a puzzled look if you mention the New Post Support Unit, or NPSU. It was set up by the European Bureau’s executive office in 1992 to provide ad- ministrative support for the 14 new posts that blossomed overnight in the former Soviet Union. As unbelievable as it may seem to us today, these posts —Tallinn, Vilnius, Riga, Minsk, Kiev (now Kyiv), Chisinau, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Baku, Ashgabat, Dushanbe, Tashkent, Bishkek and Alma Ata (now Consulate General Al- maty, after the embassy moved to the new capital, Astana) — were originally envisioned to be a “new model” for U.S. embassies. Total staff for each embassy, we were told, would not exceed 25 people: 10 Americans and 15 locally en- gaged staff. All 14 posts became part of the European Bureau, and the State Department made the decision not to ask Con- gress for any more funds to open and operate thembecause they were to be small, bargain-basement operations. NPSU was supposed to be the management SWAT team that could help these posts function administratively with limited resources. Of course, it quickly dawned on us that a few of those countries had nuclear weapons and a sig- nificant Soviet military presence parked inside their bor- ders and might need a little more attention than we had originally planned. The figure of 25 held for perhaps six months, and then the stampede began. I was the first chief of the NPSU Human Resources Unit, joining Director Cliff Tighe, Financial Manager Ron Miller, Information Management Officer Steve Laud- erdale and General Services Officer John Helm in Bonn in January 1992. Our mission was simple: help get these 14 small and new posts “normalized.” Jim Paravonian, Joanne Armor, Louis Hebert and Boyd Doty were among the other Foreign Service pioneers in the unit. Among the locally engaged staff, I am once again working with Steve Wilkins and Mike Stephen today in NPSU’s successor organi- zation, the Regional Support Unit, which relocated to Frankfurt when Embassy Bonn moved to Berlin in the mid-1990s. You can probably guess what our biggest problems were. The first was communication, the sec- ond was communication and the third was communica- tion. None of these posts had particularly reliable telephone infrastructure. Remember, in 1992 cellular technology was still in its infancy (although by the time I left Bonn three years later, most of these posts were rely- ing more on their cell-phone systems than their landlines). We also used telexes extensively (I’m not making that up) and faxes — sometimes by patiently feeding a docu- ment into a fax machine several dozen times over a pe- V ETERANS OF THE 1991-1993 ERA OF POST OPENINGS IN THE FORMER S OVIET U NION TELL THEIR STORIES . NPSU was supposed to be the management SWAT team.