The Foreign Service Journal, December 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2015 33 since the early 1970s, earlier attempts to relaunch an Inter- national Visitor Leadership Program exchange in Iraq hadn’t gone well. No Iraqi could afford the risk of being selected by the embassy for a trip that could be seen as a reward for something— the Iraqi government wanted to control selection to all largesse. USIA headquarters, however, had a long-standing rule: only embassy officers could nominate candidates for the program. We eventually managed to put together a successful workaround with a bit of good luck and some creative bending of the rules. First, USIA sent us one of the first Arabic-capable personal computers available, which we used to prepare letter-perfect Arabic-language correspondence quickly, freeing up staff time. This was crucial, because all substantive communications between the embassy and the Iraqi government had to be transmitted through formal diplomatic notes. The procedures for issuing exchange visas were much simpler in those days, as well. I kept the forms in my office and could assemble the entire application package in under an hour. Our consular colleagues gave us head-of-line privileges for exchange visas. But identifying good exchange candidates remained our big problem. Most Iraqis were still loath to have any contact with us. Here’s how we solved it: We compared USIA’s group program offerings with embassy priorities (identifying candidates for individual travel would have been too much), putting together a tentative plan for our ambassador to approve. Next, I would “socialize” the plan with our police contact, agreeing to solicit nominations from the Iraqi government via a diplomatic note, in exchange for a commitment to respect our selection criteria. We prepared a separate and detailed diplomatic note for each U.S. thematically organized group into which we sought to add an Iraqi participant, describing in detail what kind of individual was being sought “to represent Iraq.” Finally, we gave copies of the notes to our police contact, and waited. Back in Washington, USIA’s visitor programmanagers agreed to this highly unusual procedure and asked only that we verify candidates’ bona fides, which we were generally able to do because the Iraqis honored their commitment to send us only highly qualified nominees. Time was our remaining challenge. Would-be Iraqi visitors could not contact us until they had completed a police-managed “orientation” program detailing what was expected of them dur- ing their visit to the United States. Our exchange programs had fixed schedules involving participants frommany other coun- tries. Typically, the Iraqi invitees would arrive at the embassy, without warning, on the very last day we could still get them onto a flight to Washington in time for the start of the program.