Kiwanis Speech on State Department – June 25, 2003

I want to thank you for inviting me to speak to you today about the U.S. Department of State and my experience as a Foreign Service officer.  I am pleased that you are interested enough in foreign affairs to invite me.  After the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq, people are more interested in foreign affairs than they used to be.  I guess you invited me to talk about foreign policy, rather than my old boss, former President Clinton, because I don’t get $400,000 per speech.  When I have talked about the State Department previously, I have usually tried to be unbiased about it (on the one hand, on the other hand), but today, because I feel that it is under assault from other government agencies, primarily the Pentagon, I intend to speak somewhat in defense of the State Department. 

The State Department is one of the oldest, and one of the most important, departments of the US government, but it is also one of the smallest.  For that reason, it is an interesting place to work; because it is small, you have an opportunity to work on important issues, often with senior officials, even when you are relatively low ranking.  It is a relatively small organization for a Federal Government department, especially for those doing the policy work that gets in the news, as compared to security or administrative work. There is a split between those who advance because of their staff work in Washington and those who excel at representational and reporting work overseas at Embassies.  Of course, those who do both well are the ones who really get ahead.

I met most of the Secretaries of State that I worked for, although some, like Jim Baker, I only met at a reception or other social occasion.  The Secretaries I worked for also included Cyrus Vance, Henry Kissinger, Ed Muskie, Alexander Haig, George Shultz, Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren Christopher. 

The State Department is well over 200 years old.  In 1787, the Constitution gave the President responsibility for the conduct of the nation's foreign relations. It soon became clear, however, that an executive branch was necessary to support President George Washington.  The House and Senate approved legislation to establish a Department of Foreign Affairs on July 21, 1789, and George Washington signed it into law on July 27, making the Department of Foreign Affairs the first Federal agency to be created under the new Constitution. This legislation remains the basic law of the Department of State.  In September 1789, additional legislation changed the name of the agency to the Department of State and assigned to it a variety of domestic duties.

President Washington appointed Thomas Jefferson in September 1789 to be the first Secretary of State.  During its first 35 years, the Department of State was led by some of the greatest leaders of the new republic.  For Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, service as Secretary of State proved to be the stepping-stone to election as President.  Other famous names of Secretaries are John Marshall, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and William Jennings Bryan.  About the only place in today’s State Department where you get some feel for this history is on the 8^th floor, where the diplomatic reception rooms are located.  The desk on which the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Revolutionary War, is there.  The top floor where offices are located is the 7^th floor, where the Secretary of State’s office is. 

From the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century until the first years of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Department of State grew from 91 employees in Washington, D.C., in 1900, to 708 employees in 1920, to 1,128 employees in 1940.  By the time the United States entered World War II, President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were being served by a Foreign Service of about 830 trained officers.  With World War II, the number of domestic employees grew to more than 3,700 in 1945 and nearly 9,000 by 1950.  More recently, in 1999, the State Department took over two agencies that had been independent, the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA).  As a result, State significantly expanded the permanent employees on its rolls.  It has a direct hire workforce of approximately 30,000 employees, with about 60% of those working overseas.  About 20,000 of those are Americans, and 10,000 are foreign nationals.  Those overseas are stationed at more than 240 embassies and consulates. 

Of the 20,000 Americans, about ½ are Foreign Service employees.  Of those, probably about ½ are officers, the rest are secretaries, communications specialists, etc.  Of that ½, probably only about ½ work on foreign policy issues.  The other officers manage embassies, supervise security, etc.  So, there are only about 2,000 or 3,000 officers working on foreign policy.  Of those, about ½ are in Washington in the main State Department, and about ½ are in embassies overseas.  So, compared to other government departments and agencies, Foreign Service Officers have considerable influence on policy, for better or worse.  President Richard Nixon is reputed to have hated the Foreign Service.  When Henry Kissinger moved from NSC at the Nixon White House to be Secretary of State, he used the Foreign Service.  However, he surrounded himself with a few Foreign Service Officers whom he thought were the best and the brightest, and left the rest of Foreign Service to spin its wheels in its own bureaucracy. 

There is talk from time to time of doing away with the Foreign Service because we have so much information available instantaneously on cable TV news, the Internet, etc.  However, we also know from watching them how often people say that a government is saying one thing publicly and another privately.  There needs to be a private conduit through which the president of another country can communicate with the President of the United States, and often private channels are needed for lower ranking officials to communicate.  Furthermore, the US government is often interested in mundane things that the main news services may not consider worthy of coverage, such as economic statistics, or the results of local elections.  If we provide military or humanitarian assistance, somebody needs to try to make sure than the money is properly spent.  Plus, somebody needs to be in country to look out for American citizens in case they run into personal problems or get caught up in international political problems, like wars.  I haven’t stressed the role of the State Department’s consular officers who look out for American citizens, but when you travel overseas, if you have any dealings with an American embassy, it is most likely to be with a consular officer. 

Many Foreign Service officers are well educated, confident, and highly motivated.  You may have noted that one or two Foreign Service officers made high profile resignations over the Iraq war.  More recently, the Washington Post reported that Rand Beers resigned from being in charge of counter-terrorism on President Bush’s NSC to join Senator Kerry’s Democratic presidential campaign.  Randy Beers was not a Foreign Service officer, but a State Department civil service employee who spent a lot of his career working on political-military affairs, where I occasionally crossed paths with him. 

Some of the most well known Secretaries of State served during the Cold War, including George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles.  The United States’ finest hour diplomatically was probably its leadership in designing a lasting peace settlement for Europe and Asia after World War II.  In this finest hour, the crown jewel was probably the Marshall Plan, named after General Marshall, whom Winston Churchill called, “the true organizer of victory.”  While the US Army was at a low point before World War II, Marshall identified and promoted many of the men who would become the war’s leading generals, such as Eisenhower, Patton, and Mark Clark.  In Washington, he planned the strategies, such as the D-Day invasion, that his subordinate generals carried out.  Before appointing him Secretary of State, Harry Truman called George Marshall “the greatest living American.” 

At State, Secretary Marshall, missed the well organized conduct of affairs that characterized his military command, and thus set up an Executive Secretariat and a Policy Planning Staff in 1947 to organize and manage the Department’s decision making and to undertake long-range policy planning.  Secretary Marshall's Secretariat proved so successful that it has continued, without significant change, to the present day. The Policy Planning Staff, initially manned by such luminaries as George Kennan and Paul Nitze, soon lost its luster under later Secretaries, but it is still a prestigious office.  The last head of the Policy Planning Office, Richard Haass, has just left the State Department to become the new president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. 

There are similarities between George Marshall and our current Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who was also a senior General and a military Chief of Staff.   In spite of his military career, Colin Powell, the current Secretary of State, has been harshly criticized by conservatives in this administration, particularly by the Defense Department.  I think that this criticism is not deserved.  Both General Marshall and General Powell are men of high moral character who are more concerned about serving their country than about personal aggrandizement.  The first President Bush did not want to take out Saddam Hussein, and Colin Powell did what he wanted.  The second President Bush wanted to take out Saddam Hussein, and Colin Power did what he wanted.  Furthermore, although he had been the Pentagon’s senior general during the first Iraq war, he refrained from telling the Pentagon how to do their job during the second war, despite the fact that the Pentagon loudly and frequently told Powell how to do his job as Secretary of State. 

As a former military officer, Colin Powell brings a concern for his Foreign Service ”troops” that is missing with most Secretaries of State, who tend to be much more concerned about the foreign policy issues they deal with than the people who work for them.  In recent testimony before Congress, Secretary Powell said:

“I send young State Department officers out to the most difficult places in the world to serve their country, taking their families with them where there may not be any hospital care, there may not be any school for their kids, or where they’re separated from their families for a longer period than the average soldier gets separated from his family.  And they go willingly, they go with a smile on their face, because they’re happy to serve the American people. 

“Now, ever since Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as the first Secretary of State, an uninterrupted line of Secretaries of State, from number one to number 65, have been criticized at one time or another for being – what? – diplomats, for trying to find peaceful solutions, to building friendships around the world, to creating alliances.  That’s what we do.  We do it damn well.  And I’m not going to apologize to anybody.  I’m on the offense for the people who work in my Department doing a great job, and if you come after them, come after them with legitimate criticism.  We’ll respond to that.  We’re not above criticism.  But if you come after us just to come after us, you’re in for a fight, and I’m going to fight back and I’m going to protect my Department and my people.

“And I’m also going to defend the policies of the President, which were attacked even more vigorously than any sideways attack on the contributions and the loyalty and the dedication and the courage and the willingness to serve of the men and women of the State Department.” 

That’s the end of the quotation from Secretary Powell.  It’s not often that the officers at State get such a spirited defense from their Secretary. 

Although the Department of State expanded substantially during the cold war, it lost its role as the sole Federal agency involved in the preparation and execution of foreign policy. The Defense Department became more important.  Intelligence gathering and covert political action were moved into the Central Intelligence Agency, which was created in 1947. The Departments of Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture now have their own officers stationed at embassies abroad.  Most importantly, the National Security Council (NSC) was created in 1947 as part of the White House apparatus to coordinate for the President the various agencies concerned with foreign affairs.  Although Secretaries of State Acheson and Dulles held the lead role in the NSC for its first few years, the balance of control has flowed to the White House staff, now headed by Condoleeza Rice. 

During the 1990’s, State Department funding decreased in real dollars (adjusted for inflation).  Secretary Powell has tried to rectify this situation, although State always has a hard time defending its budget because it has no domestic constituency.  Nevertheless, State is probably the most important department dealing with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and one of the most important dealing with terrorism, drug smuggling, international crime, and economic issues.  As Iraq has shown, not all of these issues lend themselves to unilateral, military solutions.  The US decided that the best solution to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was military action, but the military has so far failed to find them, and they may already have been transferred to other countries.  One the other hand, the US has so far said that diplomacy is the best way to solve the North Korean (and presumably the Iranian) nuclear proliferation problem. 

I spent a considerable part of my State Department career working on non-proliferation matters, either nuclear proliferation or missile proliferation.  I never worked specifically on chemical or biological weapons proliferation.  President Reagan was elected after I had been in the State Department for about five years and was working on non-proliferation in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which is the part of the State Department that works closely with the CIA and other intelligence agencies.  The Carter Administration had begun working on the problem of missile proliferation, but with the change of administration, the senior people who had been working on this issue for Carter all lost their jobs.  Although I was pretty junior, I was one of the few people who knew anything about it.  Thus I had a larger role than I normally would have had in the creation of what eventually was called the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR).  This was my introduction to the competition between the State Department and the Defense Department. 

At that time, missile proliferation fell under the control of a man named Richard Perle at the Defense Department.  You may recognize his name as the head, until recently, of the Defense Advisory Board, and as one of the main hawks favoring war with Iraq.  Back then he was an assistant secretary of defense, which is not particularly high ranking, but his influence was much greater than his title would indicate.  Some of Perle’s staff from those days is still around, including the #2 at the NSC, Deputy NSC Advisor Steve Hadley. 

State was seeking a missile non-proliferation regime that we could get other countries to join.  Perle was seeking an extremely tough regime that would cut off almost all trade in anything having to do with either missiles or peaceful space launch vehicles, since space launch vehicles incorporate a lot of missile technology.  At first we only sought the cooperation of our closest allies – Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada and a few other countries.  Back then, Donald Rumsfeld’s “new” Europe was still Communist Europe.  Anyway, our allies would not buy on to a regime that was too tough on peaceful space cooperation, and within the US Government, the Pentagon would not buy on to a regime that allowed too much peaceful space cooperation.  So, we negotiated with our allies and within the government until I got assigned to Bangkok, Thailand.  When I got back from assignments in Bangkok and Brasilia, Brazil, they had reached agreement on what they called the MTCR, which was one of those things designed by committee that generally pleases no one. 

It did not please me, because while I was in Brazil, I helped an American company win a multimillion-dollar contract for satellite tracking stations to allow Brazil to use satellites to monitor environmental conditions in the Amazon.  A few months later, however, the Pentagon vetoed the deal because it said the tracking stations could be used to track missiles if Brazil tried to develop them, although they would have been poorly suited for this purpose.  The US eventually approved licenses for the ground stations, but my Brazilian contacts were furious with me because of my role in persuading them to buy American.  They said that they would have bought a similar Japanese system if they had known the US would have created so many problems for their environmental satellite program.  However, the State Department office in Washington that had been created to handle the MTCR asked me to come back and help them get it working.  So, I spent another two years trying to get more rich countries to sign on to it, and to get better enforcement against poorer, potentially proliferating countries of what we already had in place.  The MTCR still exists, has much wider membership, hopefully has stronger controls, and is being supplemented by other agreements on missile control. 

In the early days, one of the most contentious issues was what to do about SCUD missiles, which were at the lower limit of what the regime controlled.  SCUDs were first produced by the Soviet Union, but the Soviets sold not only the missiles themselves, but also the technology to build them.  So, today they are produced by a number of unsavory countries, including North Korea.  You may remember that during the first Gulf War, Iraq fired SCUDS at Israel and US troops in Saudi Arabia.  They were one of the weapons of mass destruction that we expected Saddam Hussein to use in the second war.  But they were not used and like other weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems, Iraq’s SCUDS have gone missing. 

When the first Gulf War started, I found myself on the hot seat, because everybody wanted to know how many SCUDS Iraq had, where they got them, whether they had improved them, what warheads they had on them, and where they were hidden.  These were all questions for the intelligence community, rather than the State Department, but of course, with war in the offing, anybody who might know anything was going to be asked for anything they could contribute.  I, of course, attended a lot of intelligence briefings because of my office’s enforcement role, and I wonder if the CIA analysts briefing on Iraq then are some of the same ones taking heat today for American failure to find Iraq weapons of mass destruction. 

One sad thing I learned is that it’s easier for the government to do easy things than for it to do hard things.  This may sound simplistic, but I found that it was often easier to take action against moderate countries that were not so bad, like Brazil or Argentina, than against tough countries that were really misbehaving, like Pakistan or China.  It looks to me like this still going on today.  Yesterday, President Bush met with Pakistani President Musharraf and reportedly promised him $3 billion in aid, although Bush did not give him F-16s, which are one of the few things we have held back in recent years. 

Pakistan built its atomic bombs using uranium enrichment technology; Pakistan is the developing country that has the best expertise in uranium enrichment.  The latest big flap in our relations with North Korea is over their building a uranium enrichment facility.  But because of our terrorist problems in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we are reluctant to crack down on Pakistan.  So, recently we have sanctioned North Korea for its relatively low-grade missile proliferation activities in helping Pakistan with missiles.  But we haven’t sanctioned Pakistan, which I think must have been involved in supplying strategically important enrichment technology to North Korea, if only because there is almost no one else in the world who could and would do such a thing.  Russia, for example, stands accused of supplying somewhat similar technology or equipment to Iran, but that is because Russia and Iran have nuclear cooperation going back years and years.  Russia might have helped North Korea years ago when Russia was still part of the Soviet Union, and North Korea was not such an international loner, but I think that today Russia is too close to the West, and North Korea is too far out there as a crazy state, for Russian to help it build an atomic bomb. 

Where does leave us?  Almost out of time.  Before I quit, however, I would like you to look at the cards I handed out about a new book, Inside a U.S. Embassy, How the Foreign Service Works for America, published by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), who are the people who sent me out here today.  (This is their short commercial.)  AFSA is the professional organization for Foreign Service officers.  Foreign Service officers are looking for a little support, because as I said earlier, they have no domestic constituency.  They generally talk to people from other governments rather than to American citizens, and usually are perceived in America as representing foreigners to the US, when in fact they are selling American ideas to foreigners.  But as Secretary Powell told Congress, they are proud to serve America and today are exposed to many security risks in doing so.  This book will give you a much better idea of what Foreign Service officers do, and I hope that some of you might be interested enough to buy the book.  The cards tell you how. 

Earlier I mentioned that if you ever deal with an American embassy or consulate overseas, you are most likely to deal with a consular officer, who would be the one to issue you a new passport, to help you get reestablished if someone stole your billfold, or perhaps even to visit you in jail if you got arrested.  They also issue or deny visas to foreigners who want to come to this country.  They often get a bad rap, because they issued visas to some of the 9/11 terrorists; they don’t have any money to give you if you need money in a foreign country, and they can only visit you in jail; they can’t get you out.  But they are on the front lines; they have maybe a minute or two to decide whether to issue a visa because of the long lines waiting.  By comparison the FBI, with months or years to look into the same terrorists’ backgrounds did not do any better.  On a more personal note, the US government is not generous with its money to citizens who go broke overseas.  But consular officers are on call 24 hours a day, if you can persuade the Marine guard at the embassy entrance to call them, which is often tougher than dealing with the consular officers themselves, because the Marines know that they often field several requests a night asking them to wake up the duty officer. 

Finally, besides working on nuclear and missile non-proliferation, I served in Thailand, Poland, Italy, and Brazil twice, usually dealing with scientific matters.  Besides proliferation, environment was usually the other big scientific issue that I handled.  In addition, before I joined the State Department, I served in the Army artillery on the DMZ in Vietnam.  So, I might know a little more than the average man in the street about these topics.  If we have time, I invite your questions.