Quote: Married to the Service in the 50’s

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‘For the male officer, marriage presents no Service problem. Convention allows that his wife need have no profession of her own. Moreover, she probably should have none, seeing that in the higher grades of the Service she will have an important social role which is likely to keep her fully employed. Indeed, it is very nearly true that she can properly have none; since, quite apart from the question of social demands on her time, there are extremely few professions the following of which would not conflict in some degree with the interests of the Service.’

Sir William StrangThe Foreign Office, 1954 from Women in Diplomacy: The FCO, 1782-1999

Quote: Diplomats, Not Meant to Sell Widgets

Image by Dillon K. Hoops via Flickr

I don’t think that diplomats are meant to sell widgets - that isn’t their function - or to know about the intricate details of how widgets are made and what they measure. What diplomats are meant to do is generally create, promote, foster the environment in which British exports are likely to be successfully achieved and specifically to press, pursue, and promote individual contracts when these are at stake. A lot of diplomacy is not about that; it’s about representing Britain in a much wider sense, a lot of which incidentally is extremely dull. It is about protecting British citizens. It’s about, in poor countries, promoting development assistance. I don’t myself think that businessmen are likely to find it a very comfortable environment in which to operate.

Sir David Gore-BoothFormer British Ambassador to India from the British Diplomatic Oral History Project | 1999David Alwyn Gore-Booth, diplomat and banker (1943- 2004)

The Diplomatic Wives: Tribute and Thanks

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In their swearing in, you see the spouses holding the book; when they retire and if they get lucky, the spouses may get a special mention at the ceremony. It does not seem to matter whether it’s the Foreign Service or the FCO. Most days, the spouse is just a spouse, doing all things unofficially, that is.

In 1971, when the Foreign Service issued a directive saying that "participation by a Foreign Service wife in the work of a post is a voluntary act of a private person, not a legal obligation which can be imposed by any Foreign Service official or his wife,” it also said: “We believe it would be a serious loss if the feelings of common effort and cooperation of our Foreign Service personnel and their wives were somehow lost.”

‘Frankly, if a wife chooses to be involved in the embassy work, it’s an unpaid benefit for us.’ That’s from the FCO spokesman in 1986. They were no longer obligated to do anything for the mission, but that did not mean the end of such things. The British Ambassadors in their valedictories recognized that when they pay tribute to their wives (with names never mentioned) even as one puts it, an “empty gesture through it is.”

Sir David Gore-Booth, the British Ambassador to India (Valedictory Despatch: Delhi, 1999) writes:

"So how does the “blustering buffoon” of Francis Wheen’s imagination sign off for the last time? Not without thanking my wives: the first for giving up under the strain after only a few years; the second for making the last 21 years a joy above and below deck. And scores of colleagues, whether UK based or locally engaged, who have helped keep this particular show on the road. I have hugely enjoyed a career that has always been colorful and times controversial. But now it is time to go home."

Sir Michael Weir, the British Ambassador to Egypt (Valedictory Despatch: Cairo, 1985) writes:

"I must end with the customary tribute to spouse and Service, empty gesture through it is to include a sentence or two of compliments in a dispatch which will be read mainly by colleagues. In my case, I have two wives to thank both of whom have been a great support but the first of whom decided that diplomatic life was crippling to the spirit. The second had joined the Service before we met, and has no excuse. I am therefore not taking my leave the same way as other valedictorians, and look forward to several further years service below stairs while my wife pursues her career."

Then there’s Lord Moran who was High Commissioner to Canada (1981-1984) (Valedictory Despatch: Lord Moran, Ottowa, 1984):

"I pay tribute, as I have done in some of my speeches, to the incalculable contribution made to our efforts by a good many of our wives, unpaid but often making all the difference between success and failure. And in this, my last dispatch, I should like to say thank you to my own wife. For thirty five years, at home and in eight countries overseas, we have done everything together. Mine has been an easier job than hers. But her contribution has been enormous. Doing it all together has made it fun. Indeed to have done it without her would have been inconceivable."

And that's that. The Foreign Service, of course, does not have the tradition of the valedictories. Occasionally, you hear the tribute to the wife in the public sphere like this one below from Craig Stapleton, former US Ambassador to France and the Czech Republic. His wife, Dorothy Walker Stapleton, is a first cousin of George H.W. Bush.

"Having served for seven years in a U.S. Embassy, I must say it would be impossible for an Ambassador to fill all the demands of the job, including managing and running the residence staff and events without a wife. Nancy Brinker, an Ambassador to Hungary, often told Debbie and me, "I need a wife." Luckily, Debbie was a willing partner, who made the visit of all who came warm and special. The spouse of an Ambassador has no direct staff, is unpaid, yet the success of the Mission in improving the relations between our respective countries falls equally on the couple."

Quote: Cocktail parties are death …

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“One of the great failures of the Diplomatic Service has been its inability to cast off its images as bowler hated, pin-striped and chinless with a fondness for champagne. It does not help when Ministers earn themselves a cheap thrill by colluding with the notion that the FCO is elitist and fuddy duddy. Or that Eton is a dirty word. A Foreign Office career is one of the best levelers – upwards or down – that has been devised. It is also testing. Bubbly is far from the mind when burning confidential documents on the roof of the Embassy in Baghdad, battening down the hatches against stone throwing mobs outside the High Commission in Lusaka or the Embassy in Tripoli, grinding out text at all-night sessions in Brussels or New York, paying incognito visits to Syria or doing bumps and jumps in an RAF Tornado over Kuwait. Indeed cocktail parties are death as I am sure 99 perfect of DS colleagues would agree. Whoever it was who suggested an international treaty banning National Day receptions should be canonized.”

Sir David Gore-BoothBritish Ambassador to Indiafrom the Valedictory Despatch: Sir David Gore Booth, Delhi, 1999British Diplomatic Oral History Project | 1999David Alwyn Gore-Booth, diplomat and banker (1943- 2004)

From Valedictory Despatches to Twitter?

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The Ambassadors’ Parting Shots

Today on BBC Radio 4 Matthew Parris kickoffs a 5-episode program on the passing of the valedictory despatch. That’s the traditional final telegram home in which British ambassadors could “let their hair down and settle a few scores.” That is, they could say whatever they wished in their final telegram home. The series features declassified Foreign Office files alongside interviews with the diplomats who wrote them. These files were released to the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act. Click here to hear the episodes. Click here to hear a clip now (additional excerpts read by actors).

The BBC also interviewed our blog friend, three times British Ambassador Charles Crawford, who left the FCO in 2007. Ambassador C gave it a thumbs up: “The BBC series is well researched and should be well worth a listen if you are interested in the way diplomacy has evolved, both for better and worse, in recent decades.” He further writes that the valedictories were canned when he was in Warsaw, and that he sent two from there: “-- one on the philosophical aspects of the end of communism in Europe (extracts from which readers in a world scoop here have seen: The Final Submission); -- one describing my Lifetime Career Oscar Achievement Awards, a self-indulgent but droll list of the best and worst moments of 28 years' service." Read Charles’ post here.

You can read below some of the valedictory despatches (pdfs) included in the series.

• Dame Glynne Evans, Lisbon, 2004
• Sir David Gore Booth, Delhi, 1999
• Sir Robin Renwick, Washington, 1995
• Sir Michael Weir, Cairo, 1985
• Lord Moran, Ottowa, 1984
• Ralph Selby, Oslo, 1975
• Sir John Russell, Rio de Janeiro, 1969
• Roger Pinsent, Managua, 1967
• Sir Anthony Rumbold, Bangkok, 1967

Andrew Bryson , the producer of the BBC show writes that “this centuries-old tradition survived in the Foreign Office through countless changes of government, upheaval and wars - before coming to an abrupt end under Labour in 2006. Perhaps the remarkable thing was that it lasted so long.”

He reports that the final straw was a 2006 valedictory from Sir Ivor Roberts, then the outgoing British ambassador to Italy. “It was fitting that his parting shot, the last of the genre, should also be a classic. He told of a Foreign Office under siege by management consultants, efficiency drives and Wall Street business-speak mumbo-jumbo:”

"Can it be that in wading through the plethora of business plans, capability reviews, skills audits, zero-based reviews and other excrescences of the management age, we have indeed forgotten what diplomacy is all about?" - Sir Ivor Roberts, Rome, 2006

Apparently, hours after this telegram was sent, ambassadors then received word from Whitehall that the practice was to be discontinued.

The report says there was concern for the “growing tendency of these valedictories to leak.” That or could it be that they no longer write them “mainly because no-one is interested to read anything longer than a text message?” Or perhaps a tweet at 140 characters?

So instead of texting “most difcult assgmt, glad wl soon b out of here” you can actually say “sucks to all this; time to go home and start a garden while wifey starts her own career.” Or “Nine countries, six continents, three wives later – thank you it has been a great ride.” Man, you can start a whole new lit genre writing valedictories in Twitter. Except that Whitehall would cringe at that and Foggy Bottom has not done these type of dispatches; and well, it also doesn't tweet goodbyes.

Of course, if they come around to it, and your valedictory is longer than 140 characters, you can fix that with Twitzer – a Firefox extension for Twitter that will short tweets that seem to cross the 140 limit. Once installed, the extension will fetch all the Twitzered text from shortText.com and update the Twitter site itself.

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US Emb Moscow Complains About Russian Sex Video

Image by Matthew Boyle via Flickr

I imagine this could be one of longest seven weeks in a life of a diplomat subjected to a barrage of allegations both in the press and on the Internet. The story and video of the sex tape purported to be of a US diplomat assigned at the US Embassy in Moscow first surfaced in early August. Yesterday, the United States finally complained to Russia's Foreign Ministry over what it says is an effort to smear a diplomat with a fabricated sex tape.

From ABC News:

"Kyle Hatcher has done nothing wrong," said Ambassador Beyrle. "Clearly the video we saw was a montage of lot of different clips, some of them which are clearly fabricated," he told ABC News. "We had our security office back in Washington take a look at that and they are convinced Kyle has done nothing wrong. I have full confidence in him and he is going to continue his work here at the embassy."

The goal of the Russian government, Beyrle believes, is to "smear him in the eyes of his contacts."

ABC News also reports that according to a senior State Department official, the most disturbing element of the video may be the authentic elements that precede the fraudulent portion. According to this official, the tape begins with surveillance video of Hatcher walking Moscow streets some five years ago. "That portion of the tape is real," the official said. Hatcher, according to the official, traveled to Moscow as a tourist years before he worked for the U.S. government.

There have been lots of speculations online that this was the work of FSB, Russia's domestic and counter intelligence agency. In July FCO’s Deputy CG in Ekaterinburg was caught in a similar trap and subsequently resigned.

And here I thought our relationship with Moscow had been reset.

Come here to this gate! Mr. Putin, er sorry, Mr. Medvedev, close this gate! Make these rogues and honeytrappers go party elsewhere!

Read the whole thing here. News item also made it to the Department's daily press brief, read it here.

Read the previous coverage of this here.BTW, if you read Russian, check out Ambassador John Beyrle's blog here.

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• U.S. Protests Russian 'Sex Tape' Used to Smear American Diplomat (abcnews.go.com)
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Quote: I'm actually a bad man who happens to have a limit...

“I’m actually a bad man who happens to have a limit beyond which I wouldn’t go,” [he says]. “The strange thing is that a lot of people who are very good men — who have never been unfaithful to their wives, always go to bed by ten and even go to church — didn’t have any trouble with the torture bit. That’s the thing I really don’t get.”

Craig Murray
Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan (August 2002 - October 2004)
Quoted in The Sunday Times, September 21, 2008
“Craig Murray on sex, murder and intrigue”

Philip Barclay Says a Familiar Goodbye

Philip Barclay, the Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Zimbabwe who blogs at the FCO’s Global Conversations says goodbye to Zimbabwe … his final blog post has a familiar feeling for those who move every 3-4 years in this business. I’ve come to think of these arrivals and leavetakings as a large part of the wear and tear of this lifestyle. The getting to know phase in every place is familiar and different in the same breath. It takes about 6-8 months. The goodbyes are often sticky and hard as glue. It takes months, years. You may still be talking about your previous post in the middle of your current tour, hankering about the food, the weather, your old life, etc., etc. You meet find friends and leave friends. And every place that you have called home is lodged in the forever country of memory, the only place where you grow roots … here is Philip:

"The Foreign Office is cruel. I was posted to Zimbabwe despite its awful reputation. I stepped off the plane anxiously, expecting to be butchered at once and fed to lions. That didn’t happen, but I have suffered a greater pain - falling in love with this beautiful, cursed nation and now, after more than three years, having to leave.
[…]
Until today, I had not realised how much I am feeling about leaving Zimbabwe. But now, Easter Monday, the day before I leave for good, I find myself crying tears for the sweet friends and the soul-expanding life I have to leave behind. I know I signed up for a job that makes me move country every three or four years, but I didn’t know it would be as hard as this."

Read his final post here. Check out the Harare bloggers home here for Grace’s posts.

Eyes on London the Next Two Days

Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US President Barack Obama
with Foreign Secretary David Miliband, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton,
US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Chancellor Alistair Darling
at Downing Street, 1 April 2009
Photo from FCO under CC license

BBC News has devoted a page of live text commentary to the London Summit. It promises to follow “every diplomatic pas de deux and protesters' placard.” Some selected posts below – kind of like Twitter except that posts are not limited to 140 characters. Follow the commentaries here. Commentaries for Day 2 is here (updated 4/3)

0805 Just a few minutes behind schedule, US President Barack Obama arrives in Downing Street for a meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

0820 A glimpse of the first ladies as they pose for a photocall on the steps of Downing Street with their husbands. Looking reasonably informal, Sarah Brown is in a blue dress, Michelle Obama tops her outfit with a silver patterned cardigan.

0827 Sarah Brown will host a First Wives Club later (not expected to include the husbands of Germany and Argentina's female leaders). The Saudi Arabian king's four wives are not making the journey either. With the French president's wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, another no-show, Michelle Obama looks set to be Queen Bee.

0832 The G20 spouses, as the leaders' other halves are known, can look forward to Welsh lamb, Jersey Royal new potatoes and asparagus for dinner this evening. Michelle Obama will be seated between Harry Potter author JK Rowling and Olympic runner Dame Kelly Holmes, we are told.

0847 Much drooling over Obama's Cadillac One, aka The Beast. It has bullet-proof windows, 5in armour designed to brush off a chemical attack and on-board supplies of Obama's blood type. Eat your heart out MTV's Pimp My Ride! President Obama's security bubble

0916 BBC political editor Nick Robinson says: It almost appears any deal will do. Gordon Brown believes it is vital the markets and public see G20 unity, what he describes as getting the oxygen of confidence into the system.

1006 Good point Lewis (below) about the smoke-filled room, because foreign dignitaries at the G20 will be exempt from the UK smoking ban. Does this leave you fuming, reader?

1026 Obama says history shows that when nations fail to co-operate the price for our people is great. That is the lesson of the Great Depression. We must reject protectionism.

1104 Obama praises extraordinary affinity and kinship with British people, we owe so much to the UK and it is a special place, he says. But he refuses to get drawn into supporting England for tonight's World Cup clash against Ukraine!

1118 The US president's information pack for his trip to Europe describes the UK, under geography, as "slightly smaller than Oregon" (!).

1153 Protesters at the Bank of England are getting louder, some are chanting: "Revolution". They are calling for the bankers and Gordon Brown to be put on a bonfire.

1209 Scotland Yard says eight people have been arrested after being found in possession of police uniforms. They were thought to be travelling in the armoured vehicle stopped earlier. Police estimate there are about 3,000 protestors in the City of London.

1213 BBC's Joe Lynam in Westminster texts: If you thought any trouble would come from protesters during G20, think again. Scuffles broke out in Downing St between press photographers trying to get the best shot when Obama arrived to meet Brown. The police even had to intervene to prevent the situation getting uglier!

1245 Scotland Yard says the number of people arrested now stands at 11.

1258 The BBC's Mark Georgiou texts: The crowd outside the Bank of England is getting increasingly tense. The police line in Threadneedle street is becoming the focus of loud attention.

The BBC News G20 page is here. The official website of London Summit 2009 is here. The website is webcasting live the most important events of the G20 London Summit - including the arrivals and press conference in cooperation with the host broadcaster. Videos will also be available in its video-on-demand archive.

Diplomatic Blogs: Truth, Power and Authenticity

The FCO hosted a digital diplomacy event yesterday. You can read Stephen Hale’s post here or check out their Bringing Foreign Policy Home page here. The FCO has linked to some bloggers who have offered reflections, not all positive, on their digital diplomacy efforts: Tony Curzon Price, Simon Dickson, Ian Brown, John Duncan.

I should note that the FCO probably has the largest number of ambassadors who have waded into blogging. In addition to the Foreign Secretary, there are about a dozen of them (check out this page) plus other FCO officials. By contrast, in the State Department, outside of the occasional postings you see in DipNote by US ambassadors, only a couple have official blogs (Ambassador Kinney in the Philippines and Ambassador Stephens in South Korea). There are a few other blogs run by PD sections -- like the ones in London and Sri Lanka, but there is no aggregator for all of them.

I am republishing Tony Curzon Price’s piece below (with permission) entitled Blogs, truth and power at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office because his point on an agency seeking to influence in a transparent and authentic way should be food for thought for the State Department and its bloggers as it expand into digital engagement.

Tony Curzon Price is Editor-in-Chief of openDemocracy. He received a PhD in economics from University College London (UCL), and worked as a jobbing economist for more than ten years. He founded a high-tech electronics company, Arithmatica, in 1998 and lived in Silicon Valley from 2001 to 2004.

Blogs, truth and power at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
By Tony Curzon Price

I went to a fascinating meeting at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office on their "digital diplomacy" initiative. The ambassadors are blogging -- you can see them aggregated here.

You might think that encouraging blogging at all levels by the foreign office would be a marketing disaster waiting to happen: surely someone was going to put a foot into a pretty well-laid trap very soon. How can "our man in Lisbon" (blogging here, in Portuguese) avoid being drawn into a debate on the state of the PIGS or the Portuguese criminal justice system that will reflect badly on the brand --- UK Plc, mostly --- he is promoting and representing?

Well, the question answers itself: it is not for nothing that he is "our man". Actually, the FCO has always needed a culture of "presumption of competence" because representatives were sent many days' travel away from any check on their power. Delegation had to be real. So there is almost no institution in the world (the Catholic Church springs to mind as a contender for that title) more suited to showing off its organisational discipline under decentralisation than the old imperial foreign ministries.

The result of all this is fascinating. Read John Duncan, for example, on Arms Treaty Negotiations. Remember that it was the failure of the chemical and biological weapons negotiations that left the door wide-open for the accusation that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. A working treaty here could have prevented the Iraq war. Will the sort of transparency that comes from this sort of blogging raise these issues to the level of importance they should have?

Ian Brown, from the Oxford Internet Institute, raised the question of how an Ambassador's blog could be authentic. Surely they're just shilling for her Majesty's government, even the blog from news-poor Zimbabwe?

This is obviously the big question for government use of new media. Just as technology allowed disintermediation of finance---and so all the excesses that we are now paying for---so that disintermediation is now hitting the production of knowledge. And we don't want to happen to knowledge what happened to money ...

My own take on this is that there are two views of the business of knowledge making: you are either trying to influence outcomes, or you are trying to "speak truth to power". In the new media, you can't afford to pretend to be doing the one when you're doing the other. The FCO cannot - just cannot - speak truth to power, because it is power. But it can transparently and authentically try to influence.

The bigger question of whether there is anyone left who has the legitimacy to speak truth rather than simply seek influence is a big question for our time. Like the analogy with finance, we now operate, as it were, without a gold standard. Beware, therefore, the inflation of all claims.

Diplomatic Bloggers: The Absent is Always Wrong

That “Official Concern” Thingy/4

There are slightly over a hundred private blogs maintained by diplomatic personnel and their family members (Digger of Life After Jerusalem also has an extensive list). Mostly, the blogs were set up to stay in touch with family members and friends back home or as catalogs of their uncommon experiences overseas (local food, exotic travel, foreign culture, etc.). Sometimes, the blogs are a “thinking out loud” online journal on the challenges of life abroad – falling ill overseas, assisting in the repatriation of a deceased American, adjusting to life abroad, tackling 12-hour work in a mass casualty incident, trying to find one’s place amidst constant relocation - in the case of family members, flooded houses, horrendous traffic, eating salad seasoned with Clorox, or just the blahs of life when one is way from family and friends …

E. Wayne Merry recently wrote an op-ed in Washington Times: “In most developed countries, the diplomatic service enjoys a stature sorely lacking here. In part this is because the Foreign Service does not engage the American public, press and Congress.”

I tend to agree. In fact, listening to public officials justifying the lack of funding for the State Department, one often hears about the agency’s and the Foreign Service’s lack of a “natural constituency.” The lack of support in Congress and the American public on State Department and USAID programs is often attributed to the fact that the FS is not supported by a specific voting block (unlike the military with operations across many states, and local jobs, supported by senators and representatives). The USAID funding to development overseas is also often misunderstood even when the US spends less than 1% of the federal budget on development assistance.

But there is also another reason – the State Department, as well as USAID have not figured out how to effectively tell its story. The stories when told are vetted many rungs up so what the American public gets is mostly the “happy talk” and the lighter side of success – you know what I mean, you read them every month in the State magazine.

It’s no wonder that Congress and the American public remains enamored with the notion that diplomats are cookie pushers conducting diplomacy within the cocktail circuits. Have they heard of a family member who lost her hearing for lack of a medical facility, of children suffering from chronic respiratory problems because of bad air, of officers who put in 12-14 hours day with no overtime, of spouses struggling for lack of career options, of officers who are separated from families due to unaccompanied assignments … there are a lot more stories like that …

Figures and charts are nice to look at but people look at them and then forget about them; stories on the other hand, tend to linger longer, connect better and when told well, get passed along.

The Bureau of Public Affairs (PA) carries out the Secretary's mandate to help the American public understand the importance of foreign affairs. But how many citizens went and write to their congressional representatives to help lobby for more funding for the State Department? Makes you wonder how effective it did on this area, considering the anemic funding in the last four years of the previous administration. In fact, I can count with my fingers the times when there were some real public reaction about the Foreign Service or our diplomats in recent memory -- 1) made-up "controversy" (e.g Iraq staffing) , 2) some visa, passport, other scandals and 3) embassy attack or diplomatic casualty. I think empathy for the Service usually runs at the lower end of the stick.


Under PA is a program called “The Secretary's Hometown Diplomats Program.” It is “designed to explain to America what we do and why it matters. We do this by tapping into our best resource: our people. Employees volunteer their time on scheduled trips back to their hometown (during home leave and hometown visits) to talk to local organizations, their elementary and high schools, their college alma maters, meet with state and local elected officials, and to participate in media interviews.”

But think about it -- what if PA develop the Hometown Diplomats Program into a blog aggregator (similar to HuffPo, the Progressive Realist or the FCO) and includes several from the 100 or so private blogs to tell the story of the men and women in the Foreign Service and USAID? Instead of one diplomat reaching out to an audience in his/her hometown, the diplomat has the potential to reach a larger public audience online. It need not be a one-time encounter, it can even develop into an online community with ongoing conversations. Interested personnel can register as bloggers in their private capacity (and work in their own time) and can pre-select subjects that they are willing to write about (e.g. LGBT issues, life in the FS, languages and foreign culture, representing America, development work, transition and relocation, leadership or professional development, etc. etc.).

But those restrictions under the “of official concern” umbrella just would not work in the blogging universe. So if State wants to do this the right way, the regs need some tweaking.

For those who want to blog specifically about policy, PA can open up the official roll of bloggers to diplomats who are not necessarily doing a PA tour of duty. They do have guest bloggers over at DipNote occasionally but then -- you never hear from the same blogger again; except for the Spokesman. The way I see it, the Spokesman already has the podium to talk about the official policy, he/she does not really need to be the primary blogger. Other folks with real names/titles should do that.

The FCO has been experimenting with digital diplomacy since 2007 but it provides some straight-forward rules and guidance: they insist that the bloggers think hard about what they are trying to achieve and who their target audience is before they begin. And they are asked to commit to posting regularly and moderating comments every day. Although they are offered tips on effective use of the medium, FCO bloggers are not told how to write.

Why am I harping on this? According to the 2008 Internet statistics, there are 220.1 million Internet users in the United States. Our Internet penetration rate is currently at 72.5% (the percentage of the total population of a given country or region that uses the Internet). That is the highest in North America.

In related stats, 54% of all online adults in the United States used the government sites. The generational differences in online activities specifically in the use of government sites are as follows:

• Trailing boomers (age 41-50) – 64 %
• Leading Boomers (51-59) – 60%
• Gen X (29-40) – 56%

I just think that with effective use of technology, there is considerable opportunity to engage the American public on the work of the State Department and USAID. We don't need more fact sheets and briefing papers. What these agencies for diplomacy and development need are more storytellers -- not spin, just real stories from the trenches.

The absent is always wrong. How much longer is State/USAID going to be absent from the online conversation that is bursting a thousandfold?

Randy Pausch used to say that "the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something." I recognize that there are security issues, and the mindset of hoarding/protecting information as well, among specific challenges that need to be overcome. But that is all part of this fast changing fascinating new world. The real challenge is the organization’s ability and willingness to seize the moment, consider the brick walls, and find ways to operate from “what can’t be done” to “what is possible.”

My mate helpfully points out that if real folks write about the "realities" of FS life, that if might turn off applicants for the Foreign Service. Well, look -- there is always that as a possibility. But considering that the Government pays a chunk of taxpayer money to train diplomats in languages and other functional skills, and to ship and house them and their families overseas -- wouldn't it make much more sense to have recruits who know exactly what they are getting into, rather than have recruits from cloud nine who flames out and quit when their expectations are not met?

Related Posts:

• Diplomatic Bloggers: No Blanket Ban but Better Guidelines Needed
• Diplomatic Bloggers: To Blog or Not to Blog
• Diplomatic Bloggers: That “Official Concern” Thingy – The Rules
• Diplomatic Bloggers: Official Blogs, Art Thou Here to Stay?
• Diplomatic Bloggers: Web 2.0 Door Opens

• 
  

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• 3 FAM 4170: Official Clearance of Speaking, Writing and Teaching (pdf)

Diplomatic Bloggers: Official Blogs, Art Thou Here to Stay?

The State Department has DipNote where posts are written, with some exceptions, by the mostly nameless “DipNote Bloggers.” The Brits has the FCO Bloggers: Global Conversations website which collects their official bloggers in one place, complete with full names and titles, including the Foreign Office Secretary David Milliband, who posts regularly. I don’t know of any other large collection of diplomatic bloggers, except these and the un-official ones (diplomats/diplomatic community members blogging in their private capacity).

The former British Ambassador Charles Crawford has written a few posts on diplomatic blogging. He thought in his post here that “the FCO has a goodly bunch, albeit with tone of unrelenting 'corporate' cheeriness, eschewing anything controversial/awkward in policy or philosphical terms.” But his indictment was that “FCO blogs are a friendly but bland product, making no serious contribution to the 'global foreign policy debate'.

I kind of look at both DipNote and the FCO Blogs as toddlers learning to walk; my hope is that they are fast learners and that they will become more agile as they grow older. Well, one can hope, and hoping is still free…

I have started reading the FCO bloggers because they provide a bit more flavor than our folks over at C Street and I like some of them because of the personal tone. One comment about the blogs: FCO bloggers try to keep to policy areas they have responsiblity for. Diverging from this has caused the odd frantic call from London to the offending blogger. What? They do that?

But Why Would a Diplomat Blog?

One of the FCO blogs by Stephen Hale, the Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy, tries to explain where FCO blogging fits in to the UK's foreign policy priorities: More niche blogs, with well defined objectives, linked to specific projects or campaigns. Because the web is about niches, and it's within niches that blogs can have real value. We want our bloggers to reach their particular target audiences (rather than to generate general-interest traffic). Read Stephen Hale’s Why Would a Diplomat Blog?

Ambassador Crawford still is not convinced with its utility, writing: “But how precisely do you begin to define what a 'target audience' is for any given diplomatic blog then target it without being at least a bit sharp and different? It takes months if not years to build up a non-trivial readership - blandness is not the way to do it.” Noah Shachtman over at Danger Room wrote something about this recently in his Info Wars post: “…you need a message that's sharp, and simple. Bland statements-by-committee just don't work. In fact, the more you vet and control your statements, the less effective it is.”

I think that the genie is out of the bottle and can’t be put back in. So here we are; the choices are clear ‘cuz according to the French – “the absent are always wrong.”

Blogs and the other new/social media provide an opportunity to improved engagement among the immediate audience and the larger global audience of these organizations. It is an entirely different world out there; the information superhighway has gotten terribly busier. Although Asia has the largest number of Internet users in the world at 650.4 millions, two other regions register the highest growth of internet usage between 2000-2008. Wanna guess which two?

The Middle East with a growth rate of Internet usage at 1,296.2 %

And Africa with a growth rate of 1,100.0 %.

This should give us some pause.

An Op-ed a Day, Rapid Response or Something Else?

Somebody made a comment that writing a blog is like writing an op-ed a day and worth the exercise. For which Ambassador Crawford responds:

“Blogs offer you the chance to write an op-ed a day. So do newspapers. Yet how many op-ed pieces by serving British diplomats have there ever been? None? The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can't work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government or HQ or both. Just say a diplomat posted a blog entry politely speculating on the wisdom of current Climate Change or Middle East policy. Imagine the scenes in Parliament: "The Secretary of State apparently cannot persuade even his own senior officials of the wisdom of this policy! Why should we take any notice of him?"

True. A unified message is necessary because it has more impact and generates less chaos and migraines. You certainly can’t have different people from the same agency talking from various policy perspectives publicly. I imagine that one or two or more would be dragged into the SFRC hearings to make clarifications or to defend their views. Can’t be done; this won’t work or people would be running around like headless chickens trying to find their heads!

The primary question I supposed is -- what is the function of an official blog? Is it an op-ed generator, a rapid response arm, a community huddle, a shining stake on cyberground, what?. At least the FCO has articulated where its blogging fits in the larger puzzle and has now been evaluated for the third time. DipNote has nothing but this, and if it has been evaluated at all, that report is not in the public sphere.

Part of Ambassador Crawford’s commentary on the FCO blogs is that when things are breaking online or even in the MSM like this one on, "A foul-mouthed anti-Semitic tirade"? or this one, the FCO bloggers and website seems to have little to say about it.


A similar criticism for DipNote, this one saying last year: “When the world is blowing up someplace, why does it take days and days for DipNote to weigh in? Where is Condoleeza Rice? Where is the energy, where is any evidence of a major commitment here to something other than a very, very careful, at times self-flattering operation?”

During the Mumbai siege, two Americans escaped and wrote about their experience with the Embassy (actually the Consulate General) in CNN’s user-generated, iReport.com site, DipNote was nowhere around. I don't think readers would expect DipNote to wade in on the core issues in Mumbai, after all it was an unfolding incident. But it's a blog - you can't expect it to be silent when what is going on is right on its alley!


It could have easily posted contact numbers for the task force (it was available elsewhere) and within a reasonable aftermath, could have invited some un-official bloggers who were assigned in Mumbai and were in the thick of things like Diplodocus who posted a few items: We Are Safe, Thanksgiving., It’s Raining in Bombay, The Earth Spins on Its Axis. And Girl in the the Rain who posted Deep Breath excerpted below:

We have been working 12-hour shifts (and sometimes more), running between phone calls or text messages with American citizens who were trapped in the hotels, meetings with the people “upstairs” who wanted to know what was going on, inquiries from families in the States, media calls (which we promptly passed off), and “field” duty at places like hospitals, outside the hotels, the airport, and even the morgue. Things were changing several times per minute - it was nearly impossible to get an accurate picture of things to report to the higher-ups at any given time, because it would all be different by the time you finished saying it.

There were also, of course, some low points. Like when one of our officers was allowed to enter the Oberoi Hotel - he left the hotel shaken, telling us of a horrific scene inside, with bodies in a restaurant where there were still meals on the tables. And, of course, each time we learned of a confirmed death of one of the people who we’d been looking for, or whose families or friends we had been in touch with.

And We’re okay. with the following:

We did our best to stay on top of the situation, and we did whatever we could to help American citizens who were caught up in the attacks or holed up in hotel rooms, (understandably) scared out of their wits. It is tough work emotionally, and I know I speak for all of my colleagues when I say that we all wholeheartedly wish we could do more for people.

I recognize that DipNote is under new management with some changes recently – but until about last year, it often reads very much like a dry report or a press release, or an extension of the happy-talk magazine. In December somebody posted Vulnerable Minorities: Eradicating Today’s Form of Slavery. The piece was in first person, 11 paragraphs in length. Below is a quick excerpt:

I’ve talked with survivors in Tamil Nadu, an especially poor state in India. Many in bonded labor, some sexually exploited, have rights to freedom under a 32-year-old Indian law. Yet the federal and local political will to rescue them from exploitation does not match the commitment on paper.

I have also met with the champion of Uyghur Muslim rights in China, Rebiya Kadeer, who was jailed for speaking truth to power. She and U.S-funded, but independently operated, Radio Free Asia have reported that Uyghur Muslims have been relocated under force, which makes them human trafficking victims. Conveniently, Kadeer says, many of those trafficked are women of child-bearing age to reduce the Uyghur complexion of Xinjiang.

And I thought as I read this post – okay you’ve met all these people and -- what were your thoughts? If I want to read a report on vulnerable minorities like this I would hunt down a report, or read straight news. It almost seems to me as if this was from a cable, tweaked for blog consumption. This kind of material can trick folks into thinking that they’re engaging the blogosphere and spreading USG’s message in this case, on human trafficking, when the writer is really just talking to himself.

Well, the same could be said about me here …tee-hee

In any case, on these official blogs, the root cause of this “dissatisfaction” might be in the fact that the audience is not only domestic but also global, but that within those segments, people also tend to form “cocoons of conversation online.” That's a lot of niches ...

So -- different strokes for different folks?

Related Post:
Diplomatic Bloggers: Web 2.0 Door Opens

Shock and Awe: The Zimbabwe Edition

Photo from wikimedia commons

The Telegraph headline screams “Zimbabwe dollar dead, says top economist.” “Zimbabwe Implosion,” says another headline from The Zimbabwean which also reports that the news from Zimbabwe is increasingly grim. "Collapsing infrastructure, hyperinflation, cholera, the world's highest HIV/Aids rate, a diaspora of refugees, and high unemployment are all signs of a country in ruins.”

FCO blogger in Harare Grace Mutandwa writes:

A few days ago in a monetary policy statement, Gono revalued the Zimbabwean dollar by removing 12 zeroes. A Z$100 trillion note, which was the highest note in circulation, is now Z$100. We have also now been told that Z$20 trillion (now Z$20) is now equivalent to US$1 and Z$2 trillion (Z$2) is now the same value as one South African Rand […] Everything is now sold in foreign currency. People who only six months ago lived very well of US$100 sent by relatives in the diaspora, now struggle to make ends meet. Zimbabweans have managed to devalue the American and British pound so much that now a US$100 does not go very far. Food is over-priced so are rentals and school fees.

Amidst all this is -- some shock and awe, the Zimbabwe edition. Martin Fletcher writing for the Times Online reports on an upcoming lavish one-day celebration for Fruitcake Bob’s 85th birthday. “[…] the zealots of his Zanu (PF) party are determined that it should be an occasion that their great leader will never forget.”

“It’s an important day for Zimbabweans to celebrate the life of our great leader and Africa’s hero,” he said. “Zanu (PF) continues to receive massive donations from the corporate world, ordinary Zimbabweans and from people from all walks of life and we are confident that this year’s celebrations will be the best.”

Wow! Great idea - arm twisting and aggressive shake downs are acceptable especially if you simply give them quaint names like “donations,” or "contributions." How about "alms" to aid the "poor?"

And so while Zimbabwe falls apart, here is the Birthday list to die for:

• 2,000 bottles of champagne — Moët & Chandon and ’61 Bollinger
• 500 bottles of whisky — Johnny Walker Blue Label, 22-year-old Chivas
• 8,000 lobsters
• 100kg king prawns
• 3,000 ducks
• 4,000 portions of caviar
• 8,000 boxes of Ferrero Rocher
• 16,000 eggs
• 3,000 cakes — chocolate and vanilla
• 4,000 packs of pork sausages
• 500kg cheese
• 4,000 packets of crackers

My. Oh. My! Would I go to hell if I wish for one live lobster to bite Bob’s nose? Never mind that – yes, I do wish!

The Johnnie Walker Blue Label (“the most acclaimed and exclusive Scotch Whisky in the world”) alone costs about $250 a bottle. And please tell these guys - Chivas Regal does not have a 22 but there is a 21 at $150 a pop. But hey -- why skimp? The better alternative is the Chivas 25 at only $270 a bottle – that’ll be quite a bargain, really -- especially if you buy a couple hundred bottles.

Let’s see -- for the Moët & Chandon champagne, you can get the Dom Perignon @ $170-$300+ (depending on the vintage). The 1961 Bollinger might be a problem though since it appears to be a rare vintage (some James Bond wanne-bes there, eh?). But I’m sure folks with money have a way around that; it’s not like they’re eating a slice of bread and water once a day, right?

These folks my friends, are aliens from Jupiter!

In Zimbabwe, Darkly

Less than 24 hours ago, AFP says that the number of people reported to be infected by cholera in Zimbabwe has risen to almost 65,000, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization. “Some 64,701 people have caught the disease during the outbreak, which started in August, and 3,295 among them have died, the WHO said.” And yet - amidst all this and in the face of world-record hyperinflation, politicians are still wrangling about “power-sharing.”

With so many things wrong in the world – in Sudan, in Sri Lanka, in Gaza, and elsewhere, and with businesses shedding jobs every day – how shocking are these numbers? 65,000 people with cholera. 52 dead and 80 wounded in Sri Lanka. How numb have we become to these news of suffering?

The Embassy and USAID in Harare as well as Ambassador McGee are doing what they can. But for stories of what Zimbabwe's like for diplomatic personnel, I visit the Harare blog of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I doubt if you can find any such stark account elsewhere.

Philip Barclay is a Second Secretary (Political/Projects/Consular) at the British Embassy in Zimbabwe. He joined the FCO in 1999 and was previously posted in London and Poland. He is one of the two FCO bloggers in Harare. What is striking about these posts to me is how real and natural they are; no attempt at glossing over and how they prick at your heart with their utter lack of adornment in explaining the state of things.

On the water shortage, Philip writes:

Monday morning. It’s been a weekend of doughnuts and I’m drinking too much again. A can of Namibian beer seems easier and tastier than water flavoured with the sulphuric tang of purification tablets. In Zimbabwe, alcoholism is a prophylactic for cholera. Not surprisingly after my excess, a certain tightness of my bowel suggests that I’d better visit the loo. But that’s not a pleasant prospect.

For some reason Harare’s powers that be cut off the British Embassy’s water supply in December. It’s not clear if this was another sign of Zim’s water system failure or a protest at our policy of saying that Mr Mugabe’s government is not altogether the best thing since sliced bread. Now Harare’s water ain’t great for drinking, fortified as it is by large amounts of the charmingly named but deadly Vibrio cholera bacterium. But I do still find it helpful for flushing toilets and miss it now it’s gone. So my toiletry routine has taken on a semi-African form. I fill a bucket from a butt and carry it down the corridor, spilling a little to present a banana-skin-type walkway to my colleagues. (Continue reading Two Philips Groaning).

Philip traveled to London for training and upon his homecoming to Harare was confronted once more with the lack of water:

I am running out of the little water I had stashed in containers. In the past I could count on my partner for water but now his taps have dried up too. The only friend I know who has a borehole can not help because she has not had power for two weeks now. I feel terribly despondent.

The whole city of Harare has no water. Our offices have no water and outside the cholera statistics are growing. Only a week ago we had someone from Population Services International (PSI) come in to tell us about prevention of cholera.

I remember vividly how she emphasised that we should wash our hands, keep ourselves and surroundings clean. she advised us not to shake hands. She spoke with passion. She made a lot of sense but today as I write this I am asking myself many questions.

Even Zimbabwe's health minister, David Parirenyatwa and president Robert Mugabe have taken turns to tell people about the importance of washing hands and general hygiene. But the question on everyone's lips is; "Where is the water?"

You can wash hands and keep your home and yourself clean if you have running water. We have had no water for several days and some of my colleagues have not had running water for months.

We have become innovative bathers but I do not know for how long we are going to be able to come to work without stinking the whole office out. There is a limit to how much perfumes and deodorants can mask body odours.

It will be very easy for cholera to wipe out whole offices. People are coming from waterless homes to waterless offices. Anyone who thinks cholera is under control is having one very big sad joke. The Zimbabwean government does not believe it should be declared a national disaster. (Continue reading One big rubbish dump)

Grace Mutandwa is the other FCO Harare blogger. She joined the British Embassy in Harare in 2002 as the locally-employed Press & Public Affairs Officer. Prior to that, she worked as an Arts Editor and a political journalist for more than 18 years for various local and international media organizations. In Life Goes On, she writes a powerful piece about the distance we keep even when things fall apart.

Someone dies, someone disappears and later reappears in court or their body is discovered decomposing somewhere. More than 50,000 people are struck by cholera and 3,028 of them die.

We all worry about these developments, do what we can to help ease the pain but at the end of the day, life for those still free to move around goes on. We go out, we invite friends to dinner, get invited to share a curry or a drink and slowly we continue with our lives.

This is the reality of life. Even in war torn countries life of sorts still goes on. A toddler spends several weeks with an abducted parent and later becomes a guest of the state in one of the country's worst prisons. Still we talk about it for a while and soon enough we move on.

Several are starving but those with the means feast -their lives go on. Survival itself has become a major feat and those who still can drag themselves around do so with dwindling empathy and patience for the less fortunate.

Two 13-year-old girls incessantly ring my gate bell and when I answer, they tell me they are looking for jobs and that they have not eaten in days. They will work for food because being paid in local currency is useless. They have walked all the way from the high density suburb of Dzivaresekwa, west of the Harare.

I already have domestic help so I give them water and two slices each of bread. The food and water soon disappear. The two skinny-looking girls thank me profusely and ask me for old clothes.

My youngest and only daughter is an 18-year-old who is built bigger than the two. She is away studying but before she left home she cleaned out her wardrobe and gave various cousins some of her clothes - so there is nothing to give.

My heart bleeds. No child should ever have to go through what those two are going through.

All this gets me thinking about how really jaded we have become with political, economic and social situation in the country. Even as I spoke to the two girls it struck me how distant I managed to remain even as I gave them the bread and water.

There is something dead in us as a people. Several stories were written and appeals launched on behalf of journalist, turned activist Jestina Mukoko. She is a prominent person, so journalists tend to focus on her. The toddler who went missing with its parents got a mention every now and then if it was lucky.

Even when the toddler turned up at a police station with its parents being accused of banditry, we as a nation failed that child. We behaved as if it was the most normal thing for a baby to be incacerated. News that the baby too was beaten to force the mother to confess, just makes the whole story very sordid, and still no one raised a voice.

The Child Protection Society suddenly died - not a single word from them. The other so called children's rights organisations just disappeared off the earth. We have become damaged goods.

We are facing a bleak year. Politicians want power but they do not seem to realise that with power comes responsibility. When I sit through 16-hour powercuts it does not make me feel better to find out that the same is happening in Nepal. Citizens deserve the best from their government.

When people hanker after power they must realise and accept the fact that they must be accountable and that citizens expect improved standards of living and not to be taken back to the dark ages.

Zimbabwe used to be Southern Africa's breadbasket. It is shameful that today we produce nothing. Today we import turkeys from Peru and chickens from Uruguay. There is something very wrong and we cannot even ask God anymore to put it right because God left Africa ages ago - in fact when he did he never even passed through Zimbabwe. So in a way life goes on.

Can you imagine a Second Secretary in our Foreign Service or one of our locally engaged staff writing these posts in DipNote? Frankly, I can’t. And yet, such details and sense of “real life happening” is probably what is needed in our diplomats’ discourse with the American public.

Cool Dude Blogging on the Job

So David Miliband is traveling in India and blogging his trip there. His Foreign Office is also on Twitter but the tweets look timely. I only mention that because Scott Lucas of Enduring America was not happy with State's Twitter-diplomacy: “Time to upset my good friends working on State Department Twitter-diplomacy: DipNote has just Twittered that I can 'watch what the U.S. Department of State is saying about the Middle East today'. So I click the link, and it’s the Daily Press Briefing…from three days ago.”

His tweet is telling me that he'll be meeting 16-17 January with President Zardari and other influential figures in Pakistan. Yesterday, Mr. Miliband did his second update from India:

Micro-blog:

We stopped at an internet café in the middle of nowhere - I wanted to do a blog but the dial-up was not fast enough. But the mobile phone revolution is reaching here - the shop was selling 5 - 10 mobile phones a day, and although there are 850 million people on less than $2 a day, 8.5 million new subscriptions per month is eating in to the backlog.

Smart Power

Hilary Clinton spoke on Tuesday about smart power - diplomatic, economic, political, legal, and cultural as well as military. That is exactly what my speech is about.

The day after the UN Security Council hammered out that Gaza resolution this was posted by the official State Department blog, Dipnote:

"Yesterday, the United Nations Security Council reached a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. Secretary Rice said, "It is obviously a very serious situation in Gaza. And while our goal must be the stabilization and normalization of Gaza through the implementation of a durable and fully respected cease-fire and an end to all terrorist activities, I think that this resolution shows that the Council and the United Nations is indeed seized of the matter. This resolution is a step toward our goals. It reflects the international community’s concern about the circumstances in Gaza and its desire for a sustainable peace in Gaza. You may read the Secretary's full statement here."

Mr. Miliband posted Three Days in New York in his blog a couple of days later:

I arrived arguing for a focus on substance not process - read my opening speech to the Security Council here. The key seemed to be in real attention to Israeli security needs and Palestinian humanitarian needs. And I was convinced that a vetoed resolution or a divided council offered nothing. That is why we spent 36 hours seeking consensus. I left sponsoring a Security Council Resolution, with fourteen votes in favour and a US abstention; more than most people expected at the beginning of the week, but less than seemed likely a couple of hours before the vote. And within 12 hours the resolution's call for a ceasefire had been rejected by Hamas and then by Israel. So what's it all for?

The UN for all its flaws is a global conscience as well as a global policeman. Parading your conscience is not pretty; but not having one is worse. Countries far away from the scene of a conflict sit in discussion if not in judgment. But the UN sets standards for itself and for its members - and needs to live up to the injunctions of its Charter. So in patrolling regional and international peace and security any conflict in the Middle East belongs in the Security Council.

Which one makes for a better reading?


I write some long posts myself but for a busy man like David Miliband, this is how a blog should be. You can read his speech on the link he posted above, and you can see the difference in tenor and style. His blog posts on the other hand are brief but personal. It gives you a sense of the person behind the blog. I think I'll write a bit more about Mr. Miliband and his global conversations at FCO later.


I'm hoping that Hillary would do some blogging herself. No, not the "R" folks doing it for her, as they're doing it now at DipNote. She certainly won't be the first cabinet secretary to do some blogging. HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt has been blogging for some time now as a way to foster public discussion. At some point, I was following his blog when he visited Indonesia and dealt with the NAMRU issue. The last series of entries he did were from his trips to Pakistan and Iraq.