High-Value Target by Hull Edmund J.;

Author:Hull, Edmund J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2011-03-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

AN EMBASSY, NOT A BUNKER

In Yemen, counterterrorism began with securing our own base of operations and our people. We hardened our embassy and trained our personnel to make them difficult targets. Al Qaeda’s operations against us, although never precluded, were made problematic. In the end, their choice to attack the embassy by a rocket instead of a vehicle bomb meant they probably would not have caused mass casualties even had they succeeded in launching their operation. We could have adopted even greater security measures by reducing staff and our activity.

The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security tended to favor this approach and fought hard to keep the embassy staff limited in number. Authorized departure became the symbol of this approach. By strictly limiting the embassy staffing to “essential” personnel, the security experts understandably sought to avoid the kind of casualties to embassy dependents we had suffered in Islamabad in 2002.1 As ambassador, I saw significant costs to this narrow approach and the real possibility that it would cripple our counterterrorism effort. We needed to engage the Yemenis on many fronts, including economic development. I needed staff to do so. Yet, because of authorized departure and years of attrition in State Department staffing, Embassy Sanaa during the first critical year had no USAID representation, no economic section, and no public diplomacy section.

Secretary of State Powell, I felt, had expressed a much healthier attitude in our initial briefing on the al Qaeda threat in December 2000. He had concluded the session by noting that terrorism was to be taken very seriously but that the United States would not “hunker down.” Rather, we would deal with terrorism and also conduct our diplomacy. Unfortunately, the decision-making process in State did not reflect this attitude, but rather put risk-averse officials in the Office of Management largely in charge. Overcoming their aversion to risk and recruiting necessary staff was a major challenge.2

Diplomacy formed the basis for counterterrorism cooperation in Yemen, and the embassy’s political agenda did receive significant help from visitors. We took our guidance on visitors from Will Rogers: we never met one we didn’t like. Some came with unfocused agendas, which allowed us to propose our own lens with which to view the al Qaeda threat and U.S. interests. A few nodded sympathetically in response to Yemeni requests—outrageous and otherwise—which left us to correct Yemeni expectations. But, on the whole, the embassy benefited enormously from those American officials who took the time and ran the security gauntlet that led to Sanaa.

One such visitor, Wendy Chamberlin, helped us to address the embassy’s critical deficit in development talent. A former ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy visited in her new capacity as assistant administrator for USAID. She immediately seized the connection we proposed between security and development, and returned to Washington to fight our bureaucratic battle. In 2002 the U.S. embassy in Sanaa had improvised its development program, including the initiative to focus our efforts on the tribal areas. We had relied on the embassy’s Yemeni staff,

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