COLUMN ONE : Diplomacy on the Defensive : The rise of terrorism has turned many American embassies into fortresses. Travelers’ havens now can be magnets for trouble. And envoys must learn to master both schmoozing and survival skills.

The U.S. Embassy in Cairo, the largest American diplomatic structure in the world, dominates this dusty city’s horizon. Two stone towers cover a full block, dwarfing the surrounding villas, university campus and government offices.

They seem to symbolize American might.

But the embassy, secured far behind an 8-foot-high concrete wall on streets where parking is banned and heavily armed police patrol, also proclaims American vulnerability.

Like a host of new embassies or recent additions from Bangladesh to Botswana, the mission here is a virtual fortress. Its perimeter is mob-resistant. Walls are bomb-safe. Windows are bulletproof. Roofs are designed to conceal sharpshooters. U.S. Marines stand guard behind bullet-resistant booths.

The Cairo embassy reflects how visibly America abroad is in retreat and how diplomacy, once a glamorous job that involved mostly political schmoozing, cajoling and convincing, is increasingly about the skills of survival.

In Pakistan, two U.S. diplomats were killed and one wounded in March by gunfire while traveling to work at the U.S. Consulate General in Karachi in a van that had been dispatched to provide an added measure of safety. Round-the-clock Pakistani guards were subsequently posted at the homes of all embassy employees in Islamabad.

As recently as September, an armor-piercing, rocket-propelled grenade, normally used against tanks, was fired from a busy street at the U.S. Embassy in central Moscow. A month earlier, Russian police disarmed a bomb in a newsstand nearby.

And in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, security deteriorated so sharply that the State Department closed the U.S. Embassy there when U.S. troops ended their mission in a U.N. peacekeeping force this spring.

Over the past 16 years, U.S. embassies and consulates have been attacked, bombed, mobbed or seized more than 360 times. And 409 American diplomatic personnel have been killed, taken hostage or injured--more than during the previous two centuries combined.

The threats now range from Muslim suicide bombers in the Middle East to drug lords and Maoist insurgents in Latin American.

The bombing Monday of the national guard training headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was not technically an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission, but the American trainers working there with their Saudi counterparts were Defense Department employees and constituted a major U.S. presence in the kingdom.

Even those charged with protecting U.S. foreign missions have been targeted. In Cairo, the embassy’s senior security officer was wounded when Muslim extremists opened fire on him en route to work eight years ago.

Before and since then, the American mission in Egypt and its diplomatic staff have faced “almost continuous threats” on a par with the most dangerous U.S. posts in Lima, Peru; Bogota, Colombia, and Beirut, according to State Department officials.

The danger to U.S. diplomats can also affect business people and tourists.

“Americans traveling overseas once looked to their embassies for protection,” a U.S. security official said. “Today, a lot of Americans abroad think their best protection is to stay away from U.S. embassies.”

That attitude is taking a toll on diplomacy. Envoys at America’s 163 embassies and 84 consulates now face greater peacetime restrictions on their movements and contacts than at any time since Benjamin Franklin opened the first American legation in Paris in the 1770s, U.S. officials say.

Diplomats in Algiers; Karachi, Pakistan, and Beirut can’t go to most parts of the cities they live in without permission or guards, for fear of religious extremists. Drug lords and leftist guerrillas pose a constant threat in Peru and Colombia. Civil unrest in many countries of Africa severely limits the movements of American officials.

In many countries, diplomats are routinely told to vary their routes and times for traveling to and from the office, avoid public transportation and stay away from poorer, ethnically divided or crime-infested areas. New ambassadors and their families are routinely trained how to act during hijackings, carjackings or kidnapings.

The State Department’s office of intelligence and threat analysis has prepared a pamphlet called “Terrorist Tactics and Practices.” It includes a “Bomb Threat Checklist,” gives accounts of recent embassy evacuations and provides a primer on surface-to-air missiles used against civilian planes.

Because of these very security concerns, “some embassies now do little more than wave the flag,” said one diplomat with recent experience in the Middle East and North Africa. “Restrictions are so prohibitive we don’t really know what’s going on in a country. Sometimes our contacts are so limited that our only sources are other diplomats.”

Although the threats began with the advent of modern terrorism in the late 1960s, the turning point came in 1979, when the U.S. mission in Libya was occupied and set ablaze and the American Embassy in Iran was seized not once but twice. After the second takeover in Tehran that November, 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days.

The U.S. response remained piecemeal until 1983, when suicide bombers destroyed the embassies in Beirut and Kuwait city, killing 70 and injuring scores.

Spurred by these attacks, a commission headed by retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman concluded in 1985 that half of U.S. overseas office buildings failed to meet minimum technical and physical security standards.

The result has been the construction of 17 so-called Inman embassies with six others in the works, from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to Santiago, Chile, from Nicosia, Cyprus, to Pretoria, South Africa; virtually all new American embassies over the past decade have been built to these security-first specifications.

“After Beirut, the philosophy became risk avoidance,” Wayne Rychak, director of the State Department’s office of physical security programs, commented. “Do whatever is necessary regardless of where the building is to construct a fortress that would withstand significant threats, short of a kamikaze pilot, now or in the future.”

In each facility, security is five layers thick. High reinforced perimeter walls are designed to stymie car bombs and discourage mobs. At least 65 feet separate the walls from the principal building, creating a standoff zone. Entry is limited. All vehicles, including embassy cars driven by diplomats, are searched. In Cairo, where up to 200 Americans work, 100 feet separate the building from its perimeter wall.

A security system, known as “the shell,” is built into the embassy’s walls, windows and doors and is designed to offer at least 15 minutes of protection from forced entry and to reduce the impact of weapons attacks.

In Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Embassy’s windows are thin, vertical slits, roughly 2 feet wide by 10 feet long, that make the sand-colored mission look more like a prison than a diplomatic mission.

Another set of walls, known as the “hardline,” separates the public from work areas and provides another delay of up to 15 minutes against mob assaults. In Cairo, a sign advises: “Don’t hold the door open for anyone behind you.”

The embassy’s innermost zone is the “safe haven,” a maximum-security fallback area for classified document destruction, communications and staff safety. Safe havens in theory provide 60 minutes of protection from forced entry and “sufficient time to permit host government intercession,” according to the State Department’s bureau of diplomatic security, which was set up after the Inman report.

Such precautions do not prevent attacks. Among the serious incidents of the 1990s, a car bomb was detonated at the ambassador’s residence in Peru, a mob of 1,500 people jumped the embassy perimeter in Turkey and public affairs officer Haynes Mahoney was kidnaped and briefly held hostage in Yemen.

Some Inman embassies have not gone up fast enough. Within an eight-week period in 1993, the unfinished mission in Bogota was targeted five times by unidentified gunmen.

Nor are attacks limited to volatile Russian and Third World areas. In 1992, terrorists planted an incendiary device in the U.S. Embassy housing compound in Tokyo, and during the same week a firebomb was thrown into the foyer of the American consulate in Brisbane, Australia.

Still, the new defenses have helped reduce terrorist attacks against diplomatic facilities in the last two years.

Such security is expensive. Building an Inman embassy costs an average of $70 million--before the very high costs of running them--and each armor-plated car costs more than $100,000.

But Congress has cut funds for embassy construction, and only Berlin and Ottawa are slated for new embassies through the year 2000.

“There’s now a realization that there’s not a budget big enough to continue to build missions throughout the world with total risk-avoidance,” Rychak said. “As budgets shrink, the money spent on building fortresses can’t be justified when you don’t even have the funds for ordinary diplomacy.”

Based on a new “threat index” that rates dangers from low to critical, security is now selective.

Six U.S. missions are judged to face “critical” threats and 35 to face “high” threats from terrorism, according to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Twenty-nine posts face critical danger and 53 face high danger from crime and disorder.

Only those embassies facing the most acute dangers will receive additional security, U.S. officials say.

One of the exceptions is Algiers, where the State Department recently predicted “a blood bath” that could endanger American lives. In case of attack by Muslim extremists, the embassy garden has been cleared to make room for an emergency helicopter pad.

Wright reported from Washington and Lamb from Cairo.

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Other Attacks

Some earlier bomb attacks against U.S. embassies and Americans overseas in connection with Mideast unrest:

* Dec. 21, 1988--Pan Am Flight 103 blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard, including 189 Americans, and 11 on the ground. U.S. seeking two Libyan intelligence agents.

* April 2, 1986--Four Americans killed when bomb under seat explodes on Boeing 727 Trans World Airlines Flight 840 from Rome to Athens.

* Sept. 20, 1984--Suicide car-bomber attacks U.S. Embassy annex in East Beirut, killing 14 and wounding 72.

* Oct. 23, 1983--Suicide bomber rams truck into U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut airport, killing 240 Marines and one U.S. sailor.

* April 18, 1983--Shiite Muslim suicide bomber hits U.S. Embassy in West Beirut, killing 63.

Sources: Associated Press; Times staff; Facts on File