For Many U.S. Diplomats, Danger Comes With Duty

Because safety concerns ruled out their usual long walks, Myles and Barbara Frechette played tennis for exercise while he was U.S. ambassador to Colombia. While they played, armed men guarded the perimeter of the tennis court, their high-powered rifles trained on the high-rise buildings around the embassy residence, fearing sniper fire.

Even exercise can be dangerous for U.S. diplomats assigned to embassies considered at high risk for terrorism. While the bombings that took at least 228 lives in Kenya and Tanzania were unexpected, many American envoys live with the daily threat of attack, whether from Middle Eastern partisans or Colombian guerrillas or drug traffickers.

“It’s like walking around with a bull’s-eye on your forehead,” said one U.S. military officer temporarily assigned to Colombia, where Frechette’s tour of duty ended last year.

For U.S. diplomatic workers such as Sue Saarnio, Friday’s bombings were a stark reminder of the risks they and their families face each day, and shattered the comforting thoughts they conjure up to argue away the dangers.

“You rationalize it to convince yourself that you’re not really at risk,” said Saarnio, 39, a political officer at the U.S. Consulate in West Jerusalem. “But then you see something like what happened in Nairobi, and it really shakes you up. These are people many of us know, who are doing the same kind of work we are. It could have been any of us.”

Another U.S. official in Jerusalem, Duncan MacInnes, 50, has served in four postings since he joined the Foreign Service.

During his first overseas assignment, in Qatar, an unexploded bomb was discovered just behind MacInnes’ home. Then, in Yemen, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired through an embassy window, fortunately while the building was closed. During his next assignment, in Sri Lanka, a massive bomb exploded on a busy downtown street not far from the embassy. MacInnes’ son, then 6, was on a school bus stuck in traffic near the blast and still has nightmares about the carnage he witnessed.

And in Israel, where MacInnes now serves as the consul for public affairs in East Jerusalem, suicide bombers have struck several times during his tenure, killing dozens.

The risk is “always there in the back of your mind,” MacInnes said. “But you’ve got to assume that it won’t happen to you, or you couldn’t do your work.”

‘Critical’ Missions

Unlike the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which were viewed as relatively low-risk postings, the U.S. Embassy in Bogota and the three U.S. diplomatic missions in Israel--the embassy in Tel Aviv and the consulates in West and East Jerusalem--are considered high-risk assignments. The ranking places them in the State Department’s “second-most-dangerous” category, below “critical” missions such as those in Beirut or Algiers but above medium- and low-risk postings elsewhere.

At the embassies considered the most risky, including Beirut, all diplomats volunteer for the assignment and either are single people or leave their families elsewhere as they take up their one-year postings. They also receive an extra salary stipend, known as “danger pay.”

In Israel, U.S. officials say the risk ranking has more to do with concerns that Americans might be injured or killed in the too-frequent political violence than with any specific fears that they would be targeted. They point out that although a number of U.S. citizens have been caught up in suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, those attacks--on buses, restaurants and pedestrian malls--were not aimed specifically at Americans or U.S. institutions.

Colombia offers a combination of well-armed threats: two guerrilla movements that control large swaths of the countryside and have bombed urban targets; and drug traffickers, whose assassinations and bombings in the early 1990s created the expression “narco-terrorism.”

In representing the U.S. government in volatile regions such as Colombia or the Middle East, diplomatic workers view precautions as a necessary part of life.

Those assigned to Israel travel to Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip only in armored vehicles, and the embassy and consulate buildings are protected by guards, fortified glass and walls, and concrete barricades that prevent vehicles from parking directly next to the facilities.

U.S. diplomatic workers and military personnel in Colombia never flag down taxis in the street. Instead, they call for the cabs and identify the cars when they arrive with a complicated system of passwords. They do not drive between cities for fear of guerrilla roadblocks--they take a plane.

“I was nervous at certain times, when traffickers were feeling the heat of U.S. pressure for extradition” or when the Cali cartel kingpins Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela were captured, said Terrence Kneebone, who last year concluded a two-year tour as U.S. Embassy press attache in Bogota.

In earlier tours of duty, Kneebone ran Panamanian roadblocks after he was declared persona non grata in the months before the U.S. invasion in December 1989 and was assigned to Honduras at the end of Nicaragua’s civil war, which was largely staged from the neighboring country. But he said he considers Bogota his most dangerous assignment.

In fact, U.S. officials in Colombia are so nervous about security that they refused to discuss it or to allow anyone assigned to the mission in Bogota to speak about it.

Still, the worries are obvious from the bunker-like design of the embassy. The clank of the fortified-steel doors shutting behind each person who enters the building provides a constant reminder of the risks that embassy employees face.

In contrast, all three facilities in Israel are on relatively busy streets, unlike the fortress-like U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan, which was built according to standards that followed the deadly 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine compound in Beirut. An investigative panel recommended after those attacks that U.S. diplomatic facilities be located away from densely populated areas, be set back from the street and meet other requirements.

3-Car Convoys

Years after El Salvador’s U.S.-backed civil war ended, the U.S. ambassador lives inside the embassy walls and is still subject to tight security. She always travels in a three-car convoy, mainly for protection against kidnapping.

But diplomats cannot always do their jobs from inside the embassy, and outside the walls the threats can be daunting. During Frechette’s tenure in Colombia, drug traffickers fired on his helicopter, and his Colombian security team foiled two assassination attempts by guerrillas.

And the precautions do not always end with the assignment, especially for diplomats who have taken on terrorists, as Frechette learned.

When he returned to Washington last year, he remembered the case of a Colombian prosecutor who went into exile in Hungary after pursuing narcotics traffickers. Gunmen hired by the drug barons found the man in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, and shot him six times in the face, an attack that he miraculously survived.

“I still have an unlisted telephone number,” Frechette said. “Why make it easy for them?”

Darling reported from Bogota and Trounson from Jerusalem.

* BOMBING ARRESTS: Iraqis are among suspects in Tanzania. In Washington, the U.S. says it has shut some embassies. A4