Newly Open U.S. Embassy Is Still a Work in Progress

The great seal of the United States and the American flag were in place when the temporary U.S. Embassy in Iraq opened for business earlier than expected this week, but State Department officials were still scrambling to finish staffing and equipping the mission.

Six months of round-the-clock work by teams of hundreds of State Department and Pentagon officials ensured that a barebones embassy was ready to function by the time Ambassador John D. Negroponte flew into Baghdad on Monday.

But tons of items that were meant to be in place for the opening were still sitting on a runway in the United Arab Emirates, awaiting transfer to military transport planes small enough to land on the Baghdad airport’s runway. Air delivery, although more expensive, was deemed less dangerous than trucking the supplies over Iraqi roads.

Earlier in June, highway robbers ambushed a convoy carrying armored Toyota Land Cruisers from Amman, Jordan, to the embassy in Baghdad, making off with all eight vehicles and the trucks carrying them. In a separate attack on a convoy bound for the embassy from Turkey, gunmen shot to death the driver of a truck carrying an ambulance.

The attacks underscored the hazards the State Department has faced as it has raced in the midst of a war zone to pull together one of the largest U.S. diplomatic missions, charged with overseeing the most expensive American foreign aid program.

Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters shortly after Negroponte’s arrival in Baghdad that the ambassador and his staff had “hit the ground running.” But in a later interview, Ereli acknowledged that the embassy was still “a work in progress.”

“We’re operating out of a temporary location with temporary facilities, and it is constantly being upgraded,” Ereli said.

“What I meant was that once they started work, they were ready to go. They had the people in place, the relationships in place, the authorities they needed to do what they need to do. But sure, there is going to be stuff coming, people coming, procedures worked up for some time.”

Many State Department officials say the department is eager to put its stamp on a reconstruction and democratization effort that it -- and many of its supporters on Capitol Hill -- thought never should have been entrusted to the Pentagon.

“Clearly, the Department of State is taking the lead now. We will be the dominant voice,” Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said in an interview with National Public Radio this week.

But the State Department had to make compromises to give President Bush what he wanted: a functioning embassy by the time the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority was dissolved and sovereignty returned to the Iraqis this week.

Negroponte will find a severe shortage of local Iraqis willing to work for the embassy, State Department officials say. Only about 100 of the 581 Iraqis whom the State Department says it needs to drive cars, provide security, translate and do a myriad of other jobs have been hired.

“Many people showed up at our job fairs,” said one State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But not many came to the interviews.” They were scared off, the official said, by threats from insurgents.

At one point, said another State Department source who worked on the transition, a department official refused to go to Baghdad to interview potential Iraqi employees, arguing that to do so would be immoral because it would put the potential employees’ lives at risk.

Negroponte will also find a shortage of Arabic-speaking foreign service officers in the new embassy. Although about 1,000 volunteered for about 190 positions, not nearly enough are fluent in Arabic -- because the department is short of Arabic speakers and also needs them in other embassies in the Arab world.

“I don’t think they’ve encountered a more complex situation in the past 50 years,” said Jeanine Jackson, the State Department’s Iraq management officer. “You just don’t know what you’re going to run into every day.”

Monday’s hand-over surprised Jackson and hundreds of others at the State Department who were still preparing for the embassy’s first full day, which was expected to be today. Instead of celebrating, they fretted about tying up loose ends.

“Security,” Jackson replied when asked what most worried her.

“It’s so darned dangerous and there are so many people and it is a very high priority of the U.S. government that we be there.”

The loss of the eight armored cars, Jackson said, was a setback for the effort to build a fleet of about 250 armored vehicles for embassy staff.

So far, she has been able to deliver only about 150 cars -- which will be used every time an embassy employee ventures out of the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad.

Jackson helped create U.S. embassies in 14 former Soviet republics in the early 1990s, after the U.S. established diplomatic ties with those new nations.

She later worked to rebuild embassies in Tanzania and Kenya gutted by terrorist bombings in 1998, and recently spent a year in Kabul, the Afghan capital, living out of a converted shipping container as she helped reopen a vastly expanded U.S. Embassy there after the ouster of the Taliban regime.

But this was the first time she had to handle both a transition from one government bureaucracy to another and put together such a large staff under such hazardous conditions.

The embassy will operate out of temporary quarters in the Green Zone for at least the next two years while the State Department negotiates with the Iraqi government over a permanent site for an embassy compound.

Embassy staffers will work from a former regime palace and live in tents and trailers. They will eat their meals together in the vast dining hall where former dictator Saddam Hussein used to entertain guests.

By year’s end, the State Department expects to have all 981 American staffers on the job in Baghdad, including hundreds of Pentagon employees and dozens of staffers on loan from 10 other government agencies for one-year stints.

One of the largest contingents is from the Justice Department -- 70 employees, many of whom are assigned to help the Iraqi government put Hussein and other members of the former president’s regime on trial for war crimes.