Operation Limited Freedom

Like many a senior U.S. diplomat on official business around the globe, Robert J. Callahan dresses up a bit and travels in chauffeur-driven style to meetings outside the embassy.

But for Callahan, who serves as the senior public affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy here, diplomacy is no suit-and-tie affair. First there’s the flak jacket and helmet. Then there’s the three-car convoy of armored vehicles and 12 armed guards.

He makes no trip without 24 hours of preparations that include surveillance of the location he plans to visit and security procedures that tell him how long he can stay and precisely how to get in and out.

“There’s not a lot of spontaneity,” he said, in what could only be described as an understatement.

Such is life inside one of the world’s most dangerous diplomatic assignments: the U.S. Embassy, Baghdad.

The embassy, in the sprawling Republican Palace once used by Saddam Hussein, sits behind two cordons of concrete blast walls and a seemingly endless series of security barriers, checkpoints and body searches. As such, it stands as a monument both to the virulence of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq and the determination of the United States to maintain its diplomatic presence here.

Embassy staffers describe their job as diplomacy in a combat zone. John Limbert, president of the American Foreign Service Assn., a Washington-based group that represents the country’s 23,000 active and retired foreign service officers, calls it “extreme diplomacy.”

Over the years, American diplomats have seen it all: They fled Saigon, Vietnam, in 1975, were taken hostage in Tehran in 1979, survived the sacking of the embassy in Pakistan’s capital the same year, were caught in civil war in Beirut in the 1980s and in Algiers a decade later. All concur on one point: When it comes to living with danger on a daily basis, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is in a category of its own.

“This is an assignment like no other,” said Limbert. He was one of 52 Americans who survived the 444-day hostage ordeal in Tehran, where “we moved around freely until the day it all happened. We didn’t face conditions like that.”

Even Soviet diplomats in Afghanistan during the 1980s had greater mobility, said Moscow’s current ambassador in Kabul, Zamir Kabulov. A junior officer at the time, Kabulov reminisced about those years, when the Soviet occupation was the target of Afghan militants, including a young Saudi commander named Osama bin Laden.

“There was no danger of terrorism in the streets of Kabul then,” Kabulov said in a telephone interview with The Times. “A random artillery explosion, yes, but no blown-up cars, no suicide bombings, no ambushes, no kidnappings.”

The decision to plant the flag in such dangerous surroundings marks a U-turn in recent American diplomatic history. After the Tehran hostage crisis, Washington’s mantra had been, “Never again.” As a result, whenever political turmoil threatened to become violent, the United States was often among the first countries to close its embassy and evacuate its staff.

Not in Iraq.

The mission’s administrative chief, Stephen A. Browning, who has helped evacuate embassies during his career, acknowledges that his experience in Baghdad has been unique.

“We’ve never done this. We’ve always been heading in the other direction,” he said. “We’re bringing in all these people used to pinstripes into this war zone, giving them color-coordinated helmet and flak jackets and telling them, ‘You go be a diplomat.’ There’s just no model for what we’ve done.”

The reason for taking such risks boils down to this: The political stakes in Iraq are huge. If the Bush administration fails to plant the seeds of democracy here, the damage will not be limited to Iraq but will ripple throughout a region gripped by hatred for the United States.

The diplomatic beachhead here doesn’t come cheap. Browning estimated that it cost nearly half a billion dollars to keep the embassy operation going for the last six months of 2004.

Whereas most of the United States’ 250-plus missions around the world exude an atmosphere of hushed efficiency, the Baghdad mission feels more like New York’s Grand Central station at rush hour, with streams of civilian and uniformed personnel moving through the long, narrow corridors.

The mission has so many types that Browning counts beds to determine how many work, eat and sleep on the embassy grounds. The number is 3,700.

They include U.S. consultants to Iraqi ministries, one of the largest CIA operations since Vietnam, managers and contractors involved in an $18-billion reconstruction program, and the headquarters staff for the U.S.-led military coalition in Iraq.

Security personnel alone number 2,500, a unit only slightly smaller than a full Marine Corps regiment. At its heart, the embassy is home to 135 State Department career diplomats, several hundred U.S. civilian contract employees and local Iraqi support staff.

Five of the senior diplomats, including Ambassador John D. Negroponte, previously served as ambassadors.

For all who work here, life’s rhythm is dictated by a concern for physical safety. The embassy has its own hostage negotiator, its own psychiatrist and its own fleet of helicopters. It is even building its own fire department because it’s considered too risky to rely on the city’s firefighting force.

With the exception of Negroponte, who has his own house nearby, the non-Iraqi staff lives in small trailer-like cabins amid piles of biodegradable sandbags, gun emplacements and signs that read: “Beware! Attack Dogs on Patrol.”

The trailers are bunched in clusters, each with names that appear to mock reality. There’s Edgewood Park, Embassy Estates and Poolside Suites. A sign in the middle of a lifeless swath of dirt proclaims, “Keep Off the Grass.”

Staffers take their meals in the mission’s main dining area, a grand hall with green-and-white marble walls and a huge glass chandelier. At its peak in August before the last occupation authority personnel left, the embassy churned out as many as 12,000 meals a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and a fourth at midnight.

“This place qualifies for its own ZIP Code,” Browning said.

The pace of work has left little time for much remodeling. The building still sports a garish mural celebrating Hussein’s Soviet-built Scud missiles and velvet-covered, gold-framed sofas and chairs that some may find more suited to a bordello. A large likeness of the ousted dictator hangs above the main palace entry hall, though it is covered by a cream-colored tarpaulin.

Because shopping outside the security cordon is considered too dangerous, every need, from toilet paper and paper plates to staples, paper clips and bottled water, must be trucked in from outside the country. Supply convoys sometimes are attacked, but embassy officials say there’s little alternative.

“I’m not going to risk someone’s life to go out and buy Post-It notes,” Browning said.

Although few of the embassy support staff venture beyond the fortified Green Zone, senior officials bristle at the suggestion that they are trapped behind the cordons of security. Diplomacy, they insist, does get done.

“We do between 25 and 40 trips in and out of bad-guy country every single day,” said deputy chief of mission, James Jeffrey. “We’re not hunkered down here. We’re out all the time, and our people do this under considerable risk.”

In the seven months since the U.S. occupation formally ended, the embassy has taken one direct rocket hit, in an attack that injured one female employee. The State Department’s assistant regional security officer, Edward Seitz, was killed Oct. 24 in a mortar attack near Baghdad’s international airport, and the embassy’s senior consultant to Iraq’s Ministry of Higher Education, James Mollen, was shot to death a month later while driving less than a mile from the Green Zone.

An Iraqi employee was reportedly assassinated this month after insurgents learned that he worked for the embassy.

To reduce the danger, the 250 local employees have been given training on how to spot surveillance and shake it off.

Simple staff lists containing telephone numbers are treated as secret documents, and local employees automatically qualify for flexible hours so they can change their times and routes to work. They even have permission to drop out of sight for days at a time, embassy officials said.

Still, recruitment is a problem and attrition is high. Officials say they lose 30% of all local employees within their first month.

Although the number of Iraqi employees is a fraction of the 600 discussed at the State Department last summer, Limbert says interest among U.S. career diplomats for a Baghdad assignment has been so high that many have had to be turned way.

The perks include a relatively short, one-year assignment, hazardous duty and hardship pay that boost the normal salary by 50%, and the chance to work on the highest-priority foreign policy issue. With little to do but work, few bother to take days off.

For what little time off they get, there are DVDs, a gym, a pool fashioned out of one of the palace’s large fountains, poker nights and informal parties.

“The social life’s not all that bad,” said a 22-year-old civilian on the embassy support staff. “It’s kind of like college.”

Sergei L. Loiko in The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.