Video Transcript
Eric J. Boswell—Example of Excellence:
Highlight
If I had to pick out one moment that I felt was really great, it’s when we successfully brought home the folks that had been besieged in our embassy in Kuwait during the first Gulf War in the year 2000 [1990] and our embassy at Baghdad as well in a separate trip during the first Gulf War. And to see them step safely off the plane at Dulles Airport was as good as I’ve felt in a long time. It had been an enormous challenge. The folks at the embassy in Kuwait had been held hostage for a period of about six months. Held hostage in the sense that they were barricaded in the embassy when the Iraqis had invested the rest of the country, and surrounded the embassy and wouldn’t let anybody in and out. The folks in the embassy had to live for close to six months on their own resources – with a communications link to us back in Washington and the outside world – but largely just existing on what they had there. I remember even my folks in the task force in Washington that was maintaining communications with them were even sending them multiple recipes for what to do with tuna fish, because they were down to pretty much tuna fish. That was all that was left in the commissary after that period of time. We were helping them find ways to dig for water in the sand on the embassy compound. And I remember Barbara Bodine, who was the DCM at the time, watching the contents of her looted apartment walk by her as she was watching from the walls of this embassy. So, it was quite a difficult experience for all of them, we were very, very happy to get them back.
Low point
I think the low point of my Foreign Service career actually occurred after my career was over. I left the State Department in 1998. My last job was Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security, and I was responsible for keeping people safe all over the world – our people safe all over the world. Four or five month after I left we lost embassies Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam – an attack on the embassy in Dar Es Salaam at least – and there was considerable loss of life. And that was a definite low point, a definite shock. It was something that we knew could have happened at any time during my time as Assistant Secretary. And, nevertheless, when it actually happens it really hits you hard. I lost some friends in the process and will always sort of think about anything more that could’ve been done to avoid that. Everyday, when I was Assistant Secretary for Security, everyday I would sit in a small room with twelve very smart people from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and we would go through the threats that had come in the previous day – the intelligence information, all the threat information that had come in the last twenty four hours – and try to figure out – separate the wheat from the chaff – try to figure out what was of merit in there. Knowing that we might get it wrong, hoping that we were getting it right. That was quite a challenge to do on a daily basis. I greatly admire the people in diplomatic security that do this for a living.
Vignette
The Office of Foreign Missions is the office that was created in the mid 80s by the Foreign Missions Act to regulate in certain ways the activities of foreign diplomats in the United States. And particularly to ensure that we could achieve reciprocal treatment for our diplomats overseas, so that there was a way of getting that kind of reciprocal treatment. The Office of Foreign Missions will decide where an embassy can be placed in the United States. It will also regulate what seem to be mundane activities, such as driving. It is not generally known that the State Department is a department of motor vehicles and issues driver licenses and plates to cars to diplomats for their vehicles. And one of the things we had to do was to find a way that diplomats paid their parking tickets. That was a very big problem in the 70s and 80s, and caused a lot of damage to the reputation of the diplomatic service in general, and certainly was a public relations problem for the State Department as well as the city of Washington. We were able to persuade foreign diplomats that it would be required for them to pay their tickets, because otherwise they simply wouldn’t be able to drive or register a car in the United States. So the creation of the Office of Foreign Missions gave us an opportunity to put this kind of pressure on, politely. And that ended the abuse of traffic incidents and parking tickets in Washington.
Reflection
For people, advice to people considering international careers, in particular the Foreign Service, I would say a couple of things. In the Foreign Service, at least when one comes in to the Foreign Service, one is a rotated through a number of assignments at the probationary period, and you get a real good flavor for various kinds of Foreign Service jobs. And I would encourage people to seek out the jobs they like – not to pay too much attention to people who tell them what tickets to punch and what is the key road to advancement. I would simply say to follow your heart a little bit, follow your passion a little bit, and the career – it’s a tremendously interesting career in all aspects of it – and find what you want and go after it. I would also say, however, that it is a career that is very tough on a family, and at every stage – whether going in or while you’re in -- I think it’s very important to involve your spouse, if there is a spouse, in the decisions you have to make about your life and your career. And make sure that he or she fully understands, and is into what you are doing. It’s a tough career, as I say, on spouses. It’s very difficult for spouses to pursue any kind of career of their own, though the State Department makes a big effort to accommodate and encourage those the best they can. But there are those issues of mobility. These are issues that affect your children. They are very important things throughout your career to be clear on.
I got enormous satisfaction out of public service, and I think there is no finer way to perform public service than in the Foreign Service. But the opportunity to travel is also tremendously enriching on the personal side, and the opportunity to live overseas is tremendously enriching. It was for me and for my family. I have a hobby that I enjoy very much, that is bird watching, ornithology. And, as you can imagine, the opportunity to travel to exotic places and live in exotic places greatly expanded the kind of bird watching that I was able to do. I can tell one story when I was working in the Bureau of Personnel as an assignments officer. A colleague who was a counselor, who was advising Foreign Service officers on their next assignments, came to me with the so-called “bid list,” the list of preferred assignments from one of his clients, a junior officer overseas. And he said, “Eric, you know this guy. I can’t make head nor tails of why he wants to go to these places that he’s got on his list.” He had places like Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea on there. I took one look at the list and I said, “I know what’s going on there, he’s a bird watcher, too.”