BY PLS
For those of you who found it hard to swallow the idea that memoirs are routinely altered or embellished to make them more saleable as non-fiction, no less, I have some even worse news. Something not so different happens with political reporting from U.S. embassies.
You’d think that ruthlessly accurate reporting and scrupulously unbiased analysis would be the bedrock products for regular delivery to Washington from U.S. embassies around the world, wouldn’t you? Why? Well, you’d expect foreign policy to be made on the basis of reality, not ideology, not quirks or prejudice, certainly not wishful thinking, wouldn’t you? After all, a sound foreign policy is vital to national security. Surely it should be based on hard-headed facts and unflinching analysis.
I learned otherwise during my first tour abroad. Let me tell you about it.
If you are waiting for some juicy personal stuff, I’m going to disappoint you. Part of me would love to name names, but my purpose here isn’t to “get back” at individuals. It’s to show the intellectual corruption of an important institution. There’s a culture of fear and intimidation that runs through the foreign service. If you want to get ahead, you have to play the game, and the game all too often involves tweaking, slanting or suppressing the truth. The art of political reporting is often entirely too artful.
The State Department insists on rotational assignments for junior officers. This way, incoming officers get a taste of working in most embassy sections before settling into a career-long speciality. So, as a freshly minted USIA officer, I too was assigned a year of rotational duties at an embassy. After that I was to become Branch Public Affairs Officer at a Consulate.
The idea of spending a few months in the Political Section was very appealing to me. I’d have chosen the political cone, with its better shot for an ambassadorship (why not?), if I hadn’t joined the Foreign Service as a middle-aged junior officer. That scenario, I quickly learned, would have been a disaster, for me.
The country in question had just held parliamentary elections. I was asked to draft a cable reporting on the results of the elections, which, I concluded, were not as conducive to a strengthened democracy as the U.S. had hoped. My boss, the Political Counselor, found nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with the facts or the conclusions of my draft. In fact he/she agreed with me. There was just one little problem. Washington didn’t want a pessimistic cable. The conclusion would have to be rewritten. So the half empty glass became half full, which makes all the difference in the world.
I protested. “How can intelligent policy be made on the basis of inaccurate reporting?”
“That’s not our problem,” I was told.
The Cold War was on. The country in question was on the U.S. side. It would be more difficult to support this country if we too pointedly recognized all the unsavory things that were going on. So we were applying very flexible definitions of democracy and democratization.
Does this sound familiar?
Before that incident, I’d been pushing for a chance to do more and more political reporting. Afterwards, I was counting the days until I could escape the Political Section. And no, my ego wasn’t bruised. If the Political Counselor had been able to show me precisely where my analysis had gone wrong, I’d have been perfectly satisfied. I’d have been thankful for the mentoring.
As a USIS officer, I was well acquainted with the pattern of political reporting wherever I served. I could have done much more political reporting than I did, but I had no interest in pulling punches then or now. Needless to say, this is not a good stance for those who want hot shot assignments and quick promotions, but it was my choice.
The State Department does have a "dissent channel," which allows officers who disagree with a policy to set forth a serious alternative and to do so without fatal career damage, so it's said. However, a handful of courageous dissent cables cannot make up for all the craven tweakings that occur every day.
It seemed to me wherever I served, and it still seems to me, that the U.S. could have achieved all vital foreign policy goals without such cynical manipulation of information and the complications that often follow from whim based-policy making. Think Iran-Contra. Think Iraq.
PS. For an example of an Ambassador who discovered his accurate analysis of reality wasn’t considered to be politically correct, see the story about Haiti in the New York Times for January 29