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Dear Subscribers and other WhirledView readers. 

This is just to let you know that we are in the process of moving from the Google Feedburner email subscription service to Feedblitz's.  Please be sure to add Feedblitz  [email protected] to your list of safe senders to continue receiving our posts. 

Thank you so much for your loyalty and for staying with us over these many years.   Patricia Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe.

 

HOW ABOUT A VIRTUAL PEACE CORPS?

By Guest Contributor Joan Wadelton

(WV editor - Patricia H Kushlis' comment:  It seems to me that many returned Peace Corps volunteers would be delighted to have the opportunity to teach and engage again with people in their countries of service over the Internet whether they be recently returned PCVs whose stays were abruptly cut short because of the COVID-19 pandemic or others who returned years ago.  Joan Wadelton's proposal below is creative, innovative and would be cost effective.  I would hope that the Peace Corps leadership would consider it seriously. )  

The Peace Corps is a wonderful organization that has sent 230,000 Americans as volunteers all over the world since 1961.  I was fortunate to spend three years in Niger as a health worker, in a village away from the capital many years ago.  My Peace Corps service prompted my life-long love of Africa.

The Peace Corps mission is:

• To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
• To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
• To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

Although countries with a Peace Corps presence have changed over the years, and the number of volunteers has fluctuated, this mission is as valid today as it was in 1961.

Generally, volunteers have been young adults just beginning their careers and not yet encumbered by family responsibilities.  Indeed, a look at the official Peace Corps website shows a skew toward this demographic.  A demographic that brings enthusiasm and a willingness to live in new places, get the job done, learn about a new culture and actively engage local populations.

This traditional model – with volunteers living and working in other countries -- has been productive and successful.  It has been refined over decades and should be retained.

But is there another way to accomplish the capacity building that is at the heart of the Peace Corps mission?

Yes, and that is remotely, through the internet.  In this approach, volunteers would remain in the United States and conduct their training and teaching activities online.

The Peace Corps would conduct its overseas and virtual volunteer programs side-by-side. 

How would the virtual volunteer program work?

Virtual volunteers would be hired under the same terms and conditions as the overseas volunteers (taking into account the fact that they would not be working overseas).   That is, they would be expected to work on a regular basis -- but not be paid.  They would need access to the internet and the ability to manage Skype, Zoom or similar programs as teaching tools. 

What would virtual volunteers bring to the table?

A virtual Peace Corps would draw from a broader universe of potential volunteers than the existing in-country programs.  For example:

• People who are older and more advanced in their careers – with more knowledge and experience to share – who would not normally move to another country;
• People whose family commitments prevent them from traveling, but who have a passion for sharing their knowledge;
• People who cannot easily travel, but who have always wanted to teach and learn about other countries and cultures.

Would the virtual program be consistent with the core Peace Corps mission?

Yes, a virtual program would reinforce and amplify the key Peace Corps’ mission goals, noted above.  It would also build collaborative working relationships, drawing on wide ranging expertise.

• Greater numbers of more experienced volunteers would add to the capacity building potential of the Peace Corps.
• A virtual program would widen the pool of Americans who would be interacting with people in other countries, thereby promoting greater understanding of the United States and its values abroad.
• And, exposing more Americans to diverse cultures, situations and peoples would strengthen US understanding of the world and enhance our interactions with it.

How would the virtual program be managed?

The virtual programs would be managed alongside existing in-country programs.  Just as with the in-country programs, Peace Corps offices overseas would work with host country officials to identify programmatic and training needs.  Peace Corps recruiters in Washington – dedicated specifically to the virtual program – would identify appropriate candidates to address those needs. 

What would be the administrative and logistical issues?

To implement a virtual Peace Corps program, Congress would need to appropriate additional funding and staff.  However, as a virtual program would not require volunteer travel and housing expenses, a large amount of new money might not be necessary.

The host countries would be responsible for providing adequate internet access and classroom facilities to support the virtual volunteers’ teaching needs.  They would not be able to charge for any training provided by the US government and would have to absorb all the associated costs.  Host countries would also be responsible for identifying gaps in local capacity that virtual volunteers could fill.

What would the host country get out of the virtual program? 

The universe of volunteers available on a virtual basis is likely to be larger and more experienced than the number of Americans willing to relocate to another country.  Host countries would therefore be able to provide a broader array of training programs to their citizens.  It would also be an opportunity for host countries to forge closer, long-term ties with a wide range of US business, educationa,l civil society and technological entities.

Conclusion

The Peace Corps should transform into a two-track organization.  Peace Corps missions overseas would administer both the in-country and virtual programs.  Peace Corps headquarters in Washington would recruit for, and support, both programs.  In this way, a venerable institution could continue on its successful and traditional path, while simultaneously moving into the 21^st century.

On Catching Rats and other Captivating Political Stories

By Patricia H Kushlis

“Sometimes you need a rat to catch a rat” is the concluding shot fired in Drew Magary’s GQ article on January 5, 2017 in which he argues that if Trump refuses to abide by the standard (and now useless) “norms” of the presidency. . . why should anyone in the press adhere to needless norms of their own.”  Magary also argues that Michael Wolff was one of very few people to grasp that reality.

Well yes.  Wolff was also one of the few people to realize that the Trump and his White House staff failed to recognize a basic rule of journalism that when talking to a journalist be sure the ground rules are set beforehand.  Even if the rules are clear, be careful what you say. And for heaven’s sake, vet the journalist’s reputation beforehand.

Wolff got around all that because of Trump’s naivety and narcissism as well his staff’s gross inexperience and infighting.  Furthermore, from Trump’s perspective no press is bad press – because it keeps him in the limelight which seems to be his primary goal in life although that may be being supplanted by his desire to avoid jail with the key thrown away.  He’s not the only leader to have that happen to him – but he would be the first American president to find himself in the dock.   

Nevertheless, look at the quality of Trump’s own media shop such as it is. Even if one of them had warned him about Wolff’s questionable journalistic reputation, Trump would likely have ignored the warning.  Instead, they seem to have been focused on which right wing journalists would receive press credentials to attend the White House briefings and how best to denigrate reporters from the mainstream  media – especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times who just might ask those embarrassing questions and whose publications don't necessarily print or air the most flattering of articles.   

Meanwhile, Wolff entered through a backdoor – apparently with the aid of Steve Bannon - set himself up in a corridor of the West Wing for nine months, where he had ready access to the in-house gossip just by being a fly on the sofa as well as obtaining more formal interviews with principals and their staffs.  He tells us his book is based on over 200 interviews many captured on audio tapes.  His first story is of a dinner party conversation between Steve Bannon and the now deceased Roger Ailes.   It’s been reported elsewhere that the party was held in New York and Wolff himself was the host.   

Trump and his right wing acolytes argue – among other things - that Fire and Fury had no editor so therefore Wolff could, and did, produce a fantasy volume of lies, fake news and, at best, distortions. 

There are multiple problems with those accusations, however.  The overall picture the author paints is of a president who was, is and remains unfit for the job – a picture extensively reported elsewhere in most media since at least summer 2016.

Moreover, the publisher, Henry Holt & Co. is a well-established New York based US publishing company – now a subsidiary of McMillan, with a strong and lengthy track record as a book publisher that dates back to 1866 and includes multiple Pulitzer Prize winners and award winning authors - so it has its own reputation to protect.

Henry Holt and Co. and McMillan were obviously concerned that Trump would try to stop publication once he got wind of the book’s explosive contents as soon as they had been printed in various prepublication reviews.  The first of these reviews broke in The Guardian on January 3, 2018 a week ahead of the book’s planned publication. This, I presume is why the publishers rushed to distribute the book a few days earlier than planned and made sure it was available for immediate downloading, hardback and paperback editions through Amazon and hardback via Barnes and Noble.

I decided to download the book on Saturday because I wanted to read this firestorm of a work for myself – and not depend on secondary sources.

An aside: it is also interesting to note that as of Sunday, the book does not appear on Henry Holt’s website.  So either the rush to publish decision did not catch up with the company’s Internet site postings or the publishers decided to keep it under wraps until the very last minute and therefore did not provide the requisite information to its own Internet editors.

 A last minute cease and desist letter demanding that publication be stopped which Trump’s lawyer Charles Harder sent to Henry Holt president Steve Rubin and author Michael Wolff is, I understand, a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment. So the publishers were on strong grounds in ignoring it.

More than anything, it seems to me that this again demonstrates Trump’s litigious character in combination with the weakness of his legal counsel.  My question is whether Trump’s lawyers recommended against such action and whether Trump personally overrode their advice – to send anyway.  Trump seems to have backed away from trying to stop publication (that the book’s contents are readily available through multiple sources) and instead is resorting to lamenting this country’s “weak libel rules” while circling the wagons with his ever true loyalists in a retreat at Camp David this weekend.

There are other takeaways from Magary’s GQ observations, but another in particular rang an all too familiar bell:  the White House press corps is traditionally all too polite and subservient as a way of preserving their access to official briefings not to mention just being there when the next shoe drops.  So the reporters too often don’t get the full story, report only a small portion or don’t report it at all.  Then their editors may also sit on it. This practice has gone on for years.  It’s often too cozy a relationship regardless of administration. 

Wolff was not part of the credentialed White House press corps.  Furthermore, nobody who talked with him seems to have set any ground rules – if they did, he ignored them - but that in itself doesn’t make his account wrong.  This takes me back to my last sentence in paragraph 2 above.    

Meanwhile, back to my copy of Fire and Fury while I wait for the next shoe to drop.

 

Russian cyber warfare: The message, the method and the medium

By Patricia H Kushlis

At long last the US – albeit thanks to a few NGOs – has begun to make public the unabated Russian disinformation campaign which engulfed last year’s American elections and continues today.  The Kremlin’s helpers primarily boosted and continue to bolster the pro-Trump message aimed at the largely under-educated American political far right. But more insidiously the Russian campaign has been designed to challenge democratic governance in the eyes of the world including and not unimportantly among Russia’s own domestic audience in the run up to the Russian Federation's own presidential election on March 18, 2018.

The Kremlin’s American campaign is a mix of propaganda and disinformation and it is part and parcel of Russia’s cyber warfare against the West – its goal is to upend Europe and the US and thereby eliminate the economic sanctions against Moscow which were enacted after Russia illegally invaded Crimea and then Eastern Ukraine in 2014.  The US Congress voted just last spring to strengthen the sanctions not, as Moscow had hoped with Trump’s ascension to the White House in January, to weaken or better yet eliminate them.

Potemkin Villages Live On

Some of the Russian stories being propagated are total fabrications- pure Potemkin Villages - but the most insidious are laced with tinges of the truth – enough to hoodwink the unwitting.  They take their cues from America’s own alt-right, neo-Nazi messages which reinforce racism and economic inequalities.

Regardless, these messages are amplified through multiple bots and cyberborgs and are targeted at the aggrieved far right Trump voters. Their goals are to undercut the veracity of the reporting in the established US media.  The stories are designed to tear a multiethnic society apart.

The Russian information warfare campaign also targets America’s far left especially those enamored by conspiracy theories but its activities against the left are far weaker than the high decibel volume aimed at the right. This campaign often echoes and amplifies Trump’s worst and most fallacious charges against the veracity of the western major media, his enemies, his fake news claims against the Mueller investigation and anyone else he perceives to be thwarting his efforts as well as promoting and encouraging his racist views.  The Kremlin goal:  to destabilize and hence weaken the US, its greatest nemesis, and Europe. 

Last January, the Obama administration publicly released an unclassified version of the DNI report.  The final quarter of the report was devoted to an analysis of the propaganda and disinformation aspects of Russian cyber warfare against the US electoral system, a campaign which inundated specific voters in swing states.  The Russian message – which succeeded – was anti-Hillary and pro-Trump.  Whether this was the deciding factor in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin is still questioned but the barrage of Internet delivered messages via Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media aimed at these vulnerable voters in certain districts was relentless and appears to have paid off.

Donald Trump – who profited from the Russian assistance - still claims the DNI report - signed off on by the heads of the most important US intelligence agencies - is “fake news.”  He is even more disparaging of the Steele Dossier. 

Nevertheless, the Russian cyber warfare campaign against the US continues. 

Ben Nimmo, Obama’s chief advisor on cyber warfare now heads a research unit on Russian disinformation at the Atlantic Council and as importantly for the media, the German Marshall Fund of the US has recently launched a crucial public website named Hamilton-68 which continually tracks Russian disinformation and propaganda activities aimed at Internet users in the US.  This website has identified 600 different bots which magnify the Russian messages via Twitter.       

The good news is that Hamilton-68 is functioning as it should. Just in the past month, I have seen information used in various reputable US media accounts that cite its data base.  This gives the reporters, researchers, and academics for the first time, access to accurate and on time data that graphically depicts how Russian cyber warfare operates in the US through substantial, near real time data which shows which stories are being promoted and by whom.  Hamilton-68 does not claim to refute them – it just makes it very clear to anyone who can read its simple graphs - the sources of stories which somehow climb to the top of the charts in now not so mysterious ways.

The fact that Facebook has finally owned up to the fact that it sold over $100,000 worth of ads despite months of denials no questions asked - which were traced back to the Internet Research Agency, an organization controlled by the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence agency) during the 2016 US presidential campaign and that those ads were designed to smear Hillary and promote Trump is a piece of the puzzle.   Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reluctantly agreed to turn over 3,000 of these ads to a Senate investigating committee.  Twitter and Google have also finally admitted that they too had published IRA ads during the 2016 campaign. These tech titans are far from alone.

Meanwhile, the investigations into the Trump campaign’s likely connections with the Kremlin grind on.  The interrelationships are complex and those under investigation are engaged in cover ups that make Nixon’s Watergate read like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The Mueller investigation has divided its work into 13 areas of inquiry.  One is looking at the potential relationships between Trump’s own campaign cyber operation run by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Russian intelligence, and Facebook ad buys – albeit a small amount in overall campaign spending on advertisements.  This investigation may hold a key to unraveling the connections.

Microtargeted campaign ads

We know that campaign ads were microtargeted at potential voters in swing districts in swing states.  Could these districts also be ones where the voting machines were antiquated and did not provide possibility of a recount?  Is there a correlation between the hacking of 21 states electoral systems and these same districts?  Did these campaign ads include Russian government buys?  Were the voting machines and the voter registration lists in these same states the targets of Russian government hacking?   If so how did they gain the electoral data upon which to base those buys?    From whom?  Or was this just coincidental?  What was the content or contents of those ads?  What role, if any, did the data mining company Cambridge Analytica play in guiding all of this?  Or did Russian intelligence just rely on readily available audience profile data on Facebook? Or what about the relationship with Jared Kushner who oversaw the Trump cyber campaign? And where did the internet security firm Kaspersky come in?

American voters, at the very least, are owed truthful answers.

A Post Script:  Last week even I received a gmail from a Russian internet source – a London based company named Quizzically Idiosyncratic TM - advertising a sweatshirt with photos of the American flag, Putin and the logo “I wish he were my president.”  Huh?  Don’t think so.  But why was I a target via gmail for that particular Russian internet campaign?

Just because I’ve made it clear publicly that I think Donald Trump is unfit for the US Presidency does not make me long for the country to be run by an autocratic Russian.  I just think the Congressional Republicans should do their duty and get rid of Messrs Trump and Mr. Pence, clean up our antiquated electoral system which the Russians have taken advantage of and apparently continue to use, reign in the Russian influence campaign itself and restore the vestige of dignity and power the US deserves.   

 

The Slapdash Cook Greets the New Year (Have a Happy!), Recycles the Christmas Beast—and Explains WhirledView

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Slapdash Cook makes plenty of mistakes in the kitchen, but there’s almost always a recovery route. And speaking of recovery, the Slapdash Cook hates waste. She should have been in Paris with the big boys on climate change last year. She’s a recycling pro.

When it comes to the worst of the world’s woes, she’s got a remedy for that, too. Stop fighting. Start cooking. What most people really want, after all, is a good meal shared with friends or family. The WhirledView/Slapdash motto?  Better to jaw-jaw in the conference room  than to slaughter the neighbors.  Best of all: bickering with the sibs over pumpkin pie.

And after the table’s cleared? Don’t toss the leftovers. Be stubborn. Be creative.

The challenge this week wasn’t a hulking turkey carcase. It was a great slab of medium rare roast beef—and no one left to share it with, this year’s Christmas quota of family having vanished. Fortunately, the Slapdash Cook has a vascular system lets her eat all the beef she wants, but enough is enough, even with prime rib.

Tossing the bloody lump into the trash along with the rest of the Christmas detritus was a tempting solution. Doling it out, chunk by chunk, to the magpies, like suet, was another. Either recourse, however, would be a declaration of defeat. Impossible!

Nor was the beef the only leftover challenge of the moment. The fridge held many candidates for trashing. There was the barely-broached quart of cream-top yogurt, a few dollops of which had worked wonders in a kofta curry. For her non-holiday lunch of yogurt and fruit, however, the Slapdash Cook prefers the fat-free version. So what to do? Yogurt takes forever to develop enough mold to justify guilt-free down-the-drain treatment.

Yogurt. Hmmmm.

At this point, the idea of goulash occurred to the Slapdash Cook (meaning me, of course). Riffling through my spattered and dog-eared old New York Times Cookbook, I found what I needed. Not goulash, but a close cousin. And joy of joys! The recipe called for another icebox orphan that screamed to be dealt with: a half bottle of tomato juice unneeded by the summer’s last batch of gazpacho. I’d even have a use for the half bag of petit pois that had been languishing in the freezer for eons.

So tote it up. Beef. Yogurt. Tomato juice. Peas. Salvage heaven.

Even if I simmered the stew for the prescribed 2 1/4 hours, there was a risk that re-purposed protein wouldn't produce the tenderest stew morsels, but my gamble worked.  No serious challenge to molars.  Even my failure to add horseradish didn’t hurt. I ground black pepper until my wrist hurt, then tossed in some green chili. This is New Mexico.

And what did I serve it with, this Slapdash dish that I hurried to the table after a very promising taste test? Why leftover mashed potatoes of course. Livened up with more green chili.

Now, what does the intrepid recycling of leftovers have to do with WhirledView?

Everything.

Making sense of world affairs is a tricky business, even with access to classified documents, anonymous top level informants and a big fat travel budget, all of which the co-authors of WhirledView definitely do not enjoy. So what do we have? Nothing fancy. Aside from a stash of relevant education and experience always on hand to draw from, it’s a matter of keeping eyes peeled, minds open and making the most of the angles that have been overlooked or the bits and pieces that have been put together in ways that don’t satisfy. Equivalents of culinary lapses and leftovers, so to speak.  However, take a little bit of this, add a little bit of that—and wow! pretty soon some delicious hypotheses emerge.

Time to serve it up, which is to say, post it, with a sprig of humor and absolutely no fear of losing a promotion for calling it exactly as we see it, this deep anxiety being an insufficiently appreciated hindrance to savvy policy analysis at all levels.

That’s it! Bon appetit! Happy New Year!

Will the real Russia please stand up?

By Patricia H Kushlis 

It wasn't long after I began to work as an Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in Moscow during Brezhnev's later years, that I learned the realities of Soviet life.  As it turned out, only one Soviet who I met during my two year stint in that workers' paradise was a true believer.  Most everyone else in the official bureaucracy mouthed the Communist rhetoric but in reality had long given up hope of life in a functional – let alone humane - system. Many Soviets sought an exit, or at least a chance to see the non-Soviet world firsthand, or even just talk with someone from the West.  Very few of those people who come to mind now were dissidents.   

The Kremlin’s three legged stool

Television propaganda and fear of the omnipresent security services kept the population in check.  An economy of scarcity fueling massive bribery was the third leg of the stool that propped up the fractured system.  Ruble millionaires frequented night clubs.  A copy of Amerika Magazine secured an excellent table at a top restaurant – a terrific way to jump to the front of the line.  Four years at Tashkent University cost about the same as Harvard.  A new car was the entry price to its equivalent in Yerevan.  Even Communist Party hospitals for the elite had scarcities of basic antibiotics and even lacked sheets. 

Yet the nightly news was filled with lengthy reports of Soviet achievements followed by shots of sad homeless American blacks sprawled seated on freezing or sweltering Harlem curbsides.  That depended upon the time of year.

But nobody - including the woman who cleaned the bathrooms at the Hotel Rossiya on Red Square - believed the newscasts:  many Soviets had short wave sets and tuned in regularly to foreign broadcasts from VOA, BBC, Deutche Welle often late at night - turning their dials to escape the buzz of Soviet jammers.  Estonians who lived along the republic’s north coast – and in signal distance of Finland – aimed their television antennas northward giving them access to Finnish Broadcasting even if they were forbidden from visiting the country.

That Russian cleaning lady knew that Russians were poor and Americans rich: she told me so - I still remember her exact words.  She also knew that Soviet young men were being killed in Afghanistan, just as Russian soldiers are dying in Eastern Ukraine today, but that part of the story, like today’s, never appeared in the Soviet media. Soldiers’ graves and burials were then, as now, kept secret.  Everyone, it seems, knew anyway.

Mothers tried to protect their sons from the draft.  Bribes helped keep young men from the perils of hazing by their own counterparts or bullets from Afghan rifles.  Yet, somehow everyone knew. And this was well before the Internet Age or even access to copying machines which in those days were kept under lock and key:  the person-to-person rumor mill was amazingly effective.

Only good stories about the Soviet Union were deemed fit for Soviet eyes and ears.  The world outside those borders was painted as a dangerous place filled with the horrors of rapacious capitalism designed to tear the Soviet Union apart. Racism was rampant: little blond boys were especially prized by Russian grandmothers.   

Sound familiar?

Corruption was ubiquitous because everyone had to engage in it to live.   Even trading in the most innocent of goods - from bananas to jeans - was illegal. They would have had to been grown or produced in the Soviet Union. Bananas don’t grow well in northern climates and jeans – I suppose – were either beyond the country’s manufacturing capabilities or seen as a symbol of hated capitalism. Anyway the latter cost about $150 on the black market. Yet, jeans suits were the in-clothes at the Bolshoi Theater whose tickets were only available to the elite - or the well connected.

Je Suis Charlie

By Patricia Lee Shape

By all accounts the next edition of Charlie Hebdo is coming out on schedule.  That's the best reply to those who don't understand satire or the need for the full exercise of free speech, even when it hurts.  

Data-Driven Public Diplomacy: an Evaluation of an Evaluation of an Evaluation

By Patricia H Kushlis

The good news is that the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy has seemingly risen from the ashes – or more accurately been wrested from the clutches of a member of the US Congress who refused to vote for the pittance required to keep this small Commission afloat.  The better news is that the resurrected Commission has begun to fulfill its mandate – to evaluate operations and programs and to offer independent guidance to the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors – as to how better to operate this country’s public diplomacy activities.  Not that the State Department is comfortable with any independently appointed commission investigating its operations:  believe me, it’s made it clear that it’s not.  Yet, all the more reason for the Commission to step to fill the breach.

The first report I’ve seen from the newly resurrected Commission appeared on September 14, 2014.  Its title “Data- Driven Public Diplomacy: Progress towards Measuring the Impact of Public Diplomacy and International Broadcasting Activities” is forbidding – a sleep inducer for a reader without an advanced degree in, and infatuation with, the arcane field of government assessments and accountability. But, I suppose, this study isn’t really written for him or her.  Rather it is aimed at the specialists and especially the policy makers who can effect change so, in the end, the report’s soporific title really doesn’t matter all that much.

Most of this report is a critique of current assessment methodology employed by the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ Voice of America.  The individuals hired by the Advisory Commission to conduct these evaluations of evaluations were American academics from a variety of tertiary institutions but none, as far as I can tell, with practical public diplomacy experience. Their names and affiliations are listed in the report.  

This lack of expertise is a weakness although presumably the experience itself gave them better insights into the actual practice of US public diplomacy. Yet since public diplomacy acumen comes foremost from hands-on learning in Washington and on assignment abroad, without having the requisite experience that ensues from having participated in its nitty-gritty and often unglamorous, behind the scenes work, an outside researcher trying to divine what happened, what is happening, what should happen and what will happen is too often whistling in the wind.

The critiques of the public diplomacy evaluations process provide the report’s body. 

The introductory historical section is by USC historian Nicholas Cull. Cull’s history summarizes the evaluation efforts by the U.S. Information Agency - which included the Voice of America and the Education and Cultural Affairs Bureau - until the Agency’s untimely demise in 1999. Cull also includes a slice of the US public diplomacy story after USIA was destroyed and its pieces shoved willy-nilly into the State Department or alternatively made part of the new, ungainly and dysfunctional structure for international broadcasting which made and still makes as little sense as the State “merger.”

Cull’s contextual history is by far the most useful part of the 58 page Commission study.  Writing in clear English, he points out that USIA did a pretty good job of internal program evaluation while bending to the requirements placed on all federal agencies by the Executive Branch or the Congress throughout the years.  A disclosure:  I was one of the many practitioners Cull interviewed for this introduction and my name appears among the list in his footnotes on page 13.

My one correction to Cull’s encapsulated history of USIA is that although Public Affairs Officers in the field received two evaluations (one by USIA’s geographic area office and the other by the Ambassador) not all public affairs staff did, as Cull erroneously indicates on page 9.  This may simply have been a typographical or editorial omission. Nevertheless, I don’t think that the requirement was redundant because public affairs officers wore dual hats:  1) they had to protect USIA interests and programs 2) as well as to please their Chief of Mission, sometimes having to deal with a less than stellar Ambassador’s countervailing whims.

The division of the report into sections on the activities of the State Department bureaus engaged directly in public diplomacy plus VOA generally makes sense except that public diplomacy has been so dispersed throughout the building, major elements – like the geographic bureaus – were excluded.

 Be that as it may, if there are central themes to the critiques in this report it’s that far too little funding is devoted to evaluations of public diplomacy effectiveness by both State and BBG, the expertise of the in-house staffs that conduct them needs strengthening and, further, that more should be done to provide narrative context in the evaluations themselves not to mention the application of greater methodological rigor (including use of comparison) employed in future evaluations.

 What I fail to understand, however, is why the evaluation teams used only one State Department Inspector General Report and also why the public diplomacy activities of the geographic bureaus were omitted.  The single OIG report referenced was a devastating one about IIP although there must have been evaluations of other elements including the geographic bureaus (all of which have their own public diplomacy staffs and budgets) available as well.

Furthermore, it seems to me that it’s impossible to evaluate Washington’s effectiveness without understanding what the results are in the field.  Public diplomacy should foremost be a coordinated and cooperative effort between the field and Washington Headquarters. Unclassified versions of OIG reports are available on the web, all OIG evaluations of Embassy and Consulate operations include public diplomacy sections – and even with all the serious problems in State’s OIG office, there’s a lot of relevant information available in those OIG reports to this Commission’s evaluators.       

I think, however, that much of the Commission’s report would have be unnecessary if:  1) USIA’s  country planning process had not been destroyed by the State Department or that once that mistake was identified years ago, the Country Plan had been reintroduced (important sections of those plans provided the context and history that the Advisory Commission evaluators identified as missing in the post-USIA evaluations); and 2) a sizeable cadre of experienced public diplomacy officers existed.  This number has decreased dramatically over the years as has the dilution of professional experience of officers serving in those positions since 1999.  So what has happened and why has professional expertise diminished as a result of the State Department’s short-sighted HR policies?  And yes, both matter.