Important Stuff to Know About: U.S. Embassies--Protecting Americans Around The World

A Steady State Firepit Discussion Publication | by Robert Cekuta

Americans’ safety is a top concern for every U.S. ambassador and the whole of their Missions. Critical to this are the Embassy Consular sections who handle most of the support for Americans in-country, with the assistance of other embassy offices. Every State Department Foreign Service Officer must do at least one tour of consular work. This requirement not only helps meet critical staffing needs, it ensures every officer can step in to help and protect an American citizen in need.

That mindset, training, and readiness are crucial.

During my first tour in Yemen in the early 1980s, an American working for Yemen’s national airline had a heart attack and died on the couch in the house of a fellow employee. After contacting the next of kin, our focus was on repatriating the American’s remains to his family in the U.S.

As a conservative Islamic, tribal society, bodies in Yemen are buried within 24 hours in accord with Moslem practices and without embalming. Under American and international standards and rules, airlines will only transport a body that was embalmed. We needed to find a solution fast. It turned out that there was a Turkman doctor, in the hospital donated by the Soviet Union, who knew and had the equipment to embalm. We met with the hospital and the doctor and got him to agree to embalm the body, which we were then able to place in a coffin — consular sections kept some on hand for emergencies — and returned his body to the States and his family.

Later, in 1997, during my tour at our Embassy in Tirana, Albania, we were called on to organize and evacuate — with the invaluable support of the U.S. Marines and Navy — hundreds of Americans threatened by a violent, chaotic collapse of the country’s government and society.

Albania at that time was a poor country moving away from one of the world’s most extreme Stalinist regimes in the world. There was little understanding of democratic or free market systems. For example there was a rash of Ponzi schemes and in February 1997 over 80% of Albanians had their meager savings in one of these scams.

That February those scams began to collapse, causing rioting and evaporation of public order. Things hit the point that one news team shot footage of a farmer hitching his tractor to a MiG and towing it home from an airbase.

Over the next weeks, working with Washington and the Marines, we evacuated over 900 Americans. The Ambassador and her team worked with the remaining authorities to get the status of forces agreement that the Marines needed to conduct the evacuations. The Mission arranged for the chain of helicopter flights to airlift Americans from the embassy compound to a U.S. Navy ship in the Adriatic from which they would be flown to Italy to our Embassy in Rome. The staff in Rome then helped them get back to the States or work out other next steps.

Besides directly helping the Americans coming to the compound to escape, staff worked to get the word out to Americans around the country about the evacuation and what they would need. (NOTE: This is why it is important for Americans living overseas to register with the consulate/embassy!) They kept contact with Americans who could not, or chose not to evacuate, such as a missionary who stayed with the orphanage he ran because he was justifiably worried about what might happen to those orphans if he left.

Most consular work is less dramatic, but equally critical to the safety of Americans abroad.

Whether in Amsterdam or Zanzibar, consular sections daily provide cradle-to-grave services for Americans abroad, including:

– Issuing birth and death certificates;

– Issuing emergency passports when a passport is lost/stolen;

– Checking on the welfare of American citizens in local hospitals and prisons; and

– Helping Americans who are arrested obtain legal representation and weighing in with local authorities to ensure Americans are not treated unfairly under the local laws.

Consular sections around the world receive hundreds of distress calls daily. It may be a plane crash, bus accident, or terrorist attack. It may be an American who got caught up in a protest and is now in jail. Consular officers, the ambassador, and other embassy colleagues all push to get the action needed from host country authorities.

Embassies monitor the local situation to assess how safe it is for Americans there and what precautions are necessary. They develop detailed emergency action plans for protecting Americans in the event of any number of possible situations.

American Foreign Service Officers all have stories about helping Americans overseas. It is part of the job and why we have embassies and consulates around the world.

Ambassador (ret.) Robert Cekuta is a four-decade veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service whose postings included Berlin, Tokyo, Albania, and the Middle East as well as senior positions in State and Ambassador to Azerbaijan.” He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 300 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.