by Raymond F. Smith
On 21 December 1988, a terrorist bomb destroyed Pan American Airlines Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 passengers and crew (190 of whom were Americans) and 11 persons on the ground. Earlier that month, the State Department sent its embassies in Europe an unclassified cable containing information from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to the effect that it had unconfirmed information that a terrorist attack would be launched against a US airliner flying from Europe to the United States during the holiday season. The US embassy in Moscow was the only recipient of the message that made the information publicly available. No Americans traveling from Russia were aboard the flight.
The families of those killed in the attack wanted to know why no other embassy had made the information available to US citizens residing in their countries. A Congressional investigating committee wanted to know why the embassy in Moscow had made it available. Because I was centrally involved in the decision, the State Department asked me to testify before the committee. It put no restrictions on my testimony. What follows is the gist of what I told the committee, provided because, although I did not put it exactly this way at the time, it illustrates how an embassy country team is supposed to function.
The Embassy Country Team
The ambassador’s country team is comprised of the heads of the Foreign Service sections at the embassy—administrative, consular, economic, political, and public affairs—and the heads of other US government agencies present at the embassy. It meets as often as the ambassador considers necessary and is chaired by the ambassador or the deputy chief of mission. It facilitates the exchange of information within an embassy and provides a forum for discussion of issues that impact more than one facet of embassy activities. At smaller embassies, the ambassador is likely to chair the meeting most of the time, at larger ones less frequently.
Ambassador Jack Matlock normally met with the country team on a weekly basis. On other days, his deputy ran the meeting. As political counselor, I acted as deputy chief of mission (DCM) when either the ambassador or DCM was away, and as charge d’affaires when both were away.
The FAA Cable Discussion
In the absence of the DCM, I chaired this meeting. When his turn came, the consul general described the information in the FAA cable and raised the question of whether it should be shared more widely. The consular section in an embassy is responsible for US citizen services, which includes threats to their safety. The discussion that followed involved three options: restricting the information to those who had already received it; providing the information to all US citizen employees of the embassy; making it more widely available to other US citizens in Moscow. It was quickly apparent that no one favored the first option. All thought that we could not restrict the information only to those who had happened to be on the initial distribution list for that particular cable. Discussion centered on whether to confine distribution to the official embassy staff or to make it available to others, such as members of the American press, the business community and students. The consul general favored the latter. The administrative counselor, whose responsibilities included overseeing embassy security, leaned toward the former. He had some concerns about releasing a US government document, even though it was unclassified.
I told the country team that I could not support providing the information we had to US government officials and not to our fellow citizens. Since the information was vague and possibly erroneous, I wanted to release it in a way that would not be alarmist. We agreed that the document itself would simply be posted on the bulletin board in the embassy cafeteria, a location frequented by many of the non-US government Americans in Moscow.
Still concerned, the administrative counselor suggested we request the State Department’s permission before posting the document. It seemed to me that the embassy should not start down the slippery slope of asking Washington how we should handle unclassified documents and I said so. He then suggested we send a cable informing the Department what we planned to do and wait a few days to see whether it demurred/objected. I agreed to that.
After the meeting, I walked over to the ambassador’s office to tell him about the discussion and the country team decision. In effect, I was giving him the same opportunity to walk our decision back as we were giving the Department. He did not demur. I signed out the cable later that day and, having heard nothing back from Washington, we posted the FAA message a few days later.
The Rest of the Story
The State Department and the FAA got a lot of criticism from the families of those killed in the terrorist attack. Much of it revolved around the fact that Moscow was the only embassy to make the information publicly available. The FAA stated that the information it had conveyed in the early December message to the State Department was unrelated to the attack on PanAm 103. To the best of my knowledge, neither the State Department nor the FAA ever sent an unclassified message to embassies on such matters again. Naturally, if the message we had received had been classified, we would not have released it to the public without requesting that it be declassified.
I think this is an example of how a country team is supposed to work and, given the information available to it, I think it made the right decision. I am not sure that an embassy in a country with many thousands of US citizens scattered widely about could have adopted our course of action. I can say that, as I sat in front of that Congressional committee answering not overtly hostile but certainly probing questions about what I did, why I did it, and what authority I had to do it, I was grateful for that country team discussion and comfortable in defending its decisions.
Raymond Smith spent more than 30 years at the State Department, retiring from the Senior Foreign Service as a Minister Counselor and then serving as a senior advisor to the Department’s Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund. He spent six years at the US embassy in Moscow, serving as political counselor from 1988-91, a period that included stints as acting deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires. He has a doctorate in international relations from Northwestern University and has authored two books, Negotiating with the Soviets and The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats, as well as numerous articles.