No Fun on a Short Leash

The hostage crises in Tehran and Bogota occurred at a time when the morale of the U.S. Foreign Service was already flagging for a number of unrelated reasons. Chief among them, in addition to a growing concern over personal safety: inadequate pay and perks in a period of worldwide inflation, insufficient opportunities for working wives (or in a few cases husbands) and a sense that in an age of instantaneous communication the scene of the real action in American diplomacy has shifted from the embassies to Washington. "We used to avoid home assignments like the plague," says a diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Paris. "It was expensive, and the jobs were less interesting. Now it's the other way around." An officer based in Belgrade agrees: "Ten years ago, the problem was: How do you get 'em back to Washington? Now it's reversed: How do you get 'em back overseas?"

One result is that the isolated hardship post, once considered an adventure or a reputation-making opportunity, is more often shunned in favor of the quieter, more civilized capital. The International Communication Agency (the revamped U.S. Information Agency) recently had job openings in both Buenos Aires and Vancouver. Not so many years ago, the Argentine post would have been considered a plum, the Canadian one a backwater bore. This time around, however, there were several dozen applicants for Vancouver and none for Buenos Aires. The reasons: Vancouver is safe and relatively cheap; Buenos Aires has sporadic political violence and triple-digit inflation.

The sorest point of all is pay. Typically, a middle-level officer with about 15 years experience earns $35,000, a Foreign Service recruit $16,000, a career ambassador $50,000. According to the American Foreign Service Association (A.F.S.A.), the gentlemanly union that represents the interests of U.S. diplomats, this salary scale is about 10% lower than that of the Federal Civil Service. To be sure, like other American Government employees abroad, diplomats also receive a housing allowance, a cost-of-living provision and access at some posts to certain duty-free goods, such as liquor, cigarettes and gasoline. But high prices and the sinking dollar have wiped out these advantages, leaving the diplomats with little more than the special prestige of being an elite corps. The House of Representatives is currently considering a new Foreign Service Act, which includes increased allowances and provides for hazardous-duty pay. Even if approved, these changes will not offset the rising costs that diplomats have experienced in the past five years.

Aggravating the problems of the Foreign Service even further is the impact of the women's revolution. A great many diplomatic wives, after holding jobs of their own in Washington, are not ready to go back to playing the role of supportive hostess in some overseas post. Says an American officer in the Middle East: "Twenty years ago, a wife loyally followed her husband around the world. Today she argues, 'Why should I give up my $30,000-a-year job to go Live in Upper Volta?' " To be sure, the State Department and individual embassies have relaxed the rules by allowing diplomats' wives to work at secretarial and "family liaison" jobs in the missions; obviously, this kind of employment does not appeal to a woman with a career of her own. An embassy wife in Tokyo says flatly: "We're being posted back to Washington this year, and I have no intention of ever going out again." Couples ponder whether their marriages can survive separations for two or three years.

Such tensions have affected the diplomatic corps during a period of radical internal change. Privately, some veteran diplomats complain that admission standards to the Foreign Service have been lowered in order to allow easier entry for women and minorities. Beyond that, says A.F.S.A. President Kenneth Bleakely, a career diplomat himself, "the whole concept of the Foreign Service is under assault." A few decades ago, many aspects of U.S. policy toward a specific country were often set by the American ambassador and his staff on the scene. Today even low-level decisions are made in Washington--with or without the concurrence of the State Department's experts in the field. Jet planes and telephones have created a new kind of diplomacy based on direct, capital-to-capital contacts. "It's a short leash now," says a 30-year veteran ruefully, "and it's just not as much fun." And then there are the official visitors. At the close of last year's Easter recess, the Peking embassy totted up the number of Congressmen, Senators, wives and aides to whom it had played host in a nine-day period. The total: 167. Says an embassy staffer: "We spend at least 50% of our time as glorified travel agents."

If the American Foreign Service has a serious fault, it would probably be that it is caught up in one of the curses of the modern age, what the German sociologist Max Weber called "the iron cage of bureaucracy." Since 1959, the size of the State Department has remained fairly stable, at about 17,000 employees, of whom 3,700 are Foreign Service officers. But embassies are now filled with employees of dozens of other Government agencies. A few years ago, the ambassador in Bonn discovered to his astonishment that his staff included a representative of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Some of these swollen missions seem to be nearly out of control. In Cairo, for instance, the embassy staff over the past five years has grown from fewer than 30 to more than 350. Because of high costs for living quarters, the U.S. is buying a group of residential compounds that will inevitably isolate American diplomats from their Egyptian hosts. "When you develop an embassy to such proportions," muses a high U.S. official in Cairo, "you run the risk of creating a community that lives of and by itself, and that does not bode well for understanding the true currents of local life."

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