Our Man in Belize.

• Author: Gibney, James

A veteran diplomat recalls life in an obscure outpost

With its Graham Greenesque title, pastel-colored book jacket, and breezy prose, Richard Conroy's memoirs of Foreign Service life in 1960s British Honduras offer an enjoyable nostalgia trip back to the days when diplomacy still featured prop-driven DC-4s and typewritten dispatches. But based on my latter-day experiences with the State Department, what's most striking about Conroy's recollections is how little the Foreign Service seems to have changed. Roughly four decades, one Cold War, and several dozen State Department reorganization plans after Conroy first took up his tropical post, the day-to-day experiences of an American vice consul -- especially in the Third World -- remain a bizarre blend of Conrad, Kafka, and the Marx Brothers.

Conroy's story begins with his induction into the Foreign Service by way of jobs in the Social Security Administration and a federal nuclear bomb factory in his native Tennessee. Recruited as part of a larger effort by the State Department to go beyond the then-usual pool of Northeastern elites, Conroy quickly demonstrates that he has the right stuff. When his State Department examiners ask whether he would commit an illegal act to advance the national interest, Conroy replies that he would first find out that he had been "misinformed" about the act's illegality, commit the act, and then slap the highest possible classification on any records of what he had done. Although this anecdote rings a little too cute to my ears, few FSOs would deny that the ability to cover your ass is an essential survival skill.

Moreover, Conroy's depiction of his early days in the department is a classic illustration of what happens when smart people are forced to do dumb things. His first assignment is to reconcile personnel files and pay records in the personnel office. Bored out of their gourds, Conroy and colleagues set up an informal tea house where they spend their days composing limericks and spreading incendiary gossip. (One of the department's longest-running internal laments is that few FSOs are good "managers" -- a legitimate concern that involves a complex mismatch between the people it attracts and the people it needs.) But this period is not a total loss: A teahouse patron later helps Conroy by derailing his assignment to Naha, Okinawa, in favor of the more desirable Zurich. Writes Conroy about his time in Switzerland: "If these years were in any way memorable...