In the national interest.

• Author: Lesser, Larry

Editor's Note: In this fictionalized account of real incidents, a retired FSO recounts his well-meaning but futile attempts to influence Washington's decision-making on personnel matters. In this story, the names and some facts have been changed to protect the innocent, and the writer!

As Deputy Chief of Mission of the American Embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the mid-'80s, one of my responsibilities was to act as mentor for the several untenured junior officers assigned to the embassy. It was one of my favorite duties. Every couple of months I invited the four or five of them for dinner, prepared and served by my capable cook and cook's assistant at the spacious home the government provided for me. Maybe invite another experienced embassy officer to participate in the discussion of the concerns junior officers have in the early stages of what they hope will be a long and rewarding career in diplomacy. In between these dinners I met with each junior officer one-on-one to hear their concerns and to dispense good advice about how to do the work and manage their Foreign Service careers.

One of the junior officers--Arabella Montanez by name--was in the embassy's political section. Her basic portfolio was the civilian political parties. At that time Bangladesh had a military-led government; representative institutions and elections had been suspended, but the political parties were allowed to function and were pretty active and pressing for the army to return to the barracks and restore legitimate civilian rule. Arabella's supervisor was Jon Gibson; his background was in political-military affairs, and he covered the military element of the national government and foreign relations. A mid-level officer named Alicia Miller handled the rest of the political reporting and representation work: labor unions, academia, religious leaders, youth ...

Arabella Montanez was charismatic. She wasn't physically imposing or beautiful--good-looking but not glamorous: she gave off a sense of tremendous positive energy. She had a radiant smile and a resonant voice. She looked people straight in the eye. She was single. Although I generally avoid ethnic stereotypes, I must note that people said Arabella had a fiery Latin temperament. Bangladeshi politicians and bureaucrats were drawn to her. She had become more fluent in Bengali than anyone else in the embassy. She dressed distinctively, wearing flouncy skirts in bold colors. She had a hearty and distinctive laugh in a low register and an irreverent style. When she entered a room people turned to look at her, and they smiled, glad to see that she was there. I observed it myself; Bangladeshi men gathered around her and joked with her and among themselves in her presence.

And not only men. Both of the major political parties (in the wilderness under the military government) were headed by women, and Arabella became friends with both of them. The two women had inherited their parties' leadership after one's father and the other's husband had been assassinated. That is a gruesome fact about the history and politics of Bangladesh: seventh or eighth most populous country in the world (though only the size of Wisconsin) and one of the world's 'largest poorest' countries. This low-lying riverine country had a history of almost unremitting conflict and sorrow.

The two female political party leaders did not get along with one another (to put it mildly), and in varying degrees they were both also suspicious of the United States and relatively inaccessible to our diplomatic representatives. But it was important that the embassy do what it could to establish and maintain a good relationship with them, considering their prominent positions in Bangladeshi society. (Each of them later became prime minister after the country returned to civilian rule.)

Because she was junior in rank Arabella couldn't call on the party leaders herself, but when she encountered one of them (the two party leaders rarely attended the same event) on social occasions around Dhaka they gravitated to her. Either of them might guide Arabella to a corner of the room, where they would engage in animated conversation, punctuated by Arabella's low-pitched resonant laughter.

Whenever Frank Bass, our ambassador, succeeded in setting up a meeting with one of the lady party leaders, he would have Arabella join him "as note-taker," knowing that Arabella's presence would lubricate the conversation and increase the degree of candor, leading to much more interesting reportage back to the State Department. Arabella performed admirably in developing Bangladeshi political contacts (that puts it crassly, but it's how we professional diplomats talk), and Ambassador Bass burnished his own credentials by using Arabella's representational skills effectively: a win-win proposition.

Our embassy earned a reputation for fine reporting. Ambassador Bass was a consummate reporting officer himself, and the embassy had excellent contacts practically everywhere in Bangladeshi government and society. We were no doubt assisted by the penchant of important and self-important Bangladeshis to cultivate relationships with American diplomats and make themselves all the more valued contacts by telling everything they knew ... and more. It's a pity that Bangladesh wasn't more important strategically since we had access to practically every significant and insignificant development and tendency in the country simply by letting the Bangladeshis talk. They asked little or nothing in return. Occasionally a cosmopolitan Bangladeshi might joke that he looked forward to the day when Bangladesh would become the 51st state. Frankly it was delightful to be an American diplomat in Dhaka in those days ... although not, apparently, for Arabella Montanez, as I came to learn.

In my own mentoring meetings with Arabella we talked primarily about career issues. She was well situated in a high-profile political reporting slot in Embassy Dhaka, but she faced a career problem. Arabella had entered the Foreign Service not as a political officer but as a consular officer; in Foreign Service parlance she was in the consular 'cone'. Consular officers could be assigned to political slots, and vice versa, but for the long term their job would be issuing visas for foreigners who wanted to go to the U.S. and providing services for ordinary American citizens living or traveling abroad. They would compete for...