Interview with Ronald K. Somerville
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Information
Interviewed by: William D. MorganInterview
September
21, 1999
Copyright 2002 ADST
[Note: This interview has not been
edited by Mr. Somerville.]
Q:
This is an interview of Ronald Somerville. We worked together for many years in
consular affairs. Ron was the executive director of the Bureau of Consular
Affairs and in many other positions in the United States government. He will fill us in on
how he came to the State Department and what he did there. Ron, as a starting
point, what brought you into the State Department and the United States government?
SOMERVILLE: Let me say at the outset, Bill, a
disclaimer. Everybody who seems to rise to a certain rank level wants to imply
and leave the impression that this has been a planned progression. In my case
it was not. It may be unbelievable at points but no matter how carefully you
plan you don't know where it is going.
I
came into government in the late '50s after the McCarthy mess, prior to the
Kennedy election campaign. I was a management intern with the old Civil Service
Commission.
Q:
Which is now . . .?
SOMERVILLE: Now it is OPM (Office of
Personnel Management). It has a rather different role now than it did then.
Back in those days in the wake of McCarthy, the Civil Service Commission
included the International Organization Employee Loyalty Board. In that
capacity they ruled on the loyalty of candidates that the US was proposing for appointment to
any UN organization. They would work as US citizens in the UN. They had to be
cleared by the board. That board reflected security responsibilities that were
given in the wake of the McCarthy mess.
Q:
At what point of time are you talking about?
SOMERVILLE: Well, there had been many firings
as a result of McCarthy; for example, Robert Service in the State Department.
There were many people who were thought to be "pinkos"
or fellow travelers and were removed and subsequently became employees again.
There was a defection, which you may remember, from the National Security
Agency in 1959. National Security was then known merely as a part of the
Department of Defense. It was at Fort Meade and did all the
code making, breaking, etc. Two gentlemen defected through Cuba to Russia and they were thought to have
taken great secrets with them.
That
triggered the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal
Security SubcommitteJay Sourwein,
chief clerk, a nasty fellow; Carl Mundt, senator from
Montana, or somewhere, and a bunch of guys
who had been strong supporters of McCarthy. They were deeply imbued with the
thought that the State Department, in particular, was, had been and may still
be run by "commies," pinkos, sympathizers,
etc. Feelings were running high. They began clamoring for jurisdiction as to
who could hold a hearing and bare all the stuff that was going on. I was called
in by the director of personnel, with two colleagues...
Q:
As an intern?
SOMERVILLE: Yes, as an intern. I had no
hooks, had been nowhere in the government and therefore in a sense could be
presumed to be unbiased. I was taken to a room that was windowless and files
were wheeled in on a cart. It was unbelievable.
These
were the files of all the employees, many of whom were State Department
employees, who had been accused or alleged to be communist sympathizers, etc.
These were people who had been fired or suspended, many of whom were
subsequently, after the heat was down, put back on the roles in non-sensitive
jobs in other agencies. Many had gravitated back to the State Department if
that had been their original place of employment. This was after the "Who
lost China" stuff had all died down.
Q:
What year was this?
SOMERVILLE: It was 1959, before the
conventions of both parties in 1960 when a deal was made. The chairman of the
commission at that time was a gentleman named Roger Jones. He was an Eisenhower
Republican. He was trusted by the right wing. He had the utmost integrity. A
nice guy, too. A deal was made that in order to keep this defection issue and
the spin off issues (the Internal Security Subcommittee and the Un-American
Activities Committee wanted to get into a great public display) from destroying
the government, it was agreed that it would stay out of the campaigns if both
parties would agree that immediately upon election, Roger Jones would move to
the State Department, take custody of the files and clean up the mess.
Q:
In a balanced and non-political way.
SOMERVILLE: That went without saying. The
election campaigns proceeded. Where were all these people who were alleged to
have been communists? The election was held in November and by December of 1960
Roger Jones was moved from the Civil Service Commission chairmanship to what
was then called deputy undersecretary of State for Administration. The position
is now called the undersecretary of State. His role was to clean up the mess in
State.
Q:
Find the spies and get rid of them?
SOMERVILLE: The whole bit. In any event, upon
his arrival he immediately drew up a reorganization that included a commitment
we had not known about in the commission during the campaigns. That commitment
included the transfer, in toto, of State Department's
personnel security structure to the Civil Service Commission. It merged with
the security structure of the Commission which included the whole government.
In those days, all background investigations were done by them and we were
separate. If you wanted to be an employee of an international organization, for
instance, you had to be cleared by them. They also did security up-dates
[renewals of former clearances]. An exception: some agencies like the FBI and
State Department had their own. Well, it was presumed because of
"all" these pinkos in State and those
"Who lost China?" types, and all this background [involved], that the
only way to clean up the mess in State was to transfer all personnel security
to the commission and merge it with a legitimate operation. So, after Roger
Jones had moved to the State Department, before a new president was even in
office, we in the commission began to draw up tables of organization, tables
with names, ranks for merging cross agencies, etc.
Q:
And all the people we were talking about in State were CiviService
or were they both Civil Service and Foreign Service?
SOMERVILLE: Both.
Jones
immediately set up a reorganization in which the Bureau of Consular Affairs,
because it was internally security linked in those days, having deep security
connections because of refugee movements and East-West connections, etc. It was
set up as the supervising bureau over the Office of Personnel, the Office of
Security, the Inspector General, and the Office of Budget. All the sensitive
elements of the central structure of the State Department were placed under the
Bureau of Consular Affairs.Roger Jones reached into
the Civil Service Commission for one of his regional directors, Bernie Rosen,
whom he brought over as director of personnel for the State Department.
Q:
All of personnel was under him?
SOMERVILLE: You got it. He also neutralized
the Director General so that the Foreign Service could not get their hands back
on this personnel cluster. So you had Roger Jones, chairman of the commission,
as deputy undersecretary of administration anBernie
Rosen as director of personnel. Then he brought in a brilliant guy from the
Rand Corporation which did a lot of defense stuff and was clean. He became a
principal deputy and planning architect.
Things
began to roll down the road. I worked in inspections, then in the Civil Service
Commission, and was involved in inspecting federal agency personnel systems.
Q:
Including now the State Department?
SOMERVILLE: Well, not at the time I was in
the field. Later on I did inspect part of State's allegations of Kenny O'Donald and a number of the Kennedy rat pact who were
running rough shod over Merit Rose and hiring only Catholics. There was a great
Catholic-Jewish brouhaha in government during the Kennedy administration. You
may not recall that the Labor Department was seen to be all Jews and the
average mafia had to take over. We had some of the same problems in the State
Department and there was an investigation by the Civil Service Commission of
these allegations that the Kennedy crew had corrupted the personnel system.
Q:
Was the entire State Department overseas assignments under thCSC?
SOMERVILLE: Absolutely, how else could they
get control? How coulyou reveal and discover and
purge?
Q:
You are saying the one of the objectives was to purge?
SOMERVILLE: Yes. That was part of the
arrangement made before the elections, including Roger Jones moving over to the
State Department, whether the government was Democratic or Republican.
Q:
I don't see how it worked.
SOMERVILLE: It worked marvelously. It defused
this battle between the Un-American Activities Committee and the Internal
Security Subcommittee that could have destroyed the executive branch.
Q:
Are you suggesting that was why it was done?
SOMERVILLE: That was the deal that was made
going into convention when it was apparent that Kennedy would be the winner. It
was done in order to prevent this from getting into the campaigns the nominees
agreed that would happen no matter who was elected. That was the solution and
it worked. Maybe there were better ideas. I don't know.
Anyway,
my immediate boss in the Civil Service Commission was transferred over to the
State Department as another deputy to Bernie Rosen, the new director of
personnel. In this capacity he had to do with Foreign Service hiring. Obviously
the whole thing was being de-Wristonized [laterally
commissioned Foreign Service officers from the Civil Service], or whatever, and
converted into a non-Foreign Service kind of an organization. It had that
flavor.
Shortly
after I arrived he called me and said, "Hey, Ron. We are going to have
some fun. Look at all the things that are going to be done." By then I had
become an inspector but still had the idea that merit should rule and politics
or corruption shouldn't influence. I was not cynical but very idealistic. I
felt this way, based upon what I knew from the onset of the defection of the
guys at NSA down through what was evolving under the Kennedy administration. I
thought that it might be a lot of fun over there [in the State Department] and
there might be a chance to do some things. So, I said, "Yes, I
would." I transferred and became the chief of non-Foreign Service officer
employment.
Q:
Give us a date on that.
SOMERVILLE: That would have been in 1962. The year before thassassination.
By
that time a whole lot of things had gone wrong. There was a new secretary of
state, Dean Rusk. The new deputy undersecretary for administration had been
fairly well neutralized by a force so potent that he never realized it could
exist. It was the Foreign Service. He had become rather neutralized. The
reorganization placed [him in] CA (Bureau of Consular Affairs)...it was headed
by the administrator of Consular Affairs. At the time it was the only statutory
position in the entire Department of State. It was the only position that could
call upon, or be called upon, by a committee of congress other than those
having normal oversight. The judiciary committees [of the House and Senate] controlled
immigration. It was unique. Because of its uniqueness in that way it was
watched by [House] judiciary and judiciary in the Senate [which] included, of
course, Internal Security.
The
reorganization had begun to go awry. They spun off personnel first, the
inspector general second, and security third to be individual entities
reporting through an A (Administration) structure, not as a part of CA's
jurisdiction. They had appointed a gentleman who was very close to immigration interests organization as an administrator. He was a true,
trusted political hack.
Q:
Sounds familiar.
SOMERVILLE: Because of what was being
attempted, the [Democratic] party felt they had to have a certain kind of individual.
So rather than being a Rusk person he was a Kennedy person. However, he had
certain weaknesses. Among those were a pension for painting the walls in his
office over one weekend six times, different colors of pink and lavender. It
conjures up a certain image. Well, that was conjured by Frances Knight and pumped out through her
husband, Wayne Parish who was the Cleveland Plain Dealer representative in Washington. He owned US Airline Guide and Aviation Daily. He was a
very influential journalist.
To
digress for a moment, Frances' background was a public relations
speech writer type. When Richard Nixon first ran against Helen Gilhagen Douglas in California, she is alleged to have written
speeches that conjured up Douglas as soft on Communism. This was published in a pink
paper's notice which is where the word pinkos comes from. So, of course, Nixon won that election. During
the later Eisenhower years, around 1957, when Marge Shipley retired from the
Passport Office, Frances Knight replaced her and became a fixture because of
her links that were very tight with J. Edgar Hoover, Bill Sullivan, his deputy,
and a third man whose name escapes me, in the FBI.
Q:
We must take pause to let the reader know that Frances Knight died just last week.
SOMERVILLE: By way of her background she was
extremely right wing. She was known to be behind a prolific system of tracking US citizens travel abroad. She dealt
through the cable system directly with consular sections in shadowing
Americans' travel abroad. She provided to the FBI and received from the FBI
comprehensive reporting on the movements of Americans abroad. She was very
active in denying passports to people whose loyalty might be questioned. She
was very active in all kinds of travel control programs that were launched from
time to time. She was a very tough lady.
Q:
Today, anyone who is wanted by a United States magistrate is subject to alert
through the State Department and perhaps to extradition back to the U.S. jurisdiction..
SOMERVILLE: Yes, that has always been legal.
That is entirely different from prohibiting the travel of an American citizen
not indicted, a free citizen. If there is no court involved you have the
constitutional right to travel. It was alleged that she was abridging that
right by her denial patterns.
Q:
But, it held up. It was documented. There were the cards and "airgrams" (surface mail, versus telegrams) that went
out from her office. Cables [telegrams] also were sent out.
SOMERVILLE: It went on until Dean Rusk
personally admonished her anordered her to cease and
desist.
Q:
To cease and desist all of these things that you have listed thawere not legal?
SOMERVILLE: That's right.
Let
me give you a little bit more of the dynamics that were happening at the time I
arrived. The new Administration obviously wanted to hit the deck running as
fast as it could. They had a mess in the State Department but they delivered on
their commitment to bring Roger Jones over, began some organizational changes.
They brought in some very tight but political-hack type people from the Kennedy
administration who were not much on governmental
expertise perhaps but very keen politicians and very close with the family.
The
security apparatus in the State Department had been successfully defeated with
plans transferred to the Civil Service Commission. A gentleman from the CIA was
hired as the head of security. You can see the pattern here. All of the
controls were replaced in the State Department. I wouldn't say it was a purge
but it was damn close to it. This was arising from dynamics set in motion many
years before with McCarthy, picked up again with the NSA people and
arrangements and commitments made going into the election. Kennedy was not soft
on communism. He was a harsh as Eisenhower ever was.
Despite
these changes in personnel and structure, the [State Department's] Office of
Security was successfully damaging the flow of appointments of ambassadors,
under secretaries, who by the right wing were suspect of being at least soft on
communism if not card-bearing. These were choked in the pipeline. Clearances
didn't get finished. Clearances were not granted preventing appointments. There
is provision in law, in Executive Order called "180 day clearance".
In an emergency a cabinet officer has the right to bring a person on board in a
sensitive position prior to the granting of a security clearance. So, the Rusk
administration began to use this 180-day clearance procedure as its only means
of filling the jobs.
Q:
It didn't mean there wasn't a security procedure that had beedone
or was going on.
SOMERVILLE: It was an ongoing thing. No
appointments were made without the initiation, to my personal knowledge, of at
least the federal agency check. The House Un-American Activities Committee had
an index; Internal Security had an index; Justice had an index etc.; and those
were checked minimally. But the field work of background
investigations and interviews, etc., were not completed.
The
system became clogged and more or less in desperation the Administration went
to a prolific use of the 180-day waiver. This, of course, inflamed the
right-wing who were sure that this was nothing more
than Kennedy bringing in a bunch of pinkos. And some
of the names involved were very liberal.
There
was a gentleman in the Office of Security who was so pained by this change that
he became a public figure, an obstructionist, alleging that gross improprieties
were taking place in security in the State Department. His name was Otto Otepka.
For many years he had been the head of the investigating division. He had seen
his empire almost transferred to the Civil Service Commission and the efforts
of his field agents, which were being so thorough, that nothing moved, usurped
by the 180-day procedure. He went public through The Richmond News Leader, an
extremely right-wing publication at that time. He became a pariah. While this
was going on, I as chief of Officer Employment discovered that I had two
employees who were involved. One, as a flow point for Otepka's material.
Q:
What do you mean by "flow point"?
SOMERVILLE: It was through her that Otepka's material was being feto
The Richmond Leader.
Q:
I presume this was more than just sensitive material.
SOMERVILLE: I won't say that it was security
sensitive but certainly privacy sensitive and damaging stuff about some of the
people who were being appointed. Information from security
backgrounds, etc., material that could only come from security files. Very suggestive stuff. Anyway, I found that I had another
employee who was actively involved in dealing with senior candidates in
distributing J. Edgar Hoover's book. She had a crate of these damn things in
her office and she was passing them out to all the candidates to warn them.
Well, here I am, a young guy from the Civil Service
Commission not knowing anybody in the State Department trying to run an
operation and I had to deal with the folks.
Well,
it turns out that Otto Otepka was typing his material in Frances
Knight's office. I told you this was unbelievable. He was producing his
material in her office with her knowledge, using J. Edgar Hoover intelligence.
I knew this because there were times I was in her office and she would
telephone across and get input from over there. I was required to chastise and
stop what they were doing. I couldn't stop the flow to the Richmond News Leader
because that was done off premises, but I got rid of the publications, etc.
Q:
Who ordered you to stop it?
SOMERVILLE: I do not recall but I think the
relationship between me and my supervisor and his supervisor and the deputy
under secretary for Administration was such that perhaps there wasn't a need
for an order. I was an idealist young guy and had an idea how the government
should work and these operations were not the right way. You don't destroy
people's reputations with information you are privileged to have, and should
treat it accordingly.
Q:
And the officials concerned felt, if not ideologically exactly ayou did, in principle, that this was the wrong thing to
do.
SOMERVILLE: Yes. My immediate superior was a
Foreign Service officer, a very senior guy of impeccable credentials and not a
captive of the sabotage that was being perpetrated on the new deputy under
secretary for Administration. So I enjoyed working for him.
Q:
And you had been in State long enough to have a feeling for whawas
evolving.
SOMERVILLE: Yes. That was a little bit of the
climate that existed. I had nothing to do with CA at this time. I was solely in
the Office of Personnel as a recruiter seeking officers, and getting them
through clearances, etc.
Q:
I'm sort of lost. Wasn't it part of CA?
SOMERVILLE: By the time I arrived it was
functioning autonomously again. Let me put it this way. The person who had been
appointed by the new administration to the CA administrator's job, with all the
subordinates under attack sufficiently by then, felt that it was wise to spin
apart the pieces. That combined with the kinds of pressures that the
"system" was bringing to bear on Roger Jones because...
Q:
The Inspector General?
SOMERVILLE: That was sacrosanct. It was a
different idea than it was now. It was wholly and solely a Foreign Service
entity. It solely looked at embassies and that sort of thing. Non-Foreign
Service management did not diddle with the Inspector General. Well, that had
been taken away and put under this guy from the Civil Service Commission. You
can see the anger. I won't say it was right or wrong.
Q:
Was that legal? It was in the Foreign Service Act.
SOMERVILLE: It was legal. Administratively
you can move it wherever you want to. Remember you didn't have the Inspector
General Act that you and I are used to for the last 20 years. Then it didn't
exist.
And
the responsibilities of the Inspector General inferentially were the totality
of the non- Civil Service part of the personnel system as stated in law. So they
made it an ineffectual job. It was a sit on the side, get out of the way, we
are running the show.
Q:
It was perhaps more a job of looking into things that might need cops, if you
will, rather than today's role of an inspector general on policy.
SOMERVILLE: Well, in those days a major
objective of having the Foreign Service inspection operation wasn't limited to
the appropriate stewardship of money, property, etc. It was also to make sure
that we didn't have ambassadors and staff who went native. There was a great
concern of clientitis in those days. That the staff would become strong advocates for a point of view
that they were no longer functioning in the broader U.S. national
interest.
Q:
That still is a question.
SOMERVILLE: And it always will be. This
concerned Kissinger when he came in and he designed
the GLOP program. He took people out of their geographical areas and made them
move, because their loyalties became distorted, internally and externally.
Q:
Let me stop, Ron, for just a minute. There is something that I think the reader
needs to know a little more about. What was your background before you became
an intern. Where did you grow up and go to school?
SOMERVILLE: I am from Pennsylvania and spent a couple of years in the
Service. Always had an interest in government. In high
school I came down for an inauguration of a president with a bunch of friends.
Strange as it may seem there is a building catty- corner from the White House,
across from the Old Executive Office building. We came down, pulled down the
fire escape on the back, climbed on top of the building and were opposite the
presidential reviewing stand watching the parade and waving at everybody.
Q:
You can't do that any more.
SOMERVILLE: I graduated from Pennsylvania University in industrial psychology. I went
through the management intern exam including interviews.
Q:
That's the way you came into the Civil Service?
SOMERVILLE: That was the mechanism then from
which I got my firsassignment to the Civil Service
Commission.
Q:
Okay, you are now plugged in.
SOMERVILLE: That, of course, was totally
concerned with personnerelated activities for the
government.
Here's
is a little aside that is funny. When I joined the State Department you filled
out a little piece of paper to go into the Stud Book (Biographical Register). I
was required to state what I had been doing previously. I put down Civil
Service Commission, listing no responsibilities. So, for 15 years I was seen to
be a CIA plant in the State Department.
Along
the way I was offered the job of personnel officer for what was then the A
Bureau, the Administration Bureau, which was different than it is presently
concocted. It had fiscal operations as well as other operations. It did not
have security, the inspector general or personnel. By the time this happened,
the CA superstructure had nearly been dismantled administratively, not legally.
The administrator was more and more isolated from operations and greater
autonomy had been given to the Visa Office, the Passport Office, and Services
to Americans Abroad Office, which Frances Knight (as head of the Passport
Office) was still trying to gobble up.
CA
had become a holding company. It didn't have its own budget. There was a visa
budget, a passport budget and no significant central control between those and
the Department, OMB and congress. By intent, it was being dismantled. This was
because of the fracas about the political appointee who had been placed in the
administrator's position by the Kennedy administration.
In
moving to the A Bureau personnel officer job I moved into one of responsibility
again for servicing CA to the extent anybody supported them to a personnel
sense because the CA assistant secretary's level had no involvement. It was
very strange. So, I did the classification, assignments and all the personnel
stuff.
Q:
You had the staff to go along with these responsibilities?
SOMERVILLE: I inherited two people who came
from CA. Bear in mind this was not really a control structure. Nobody wanted to
sit on top of Frances Knight. Nobody wanted to get in her way because they
would be shot. The Foreign Service was an overseas thing by itself and the Visa
Office didn't really deal anywhere else.
At
this time I was also given residual responsibility for the care and feeding of
Otto Otepka. By now his case had progressed through
"grievances" [appeals] in the court and he was in a holding pattern.
They placed him in a building by himself where Virginia Avenue now exists. There was a State
Annex there. It was a building that was to be torn down and Virginia Ave was to be constructed. He called
in reporters and showed them the rats and the mice and all hell was raised
about the mistreatment of this poor super American patriot, etc. I had to give
him desk space, meet with him once a week, make sure he got all the directives
in the system and create the charade that somehow he wasn't an outcast. He was
integrated into the organization, and given all the communications he needed to
do his job, etc. In the mean time he is hold up in Frances Knight's office
producing a book. Through some contortion and convolution in the security
stuff, I became suspect of being one of his flow points to the Richmond News
Leader.
Q:
Of course. You associated with him.
SOMERVILLE: Without mentioning any names it
became known to me that the space I was in, then State Annex 2, had previously
been security space and had microphones and those were turned on. I will tell
you, Bill, for about six months I had the most marvelous time. I worked late
and engaged in fictitious conversations and fed more stuff. Oh, it was
marvelous.
In
the service role of the Bureau for Consular Affairs, I was called by the then
deputy under secretary for Administration, a gentleman by the name of Bill
Crockett, and told there was a lady in an office on the fifth floor, for whom we have to create an office organizationally and staff
with two people. This will become a second special advisor to the secretary.
There was a senior advisor to the secretary on refugee affairs. This was to be
something like that, a senior advisor on consular affairs. Go see the lady and
set it up.
So,
I went to the office and Barbara Watson was sitting there. She introduced
herself and didn't have the foggiest notion what the State Department was. She
had been brought down from New York City to be appointed in this consultant
role. I didn't know what was going on. I created, honestly, an office to
support this senior advisor outside of CA. I got space, set up an office, got a
couple of secretaries, etc. After this was all done I learned that this was a
transitory position to the administrator for Security and Consular Affairs. Bare in mind this was just a shell and existed only in law
and not at all administratively, authoritatively, budget-wise, or
position-wise. She was sponsored by John Rooney, who had been the district
attorney in Brooklyn, and a close friend of Barbara
Watson's-Barbara was there preparatory to being appointed the Administrator of
the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, which at the time comprised only
the Passport Office, the Visa Office and the Office of Citizen Services. The
only security aspect that it had, had to do with the prevention of security
risks from entering the U.S. via the visa processing system or curtailing of
travel by Americans under indictment, on the passport side. These were both
under legislation. The first one under the Immigration and Nationality Act; the
second, I think, was in the act that created the bureau.
Q:
Let's get a date on this.
SOMERVILLE: In September of 1968, Barbara
Watson was nominated,confirmed
and appointed.
Q:
Her predecessor was?
SOMERVILLE: A name I cannot remember. [Abba
P. Schwartz 1962-66] The position was vacant at the time. It was a person who
had been fired. Rusk called him and told him he was no longer an employee
having been targeted by the right-wing on the Hill, and engaged in practices
that became notorious. Although in ethnic and migration circles he was highly
regarded. He was a lawyer with a long time association with legal immigration issues,
particularly with regard to refugees.
The
election took place in November and of course Richard Nixon won. In reviewing
his appointments he decided very early in the game, in January, the month of
his swearing in, that it was in his political and administrative interest to
retain the very fresh, brand new administrator for Consular Affairs, Barbara
Watson.
Q:
In skills. In terms of credentials and background.
SOMERVILLE:
She was qualified and more importantly she was politically important in that
Nixon had to deal with John Rooney on the appropriations side, with Dr. Morgan
Utters on the international relations side, with Carl Mundt
and the current conservatives who had found her sufficiently acceptable to
confirm her. And lastly, if he opened the position up, he would have grave
difficulty getting through the various factions and interests anytime soon to
appoint a successor.There was another element that
was not seen and that was that Barbara Watson was the most senior black woman
ever in the history of the State Department. First black
assistant secretary, first female assistant secretary. She broke many,
many of the old "rules". Politically acceptable to
both parties. She could not be penetrated by Frances Knight. Here you
have Nixon, for whom she had worked many years before, as a new president
reflecting what he knew to be the case in terms of dealing with Frances Knight.
He
left Barbara Watson in the position. Strengthened her by recreating the bureau,
authorizing the creation of a staff and directed that the staff should manage a
bureau entity and that all office directors within the bureau should report
only through the administrator for the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs.
The visa director at the time was Ray Collum, a
strong personality. Frances Knight, a very partisan political person would be
managed by a black woman who had good political credentials, was astute,
bright, imposing, and seemingly acceptable by the State Department's Foreign
Service.
Shortly
thereafter I was called and asked if I would please come aboard. In truth she
didn't know where to turn. It was suggested by the then assistant secretary for
administration, John Thomas, with whom, I had grave disagreements -- I cared
not at all for some of his style -- that she consider me as personnel
officer/deputy executive director. He noted that she had to have a Foreign
Service person in as executive director because the organization was
principally overseas, a Foreign Service organization. Because of our problems,
he offered to give her my position, with me. So, I had the distinct honor of
arriving with the position on my forehead, thus removing a thorn from his side
and fulfilling an obligation that he had to make sure that the bureau was put
back into a structural soundness.
Q:
And with someone who was qualified to do it and knew enough abouthe
department and the machinations.
SOMERVILLE: Probably more the latter than the
former. This was the time when there was a gentleman by the name of Bill
Crockett who was the deputy under secretary for administration, now called the
under secretary for management. These fit together very nicely because Barbara
came in from outside, a total non-fit for the State Department, being senior
black and senior female. The Foreign Service didn't like either one of them,
and arranged its affairs generally for them, except in very subordinate
positions or in consular sections. Bill Crockett, who was very close to John
Rooney, was a Foreign Service Staff officer whose wife never forgot the
indignities that she suffered from the Foreign Service officers. Mr. Crockett
was also very close to Wayne Hays.
During
those years we went through a very stressful "Oh, dear, what should we be?
Oh, dear, what should we be?" There were personnel studies after studies. Should
we be Domestic Service? Should we be Foreign Service? Should we merge? How
should we restructure ourselves to be effective? There was commission after
commission. The Wriston Commission.
The Hoover Commission. Anyway, it was decided with Wayne
Hays' strongest support that we really should be one Service and that is the
only way you are going to get rid of this rivalry between the Staff officers
and the Foreign Service officers and the Civil Service officers.
Q:
Which was getting more extreme and more complex and
confusing.
SOMERVILLE: Wayne Hays was chairman of two powerful
entities on the Hill. First, for the State Department, he was chairman of the
Foreign Affairs subcommittee on foreign operations in the State Department. Probably
of greater interest to him, and the Congress, was that he was full chairman of
the House Administration Committee. What does that mean? He assigns space,
staff, dollars and parking permits to every congressman. Therefore, he had in
those days ultimate power. There was no congressman in the Hill structure that
had more power.
In
any event, Wayne Hays, John Rooney and Leo Ryan hated Frances Knight and
supported Barbara Watson. Nixon decided for all these reasons to keep her in
place to put together the bureau. I joined the bureau as personnel officer with
the new executive director, Jerry Wetzork, a nice
fellow. We began an operation which rapidly was perceived to be one of
outcasts. Outcasts of the Passport Office because it was seen
as a non-player, and outside the purview of any professional interest in the
State Department. A non-player as far as the Visa function and its
massive staff abroad, because those were technicians who handled those dirty
smelling foreigners and didn't go to the parties or have the same titles. They
rarely got the decent space abroad because they had to have big waiting rooms
with lots of immigrants coming in.
Q:
And still a lot of staff officers.
SOMERVILLE: It was a mixture, but mostly
Staff officers despite the Rogers Act in 1924. But then because of the Hays
program it became really bastardized.
Q:
You haven't told us about the Wayne Hays program.
SOMERVILLE: Wayne Hays felt that the Department of
State could only be effectively managed if we got rid of the rivalries. We
would have one type of officer that he saw as a Foreign Service Reserve/Foreign
Service officer. He saw the Reserve officer as a transitional mode to a single
structure of Foreign Service officers.
Q:
From Staff, to Reserve, to officer?
SOMERVILLE: From staff to reserve and
eventually to officer; or on the Civil Service side, from Civil Service to
Reserve to officer. He felt strongly that only with a single service could you
get rid of this rivalry once and for all because the problems were readily
apparent. We had no consular officers in significant senior positions in the
Department. They could not aspire to be ambassadors. They rarely got to be
principal officers even though a post's primary staffing function and
responsibility was consular. A Foreign Service officer, typically going the
political route, was perceived and in fact was the most favorite when it came
to the more responsible positions, and therefore promotions. Rarely did a
consular officer who was also a Foreign Service officer ever become what was
then FSO-1, the senior most Foreign Service rank. The reason they didn't had
less to do with their abilities and performance but more to do with the fact
that they were not permitted to seek assignments that qualified them both for
visibility and for a record of performance in the more senior jobs.
Q:
I might throw in what was true at the time of the Rogers Act, and continued:
consular work tended to be more technical, more repetitive...
SOMERVILLE: It tended to be like that other
non-starter in the Foreign Service: administration. There were many efforts
over the years during my tenure to join together the two career specialties.
They both stem from law and regulation and finite fixed things and merely
required you to relate a body of written information to a situation to a
solution, without any real analytical judgment. They didn't have to understand
[substantively] foreign governments and peoples and culture.
Q:
It took care of the social superiority of the diplomatic officer.
SOMERVILLE: How much Wayne Hays saw of this
on his own and how much he was influenced by Bill Crockett, no one really
knows. There was then an attempt to pass legislation to merge the two. The
Foreign Service officers were very strongly against what was seen by them as
diluting their ranks. They were instrumental in having other elements in
congress stop the legislation. Wayne Hays vowed that with his hammer over the
State Department he would show his colleagues that the employees, other than
those blue noses, really wanted to do this. He encouraged the Department to
administratively achieve the same objective. Hence we began what was called the
Hays program. This was a program of convincing the employees, Staff and Civil
Service officers, that it was in their best interest to volunteer for
conversion to the Foreign Service Reserve Corps carrying with them their career
status and eventually moving into the Foreign Service retirement system.
Q:
Was there a Reserve officer corps at the time?
SOMERVILLE: The reserve appointment authority
[in the Foreign Service Act] began to be used, and some would say bastardized
extensively, by the new Kennedy administration. They saw themselves being
hamstrung in every other direction they took to assume the reins of power in
the State Department. They couldn't get their own people in easily and when
they did, those people were not able to get control of the structure. They were
titularly there but not really there. There was an
intervening structure they had to create and they did it by the use of the FSR,
the Foreign Service Reserve appointment authority which until then had been
used only for doctors, deep, deep specialists, or clearly transitory
appointments from Social Security Administration or Department of Defense,
etc., some other appointing authority; it didn't stay.
Q:
And an appointment that could only last five years.
SOMERVILLE: Yes. That was non-renewable
administratively. Legally, the appointment was limited to five years but there
was no statutory language prohibiting subsequent FSR appointments. So there
were people who served for a number of tours successively.
Q:
By and large, however, they were in positions that no
one woulever raise a question about, like a medical
officer.
SOMERVILLE: Yes. A highly
specialized skill. They weren't a threat to anyone's career field or
assignment opportunity. They were non-threatening.
The
Hays program was a massive one. It was a very costly one for the US government. It was one of the
stupidest things that was ever done. I had the
dishonor or ignoble job to be responsible principally for the program. We had
daily seminars and briefings and I had to call Bill Crockett's office every
evening at 5:00 and tell them how many people converted that day, from
the Civil Service or the staff. That was then passed over to Wayne Hays to
further convince him and keep his eye on the ball in getting the rest of his
colleagues up there to agree to release the Hays Bill which would give us
statutory basis for this.
Q:
The staff corps could see that it was advantageous to it, other than from the
competition aspect. If they got the word correctly they would have realized
they wouldn't vie successfully in most cases because of the officer promotion
system which was highly competitive. But, the civil servant in State could see,
perhaps, how he could grow with this conversion.
SOMERVILLE: Not only could [the Civil Service
officer] grow, but he was clearly told that this was what his management wanted
him to do. For example, for family and personal reasons I did not feel free to
try and join the Foreign Service. However, I felt greatly constrained to
convert to the Foreign Service Reserve program because I was charged with
making it work. So, I converted to the Foreign Service Reserve. I never had an intent of going abroad. I accepted the appointment under
the ground rules that were then in place administratively, which was no
obligation to serve abroad. It was to be as though I had continued in a Civil
Service capacity except that my label would change, my pay system would change
and my promotion system would change. I became an FSR-2.
Q:
You were competitive with FSRs or with FSOs?
SOMERVILLE: Bill, it was mumble-jumble over
the years. The criteria changed over the years. The composition of the boards
changed. I was very fortunate and promoted from FSR-2 to FSR-1. I am sure there
were Foreign Service officers who wondered "who the hell is this? A non-Foreign Service person taking up a slot." And, I
am sure there was resentment. Naturally so.
Q:
Yes, because there were just "X" number of promotions and you goone in your class as an "R." How did that
manifest itself?
SOMERVILLE: Well, because of where I was in
CA, I don't think I experienced much of anything from my colleagues whether
they were Foreign Service or Civil Service. I was seen more as an executive
director and was working for a powerful assistant secretary of Consular
Affairs. We either intruded ourselves or were invited into the assignment
process, promotion number allocation, not the panel process of deciding who
won. We obtained the resources necessary to create the positions, staff them, furnish them. I didn't recognize any resentment to me.
Q:
I don't think there was either, because you did all these things that were
necessary and good for the consular bureau. I think few knew of your promotion,
or cared. It was a non-issue because you did absolutely everything; and even
more: you taught us how to do it. Now, everyone would walk away smiling.
SOMERVILLE: To digress. Up until the time we
began to recreate, reconstitute and reform the front office of CA there had
been little opportunity for consular officers to get involved in anything that
would expose them to how the Hill worked, how the Office of Management and
Budget worked, how the Internal Acquisition and Allocation of Resources worked.
They knew nothing of the processes.
Q:
They didn't want to know. It was only when they served in personnel or some
place associated with you, like the computer in the Visa Office as I was, that
one realized that there was power, in the good sense. And you supported them
and translated some of these "technical" things. You protected me in
the Visa Office from somebody who hated that sort of thing, and was scared of
it. SOMERVILLE: This was an anathema to Julio
Arias, who kind of epitomized the old staff consular officer.
Q:
And there was an employee out there to get through to him.
SOMERVILLE: That was the man who was thrown out
by Frances Knight and for political reasons we were asked to find a home for
him. I didn't solve this problem, Diego Asencio did.
Immediately after appointment as assistant secretary, he got a call from the
Hill. Wayne Hays was sitting on the State Department authorization bill and had
been doing this for a period of several weeks. There was a real risk that we
would not be reauthorized. Pat Kennedy went to visit the gentleman with the
then under secretary for management. I had warned them in advance what was
going to happen. Pat Kennedy called Diego Asencio
from the office on the Hill to say that his first payback opportunity was
coming now and here is what it is. "You have a gentleman in the Passport
Office who is isolated, ostracized, sitting in an office with no lights and no
heat and you are going to have to do something for this person". So, you
got him.
Q:
He was on board when I arrived as deputy director of VO (the Visa Office). I
was told that part of my new job I was taking on was to keep this "special
politically sponsored soul from the Passport Office" and Julio Arias, the
head of the Visa Office, apart, from each others' throats.
SOMERVILLE: Was Helen Mulholland
still there?
Q:
No, she had left.
SOMERVILLE: She sued Barbara Watson for sex
discrimination for bringing that gentleman in and taking her responsibilities.
This reached the point of depositions, after Barbara had been de-hired [and
replaced by a Republican appointee: Leonard Walentynowicz].
She served twice you know. She came back with the promise that Carter would get
rid of Frances Knight. That was the only caveat she insisted upon to come back
to the office.
Q:
Now, the reader should know clearly that none of this is gossip. This is all
personnel management of the highest order and all true. This is all factual,
interpersonal relationships.
SOMERVILLE: The first time Barbara was
de-hired she was made ambassador to Malaysia. The second time she was de-hired
she returned to civilian life. The lady in the Visa Office whose job was usurped
by the gentleman [from the Passport office] sued Barbara Watson for sex
discrimination having given a female's duties and responsibilities to a male. I
went over and wrote Barbara's deposition in her apartment on Queen Ann's Lane,
she being a non-employee at the time but not at the time covered by the suit.
The lady didn't succeed because the case had no merit. It was a very
unfortunate case because she was a nice lady and had put a life time of effort
into the job and felt she had been terribly treated.
Q:
And this is the bottom line of so many personnel, congressional, executive
branch, intercessions in personnel actions. It's real
and you just happen to have one of those jobs that stayed mostly to the center
of that.
SOMERVILLE: Okay. Let's take a little
digression into the area oautomation, work
engineering, process design and that sort of thing.
Q:
Now, do that in terms of the point in which we have reached iour
discussion: the establishment of the new bureau.
SOMERVILLE: Okay, but in truth I have to go
behind that a little bit.
Q:
Yes, you should.
SOMERVILLE: I am essentially relating to you
things in which I was personally involved, not things that evolved around me. I
had to meet with Wayne Hays on numerous occasions carrying him ammunition to
fire at Frances Knight. I had to meet with John Rooney in his office on the
Hill carrying him ammunition to throw back and shoot at Frances Knight. I spent
time with him creating scenarios that could be used to strengthen the consular
function, whether it was dealing with the secretary, the under secretary for
management, etc. These comments are only things in which I participated in.
Q:
I would argue that the first things that you faced in terms of our chronology
here of setting up CA was Frances Knight. I think, excuse the expression, she
has to be done away with in the sense that Barbara had a terrible time as the
new leader, leading in comparison to other "principals" - heads of
bureaus - in the State Department.
SOMERVILLE: Before we go to the automation
side let me talk about that. As Barbara Watson assumed her new duties she was
immediately targeted by Frances Knight for demise. Frances worked her will on the Hill in an
attempt to further disestablish the bureau and prevent it from being
reconstituted, recreated, reorganized. She attempted
to have it de-funded. She accused Barbara Watson of needing officers around her
all the time. She alluded to the senior staff members around Barbara Watson as
hand holders. She alleged she only spoke words that were stuffed in her mouth
by others. She alleged that the woman had to be scripted for everything that
she did. She did this through her husband, Wayne Parish in the Cleveland Plain
Dealer which had entree into a very strong Ohio Republican congressional
delegation. There were some very strong folks through Karl Mundt.
and basically through the ideological right wing.
Q:
This is a holdover from the McCarthy era.
SOMERVILLE: Yes. Frances built up a fierce reputation as a
hard nose manager. She got the job done. She created statistical material every
year about how much money she made for the Treasury and how little it cost. Of
course, she didn't compare it against anything. What we found early in the game
was that in reviewing the annual financial data as we began to put together a
coordinated, consolidated, single CA presentation, I discovered negative
obligations in a particular account in the Passport Office, which meant that
somehow an account had more money in it at the end of the year then had been
given at the beginning of the year.
Q:
They made a profit.
SOMERVILLE: I wondered, what the hell is
this? As it were, this came to the attention of the chairman of the House
Appropriations subcommittee that governed the State Department. The structural
situation was such that the only way it could be addressed was externally. He
sent a group in from the House survey and investigations group, which is a
group available to the entire appropriations committee in the House from the
FBI and from the GAO (General Accounting Office) and the Defense Department's
contract audit agency. A gentleman by the name of Loft from the FBI and two
other guys came over to investigate the books. What they found was there had
been created in the Passport Office during Ms. Knight's tenure a "special
handling fee." From the time passports were first created you had a dead
period, and then a peak period in the spring when everybody is thinking about
going abroad. It is difficult to staff for peaks and valleys. Work in the peak
season accumulated. Backlogs are a natural, built-in fact of life. The real
management issue was how should you define a backlog and how big should it be
because it is always going to be there.
Well,
a scheme had been thought up whereby a special handling fee, an extra charge, would
be an elective made available to the applicant during the high season if they
wanted the passport on time. What we found further was that Frances Knight had
a great publicity activity every year of parading a vast public image that she
had been starved of resources and therefore there were all these backlogs and
people couldn't travel abroad missing their trains and planes. Of course, when
that publicity was out, the attractiveness of her special handling fee became
very high.
What
happened is she had been able to create this picture that created so much cash
in her communications, telephone and postage account that the inflow of money
for special handling more than offset all the expenditures. Of course, the
congressional group passed it over to the GAO and the GAO said it was illegal
and it has to be terminated. You could not take to a court of law malfeasance
in the sense of a connection between the publicity, the imposing of a fee and
the offset in the appropriations thereby giving her an unseen amount to use for
other purposes. Nobody took the money away.
Q:
Didn't she have good financial people to tell her that such a fewas against the law?
SOMERVILLE: She had competent staff but you
had logic type compartments, the financial guys did financial stuff and
management guys did management stuff, etc.
Q:
You weighed very carefully going into the director and saying,"this
ain't legal."
SOMERVILLE: Yes.
Q:
And you had to do it in this way since it couldn't be done by some memo. She
had to be confronted. Because if she didn't know what she was doing was
illegal, she knew it was self serving.
SOMERVILLE: In my mind I don't believe the
lady had a dumb bone in her body. She was very bright. She modernized the
Passport Office, give the devil her due. She created a work environment in
which the work got produced. She created a political environment by which she
got the resources that she needed. She further created a political climate that
preserved her empire and insulated her from meddling above. She viewed anybody
who came from above, as meddling. She obviously felt her political strength was
such that she could get away with the apparatus for tracking Americans travel
abroad.
Q:
She had links with J. Edger Hoover.
SOMERVILLE: I discovered in my first year in
CA on looking at the physical facilities a dozen desks in the Passport Office
that I couldn't figure out. These were to accommodate 12 FBI agents who were
normally resident in her office for the file information she had. She had the
largest colored photographic collection of US citizens that existed because she
had a duplicate photo of every person who had ever applied for a passport. She
had familiar link information that exceeded anything available elsewhere in the
government. When the privacy act came into existence we got rid of them. No
agency can go pawing in your file now. It has to be requested, purpose stated,
authorized and recorded.
She
saw herself as an integral part of a security apparatus. Don't disregard the title
of the bureau - the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs.
Scott
McLeod has a certain reputation in an ideological perspective. He was
instrumental in the creation of the bureau with that functional perspective.
What you had there was the classic art of the over reach. It never really
materialized in any broad way except for what was conjured by Frances or in the visa process. You know
the Department has certain links elsewhere on visa clearance issues. Except during that very brief period after the Kennedy election
when for gaining control purposes it was seen desirable of putting together all
the pieces that had ever been contemplated in the bureau in statute. The
bureau was created in statute during the Scott McLeod days long before I ever
got there. This was what they had in mind at that time but they couldn't pull
it off. Scott McLeod was in the bureau at the time that Frances Knight was
appointed. He was never confirmed as the administrator for Consular Affairs. He
could not be confirmed. His name was finally withdrawn. He served in an acting
capacity. There were a series of two or three appointments there that were very
messy and very politicized and ideologically driven.
The history of CA leading up to my association was far messier than after I
arrived.
I
faced an demand that we would open Detroit. It wasn't necessary but it was
the cost of getting rid of Frances Knight and they would seriously consider
opening two other agencies. Upon her retirement and the ascension of the first
non-political type in many years, Lory Lawrence, from
the Foreign Service, as head of the Passport Office, we had to carry through
with the commitment to open Detroit, which was subsequently closed a
few years later when the political heat was off. We created studies and
forwarded them to congress about the need for two additional agencies but did
not open them. And, with that we will end the career of Frances Knight. She
retired and the State Department resumed management of the passport function
probably for the first time in 25 years. Between Marge Shipley and Frances
Knight, the Passport Office had been more or less untouchable for about a
quarter of a century.
Q:
For obvious political reasons, but also political securitreasons of a right-wing inheritance.
SOMERVILLE: That, but I have to be fair to
the incumbents, Bill. The State Department managed everything poorly, if it
managed at all. It was almost anathema to the profession of most concern to the
Foreign Service and, these were production operations. They demanded a totally
different style, a different hand at the helm, a little more rigidity, and very
service oriented. The State Department would not have given good stewardship
anyway, I'm tempted to say. The good stewardship that followed didn't happen by
accident. Lory Lawrence, in fact a career senior person,
was carefully selected for that position.
Q:
And succeeded?
SOMERVILLE: Lory
succeeded tremendously. What he succeeded in doing was reorienting a Civil
Service Passport Office shop, ruled by a tyrant totally outside the sphere of
the State Department, and bringing them into the fold. Whether it was more
efficient or not is not something to be argued. What he did was to reorient
management and employees and brought them into CA firstly, so that CA for the first
time in probably 30 or 40 years and maybe since the Rogers Act,
began to function as a bureau sharing resources, staff, management philosophy,
and becoming a global looking organization encompassing both US domestic as well as overseas
functions. That was a big change.
Q:
This was supported, enthusiastically I presume, with all of the ramifications
of management and integration by Barbara Watson. Were you now the deputy
director?
SOMERVILLE: Oh, yes, long before.
Q:
When did you actually become executive director of the Bureau oConsular Affairs?
SOMERVILLE: It was about 1971, somewhere in
that neighborhood.
Q:
And Barbara came on when?
SOMERVILLE: In 1968.
Q:
So you had at least three years of experimentation.
SOMERVILLE: Apprenticeship. The change in the
management of the Passport Office was not universally embraced. Political
forces on the Hill, in particular, were very unhappy at the thought of a
"careerist" going into the job. The Foreign Service wasn't
universally enthusiastic about the idea of getting into that sort of thing. I
think it was accepted primarily on the thesis that it was consular and was
therefore not really relevant to other things being done in the State
Department.
Q:
Or wouldn't use resources that were needed in other areas?
SOMERVILLE: Yes, and there were other
concerns, too. The Passport Office hiring system was generally to hire people
at the base, not as professionals, to train, promote and develop them and
finally they became officers and some were damn good. There was no exam entry
comparable to the Foreign Service. The State Department by and large was
bifurcated with most serious positions being held by the Foreign Service,
domestically and all positions abroad, except Foreign Service National
positions. There was no Civil Service assignment abroad at all. There were very
few interims, like FSRs, which included security and
very specialized activities.
Q:
Not even to make them stronger and more experienced througtraining
of a sort?
SOMERVILLE: None. From the departmental
personnel policy standpoint there were prohibitions. For example, a Foreign
Service officer who didn't want to go around the world any more was prohibited
from converting into the Civil Service. A Civil Service officer could apply for
lateral entry but he wouldn't get it unless he was lucky enough to be a Wristonee or under a Hays program or some special program
that was blessed. In the normal run of the mill to and fro year after year a
civil servant could not cross the line into the Foreign Service nor could a Foreign
Service officer cross the line back into the Civil Service.
Q:
We had a tremendous need of personnel at the end of World War II.
SOMERVILLE: Right. And that was what brought
the Wristonee program but not the normal Civil
Service program. There was one other, but it was very oriented to employees
already in the State Department and I can't think of the name of it but it was
patterned after the navy.
Q:
Bill Macomber's Mustang program, which I think still existtoday.
SOMERVILLE: That was more or less oriented
towards staff corps.
Q:
We needed more people but we needed the right people who would bcompetitive for jobs and hopefully for professionalism.
And it worked.
SOMERVILLE: Well, there is very little
continuity over the years itechniques
for meeting overseas staffing requirements.
Q:
And this is your job.
SOMERVILLE: You went from a Wriston program that was deemed successful and then deemed
a failure. After it was deemed a failure, the Department bumped along for a few
years and came up with the Hays program which initially was for Foreign Service
staff, to recreate a strong Foreign Service staff, recognizing that the
broadening of the Foreign Service officer corps to cover consular and
administration was really so resisted that it couldn't work. And the Hays
program failed because you were creating a two class society.
I
have to tell you that Barbara Watson was dead set against the Hays program. She
saw it as parallel to her experience in the black community. You had the water
workers and then you had the carriers of water. The carriers of water analogous
to blacks were the staff people. Even though this would have given her in the
consular corps access to a lot more talent she needed, she did not support the
staff conversion program, the Hays program, because it was a two class system.
Q:
And you were under instructions to implement it as a StatDepartment
executive director.
SOMERVILLE: I was on both sides of the camp.
Q:
How did this play out?
SOMERVILLE: Well, one paid lip service to Caesar
and one does in thhalls and behind the doors what one
has to do.
Q:
Because you also were against a two class system?
SOMERVILLE: We have to separate this by time
a little bit, Bill. My primary role in flogging the system to get conversions
was before coming to CA. It was in the A bureau and M, and that constellation
that serviced CA, budget and fiscal, personnel and all that. In that context I
had a relationship with the Hays program. When I moved to CA, I was the CA
person. My relationship with Wayne Hays and his staff became one primarily of
gaining support for consular interest issues, whether it was budgetary or not.
Now Wayne Hays was both House administration and foreign affairs committee. So,
he was a king pin in congress and he was important for us. My relationship with
him had a lot to do with containing and controlling Frances Knight. He became a
primary power and influence when it came to doing that.
Q:
And that dominated all other issues in the beginning,
I presume?
SOMERVILLE: Yes. So, the issue of staff corps
and conversions, etc. in my relationship was a different one. I was more able
to carry out I guess policy stands that Barbara would have wanted and that was:
"Get us the talent, get them regular. Get me the junior officers. Don't
tell me to hire all the spouses. Don't tell me to hire the kids. Don't tell me
to hire the DOD overseas families. And, don't get me staff people. Give me FSOs solely." She did not seek to have Civil Service
people excursions, nor did she seek a Mustang kind of thing. She supported the
Mustang program primarily as an EEO thing, not as something functionally tied
to the consular staffing requirements abroad.
She
recognized what they had to be, to be the most effective in their jobs. They
had to be respected in the mission, literate, capable of analyzing issues and
drafting, because when she arrived she found as a result of the kinds of
staffing patterns that had taken place prior to her arrival, a lot of consular
officers, in fairness, were not competitive. They were adequate to stamp a visa
or issue a passport, but they couldn't carry on an analytical conversation.
They had no local contacts that would be useful to the mission in terms of
information gathering or information spreading. They had no public diplomacy
sense at all.
Q:
And maybe a chip on their shoulder to a degree where it made iworse.
SOMERVILLE: They tended to isolate
themselves. There is no questioabout that.
Q:
Well, there was a mass of people affected by this over severayears,
so it wasn't just like turning a clock on and off. No way.
SOMERVILLE:
That is correct and they were confronted year after year with the proposal that
they merge with their brothers and sisters in the admin function, who likewise
were seen as pencil counters and bean counters and floor washers, etc. The
admin folks had a very low reputation. There was very little movement from
admin or consular into any other endeavor in the State Department. There was
very little movement to senior management positions except in those fields.
There was very little cross over.
There
is another aspect that has to go in the deck and that is that the situation was
one in which both the admin folks and the consular folks maximized the use of
their own jargon, their own tools, to create a mystic which gave them some
prestige and protection from inroads.
Q:
And got maybe better promotions in some ways. I remember Barbara Watson's
insistence that in addition to equal or better promotion rates, there be other
outside signs of the equality and importance in foreign affairs of consular
work.
SOMERVILLE: Well, that's another discussion.
What we had was the entering of an era in which we created a parallel to what
is now to be found unconstitutional in the private sector. That is, we
approached the idea of quota systems as the only way we could crack the egg,
which was, I think, the thinking in the private sector. By
looking at the number of senior and mid level positions that were important to
the Department and to begin to demand a proportion of those, a specific
percentage.
To
be successful we did all kinds of crazy things. We went over to Frances Wilson
in the EB bureau, Economic and Commercial Bureau, and said, "Frances, you
and we have to fight publicly over a number of these principal officerships and other things in order for either one of us
to get a decent bottom line." So, we engaged in crossed memos and in great
conflict in meetings before the authorities could make decisions, thereby
carving out a specific piece of the pie for each of us.
Q:
Now, Ron, if you would like to stop this chronological pattern, keeping with
personnel and personnel management issues, or do you want to stop and come back
to it later in our interview?
SOMERVILLE: Let me come forward in time.
There are two things that I think might be worth putting on the record. One is
some evolutionary kinds of things in management and the other is a little bit
on automation, mechanization process and that sort of thing. They tend to get
together later on.
When
we arrived in CA, as previously mentioned, there was no bureau structure. There
was nothing. There was an aftermath of an attempt to dissolve and recreate free
standing entities for visa operations, passport operations and what they called
federal security operations consisting of federal benefits and service abroad
to Americans in trouble. There was no budget entity, no personnel entity, no
management philosophThere was nothing.
However, what we found is that there was an interest in automation and modern
technology that would assist in a vast workload and tremendous accelerations in
the increasing amount of workload with the changes in the visa line in 1968,
with the increase of travel by Americans abroad and need for passport services
and special consular services abroad at the missions.
As
a result when we arrived we found that in the Passport Office we had the most
modern technology in the entire State Department. It was punch paper tape, flexawriters, and it connected to the only mainframe
computer the State Department had, an IBM 360, that was acquired on the
justification of passport name check operations. That was the first mainframe
computer acquisition for the State Department.
Q:
Nothing to do with foreign affairs.
SOMERVILLE: Nothing. Well, I have to tell you
that I do consulting work now on information technology. Today, if you are a political officer assigned abroad and are sitting at your
desk your tools are essentially as they were 25 years ago. You don't yet have a
desktop. You can't consult with a colleague at the next post in creation of a
document. There is no collaborative work possible. You can shoot documents
physically around, but you can't collaborate in real time as you can
domestically here. I work in a work group and we do all of our work at home on
documents through the Internet.
Q:
Is that security, money or attitude problems as managed by thState
Department?
SOMERVILLE: All of the above. USIA has a
semblance. They are essentially not concerned about security primarily. They
are out there being seen and want to be seen.
Anyway,
what we found was that we had a paper punch operation in passports where
information was created on a piece of tape with holes in it, and was carried to
a machine that produced things automatically. We had the beginning of that sort
of thing in the visa operations for name checks where they were poking tapes
overseas into a communication terminal that was carrying the message back to
this single computer and getting a name check and sending back a response.
Q: We even have that in the Consular Training Segment of
the ForeigService Institute as an example of what not
to do.
SOMERVILLE: I saw the flexawriter
over there. So, although there wasn't a central management structure, there was
a microcosm of work simplification, automation orientation, mechanization
sensitivity both in the Visa Office and the Passport Office. But they were not
tied together. There was no communication back and forth between the two. There
was Frances Knight, and the Foreign Service side didn't concern itself with the
other side. The Visa Office was significantly Foreign Service. There was no
cross communication. When it was attempted it was stifled. People who showed
disloyalty and dealt with the head office, CA, were headless soon if they were
in the Passport Office and found to be dealing with the enemy. I had to save
more than one senior officer who was found to be dealing with us in the bureau
on bureau issues. They were simply PNGed
We
put some [of the Passport Office] in Visa, some in CA and OCS; moved a couple
of them outside the bureau entirely because they were very vulnerable to being
besmirched by Frances.
Back to my point. There was an attitude toward mechanization. An attitude towards automation that didn't exist anywhere else in
the State Department. That was very refreshing. We continued after the
beginning of the reconstitution of the bureau with the separate entities for a
period of several years until Frances retired. Upon her retirement we
centralized mechanization from Visa and from Passport. And, you know some of
the problems that caused. I think you might have been there at the time. There
were civil servants who had long been involved in things and developed
proprietary attitudes that had to change.
Q:
Also, within the Department there had begun a power center in the
Administration's new focus on general automation that had some definitional
problems with the work in CA.
SOMERVILLE: We had significant philosophical
problems in the Department to automation as to whether it had to be done all
centrally by the central automation shop or whether the functional areas such
as CA could create and implement their own programs. That battle is still going
on. It will never end. There is really no resolution. There is no one way for
this reason, Bill: Applications development can best be done close to the
application sight, and that is CA in and visa and
passports operations. However, that has to fit into a larger scheme for
economy, for integration into a larger entity. The larger entity's requirements
have to be built into the applications development process. How do you best
assure that that happens? Then you eventually get down to personalities and
organizational relationships. There is nothing scientific about it at all. It
is getting them to work together. Now you get into power relationships.
Q:
And money, too. These are costly.
SOMERVILLE: These are very costly and CA
typically, because of its unique relationship outside the loop of normal
congressional links in the State Department, has links to the Senate and House
judiciary committees. No other part of the State Departments links to those two
committees. I will be very cynical and say no member serving on the Senate or
House judiciary committee can go abroad without the hook on the State
Department that gives them access to justification to travel abroad. This is
very cynical, but I am going to tell you something. Over time it is important.
And the same thing is true of staffers.
One
of the things we did early in the game, Bill, and you recall this, was to
create the Consular Conference, a kind of traveling road show, in which we
would go around the world and take senior staff and technical people to talk
about what is happening in headquarters and the field and get them talking
together. We always took with us our OMB examiners and our staffers from the
Senate and House judiciary committees, and eventually appropriations
committees. Now, to do that, sometimes I had to pay the travel of the
congressional travelers because their staff budgets would not support the
travel. So, we paid their travel for them to come and bring us the message from
the Hill. It worked wonders.
Q:
And this was fairly well understood by one and all overseas. They sometimes
wondered, because maybe they weren't always told as honestly and as up forward,
what the semi-devious reason was for the conference. But, the conferences were
indeed were valid. It was a most valid program.
SOMERVILLE: This was true. There was a
tendency overseas to see the value of the conference in terms of what they
gained at that level. A better understanding of policy operations and the
background of what they had seen happen is helpful and it is hard to measure
that. They couldn't see at all the benefit that was gained by entertaining
folks from outside the work sphere of the State Department. And, yet, to get
the budgets we had to have, to get support on legislation, it was important for
these people to understand that the folks out there needed their support. It seemed
to work.
There
was a symbioses involved in the process. We had created what later became known
as the Consular Package, and we will talk about that in specific terms, which
included a raft of statistical analytical information which depicted workloads,
processes, staffing and other resource related items post by post, mission by
mission, worldwide. The use of that accumulated
information, analysis based thereon and global statistical summaries depended
upon credibility. To a great extent we gained credibility for that product by
having the users, the consumers were really not us although they helped us do
the analytical work, but the marketing use of the tool was even more important.
That demanded credibility. By taking the OMB staffers, having committee
staffers from appropriations, foreign relations and judiciary committees out,
to hear us talk about how vital it was that it be accurate and not be fluff,
that the numbers be sound, vetted and staffed throughout the embassy and the
posts so that everybody was on the same sheet of paper. They became more and
more impressed. These were credible documents, credible requirements and they
needed to have appropriations support.
Q:
And none of the consular sections, like many government agencies, needed money
for weapons, etc., but in fact needed resources to serve people. People, constituents, getting passports, getting visas for
relatives to come to the U.S. All real-life, vote related,
appropriated resources.
SOMERVILLE: That's right. It brought them up
against the only portion of a 25,000 person institution that costs $5 billion a
year that directly touches them and their constituents. By advertising the fee
collections and the amount we put into the Treasury, it became less painful for
them to appropriate the money because they could show their colleagues an
offset which was an income to the Treasury.
We
exercised good stewardship in increasing those fee levels which had not been
done before. When we arrived, we found the fee income was far less than costs.
Working with OMB directly we developed a system to analyze services in terms of
costs, increase fee schedules close to cost recovery, which again supported OMB
and the appropriating committees in having to come to give us more money. It
convinced them that we had costed and covered all the
fees and all the costs we could.
Q:
In language and style that they understood.
SOMERVILLE: Bill, we even gave them clearance
on the schemes before we issued them, partially for ego reasons and partially
for involvement reasons.
Q:
And, you knew it was going to be a great success.
SOMERVILLE: Well, we knew that when we
changed fees we were going to have great public outcry. We doubled the IV,
immigrant visa, fees two and a half times and we were
accused of subverting CSCE (Council on Security and Cooperation in Europe) by Larry Eagleburger
because we had done something that prohibited the free crossing of
international borders and he held us up for one year.
Q:
It was constitutionally required. Those immigrants had the right to this visa,
why should they pay for it. I said this to Barbara Watson one day.
SOMERVILLE: You did?
Increasing
that fee, by and large, did more for us on the Hill and OMB than any other fee
change we made, because these were immigrants. Other fees, that affected
American citizens, caused a little different attitude. Anyway, Larry Eagleburger was assistant secretary for EUR and he
prevented us for one whole year from implementation of alleged allegations that
this subverted CSCE. Now, who is right? I can't say. That was a damn important
treaty in those days and we were the advocates of it.
In
any event, the system that we had developed for placing fees more closely in
alignment with actual costs was such that OMB asked us to teach INS how to do
it, because INS was collecting very little money [for the services it gave]..
We tried our best, sending our guys over to talk to them, but they got no
where. INS for another 15 years charged token fees and saw no value in
cooperating with OMB and the congress in collecting fees and forewent the
opportunities that we seized on in building goodwill and convincing the
congress of good stewardship and giving them something that they could use for
their colleagues to get them to stop bitching about giving the State Department
an extra $20 million for automation for consular operations. They are paying it
back.
Q:
Could you bring us up to date as to whether the INS fee ianywhere
near costs today?
SOMERVILLE: INS, after being beaten over the
head year after year after year, finally did institute a new fee program maybe
a decade ago now, about the time I retired. They did it, however, by bum-set.
Q:
What?
SOMERVILLE: They sat on their bums and used
manpower utilization data derived for budgetary and other purposes and did a
little sampling and used it to support a theory on costs that in turn produced
a fee schedule. It looked fine from the outside because it was an increase.
However, anyone who has watched the results over the decade has seen them get
into deep, deep, deep political, legal - and in one case criminal - trouble,
because once having collected the fees they misutilized
them. This was in contrast to the State Department where the fees collected all
went to Treasury as miscellaneous receipts and recorded as income for the US
government which we could show as an off set. They achieved statutory authority
to retain certain fees and they had such a weak internal management control
system that they couldn't control where the money was going. And we went into
legalization, you remember that one. Funds that were collected for legalization
were supposed to be used only for that purpose. But they ended up buying
vehicles with them. I don't believe it was ever proven to be stealing of funds.
Rather it was a mis-accounting, misuse and abuse. I
believe someone went to jail because of it.
Q:
Did we ever change our system of turning over all the fee fundto
the Treasury?
SOMERVILLE: During my time in CA, Bill, I was
encouraged by some to do two things. One was to centralize global consular
resources in an earmarked appropriations context, in CA, which CA would then
dole out to the posts or geographic bureaus in terms of operations dollars,
salary dollars, FTE positions, staff, etc. The other was to come up with a
scheme that would permit us to have direct access to fees collected. Instead of
them going to the Treasury, the fee receipts would be retained by the State
Department.
I
resisted that, however, for about 15 years. The reason I did was that I felt
the success of consular operations abroad required integration with the
mission. The minute you make a reservation of resources, you are outside the
loop. You are no longer important. You are no longer considered. If you have
overloads as we had highly seasonal workloads, you can't call upon the mission
for shot infusions of resources. You can't detail staff across from other
sections. You begin to see the loss of even junior officer assignments. The
plain fact of life is you cannot operate a post from Washington. You cannot do it. The post
administration has got to be local. So, I resisted the idea of centralization
and earmarking into CA.
We
came out of S&E [salary and expenses], which is the generic appropriation
for the State Department. We competed within the mission then for a proper
allocation and we used all kinds of things to do that. Leadership support from
the Hill or OMB or support internally or getting prominent folks up topside. We
had Barbara Watson, a prominent black female, who could only be bruised so much
because she had unique qualities.
The
accounting for fees as a trust in the State Department, versus going to
Treasury, I resisted also. I felt that in fact if we did that, we would be
taken out of the appropriation and wouldn't be appropriating but living on
fees. Fees, certainly for visas and passports, are variable over time. You may
say, "Yes, but they have gone up traditionally," and they have. But
travel patterns change with world economic conditions, currency exchange rates
due to terrorism, etc. There are all kinds of things that caused changes in the
rates of travel, and there was income derived from passports and visas. We had
constant costs. We had base costs. If we went into a fee based support system
and we went into the overloads, we would have no place to go.
Q:
And you would have to prove that the price spent was the following....
SOMERVILLE: We could only change income by
price. So, we continued to depend upon on specific appropriation for the State Department
as a budget base. About five years ago they needed money to implement a machine
readable visa world wide which would take a significant automation investment.
There was no real hope of getting an appropriations increase to support it at
the time.
Q:
Did they need that by legislation?
SOMERVILLE: Well, they needed the money. In
order to get the money they came up with a proposal which essentially assured
congress that the monies flowing into miscellaneous receipts would continue
unabated, unaffected by the change that was going to be proposed. Therefore,
Treasury could project this as a source of income to the government. They
convinced congress that it was appropriate because of the increased cost for
the machinery of the visa to charge the visa applicant an additional amount for
that machine readable visa, which gave the visa applicant, the future user, certain benefits. These included being able to get through
custom checks and border checks routinely and more quickly. It gave us all
kinds of benefits, but it gave them benefits too.
Q:
Was security the principal benefit, the driving force?
SOMERVILLE: There was a package of
beneficiaries. The system was a beneficiary in the sense that the labor
required to produce the machine readable visa was not to exceed the labor
required to produce a routine visa. The security enhancements were a plus, in
terms of internal vulnerabilities, fraud perpetrated by officers or Foreign
Service nationals, which has always been there although not talked about much. It
is a serious concern in a number of parts of the world. We have found at times
the whole visa section to be culpable. External control in
terms of the inviolability of the visa once put into the foreign passport.
Border control points could more readily determine when there had been
manipulation, changed visas, substituted pictures, etc. The fields that were
automated were more assuredly read by automatic readers at the ports of entry
in terms of getting clearance as a person came through. There were many beneficiaries.
I think the driving point was security.
Q:
And don't forget the word that goes with it,
terrorism.
SOMERVILLE: Terrorism, yes. Well, this was
ongoing. We had a little problem with the sheik in an African country being
issued a visa....
In
this same time frame, because of those external drivers, you began to get money
appropriated with the FBI for the creation of the first automatic fingerprint
system. This was contemplated in the machine readable visa because it was
anticipated that eventually the machine readable visa would be tied into an
automatic data base that the FBI had just begun to develop. Now, it took about
seven or eight years for the FBI to finish its work. It is now in operation.
We
are now running fingerprints from the missions into the automated data base. We
are designing systems now that will electronically transmit the fingerprint as
a part of the lookup system. That is being done in Mexico as a pilot test.
Q:
You have come now in your interview to the point of present-daknowledge
and sophistication that we have reached, is that
right?
SOMERVILLE: Well, yes. Technology has emerged
that will make that possible in a cost-effective manner. You have been able to
do it for years and has been done in Los Alamos and Sandy and places like that where they
read the iris of the eyeball, the fingerprint, and do all kinds of interesting
things. Today, because the cost of technology is down, money it is no longer an
issue. We also had the problem Mexico followers are well aware of: the
millions and millions and millions of border crossing cards. You can't eyeball
a document. You can electronically process a document and get a fingerprint
check immediately, but you can't do much beyond that. The traffic queues now
will line up for hours and hours. Now, with NAFTA ( North
American Free Trade Agreement) you have trucks and vehicle traffic like you
have never had before, and you have to be able to get them through.
Q:
And you can't issue pre-clearances like you do for airplanes.
SOMERVILLE: Right. We convinced congress that
while not reducing the fee income projected by Treasury for consular
operations, we could fairly establish a new fee for the machine readable
passport even though by treaty we agree with foreign countries to waive
non-immigrant fees bilaterally. We have done this with practically every
country in the world. We could implement a machine readable document without
violating those treaties, without reducing the flow of money to the Treasury,
because it was a fee that had not been charged before, and that the sums we
could charge that legitimately related to cost would in turn support the cost
of the automation going into it.
We
would not collect money for American salaries and permanent costs and
buildings. We would collect money associated with automation of the process.
That was the camel's nose under the tent. Congress agreed. Machine readable
visa fees are collected, deposited to Treasury, credited to a trust account in
the State Department and available for general support, with some specific
earmarking for visa automation. So, we have now access to fees very
specifically, very pointedly, under very controlled conditions, using
accounting systems that account for their stewardship and operating under an
annual stewardship report to congress, which is how we keep the system honest.
Q:
And not questioned on the Hill anymore?
SOMERVILLE: As a matter of fact it has worked
so well that a new fee was established for domestic passport operations for
expedited services. If you now go to a passport agency and apply for a passport
you are going to pay, I think, $45. If you want to pay an extra $25 or $35 you
can have a guarantee that you will get your passport in 24 hours.
Q:
That was attacked on television the other night.
SOMERVILLE: I'm sure it will be.
Q:
Yes. Why should I have to pay for a service like that, that I aalready paying for?
SOMERVILLE: You have opened a can of worms.
Let me digress. In the first part of our interview I mentioned a special handling
fee that Frances Knight had instituted which gave her access to money. There
are elements of the reconstitution of the special handling fee in the fee that
is now charged for special services. Back in time I had an analysis done,
including review by the GAO and by the survey and investigation group of the
House appropriations committee, of the relationship between increased cost and
rapid service. We found the difference to be less then 50 cents. We documented
the fact that the operating procedures of the Passport Office were such that
uniformly, whether or not a person had paid an extra fee when backlogs
occurred, the first procedure upon opening the mail was to see the departure
date of the traveler and if the departure date was within ten days it was
automatically slipped to the front of the line. The State Department continued
that practice because it makes sense. So, I have great difficulty seeing the
basis for a $35 fee for special handling, although I have not seen any numbers.
In any event, that fee was established and it is now a source of income and the
funds are available.
The
first two years' income was substantially dedicated to the Passport Office
automation to come up with a new passport. The funds otherwise flow into a
capital improvement fund for information and technology support in the
department across the board, as do the machine readable visa fees. So, now
there are two fees, the funds of which are retained by the State Department.
They are re-authorized every year. They are appropriated from the trust fund
not Treasury receipts. So, the same congressional oversight is there. It is
just that they are not drawn from generic Treasury funds. Now, it gave the
department an infusion of cash which it otherwise would not be able to get.
Q:
And it is a service-oriented fee, which we understand.
SOMERVILLE: There is nothing wrong with this
as long as the stewardship in accounting and utilization is vigilant, not like
INS. I think as long as the judiciary committees are involved in the oversight,
and the authorizing and appropriations committees continue to demand their
reports, it won't be distorted.
Q:
Does the oversight take care of intervention? Let's face it,
it is often somebody doing a favor for a constituent, or the consul general
taking care of that call from the president, via the ambassador. That type of
intervention often settles all emergency cases, or most of them. But, now that
you have a fee that you can tell the person, "Well, if you pay $35 more
that will take care of the intervention...." Or doesn't that exist?
SOMERVILLE: I think probably the existence of
the passport expedite fee is of value to congressional service staffers because
the applicant is shown right at the time of application that there is a way you
can be sure,. "Here it is, pay your money."
As long as Passport delivers on that, it is better for congress because they
get fewer calls.
There
is another aspect of fees perhaps worth documenting that is going on now and
that is in the passport context. Because telephone workloads are terribly
consuming, because they are a constant source of irritation to the public,
there is no way without going to free 800 numbers that you can stack the calls
properly. Social Security attempted to do that with free lines and ended up spending
several hundred million dollars a year and had a devil of a time getting away
from it. In the passport context, a contractor was engaged to develop a system
of an automated telephone tree response pattern responding to the most
frequently asked questions. In addition, a contractor was engaged to handle the
telephone calls that were in person queries. A differential fee was
established. The in-person queries now, if you call the line, you will pay
$1.05 a minute, for talking to someone about where is my passport, etc. You
will pay 35 cents a minute to call into the telephone tree and play with the
computer by pushing such-and-such a number.
Both
of those systems have generated a lot of controversy. The response at the State
Department has been, "Okay, if this is unacceptable, congress, give us 500
positions and $50 million and we will recreate what we had before; that is,
staff to handle the telephones. Those people are now issuing passports. If you
want us to do that, that is fine with us, but you have to give us the money
first." And, of course, congress is not in the mood to give away money.
So, despite a lot of complaints and a number of the public feeling they are
being ripped off, the system is in place and the proceeds are maintained. Now, the proceeds generally only pay for the cost of that service.
It is a service, however, that was paid out of an appropriated base up until
the system was designed and implemented, so it released funds for other things.
It also does another thing. It keeps disruptions from coming into passport
agencies.
Q:
I have to presume that a lot of what you have done, and had tdo,
was in reaction to something that happened in the real world.
SOMERVILLE: There is no question about that.
Q:
Would you say that most of those things that you have singled out, particularly
reacting with the computer, reacting with modernization of an automated system
of some sort, was more to advance planning on your part, or events that just
took place?
SOMERVILLE: Both. It is difficult to get
funds on theories. You need to be able to develop a describable need that can
be used to justify the acquisition of anything that costs money. So, there has
to be something happening out there, not just a theory of something happening,
in my experience, before OMB and congress will respond. There are 20 other
demands for that money.
We
are going to need to address the internal management philosophies of the State
Department in relation to funding and staffing because the battles that we
fought were more severe internally than they were externally.
Q:
I sense that management issues you faced were quite different than your
successors face and they have a different base from which they now work. No
one, I would argue, "internally" cared much about a consular package.
If, I'm right, all those things came from you and the few others that thought
that way.
SOMERVILLE: As I said when I arrived there
was no base for anything. There was very little knowledge base by resources and
what was being consumed. They were all buried in the budgets of geographic
bureaus and posts and various places. The competition internally, within the
State Department, was such that we had a very difficult time pressing our needs
successfully. Consular issues are generally not of great importance to a
cabinet officer, unless they get him in trouble. Unless there
is an American in a Mexican jail being tortured. Unless there is a
constituent has a visa applicant who can't get a visa or a refugee who got
kicked out or a passport that didn't get issued, they didn't give a darn. As a
result the consular activity was doing less well than necessary to support the
functions.
In
looking at the internal situation it became quite apparent that no matter what
we did, dealing solely internally wouldn't make a great deal of difference.
Even if we were able to generate increased appropriations flow, the commissions
that were paid on that increased flow were very severe. Very little ended up at
the trickle down level where the rubber meets the road. Even if it was
appropriated as an increase in good faith, and was distributed by the
Department to the geographic bureaus and down to the missions, the mission
demands were such that distortions occurred there. In casting about for a
product that has credibility, provides an analytical tool to ourselves, because
frankly we didn't have the foggiest idea of whether Mexico had too many or too few resources,
we had no knowledge of what procedural flow was in place in Mexico City versus Paris. There was little procedural
control, little constancy, little sharing across line, except as an assigned
officer went from post to post and they could be very capricious because what
they remembered was often not the same kind of case. So, you had disruptions
caused by assignment change which were aided and abetted by the lack of a firm
procedural milieu.
There
was an officer who had no concept of how to engineer workload, analyze
workload, project workload, lead workload, develop proper work habits among
staff, etc. As we cast about we began to think about a scheme that would permit
us to go globally.
Q:
Who is we in this case?
SOMERVILLE: Probably yours truly and a
particular analyst at OMB. We got together and talked about how can we systematically portray what is going on in a way that
will influence all the people who have a vote in the process. And that begins
at the embassy or post and runs up through the assistant secretaries and
cabinet level, the comptroller, OMB and congress. We began thinking about a
packaging that would reflect something about each post. The best account item
we had was the fee schedule. It didn't represent necessarily clean cleavages in
the work but what it was was an accepted enumeration
of tasks that were supported by allocations of fees. Whether or not those
allocations were correct, which they weren't when we came on board, was less
relevant than that they had credibility externally. They had been alluded to as
being accurate. They supported the thesis to give them money because their
money is coming into the Treasury, etc.
So,
we started basically with items contained in the Foreign Service consular fee
list. We began to try to associate work effort with those tasks. What is
consumed to produce it. This tied in with our refinement
of the consular fee schedule because that became the basis of the consular
package. We had to be more accurate or we couldn't use it for analytical
purposes. We thought we couldn't do this from Washington and came up with a scheme that
involves the consular officer, who knows conditions, what it takes to produce a
visa, and it is different in every post. Even if we make it procedurally
parallel, the conditions, economically, societal, political, environmental,
work, staff, etc. that what it takes to produce a particular item will vary
greatly even within country.
So,
what we set about to do was to come up with a scheme that would permit us to
depict the primary consumers of resources, beginning with the fee schedule, and
after a year moving beyond that to things that were more clearly accountable
and meant something. There were a number of items in the fee schedule that
meant nothing in terms of manpower. We evolved from something that began
looking from the first enumeration of task, the fee schedule, to an enumeration
of tasks representing a product. It might be a jail visit,
correspondence, visas issued or denied, etc. We associated these with
work hours. We came up with a structural package.
I
mentioned earlier that we were involved in managerial devolution before it
became popular because we involved the consular officer at his desk in a
process of a re- orientation of how to look at work, at workload, at staff,
programming of the day's activities, the rhythm of staffing requirements, etc.
We
began to use the consular officer as a local manager, not just as a guy banging
out visas. We required that he involve his admin counselor and his DCM in the
process of validating what he anticipated, what he had done and what he
foresees for the future. This gave us a way around a real hard nut in the
Foreign Service. That is, the average tour abroad is three years or less. The
first year is spent settling in, the second year is spent working and the third
year is spent looking for the next assignment, when interest begins to wane.
There
was very inadequate bridging from manager to manager, stylistically, policy
wise, their understanding of the tools of the trade. There was very little
continuity at post. By using the kind of a system that we came up with for looking
at work and assessing work and projecting work based on past experience and
current events, we were beginning to create a bridge so that the transition
from manager to manager became less traumatic and workload proceeded less
encumbered by idiotic change and more encumbered by consistency.
I
think this was better understood, even by the local work force who participated
in many cases in the workload analysis. I think the approach facilitated
re-engineering efforts which you now call re-engineering and that is dissecting
tasks into components and trying to figure out where they work and in what
sequence.
Q:
It tells the manager quite a bit.
SOMERVILLE: Well, it gave them a way to look
at the job that I think perhaps was not as much in his mind before. As we
developed this package of methodology reviewing the tasks, the tools it took to
produce the tasks, we began to show high top support for the process. We began
to communicate the credibility that must be included within top management at
State. The competition for resources in the State Department had been such that
the consular activity was always a pain in the neck to top management. And, top
management could never be confident that the investments that they were making
made a difference. Top management in many cases had a view of the consular
manager of being an idiot who didn't really know what he wanted. He didn't
understand it.
And,
in many cases they were right. These were not managers, these were technical
guys who were damn good at adjudicating a visa, at taking care of problems with
local authorities, but couldn't manage worth a dime because they had never been
taught. Never been given the tools or orientated to how to look at work, not as
a curse but something that was there that you engineer and worked with.
Q:
How did Barbara use this device?
SOMERVILLE:
The first use of the device was internally because through the creation and
initial implementation of the device we involved the department, the geographic
bureaus and posts as well as the comptroller and Personnel Office in a process
of inspection and examination and a production of data that reflected, for
better or for worse, what was going on. It helped the Comptroller to provide us
the resources we needed, but his problem was satisfying many customers. It
gained us a better understanding, beginning with the counselor for
administration at the embassy level in the mission. We required the DCM to sign
off on the package so we made sure at least he knew the words and had some
accountability. So, the benefits initially were obtained within the State
Department, not externally.
Now,
when it came to packaging the State Department's annual budget and getting it
through the review processes at OMB, we had by the time it reached OMB coopted them into the process of the design of the tool,
the initial operation of the tool, the analytical techniques applied to the
tool and good exposure to our stewardship to making sure that the alleged
credibility was reasonable.
Q:
Was there any other element in the department that was using anything
comparable?
SOMERVILLE: No. It was pretty primitive. For
20 years the consular package was the only systematic compilation in which you
could look backward and forward. The only one in which there was routinely
required the participation at the operating level at the post in workload
analysis, anticipation and forecasting, etc. It wasn't universally embraced,
Bill. Many people in the field fought like hell.
Then
we got into semi-annual and quarterly updates. We were lucky because the Visa
Office had always had statistical reporting of a certain kind, so we just snuck
in and wrote on what was already there and accepted in the visa context. Over
the years we began to flesh it out a little more and a little more. We had battles
with the Visa Office because we were corrupting their reporting. They had to
have this reporting in a certain way and at a certain time and it couldn't be
adjusted because it would violate the law or abrogate the intent of the law. It
was a sacred sort of thing. But, this served the purpose of letting us go
beyond an annual compilation to a validation technique. It never hurts to let
the client know out there that it isn't the next guy who arrives a year later
that is going to have to account for it, he is going
to account for something every four months.
To
digress a moment, you have to understand the cycling of the process a little
bit. A workload analysis budget forecast is inherently old by the time you are
saying it is the truth. When you begin the process you are at least eight
months from the conclusion of a fiscal year that you are going to say was fact.
You are going to report that three things were done in that year. Well, hell,
the year is only one-fourth over when you are beginning to say that. Then you
are going to say that this year we are going to do something with a certain
volume of work that is so far down the road but by the time you are sending it
to congress it is old. Not only is it old, but the real facts of the prior
year's activities become known and if they are in variance with what you are
sending forward, the starting point of everything you have calculated is wrong.
We
got into a periodic updating of the process in order that when we went to OMB,
before it resulted in a president's budget in January, we had valid
information. We would go in and say, "Okay, you got the forecast and here
we stand in the validating update in between." Sometimes it would be
denied, but usually it confirmed. If it didn't confirm we threw it in the waste
basket.
Now,
this got us through the State Department process because they were no longer
competing against fluff. They were looking at things that were alleged to be
rather firm, rather precise, they were measurable. There were predictable
consequences if you ignored them. More importantly, the guys outside, the guys
that we had recruited from the congress and those from OMB, were saying,
"What does the package say? Tell us what the analysis shows." So we
created the external force that caused the State Department to say, "We
support it," because we coupled the external support with not too heavily
veiled threats from external realities to earmark appropriations if the State
Department didn't come up with a scheme to probably depict the consular
requirement.
And,
of course, if there was anything the Department didn't want, it was an
earmarking of the appropriations, and properly so. They needed the flexibility
to use money where they needed it. But, without those kind
of potential threats in mind, we wouldn't have gotten the kind of support that
we did.
Q:
Ron, as you talk through the consular package, one element that you have not
included - maybe because it isn't as numbers-oriented as visas and passports -
is protection of Americans and general services to Americans, such as federal
benefits. All of these are very sensitive and very costly. How did that fare?
SOMERVILLE: We leaned more on verbal analysis
in protection and welfare and services to Americans. That is, descriptions of conditions
in local jails, the amount of narcotic activity that was going on, and local
conditions that made a difference. If a protection and welfare case in one
environment took 50 times as long as somewhere else we could handle that in a
text because we had both a text and numbers. In the special consular stuff
generally we did not publish it externally, a raft of statistical data. That
was better addressed in a narrative context.
Q:
We produced "Warnings to Americans."
SOMERVILLE: We had that. But, the end product
was an overlay globally, a summary geographic bureau by geographic bureau, a
summary country by country, and under that was a serious document on each post.
The entire compendium was perhaps two or three inches. Now you could live with
the summary of maybe two dozen pages or you had a compendium in a full book. We
made sure that the full book got to the Hill, to the staffers and to OMB, even
though officially they got summaries. In the detail sheet for each post you
will not find a lot of narrative typically talking about things that justify
themselves statistically, visas and passports generally. Your text is more
devoted to the softer things that can't be quite as quantified.
Q:
Such as hostage taking, the shooting down of airplanes with Americans on them,
things that made the paper and are pretty explicit in terms of services.
SOMERVILLE: Exactly. We would publish the
number of guys in jail, increases in arrest rates, etc. During this time,
remember, other things are happening to reduce the significant impact of
certain kinds of activity. We negotiated bilateral treaties with most of the
countries of the world now in which we exchange prisoners. We agreed that a
Russian who is convicted in New York will be sent back to Russia to serve his time and they agree
that Americans convicted in Moscow will come back here to serve their
time.
Q:
Even a Frenchman.
SOMERVILLE: Even a Frenchman. And so we have
reduced some of thosworkloads by other arrangements.
Now
the package became useful for all sorts of things. When an ambassador went to
post he got this stuff as part of his orientation. When a principal officer
went out he came around and got the stuff. It was useful in briefing people on
the Hill who were going abroad.
Q:
Where is it today?
SOMERVILLE:
I think it plays the same role in that it is part of an environment in which a
consular manager is taught from the beginning that he has a responsibility to
analyze his processes, not merely arrive and do work. He has to project,
attempt to re-engineer, learn how to play within the bureaucratic enterprise.
When we arrived consular officers didn't know how to articulate what it was
they needed. And, when they could articulate it they didn't know where to do
it. The concept of building friends for future need, the symbioses of a
bureaucratic enterprise was there, but it was: 'I will trade you a visa for
something else'.
Q:
That still happens.
SOMERVILLE: Well, I can't really say. The idea that an entire work style, however, that involves visiting
the counselor for administration, and finding out where you can help him, and
visiting other members of the mission. There is a time to pay back and
you enlist the support. So, the package is still a part of [managing a consular
operation]. It encourages an attitude, way to approach work, way to approach
[colleagues]. It inculcates a better feeling; if I articulate it properly they
are going to respond. Now, we all know in resource allocation there is
favoritism. You go from post to post and one is working real hard and one is
losing, apparently. I think the consular managers have a stronger feeling that
there is less of that. So I think it kind of infuses the entire consular
operations.
Q:
It didn't go away, it got stronger and was actually
mimicked. The two people who led it, you and Barbara
Watson, as the first ones at it, have been substantiated. Management continues
the same forever there after. Or put another way, does the leader of Consular
Affairs now take the exact same positive attitude?
SOMERVILLE: The only diminution was, I
believe, a particular political appointee whose fate in a bureau was very bad,
who left under a black cloud, whose interests had nothing at all to do with...
***
Q:
Today is September 28, 1999. We are in the middle of talking
about some of the successors to Assistant Secretary of State for Consular
Affairs, Barbara Watson, in terms of whether they were supportive or not, and
to what degree. of the Consular Package.
SOMERVILLE: I was talking about one
particular assistant secretary who was not destructive but just totally
uninvolved. The result of being uninvolved is that you conduct yourself at
hearings and various activities in which you know nothing about the process,
allude to nothing authoritative, thereby diminish the
support that had been built for a process.
Q:
And, even worse, talked at length about the poor
service CA waproviding American citizens, under
certain conditions.
SOMERVILLE: I have heard about that. But, the
immediate successor to Barbara Watson, Lenny Walentynowicz,
a lawyer from Buffalo, had never had a significant
managerial job before joining the bureau. He was significantly driven
ideologically on immigration matters. He came on board and showed himself an
able student of the managerial processes that we had instituted and soon
learned that their external credibility meant that they would be useful to him
in terms of maintaining a resource base and a carefully crafted reputation of
adequate performance, thereby letting him pursue things that were of more
interest to himself.
He
became actively involved internally in advancing the interest of an analytical
approach to work analysis and resource planning. He carried that through OMB.
He comported himself well and learned the material he needed to learn for
hearings and under his direction the process was strengthened. It continued to
provide the department and congress and the public with all the benefits that
had been envisaged at its creation. He had the political sensitivity to
understand the value of continuing to involve congress and OMB in the process
in context elaboration of the process and reenforcement
of the process. He was very supportive.
Following
Walentynowicz we had the return of Barbara Watson for
a period, and she continued her solid support, advancing the interests of the
consular corps as an integrated professional organization.
Upon
her departure, Diego Asencio came on board as the
first senior FSO, as far as I can recall, to head the
Bureau of Consular Affairs. He actively, energetically, visibly supported any
process that could advance the Department's interest in supporting Consular
Affairs.
Q:
Including being certain that consular officers had arrived in full competition
for promotion and equality with all Foreign Service officers.
SOMERVILLE: True, and there is an interesting
evolution there Bill. With Barbara Watson you had a background that experienced
discrimination from birth. So, you had very strong drives to equalize and the
boot strap to bring a mistreated, in her eyes, abused and unappreciated group,
to full equality. Now, she was also active in promoting the EEO agenda,
probably more ethnically and racially than sexually, but she was there and very
much involved in the processes in the Department and externally that had
advanced the cause of EEO.
She
had been followed in her first "appearance" by the fellow from Buffalo who was ethnically Polish, who had
a number of the stereo typical views that might be expected. He had a feeling
that quota kinds of approaches to handling disadvantaged
groups was wrong, but he recognized that they were there and he fought
hard internally for the rights of the consular officer.
Q:
The famous third generation, if you will.
SOMERVILLE: Yes. He had an analogist
perspective but it was ethnically based. After Barbara's second
"appearance" Diego Asencio was the most
senior Hispanic in the Department. He had some elements of perspective that
were influenced by that. He felt that the time had arrived that consular
officers should be able to hold their heads as high as anyone. That they should
secure a full measure of assignments to the attractive positions, should aspire
to become ambassadors, etc. Now, these are not significantly different than
Barbara Watson's, but he was serving in a different time frame. He could look upon
a group that was more qualified. It had been enriched over a period of time. It
had gained respect. I guess consular officers picked up the baton and carried
it proudly.
Diego,
probably stylistically and personality-wise, had the strongest assets of any of
the assistant secretaries I served with. He could captivate an audience bent on
his destruction. He knew how to disarm them, how to massage their egos and was
canny enough to discern ahead of time what they needed and wanted, and led them
to believe that they would receive a reasonable measure of what they needed.
He
continued the same battles internally, however, he had
a modicum of success in some ways significantly greater than Barbara Watson's
or Lenny Walentynowicz's in that he was of the cloth.
He was successful as a Foreign Service officer and had been an ambassador. He
was highly regarded as a political officer even though, he, as Barbara Watson,
became a super consular officer. He never addressed himself to the substance of
consular work, to become an expert in it like a lawyer would be, and as Barbara
Watson did.
Q:
And as Walentynowicz did.
SOMERVILLE: Well, she had a more scholarly
approach. Lenny, I think, had a more ideologically driven perspective. Diego's great
mission was to preside over the reintegration of the Passport Office into the
State Department and into the consular management totality. He presided over Lory Lawrence's assignment, succeeding Frances Knight. He
had a style in reorganizing the bureau at that time that led to very heavy
employee involvement all the way down to the desk, to the clerk. There were
working groups and endless discussions. This was a very brilliant bureaucratic
tactic and encouraged cross talk. It opened up cross assignment potential. It
raised horizons. Within six months the bureau was thinking and being perceived
as a bureau, as an entity.
He
was able to create an environment that better met the aspirations of
particularly the non-involved passport folks, but also across the bureau. He
created certain centralized amalgams that facilitated the creation as a whole.
He centralized automation kinds of activities, and planning activities, and
anti-fraud activities, and policy activities, and public affairs activities. He
brought people from the constituent pieces into those centralized entities
which gave them a stake in a larger bureau view. Now, some of those perhaps
later were devolved back down to a lower level, nevertheless they continued to
maintain a central tie and a cordial relationship. So, Diego presided over a
new era in the bureau and a new era congressionally.
Q:
He had friends in congress.
SOMERVILLE: He and the chairman of the House
Foreign RelationCommittee were very close personal
friends.
Q:
He also had something else in his credentials which you failed tre-mention.
SOMERVILLE: What was that?
Q:
He had been a prisoner of a terrorist group.
SOMERVILLE: Yes, he had two unique
qualifications. His first assignment was as a consular officer in the Yucatan peninsula and he had visited jails
himself. Subsequently, as ambassador to Bogota, Colombia, he had been a captive.
Q:
And managed it brilliantly.
SOMERVILLE: Yes, and he wrote a book about
it. It was on the plane returning after his release that he was told he was going
to be assigned as assistant secretary for Consular Affairs. And, to his credit
he didn't run the other way. He carried on a liaison with the Mexican
government in terms of consular issues, the likes of which had never been seen
before or since. We created a cross border working group tantamount to being a
commission and created new border crossing documents. He was able to accept
some of the things the Mexicans felt essential to accept for political or other
reasons. He knew them and respected them and they felt better. He had probably
the strongest innate leadership skills of any assistant secretary, in fact,
almost anyone I worked with my entire career.
I
have to add that he was not universally loved. This is not a god figure. But,
from the standpoint of being a leader and involving people in the processes
that will affect them, his philosophy and approach were carried out very
effectively.
Q:
As we near the end of our discussion you have given us sort of a rundown of our
leaders, which is vital. You have given all the 129 million reasons why we
needed better leadership and how each of these had in their own way
contributed. You don't have many left to contribute to. I can't remember who
the present one is.
SOMERVILLE: The present head of CA is Mary
Ryan.
Q:
Why don't you just give us a quick summary of who were youleaders
through your retirement.
SOMERVILLE: Okay. Joan Clark succeeded Diego Asencio.
Q:
She was another career officer.
SOMERVILLE: She was a career officer from the
administration area. She had been ambassador to Malta, a deputy director general, an
executive director in the EUR Bureau, had a career stretching back to the
Berlin Airlift her initial assignment having been, I think, a cargo checker
standing on the runways in Berlin. She was staff corps. She suffered
life-long discomfort from a therm condition caused by
serving on the runway in Berlin. She could never become warm
enough. Like a permanent case of chill blains.
Q:
This can be hurtful.
SOMERVILLE: Yes. Anyway she had a very long
and illustrious career and was very highly regarded in the Foreign Service. She
had also been an assignment officer too for the administrative people.
Q:
How does she fit into Consular Affairs?
SOMERVILLE: Well, there was a vacancy [Asencio had been named ambassador to Brazil]. For whatever
reason Joan was available from her previous assignment. The Department
had a problem every time the job became unencumbered and that was that there
continued to be a faction outside the government that felt that that should be
politically encumbered. The White House has traditionally wanted to seize the
job for political appointees for policy and partisan political reasons.
There
are always considerations out there, that need to be satisfied by numbers and
the CA function, with all the fine things we say about how we have elevated its
stature, still doesn't count consistently for a whole lot as far as the main
line interests of the foreign policy establishment. The political interests are
primarily to keep the public happy. That results in every time the job is to be
vacant there is a great deal of consternation in the State Department in a
careful crafting of the lists of potential incumbents and selection of the
candidate.
Q:
And making sure that the candidate has all of the qualitieneeded
for that position.
SOMERVILLE: Absolutely. When Diego was coming
out there was obviously diverse interest in filling the job. Joan was female, a
highly respected professional, so she was immune from certain kinds of
limiters, shall we say.
Q:
She did have knowledge of Consular Affairs.
SOMERVILLE: She had been an ambassador and an
admin person at the highest levels. She knew the resources system, and that is
a principal concern. She knew the personnel assignment system, which is a
principal concern in running the consular operation. She had some familiarity
with automation having been in personnel when they automated a lot of personnel
processes. She had been supportive of the consular requirements when she was in
geographic bureaus. So, there were lots of reasons why she was more than a
suitable candidate.
Q:
Did she come forward into history with any particular qualities?
SOMERVILLE: Joan was probably more of a hands
on manager than most all of her predecessors. Her style of management got down
to the desk level. Some probably felt that she micro-managed, but I am not
prepared to say that one way or another. Her management style was to wander
into the nooks and crannies of the processes and make sure that things were
ship shape.
Q:
So she was management oriented in the sense of "ship shape".
SOMERVILLE: Yes, I think so. I think that is
fair. I don't think she enjoyed the same day-in-day-out deep involvement in
policy issues. It was just not her style. She was an admin person used to making
things happen. Diego was much more reflective and loved to deal at length, ad
nauseam, in argumentative discussion of policy pluses and minuses, and ins and
outs. Barbara was more legally oriented. She was a lawyer. Lenny was more
ideologically driven. You really had a contrast here.
Q:
Now the lady that you won't mention, I will because it is part of published
history: Elizabeth Tamposi, political appointee from New Hampshire. She had some sincere limitations, one of the most serious from the bureau's
standpoint was that she was on duty at the time of the destruction of PanAm 103, over Scotland. The Department was held
inordinately responsible, especially Consular Affairs, for its lack of
sympathetic understanding of the tragedy of the act of terrorism. She also was
on board when, unfortunately, the passport documentation of Bill Clinton, a
president-to-be, and his mother were put through a series of blunders. It was
sad for the Department.
SOMERVILLE: What can be added to that, I
believe, is that the then secretary of state, career officer, Larry Eagleburger, summarily fired her, rightly or wrongly. The
activity that resulted under her stewardship during a presidential campaign
became embarrassing to everyone for whatever reason. She retired back to New Hampshire. She came in as a political
appointee as was the administration's right to do. I don't believe she felt
comfortable in the role.
She
returned to private life and was followed by her former deputy, Mary Ryan. Mary
Ryan was Ms. Tamposi's deputy and Ms. Tamposi felt uncomfortable with her. Mary is of the highest
career and well known to be a very outstanding and upstanding officer. Her
presence was dismissed by Ms. Tamposi and upon Ms. Tamposi's release she came back to CA, this time as
assistant secretary. She has been greatly loved. She has spent a lot of time
working with the line level officers and loves to use the consular conferences
as an opportunity to meet and deal with and be seen and known by her clients.
Q:
And now back to the consular package, which is still
used.
SOMERVILLE: The consular package is probably
used more now than perhaps it was in some of the in-between years. There was
some weakening of its utility during a couple of administrations but I think it
has been put back into a very prominent position. The need has not changed. It
has been made easier by virtue of the further application of automated tools.
Q:
And, no in-house problems with it?
SOMERVILLE: I'm sure there are always
problems with it. There will always be one basic problem, Bill, and I guess it
is worth mentioning. We began with the fee schedule and moved over the years to
measure certain elements of work that were captured by the fee schedule, to
eliminate some that were over identified. There is a constant war as to whether
we are measuring the right things. So, you have a contest of do you change the
measured elements and lose the analytical, historical and political value of
being able to look forward and backward with long eye sight for improving the
precision of measuring where your time is going, or do you maintain the
elements that people are used to seeing and are useful for looking backward and
forwards and use your verbal textural material to carry messages that are not
adequately borne out by the numbers.I held fast to
standard units. Subsequently they were reduced in number but the consistent
units have been maintained.. So, while a purest will
look and say this doesn't adequately cover certain of your manpower
considerations that should be measured because they are important, they have
continued to choose, and correctly I think, to address that in textual ways
rather than change the counted units.
Q:
But all statisticians have to compromise these things.
SOMERVILLE: Well, here you make it a little more dicey in that there are the political issues which are
not just statistical. A statistician will probably make more changes in what he
is counting, as the Census Bureau, in order to more accurately depict what is
going on. But, when your credibility depends on consistency, if you begin to
change things you unnecessarily come under suspicion.
Q:
That you are changing something or just changing degrees oinformation?
SOMERVILLE: What you begin to lose is credibility, that you have created. And this is a judgment
call. My only point is that they are sticking with the approach that we used
and that was changes in accounted activities through natural movement. As you
need to get more meaning through other things that are happening, do it
descriptively.
Q:
Who was your immediate successor?
SOMERVILLE: Currently, Frank Moss, a Civil
Service officer and senior executive person is executive director. He was
preceded by a Foreign Service officer, who in turn was preceded by my
successor, a fellow who had been an executive director elsewhere in the
Department.
Q:
Then there wasn't much continuity after your departure.
SOMERVILLE: Well, the person who followed me
had been an executive director. The person who followed that person was in the
Visa Office and involved in the consular package over the years. He wasn't
there very long, but it was planned that he would be sort of a bridge. Frank
Moss has been in the job for a little more than a year.
Q:
But you institutionalized it to such a degree little would baffected
negatively.
SOMERVILLE: It is a different era. I probably
could not function adequately in the present milieu, it is so changed. I am
technologically obsolete.
Q:
You certainly came into technology and into computers and today's world in
different directions at different times. What you have said to me, as an
experienced consular and Foreign Service officer, is very important because you
do need the new generation behind you well trained, and intellectually able to
accept historical realities... Would you summarize this?
SOMERVILLE: Yes. Let me track it a little
bit. When I arrived in CA automation consisted of punch paper tape machines, flexawriters, EAM cards and connections to one IBM 360 in
the basement of the State Department. Shortly down the road it was realized
that we needed to get out of typewriters and old addressographs abroad and
participated in a working group on "selection" that resulted in the
selection of WANG Corporation. It was the only domestic producers of automation
equipment that could provide us a worldwide network of service. If it didn't
exist they were willing to commit themselves contractually to buying locally
service at posts to maintain equipment. This was a serious issue because this
stuff is going to be shoved in 250 places around the world and it had to be
kept up, maintained.
We
went into a procurement that resulted in a master contract that remained in
place for over a decade. It began with word-processing. That was automation.
You didn't automate office practices and procedures, you automated typewriting.
So, WANG word processing was procured and sold around the world. In that
context we began to use the WANG equipment to automate visa processes abroad.
We began to use parallel equipment in the Passport Office to further automate.
We remained with the WANG contract and WANG developed many computers. These
were small main frames that could be established abroad and maintained abroad
and to which you could connect networks. This was heaven!
We
embarked on a program of redesigning visa and other processes at post that
would key into a mini computer installed in the post. The
mini computer then interchanging with the communications system for name checks
with the main frame computer back here. We did not export the name
check. That advanced to the point that it nearly collapsed. We ended up with
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of mini computers around the world, complex
data basis, partially decentralized, interfacing with the communications system
that often didn't work right - still doesn't - back to sophisticated
centralized software and main frame computers in Washington which eventually
became linked with customs and INS, so your name checks now cross over agency
lines to other data bases. We don't suck your data bases in but link the data
bases so the name in one will show up in another check.
This
resulted in further automation in consular operations but also resulted in an
absolute disaster around the world of hundreds of mini computers demanding
hundreds of sophisticated staffers, technicians who can maintain them. We
embarked on an enormous recruitment program for technicians to assign abroad
because for security reasons we couldn't use Foreign Service nationals. When we
did they penetrated security. Remember there was one computer room in Eastern Europe where the national who was running
it was a KGB type and they found a hard wire coming out of the next room that
went out of the building!
In
any event we reached the point of saturation of the mini computer technology.
We were quite advanced in our use of it in consular operations. We were the
only process at post that was automated. The only other use that was made of
the equipment was for word processing for administrative support.
Realizing
that we were stuck with a produce that was becoming obsolete, we triggered
action to get into a different equipment approach. The State Department was
probably $160 or $180 million committed to WANG. In those days you couldn't
expect congress to give you replacement money to that tune. You had to find a
way to move alone evolutionary. And, yet, WANG was becoming a bankrupt company
and began not to produce its own stuff. It was labeling IBM equipment. It was
funny. We were getting equipment from IBM that had to be re-labeled WANG
because we could only buy from WANG and we depended on their software and their
ability to support the hardware became nil. Here we are a global organization
with a failing technology.
After
my retirement I became associated with the centralized information technology
arm of the Department. In that context I was involved in a procurement
operation which led to under the label ONA a logical approach to modernization
a few years ago. Pat Kennedy was in A and was very helpful. In fact, it was his
organization then. We came up with a way that we could get budgetary support
for the replacement of all the WANG stuff globally. That program completes this
year. All embassies and all posts will have had replacement PCs,
we are talking about personal computer technology, which is networking in a
sophisticated way, not word processing stuff. So, it was a total embassy
approach now which is fully networked, working out of PCs, not enhanced word
processing and mini computers.
Q:
And secure.
SOMERVILLE: One of the big problems of the
Department's approach to automation with the WANG material was that it was not
secure. The cables in the State Department even now must be prepared only on
machines that do not emanate any electronic signals that can be intercepted,
translated and converted to text so that you are not violating security
requirements.
NSA
created what it calls "tempest" technology, whereas a machine that
might cost you $4,000 if it were tempest, which means shielded, etc., might cost
you $15,000. So you can see it never caught on.
It
was happening even in the bureaus. A funny aside. We
were on WANG technology and in the press of business in the Visa Office you
send many, many cables. It was prohibited that they be produced on WANG
machines because they were not tempest cleared. You could only use a manual
typewriter. We had in the bureau a WANG mini computer network system. What they
began to do was prepare the cables on the word processors, snap them out and
put the security classification on by typewriter and then furnish them to the
cable room. So, the security was typed on the thing after it had been produced
out of the data base.
Not
knowing this, I volunteered to be the first guinea pig to be inspected by the
inspection corps in their first effort in looking at how automation was being
used and was it being safely and properly used. They came into the bureau and I
didn't know at the time that there was software that even though you erased
something in a computer, all you do is move the address of the information, you
don't remove the information. They came in and bled out information that had
been erased and found that all the cables being produced in the Visa Office,
classified stuff, were being prepared on the word processors and handled as I
described.
They
took my tape drives. In those days these things were a very expensive thing on
the computer. They confiscated physically, about $70,000 worth of tape drives.
They said, "Somerville, you are going to pay for this.
Now you are a good guy and this is a dry run and we understand this, but we are
not going to return your tape drives." This meant we had to find money to
replace the damn things.
Q:
I can remember well in the field when the consular officer had only a Foreign
Service national who would type things on a typewriter. She did it without a
classification on it. You then took the cable and typed on the classification.
SOMERVILLE: We had the envy of the
Department. Also you may recall we had a private communications network, the
TWX, which carried the name check material from post to Washington and back to post. We could use
that TWX line for "back channel" communications, although it wasn't
terribly legal. Nobody in the embassy had any similar alternative to it, only
we had that sort of thing, so it was used by others. Our concern was that its
use became so rampant that record information was not being retained because
the officers were using them for advisory and it was gone as soon as it was
received.
It
got even more dicey. Pat Kennedy was the chief
administrative guy supporting George Schultz as his executive secretary back
when fax machines were very novel. He had the only three in the Department of
State and they were for use on the secretary's personal plane. He called one
day and said, "Ron, these things are too damn heavy. My guys are bitching
and moaning because they are having to carry them on
and off airplanes. Let's make a deal. I don't have any money, you have money. I
have three fax machines. I need three new ones which are faster and lightweight
so they can be lugged around. Let's make deal. You cut a requisition and buy
the new ones and I will give you mine for the new ones. I will carry the paper
because I couldn't get authorization, if you agree to that."
I
said, "Fine. You need the paper I will give you the numbers." As a
result CA had the first three fax machines outside the secretary's office. We
put one in visa, one in "systems" and one in my office so we could do
fax communication. What I found was that this was useful in dealing with the
posts because it didn't have the same problems as the TWX system. But,
overseas, the only people who had them were the USIS offices. So, we had to
make an arrangement with USIS that when we wanted to fax to our consular guys
it would come out in the USIS library.
Q:
Well, that is really secure.
SOMERVILLE: In this case it was a marriage
that brought them even closer together. A consular officer and an
administrative officer learned how to cooperate mutually.
Q:
Ron, I have the distinct impression that you have very well summarized things.
But, let's run over those things in your experience that you either want to
bring up, perhaps pointedly, or remind us of some of your higher or lower
points of your career, whatever. Let this be your over-all career summary.
SOMERVILLE: Great. A couple of things I will
say about the years that I spent in CA. It is pretty apparent that sustained
support for the consular function, consular operations, etc., won't come about
by chance. If CA - I say CA because I think in many respects CA has to be
responsible for its own destiny - is not able to maintain cooperative, mutually
productive relationships with each of the two judiciary committees, with the
authorizing and appropriating committee staffs, involve them in the operations
to the extent that is possible in terms of information flow, in terms of
participation, even in terms of direct communication by individuals prominent
on both sides; likewise with the Office of Management and Budget, the principal
examiners, competition for attention, resources, bread and butter things like
promotions, key assignments, cross training - the whole ball of wax -
competition is so severe in the State Department that State can easily revert
to what it was 15 or 20 years ago.
It
is always an issue. It is not to be cursed. It is not to be regretted. It is to
be acknowledged and dealt with. The State Department hires on balance very,
very bright people. I spent time as an inspector looking at many agencies when
I was with the Civil Service Commission and I can say, based on my own
experience, that the type of individual typically hired in the State Department
is far more verbal, more analytically inclined than almost any other agency in
government. With that brain trust you have very bright people who will gather
to themselves the tools they need to be successful.
Success
is defined in a much narrower ground than in departmentally. It is defined in
very personal terms. The organization will be structured because it is
controlled and operated by those same practitioners. It will be structured and
operated to enhance the possibilities of success. If you are not on the same
train you get forgotten and that is not good or bad, it is just the nature of
the beast.
And,
so CA people in the future are going to have to do the same kind of hill
climbing, clamoring, doing things necessary to make
themselves be perceived as important. Important in terms of starting with bread
and butter issues, in terms of getting attention for their resource
requirements that don't disadvantage other parts of the Department. In the past
the Department was perceived as a place of zero sum in
that if consular squawked and got more stats somebody lost. A political report
didn't get issued. An ambassador didn't have a secretary. I think in the
present environment that feeling is not extant because there has been a general
raising of all ships over the last 15 years and because CA does have some
independent access to resources there is not the same animosity and jealousy.
It takes work to keep that. It takes a lot of nurture.
Q:
The only thing you haven't mentioned in detail is the "substance" of
consular work: that is, service to American citizens when abroad; passport
issuance, protection when arrested and jail. These demands on consular officers
will never stop, unless somehow our nation stops. The second substantive issue
is service to aliens needing to enter the United States. State will always adjudicate
visas since nobody else will take the responsibility unless congress says that
another federal unit must?.
SOMERVILLE: Congress has every couple of
years brought up the possibility of re- engineering the executive branch for
immigrant and citizenship documentation purposes. There is right this month in
congress a discussion with the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]
about reorganization of INS that would split it into two agencies within
Justice or would create two clear pieces under a commissioner. Doris Misner [present commissioner] favors the single
commissioner and two clear pieces, while Congress is talking about two
agencies. Within the last three years a commission recommended that a part of
the INS be split off and given to the State Department because the State
Department now had better stewardship, now was better run, now could more
assuredly provide the service that congress wanted. That is a change. A hell of a change from 20 years ago.
A
commission, eight years ago, chaired by Diego Asencio,
former assistant secretary, recommended that the passport function be taken
away from State and given to INS. So the pot bubbles. There are alternative
organizational arrangements that can be made. The visa function in Canada is carried out independent of its
foreign policy establishment and works very efficiency according to everything
I have heard.
The
passport documentation function in various countries isn't done by the foreign
ministries in most cases, but by the interior ministry. It doesn't need to be
in the State Department. If State ever lost it, it would lose an awful lot. It
would lose one of the few processes to take it into contact with John Q.
Public. There is virtually nothing else State does that directly touches a
citizen in the US.
Q:
We call CA the American Bureau.
SOMERVILLE: And that is what it is. If you
lose touch with thfolks there is no support for
anything else you want to do.
Q:
Have we converted some in the State Department to understanbetter
what the consular function is and how we are important to State?
SOMERVILLE: Yes and no. I think an officer's
perspective changes markedly depending on where he is organizationally. The
consular section has traditionally provided the Foreign Service officer corps,
as a sheltered immersion opportunity for new officers to learn the culture of
the Foreign Service, to learn the vagaries of living abroad with a family, of
assimilating in another culture, of using a different language to communicate,
of learning how to live with bosses. There is a culturation
process and orientation process that is probably parallel only in the military
in terms of change of one's life patterns when you take a job.
The
consular section provides an opportunity for officers to learn a whole lot in
their first two tours that is very useful. I have said for years that the
consular operation permitted the Department to support a high ranking,
political, economic structure by providing a base for orientation. With moves
in the last decade to use more dependents for the fodder-type jobs and to use
to some extent retirees as Foreign Service Reserve officers, we have reduced
the use of junior officers thereby depriving them, I think, of a bonafide, honest-to-god useful orientation period in their
career.
There
are few other opportunities in the State Department that a Foreign Service
officer will get, an opportunity to manage, to plan a budget, to analyze and
change a workload, to supervise people directly. So, by cutting off this
universal opportunist -- which was known, however, as the universal curse to
some, we have, I think, to some extent brought injury to the ability of the
Foreign Service in the future.
Q:
How about to serve the American public?
SOMERVILLE: That is the number one role of
the chief representative abroad, of the American diplomat. And, I have had
American ambassadors remind me of that, who are
political appointees. "What are you here for primarily?", and this
was not as chief of the consular section, it was his chief of the political
section, "To protect American citizens in all forms."
Q:
I think we have exposed Ambassadors to this more in the last 2years or so.
SOMERVILLE: Absolutely. World events have
caused that too. But, you still have a good amount of feeling that that is a
diversion from "true work". The holy grail
continues to be reporting.
Q:
Which always will be, and maybe must be?
SOMERVILLE: I'm not at all sure. With the
advent of the Internet and taking an examination right today of how information
is flowing in the system, political reports are no longer the holy grail that they once were. When you get to the point I
think we can foresee within five years, where the State Department will be
using web based technology for political reporting, using the Internet as a
transport mechanism from the post to Washington, you will measure, as you do in
a web page, how much use is made of the information that is being reported. Two
hits in two years? Is it worth compiling? You don't now know anything about
readership when you create a document overseas or send information. All you do
is throw it into the damn pond.
Q:
Do you mean that after this wonderful consular management package that we have,
even the political section can't measure some of those things now?
SOMERVILLE: They can't. When they send
something in it is gone. You stipulate an address on a TAG [Locator index of
subject and location] but you don't know where it goes. You don't know if
anybody ever sees it. You don't know if it is ever used. You just know that you
sent it. The only way they know now is if somebody comes back saying it was a
good report.
Q:
They have none of that approved now?
SOMERVILLE: No. Zip! It is coming, but it is
not there now.
Q:
Your point is that it is necessary to survive.
SOMERVILLE: Well, the information in a number
of the more advanced governments is now disseminated from web pages. This is
true in Scandinavia and certain other European
countries. It is becoming true in Asia. We are beginning to play with it in public diplomacy,
but we are not there yet. As things are web-paged with periodical information,
as with the Washington Post, you have parallel things happening around the
world. These things are all in electronic form. Your reporting job will be
going from web page to web page. But, you don't need to be sitting in Rome to do that because when you call
up the foreign affairs ministry in Rome on their web page, where are you
sitting? You can do it from Washington. I predict that the trend of the
last 50 years of centralized decision-making ain't
going to reverse. We talked devolution. It is not going to happen. I think the
trend is going to reverse that.
Q:
The only thing you have left out of that is personal contacts, the human
relationships and all those horrible things and wonderful things that make
foreign affairs, international affairs and human affairs, affairs. If you translate everyone into a machine of some sort or a place or
a disk, whatever. It is not even going to work for visa operations.
SOMERVILLE: How are battlefields controlled?
How was Kuwait controlled? Where was it controlled
from? It was controlled from the war room in the Pentagon and the White House.
Where was the Kosovo stuff controlled from? It wasn't
controlled from the Avian airbase in Italy, it was controlled remotely.
Q:
Yes and no. But, maybe with that we should kiss the value of the consular
function goodby. And you have reminded us very well,
Ron, of what it has done for others in the State Department,
and our own service to all Consular Affairs. I am not saying goodby at this point because I want you to give us our last
words, be they pages, but the important thing is you have seen it. You have
walked through it and I walked through it with you, gratefully, as many others
have too and seen the change.
SOMERVILLE: It was an era of change.
Q:
And a lot of fun.
SOMERVILLE: Yes.
Q:
What are your final words to us?
SOMERVILLE: Right now? Traffic is mounting on
the Beltway.
Q:
Those are words of the reality of Washington in retirement.
SOMERVILLE: I think probably now is about as
exciting a time as ever to be in the consular operation. The elements of
excitement should be as strong or stronger now as they have ever been.
Q:
Now that speaks of your devolution.
SOMERVILLE: It was a fun time for many years.
Q:
Do you feel that?
SOMERVILLE: Yes, I do. Very
much so. I think the security of job definition and job constraints is
now going to be a thing of the past. Officers are going to have to deal with
less defined parameters. That is wonderful although for many of the older
officers it may not be very tolerable.
Q:
Thank you, Ron.