Calendar of Events 2012
AAUW PLACERVILLE
February 19th - 2:00 pm
Afternoon at the Theater
"42nd Street"
The Three Stages in Folsom
followed by social gathering in Shingle Springs
March 10th - 9:30 am
Women Health Event (Medical Issues of the Older Woman)
Federated Church
April 28th - 6:00 pm
Catered Dinner/Social
to celebrate Spring
Federated Church
Previous Event:
State Dept., CIA vets wow audience for charity
Posted by Chris Daley on Nov 23 2011. Mountain Democrat
John and Patricia Garon were the guest speakers at the American Association of University Women's fundraising event on Nov. 10. The AAUW provides scholarships for local young women who have been living in foster care, turn 18 and want to attend college. The group also supports a summer math and science camp at UCD for junior high girls who show promise in those fields.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Garons spent the next several decades as Foreign Service Officers with the U.S. Department of State.
John Garon jumped right into his “What Does an Embassy Do?” presentation with a harrowing tale of being on the USS Essex aircraft carrier when its mooring lines were cut and it was set adrift by Dutch protestors in Rotterdam harbor. The ship was saved by fast-acting tugboats. (The Netherlands is the largest manufacturer of tugboats, he noted parenthetically.) John and Patricia later made it back to their “company” car only to find that the brand new, white Mustang had been savaged by a large bucket of red paint. Welcome to the Foreign Service.
The Garons‟ next posting was to Ouagadougou, the capital of Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso in the middle of the hump of Africa. After that, it seemed a bit of a blur as the couple recalled the location and order of subsequent assignments. Netherlands, Upper Volta, Gabon, Liberia, brief stints in Portugal and Washington, D.C., and twice to Morocco for a total of eight years there.
A U.S. embassy is always located in the capital city or seat of government of a country. The Consulate General is usually in a large city, while consulates may be spread around a given country whose population or significance to American interests warrants it.
“The ambassador is the boss,” John said. “He‟s the head of any and all official American personnel in the country. But the „drugs and thugs guys,‟ the CIA or DEA officers usually get around the ambassador.”
John called the CIA the “thugs” even as he introduced his friend from all the way back to high school, Steve Almy, a retired, undercover CIA officer. Almy talked briefly and answered a few questions about being an intelligence officer (not an agent — agents are the FBI guys, he clarified).
“There are lots of American tourists all around the world,” John continued. “And they get into trouble. The consulate deals with the troublemakers although they are under the law and control of the local authorities. People have to understand they‟re under the authority of that country.” He related a couple of examples of Americans, a young college age fellow and an older stockbroker. Both had “fallen in love with European women,” and didn‟t go home. Eventually they spent all their money, wore out their welcome with the women and then came to see John at the consulate, demanding that they be sent home.
“The U.S. is not overseeing or babysitting Americans abroad,” he explained. “If you‟re broke,‟ call home,‟ we tell them. The U.S. does not have any funds for repatriating Americans.”
The young man said he was way too embarrassed to phone his folks, and the stockbroker said he really couldn‟t call his wife and ask her for money to come home after several months with his European girlfriend. There‟s more to both of these stories, but you‟ll have to get John to wrap it all up for you.
There are about 13,000 Foreign Service officers in 250 embassies and consulates around the world, John noted. And the Foreign Service is structured much like the U.S. Navy. Its promotion path is “either up or out and is intended to weed out the chaff; sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not,” he said. Today, he said, “the service has been militarized, so I don‟t even recognize it. The military tail wags the dog — perceived as providing fast action. But the State Department never solves problems quickly.”
Patricia told the audience that of 30,000 people who take the Foreign Service examinations, only 200 make it to the final, oral exams. And only 2 percent pass the whole thing the first time. John added, “After you pass the tests you go on a roster for up to a year-and-a-half. If you‟re not assigned you have to go back to the beginning and start over again.” Patricia continued, “The tests try to weed out people who are not serious, and there are even people who take them just to put on their resumes — as long as they pass. It‟s not that you have the right answer to the questions; it‟s how well you can think.”
She gave an example of a final question:
“You learn that Russia is going to attack the country you‟re in. How will you evacuate all the Americans in the entire country before the attack?”
Maybe being married to a Foreign Service Officer for years helped, but Patricia was one of the 2 percent, John proudly announced. “One of your most important jobs is to make and cultivate contacts,” she explained. “People who are important to us such as future leaders of a country plus the people who are currently in positions of leadership, business people and those from academia. You have to work your contacts at all levels.” All levels would include those out of power such as potential revolutionaries, movers and shakers out in the hinterlands who may just come into power overnight. “Client-itis is a real problem,” John added. That is what Foreign Service Officers develop when they only see and hear the top people in the government.
“No one saw the revolutions in Iran and Portugal coming, because no one would talked to the opposition,” he said.
From being on show at embassy functions to becoming a professional officer, Patricia said her first two months on duty just about finished her off. She was detained and nearly strip-searched by a bunch of drunken soldiers one night. Another time a contact, a fairly high government minister invited her to go visit some “witchcraft activities.” Following the fellow‟s car deeper and deeper into the jungle, the Garons began to worry that they were in way over their heads. The minister finally stopped, pulled an Uzi automatic rifle from the trunk of his car, splashed some nasty looking, foul smelling goo onto a live goat he had hog tied in the vehicle, tied the goat to a tree and started shooting at it. No ill effects to the goat. He tried it again, again no harm to the goat.
He handed John the rifle. John sighted it, adjusted it, pulled the trigger and “sprayed lamb chops all over the forest,” Patricia explained. The punch line from the minister was: “This stuff doesn‟t work with white people.” The witchcraft part was that the goo had magic powers to protect man or goat from being killed. John had early on noticed that the sights were off to the left and the minister had decimated a patch of jungle without coming close to the goat. There‟s a little more tension and detail to the story, as you might imagine. Afterwards, Patricia said she told her boss, “Mr. Ambassador, if my next 20 years are going to be like my first two months, I quit right now.”
Uzis and nasty smelling goats in deep, dark jungles were not the toughest part of the job, John continued. Working in the consular division of the embassy that issues travel visas to the United States was much worse.
“The worst job is working in the „visa mills,‟ especially Santo Domingo and Mexico City. All new FSOs have to do two years on the visa line,” he said. “Applicants for visas have to convince the consul that they are coming back from the United States.” Patricia admitted that the consular officers “hated the local people, but we all liked them.”
A large embassy will have numerous sections dealing with a myriad of issues including agriculture, commerce, security, public diplomacy, and those issues are handled by American specialists. FBI, CIA, FDA, DEA, ATF, IRS, FAA, Peace Corps personnel are common in those embassies depending upon the country and the relative significance of the specific issues. For example, the FBI will have a presence in a country where there is a lot of counterfeiting, John said. They once asked an FAA official in India what the role of the Federal Aviation Administration was in that country. “We keep the skies safe and the pilots sober,” that gentleman answered.
“The Public Diplomacy Section is tasked with winning the hearts and minds of the people,” Patricia explained. “We have links to local media, write Op Ed pieces and put on cultural and educational programs. State Department tours host people on trips to the U.S. I would select them, and they were generally people of some substance. I never heard of anyone who didn‟t love the U.S., and the nicest things happen to these people.”The State Department organizes tours the other way as well, sending jazz bands and rock „n roll bands to countries all over the world. They represent “benign propaganda, and it really does win the hearts and minds of the people,” she said.
Communicating with the people of another country requires some fluency with the local language. French and Arabic in Morocco, Dutch in the Netherlands, French or native languages in West Africa. “You must learn the language,” Patricia noted forcefully.
The Garons turned the microphone over to Steve Almy who related a few CIA stories and told a little bit about his and his wife‟s experience in the world of covert operations.
“My family has been spies for 400 years,” Steve began.
But that‟s a story for another time.
“My family has been spies for 400 years,” Steve began.
But that‟s a story for another time.
The audience numbered about 100 people who gave generously to the AAUW scholarship program. In addition to $10s and $20s, one group member announced that there were two $100 bills in the collection bowl. That drew a big round of applause.
