During a college reunion I sat down, at dinner, with a classmate that had gone into the diplomatic service after a tour of duty, as a line grunt, in Vietnam. Like most reunion conversations we ended up talking about what we had done over the intervening 35 – 40 years.
He had just retired from the State Department and I had retired from the military. When he found out that I had done the bulk of my twenty years in Special Operations the first words out of his mouth was “Thank You!” When I asked why the thanks he said he and his friends in the diplomatic service knew no matter how bad things got that Special Operations would come and get them out no matter what it cost us.
Well, fifteen years later, I guess that security blanket no longer exists. Another, unacknowledged, legacy from the Emperor!
Did he say whether he had ever been entangled in CIA stuff? If what both you guys are saying is correct, the only time an ambassador wouldn’t be covered by military contingency plans is if it was a covert CIA operation. Travis, do you know anything about that? Do military contingency plans go into effect for attacks on ambassadors that happen in mission outposts where covert operations were going on (as opposed to the actual embassy)? What’s the starting point for the military to be drawn in, and do we have evidence that that starting point was activated?