Safety of U.S. missions subject for concern

Press, 1 July 1985, Page 4

Safety of U.S. missions subject for concern

NZPA-Reuter Washington

As senior United States officials talked increasingly of being involved in a war against terrorism, a report has urged a huge building programme to provide at-tack-proof United States missions abroad.

The report to the Secretary of State, Mr George Shultz, recommended that many United States diplomatic buildings abroad “be replaced by more physically secure sites and buildings.” The report, by a panel headed by a former Central Intelligence Agency deputy director, Admiral Bobby Inman, gave no details of how many new embassies were contemplated or how much the recommended programme would cost. But a spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said that Mr Shultz, in a letter to the committee’s chairman, Senator Richard Lugar (Indiana, Republican), put the cost at more than SUS 3

billion ($6.39 billion) over the next five to seven years. A State Department spokesman, Edward Djerijian, told reporters that Mr Shultz described the report as imaginative and well thought out and that he supported it in principle. The report follows widespread concern for the safety of United States missions and diplomats in the last few years.

A suicide car bomber who penetrated the United States Embassy compound in Beirut in 1983, killing 46 people, was the most dramatic in a series of attacks by anti-American activists which also included the takeover of the United States embassy in Tehran in 1979 and United States diplomats were held hostage for more than a year.

The Inman report also recommended better security for foreign diplomats in the United States under a new Diplomatic Security

Service within the State Department. Responsibility for the safety of foreign diplomats is now divided between the State Department, the Secret Service, and local and state police forces. The new service should also be responsible for all security at United States missions, which should be provided with “state of the art” security and recommend security procedures for diplomats’ residences, the report said. The report did not make public its recommendations on the intelligence and counter-intelligence aspects of United States missions, saying only that its advice to Mr Shultz on such subjects was classified. Robert Lamb, a senior department official who will co-ordinate the implementation of the panel’s 91 recommendations, told reporters that 126 of the 262 United States embassies and consulates around the world would have to be rebuilt or

replaced. Mr Lamb said that such a high total needing drastic work had come as a shock. “We knew we had a problem, but we had not considered it to be of such magnitude,” he said. He said 75 embassies or consulates among the 126 would have to be moved to new sites, many of them because they were in city centres where not all the panel’s recommendations could be implemented for space reasons. Mr Lamb commented on only one aspect of the secret part of the panel’s recommendations, admitting that it had addressed the issue of foreign nationals employed in United States missions, especially in Eastern Europe, which has raised concern about spying. He did not, however, give any details, saying that the State Department had implemented a policy of reducing the number of Soviet employees at the Embassy in Moscow before the panel’s report was published.