A Personal Appeal to the Secretary of State
by Kenneth M. Quinn
I was shot at, blown up, wounded, or targeted for assassination in every foreign assignment I had during my 32-year career as a State Department Foreign Service officer.
My family endured these same risks. When my ambassadorial residence in Phnom Penh was struck by a rocket and then ringed in automatic weapons fire, my wife and I covered our three children with our bodies to protect them. I prayed, as I had never prayed before, that God would let the bullets kill me and not my children. That night, Divine Providence was watching over us as we all escaped unharmed. However, even if you are fortunate to survive such a near death event, you can still carry that experience home with you. Shortly after we returned to America, I witnessed my 12-year-old daughter ducking to the floor in our home in Des Moines when someone set off a string of very loud firecrackers outside our home.
In the Philippines, during the three years I served as deputy chief of mission, the American embassy in Manila was the most terrorist-impacted US diplomatic post in the world. Ten official Americans were killed in targeted terrorist attacks while traveling to work in their cars. I was the number two target for assassination by the radical Maoist New People’s Army and had five bodyguards around me whenever I moved about in public.
In addition to being blown up in Cambodia and targeted in the Philippines, I was shot at in Gaza; wounded in a rocket attack in Saigon; came under Viet Cong fire on multiple occasions in SaDec and Ba Xuyen Provinces; and narrowly escaped capture, first by the genocidal Khmer Rouge in 1973, and then a decade later by the terrorist Hezbollah in a remote part of Lebanon, shortly after the US embassy in Beirut had been blown up, killing over 60 persons.
Other Foreign Service colleagues close to me have suffered similarly and in some cases made the ultimate sacrifice, including: my treasured friend Ambassador Arnie Raphael who was killed in a terrorist bombing in Pakistan; Robert Little, a 29-year old officer with whom I had studied Vietnamese, who was executed by the Viet Cong during the 1968 TET Offensive, one of 16 Foreign Service officers killed that year alone; and John Paul Vann, the most inspiring senior civilian officer in Vietnam, whose body I helped carry off the battlefield. My lifelong friend Kent Paxton, a heroic Army helicopter pilot earlier in the war, who was later badly injured in an IED explosion while serving as a USAID rural development officer in the Mekong Delta, still bears an injury and lasting impediments.
A Historic Legacy of Confronting Danger
Life-threatening dangers to American diplomats date to the earliest days of our Republic, beginning with William Palfrey, who was “lost at sea” in 1780 while en route to Paris to serve at the newly established embassy headed by America’s first ambassador, Benjamin Franklin.
Since then, over 300 Foreign Service personnel have lost their lives in service to our country. Their names are inscribed on two large black marble plaques visible as visitors enter the State Department in Washington. Over 40 died in Indochina, where I served for almost six years during the war. At the headquarters of USAID, which was founded in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, there was a Wall of Honor with the names of the 99 Foreign Service employees who died in the line of duty.
Local citizen Foreign Service National employees share many of the same risks as their American colleagues, and sometimes even more. In 1975, the over 50 Foreign Service National Cambodian citizens who had been employed by the US embassy in Phnom Penh were all targeted, along with their families, by the Khmer Rouge regime for having worked for the Americans. No one survived.
While the popular image of many of our fellow citizens may be that a diplomat’s life is made up of attending fancy receptions, the reality is that terrorism and regional conflicts as well as exposure to exotic diseases, from Yellow Fever during Ben Franklin’s era to Ebola today, have been a consistent threat for Foreign Service personnel around the globe. In my own case, having been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, I have suffered from type-II diabetes, prostate cancer, Hepatitis E, neuropathy, sarcoid lung impairment, and a diagnosis of possible blindness.
Indeed, with the exception of first responders who carry a weapon or deal with fires and explosives, like my two grandfathers who were New York City policemen, the Foreign Service and our intelligence service personnel abroad arguably hold one of the most dangerous civilian occupations in America. Just consider the following statistics from recent decades:
- Seven American Foreign Service ambassadors have been assassinated or killed in the line of duty.
- Over 60 American Embassy staff members spent 444 days held hostage by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran.
- American embassies in Kenya, Tanzania, and Lebanon were blown up with significant numbers of American and local Foreign Service National employees killed and wounded.
- Those casualties are in addition to those killed and wounded in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Benghazi, and over 100 terrorist attacks or incidents at other diplomatic posts.
Except for those killed in the Twin Towers on 9/11, there are few other civilian occupations or civilian organizations in America that have had similar numbers of CEOs murdered or corporate offices blown up or employees taken hostage or killed as the Foreign Service.
Exceptional Foreign Affairs Achievements
A new book titled Representing America, published by the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST.org), which is comprised of excerpts from the oral histories of Foreign Service personnel over the past 100 years, provides remarkable accounts of the extraordinary challenges and dangers those individuals faced.
The most stunning story in the over 300-page ADST volume is FSO Max Bishop’s account of filing his report from Tokyo in January of 1941 about Japan’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor. No doubt you will be left perplexed, as I was, about how what is arguably the most significant intelligence report in the 250-year history of the American Republic, one that was submitted by a Foreign Service Officer eleven months before the actual attack, was somehow completely overlooked by senior officials in Washington.
Another story is set in Moscow in 1991, as career Foreign Service Ambassador Jim Collins is on the phone with President George H.W. Bush, carefully calibrating US actions to ensure the dissolution of the Soviet Union, one of the greatest American foreign policy achievements of the 20th Century.
Other stories provide insights into foreign policy events, some far in the past, but all exceptional: from William Trimble, an FSO issuing visas to endangered Jews in Paris in 1939 so they could find asylum in America; to Wells Stabler and Daniel Newberry recounting the extreme violence they faced in Jerusalem, including US Consul Thomas Wasson being gunned down in the street as the state of Israel was emerging in 1948; to Joanne Huskey crawling through the remnants of the American embassy in Nairobi searching for her children after it was blown up by Al-Qaeda in 1998 (she found them alive); to Jonathan Addleton’s description of 25-year-old provincial reconstruction team member FSO Anne Smedinghof being killed by a Taliban IED in Afghanistan in 2013.
Providing post-war accounting for US POW / MIAs is another function of the Foreign Service. The US – Russia Joint Commission on POWs, on which I served, and which was led by a career FSO ambassador, gained the first-ever American access to both former Soviet state security archives in Moscow and Soviet prisons in Khabarovsk and on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia. I personally negotiated to obtain the first access into a North Vietnamese prison and our first information on US military personnel lost in China.
The volume recounts how career State Department Foreign Service officers made exceptional efforts and risked danger to protect American citizens during times of extreme danger abroad.
I was riveted by reading FSO J. Pierpont Moffit’s oral history account of how he and his colleagues undertook a desperate effort to arrange for a special train and river barges to evacuate the more than 1,000 American citizens about to be trapped by the rampaging radical Russian Bolshevik revolutionaries at the gates of Warsaw in 1920. Disregarding orders from Washington, those career Foreign Service officers made the decision to stay until the very last moment to assist as many Americans as possible.
That dedication was paralleled by another lifelong friend, FSO Lionel Rosenblatt, whose recent obituary in the New York Times described how he disregarded orders and flew to Saigon to assist thousands of the most endangered Vietnamese to escape in April 1975. Several years later, an array of career officers led the effort to rescue the “Boat People” refugees fleeing communism in Vietnam, an outcome that produced a standing ovation for America at the United Nations.
Keeping Americans and American Agriculture Safe from Global Pandemics / Spreading the Green Revolution / Eradicating Smallpox
During the first Trump administration, career Foreign Service officers in the US embassy in Beijing in early 2018—two years in advance of the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in 2020—warned agencies in Washington about technical security deficiencies at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Wuhan, believed by many to be the source of Covid-19. Another career Foreign Service officer, Ambassador Nancy Powell, coordinated the US government’s highly effective international response to two very significant pandemic diseases —Avian bird flu and Ebola.
In the 1970s, USDA Foreign Agricultural Service and USAID personnel were instrumental in exporting American Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug’s high yielding wheat varieties from Mexico to countries across the Middle East and South Asia, spreading the Green Revolution, the single greatest period of food production and hunger reduction in all human history, impacting up to one billion people. That agricultural achievement was paralleled by an equally historic medical achievement—the eradication of smallpox across West Africa through a USAID vaccination program.
FSOs Countering Terrorism, Genocide, and Narcotics Trafficking at One Embassy
I am particularly proud of the achievements of my small embassy during my time as chief of mission in Phnom Penh, including our being:
- honored for facilitating the capture of one of the highest ranking North Korean terrorist operatives ever apprehended;
- recognized by the Treasury Department for helping break up an international counterfeiting operation with links to Iran that had forced the redesign of the US $100 bill;
- commended by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for the operation we devised to break up an international drug trafficking ring, leading to 20 successful prosecutions by the Justice Department; and
- our having created an intelligence sharing mechanism with the Cambodian government that led to the capture of Hambali, the top Al-Qaeda terrorist leader in Southeast Asia.
In addition, when civil war erupted in July 1997, since we had no Marine security guards at our embassy in Phnom Penh, I personally responded to an urgent phone call from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch by driving into an active combat zone with only the American flag flying on my ambassadorial car for protection in order to rescue a group of Mormon missionaries who the senator had said were trapped by the fighting. When I arrived at their compound, the head of that religious missionary group said that he “was never so glad to see the American flag.” Another individual said, “Now I know what it means to be an American.”
My Personal Appeal to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Honor America’s Diplomatic Service and Its Founder Benjamin Franklin
The bond that motivated me that day—that when a fellow American is in danger abroad, no matter the risk to yourself, you always go to assist them —is the historic legacy of the career Foreign Service.
Mr. Secretary, with utmost respect, it is my great hope that you will issue a historic proclamation honoring the achievements and sacrifices over the past 250 years by the Foreign Service officers and staff from all foreign affairs agencies—including the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service, the Foreign Commercial Service, USAID and the State Department, including the consular and admin officers and couriers and communicators and diplomatic security agents, as well as the thousands of Foreign Service National local employees.
In that statement, I urge that you call on Congress to pass a Joint Resolution recognizing the extraordinary contributions and sacrifices by members of the Foreign Service and their families in service to our country. From our founder, Benjamin Franklin, leading the effort to gain foreign support for our independence, to the extraordinary record of achievements and sacrifices in maintaining our freedom during war time and protecting our citizens from threats of terrorism, the Foreign Service deserves the recognition of the American people.
Having completed his Ph.D. studies at the University of Maryland, Kenneth Quinn (quinnkm@msn.com) joined the State Department in 1967, retiring in 1999 following his service as US ambassador to Cambodia. At retirement, he received the State Department Award for Heroism for five lifesaving rescues he carried out in Indochina. Ambassador Quinn is the only individual to have on three separate occasions received the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) Award for Intellectual Courage and Dissent. From 2000 to 2020, he was president of the World Food Prize in Des Moines, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Food & Agriculture.” This article is based on his presentations at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa in 2025 about his experiences as a career Foreign Service Officer, including his five and one-half years on detail to USAID and the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) in South Vietnam during the war.