16 ms·

The Diplomatic Couriers Who Deliver America's Secret Mail

106 points by ALee 8y ago

will_brown 8y ago
For those that are interested my Dad was a Diplomatic Courier and published 10 years worth of personal letters traveling the world in the Navy and then as a Courier from 1956-1966. https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/dp/B01MR2ZQ5W https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/d... “DEAR MOM” is a book told through 591 letters to my parents while living throughout the world. The letters seen here are transcriptions of all letters I wrote to my parents for ten years following college graduation. They record my daily life in surprising detail from Navy Officer Candidate School until resigning from the U.S. Foreign Service in Viet Nam. This was a decade of practically non-stop travel throughout most of the world – some 4 million miles.
- tango24 8y ago
  4 million miles of traveling, wow. Did that cause any systemic back-pain issues for him sitting on long-haul flights non-stop for a solid decade?
- jonnydubowsky 8y ago
  This is a generous gift of stories that help provide a glimpse into a world that maintains a certain cinematic quality. I look forward to reading this book. Thanks for sharing and thank your pop for these snapshots.
- jonnydubowsky 8y ago
  I'm already laughing at the story before the adventure begins, where your dad was trying to meet up with someone via car, on the GW bridge. It's amazing how we take for granted the ease by which we can now coordinate meetups. The days of, "I'll meet you at the GW Bridge at noon" certainly lead to many missed connections, or in your dad's case, pulling a 180 across 4 lanes of traffic. I'm really going to enjoy this book.
- wizardforhire 8y ago
  My aunt was a courier in Brussels in the 90s/2000s! I visited her when I was backpacking and she gave me the low down. It was pretty funny, really boring job but she had to get security clearance, get hand to hand and firearm training. It came up because she was giving me a ride somewhere and when I first got in her car she was like “now be careful, there’s a gun here, here, here, there, there, under the seat between the seats behind the seats, in the glove box” just all over the place!!!
  - withdavidli 8y ago
    Did she ever get pulled over by the cops? Asked if there were any weapons in the car lol. Or do they get diplomatic plates?
Fezzik 8y ago
The pay starts pretty low, but they apparently have many job openings: https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/specialist/career-tracks/diplomatic-courier/ https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/specialist/ca...
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Honestly even with "75% travel" I'm surprised they're struggling so much to find people. Seems like a lot of people want to travel, and would love to spend part of their 20s doing so. Would be interesting to know just how dangerous it is though, particularly for relatively low pay. The article covers some plane crashes, but doesn't really explore the question in detail.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Government jobs in the field are usually kneecapped from a career perspective. My guess would be that once you have the clearances for awhile, you can make a lot more money working for some contractor.
  - packetslave 8y ago
    I would imagine the requirement for a TS/SCI clearance cuts down on the number of candidates that make it through the hiring process substantially.
    - Someone1234 8y ago
      That's a good point. I doubt I could get that clearance for example.
      - techsupporter 8y ago
        Depending on how strenuous the clearing agency is, a lot of people are knocked out for seemingly banal reasons. I work with people who have to have clearances for various projects and people have been knocked off of those teams for: - Being a dual citizen (and, far worse, holding a passport from the other country) even if they were born citizens of the US and the other country - Having traveled to several countries, like China or Russia, for reasons other than a short tourism stay - Being married to a non-US-citizen, even a permanent resident - Owing a lot of money on student loans - Parents being born in or citizens of the "wrong" country - Psychiatric or psychology counseling for certain conditions - A history of regular gambling From what I can tell, the investigators want someone who was born in the US to parents whose ancestry can both be traced to the Mayflower and who does nothing except stay at home and read National Geographic while sitting by the fire next to an equally-suitable spouse.
nraynaud 8y ago
My aunt opened an unlicensed orphanage in northern Ivory Coast after WWII, and she had the Queen of the Netherland as a donor. Every year around Christmas the Dutch diplomatic mail service would come, heavily armed and very serious, to deliver boxes of sweet treats for the children.
- Theodores 8y ago
  Amazing story, if I was a fiction writer then not in a million Sundays would I imagine such a thing. I don't think I have seen the word 'unlicensed' followed by the word 'orphanage' before, I might just add '2' on the end and use that for my password.
  - nraynaud 8y ago
    The whole story is crazy, they were 2 women, and they couldn’t get the papers to open the orphanage, so they legally adopted the kids, one woman adopting the girls and the other one the boys (the idea is to let them inter-marry if they wanted to). I don’t know how safe it is to give the google keywords to find the place.
- toyg 8y ago
  You should write down your aunt’s story, get a lit agent, and start knocking on publishers’ doors. After publishing, tell the agent to shop it to Hollywood.
windows_tips 8y ago
All government communications are subject to inspection and should be disclosed as soon as possible. Why does the State Department need to take such extreme measures and have special exemption from processes meant to detect and stop all manner of nefarious activity?
- fl0wenol 8y ago
  All country's diplomatic services have a similar exempt mail/pouch system; it's a service we all extend to each other. Others leave ours alone, and we leave foreign government's alone in turn (at ports or elsewhere). Governments are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other; this is a way to do it out in the open.
  - windows_tips 8y ago
    Governments are a function of their laws. I'm not sure what you mean by, 'are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other'. I don't actually allow or expect my government to keep secrets. I don't think 'they' are even authorized to. If 'they' could, 'they' would not be a representative government, of, for, and by the people.
    - grkvlt 8y ago
      Of course governments must keep secrets. These are things like order of battle details for the military; location and other details for nuclear weapons; names and addresses of intelligence officers, informants or defectors; algorithms for decryption of foreign ciphers; and so on. However, in western democracies the secrecy is usually time limited. For example in the United Kingdom we have the 30-year rule[0] which provides for public release of confidential government documents after 30 years (and they are moving to 20 years now) which is a good compromise between transparency and the need for operational secrecy and security. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-year_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-year_rule
      - windows_tips 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
grouseway 8y ago
They even carry furniture. Not unexpected given the lengths that spies go to. It reminds me of the IBM Selectric bug (apparently planted during a customs inspection). http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/ http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/
zeveb 8y ago
> Employing 103 couriers at 12 hubs around the world, the DCS boasts a delivery success rate that would be the envy of FedEx and UPS. Do they? The article never backs that up: > Nobody at the service could remember a single lost pouch or unsuccessful delivery in the service’s modern history, though missions can be aborted for political, weather, or mechanical reasons if necessary. The service did once manage to lose a baby grand piano along the Orient Express in 1919. Evidently, the courier—David K E Bruce, later a renowned diplomat—slept beneath it on a railway platform in Bulgaria and woke to find the piano was gone. I'd count cancelled missions as unsuccessful, just as I'd count a cancelled delivery by UPS. Given that the Diplomatic Couriers Service must have orders of magnitude fewer packages than e.g. UPS or FedEx, it's entirely possible that those few failures are a higher failure rate than the commercial carriers. None of that's to detract from the DCS's really cool achievements — I just dislike journalistic hyperbole.

106 points by ALee 8y ago

For those that are interested my Dad was a Diplomatic Courier and published 10 years worth of personal letters traveling the world in the Navy and then as a Courier from 1956-1966. https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/dp/B01MR2ZQ5W https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/d... “DEAR MOM” is a book told through 591 letters to my parents while living throughout the world. The letters seen here are transcriptions of all letters I wrote to my parents for ten years following college graduation. They record my daily life in surprising detail from Navy Officer Candidate School until resigning from the U.S. Foreign Service in Viet Nam. This was a decade of practically non-stop travel throughout most of the world – some 4 million miles.

tango24 8y ago
4 million miles of traveling, wow. Did that cause any systemic back-pain issues for him sitting on long-haul flights non-stop for a solid decade?
jonnydubowsky 8y ago
This is a generous gift of stories that help provide a glimpse into a world that maintains a certain cinematic quality. I look forward to reading this book. Thanks for sharing and thank your pop for these snapshots.
jonnydubowsky 8y ago
I'm already laughing at the story before the adventure begins, where your dad was trying to meet up with someone via car, on the GW bridge. It's amazing how we take for granted the ease by which we can now coordinate meetups. The days of, "I'll meet you at the GW Bridge at noon" certainly lead to many missed connections, or in your dad's case, pulling a 180 across 4 lanes of traffic. I'm really going to enjoy this book.
wizardforhire 8y ago
My aunt was a courier in Brussels in the 90s/2000s! I visited her when I was backpacking and she gave me the low down. It was pretty funny, really boring job but she had to get security clearance, get hand to hand and firearm training. It came up because she was giving me a ride somewhere and when I first got in her car she was like “now be careful, there’s a gun here, here, here, there, there, under the seat between the seats behind the seats, in the glove box” just all over the place!!!
- withdavidli 8y ago
  Did she ever get pulled over by the cops? Asked if there were any weapons in the car lol. Or do they get diplomatic plates?

Fezzik 8y ago

The pay starts pretty low, but they apparently have many job openings: https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/specialist/career-tracks/diplomatic-courier/ https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/specialist/ca...

Someone1234 8y ago
Honestly even with "75% travel" I'm surprised they're struggling so much to find people. Seems like a lot of people want to travel, and would love to spend part of their 20s doing so. Would be interesting to know just how dangerous it is though, particularly for relatively low pay. The article covers some plane crashes, but doesn't really explore the question in detail.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Government jobs in the field are usually kneecapped from a career perspective. My guess would be that once you have the clearances for awhile, you can make a lot more money working for some contractor.
- packetslave 8y ago
  I would imagine the requirement for a TS/SCI clearance cuts down on the number of candidates that make it through the hiring process substantially.
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    That's a good point. I doubt I could get that clearance for example.
    - techsupporter 8y ago
      Depending on how strenuous the clearing agency is, a lot of people are knocked out for seemingly banal reasons. I work with people who have to have clearances for various projects and people have been knocked off of those teams for: - Being a dual citizen (and, far worse, holding a passport from the other country) even if they were born citizens of the US and the other country - Having traveled to several countries, like China or Russia, for reasons other than a short tourism stay - Being married to a non-US-citizen, even a permanent resident - Owing a lot of money on student loans - Parents being born in or citizens of the "wrong" country - Psychiatric or psychology counseling for certain conditions - A history of regular gambling From what I can tell, the investigators want someone who was born in the US to parents whose ancestry can both be traced to the Mayflower and who does nothing except stay at home and read National Geographic while sitting by the fire next to an equally-suitable spouse.

nraynaud 8y ago

My aunt opened an unlicensed orphanage in northern Ivory Coast after WWII, and she had the Queen of the Netherland as a donor. Every year around Christmas the Dutch diplomatic mail service would come, heavily armed and very serious, to deliver boxes of sweet treats for the children.

Theodores 8y ago
Amazing story, if I was a fiction writer then not in a million Sundays would I imagine such a thing. I don't think I have seen the word 'unlicensed' followed by the word 'orphanage' before, I might just add '2' on the end and use that for my password.
- nraynaud 8y ago
  The whole story is crazy, they were 2 women, and they couldn’t get the papers to open the orphanage, so they legally adopted the kids, one woman adopting the girls and the other one the boys (the idea is to let them inter-marry if they wanted to). I don’t know how safe it is to give the google keywords to find the place.
toyg 8y ago
You should write down your aunt’s story, get a lit agent, and start knocking on publishers’ doors. After publishing, tell the agent to shop it to Hollywood.

windows_tips 8y ago

All government communications are subject to inspection and should be disclosed as soon as possible. Why does the State Department need to take such extreme measures and have special exemption from processes meant to detect and stop all manner of nefarious activity?

fl0wenol 8y ago
All country's diplomatic services have a similar exempt mail/pouch system; it's a service we all extend to each other. Others leave ours alone, and we leave foreign government's alone in turn (at ports or elsewhere). Governments are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other; this is a way to do it out in the open.
- windows_tips 8y ago
  Governments are a function of their laws. I'm not sure what you mean by, 'are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other'. I don't actually allow or expect my government to keep secrets. I don't think 'they' are even authorized to. If 'they' could, 'they' would not be a representative government, of, for, and by the people.
  - grkvlt 8y ago
    Of course governments must keep secrets. These are things like order of battle details for the military; location and other details for nuclear weapons; names and addresses of intelligence officers, informants or defectors; algorithms for decryption of foreign ciphers; and so on. However, in western democracies the secrecy is usually time limited. For example in the United Kingdom we have the 30-year rule[0] which provides for public release of confidential government documents after 30 years (and they are moving to 20 years now) which is a good compromise between transparency and the need for operational secrecy and security. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-year_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-year_rule
    - windows_tips 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

grouseway 8y ago

They even carry furniture. Not unexpected given the lengths that spies go to. It reminds me of the IBM Selectric bug (apparently planted during a customs inspection). http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/ http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/

zeveb 8y ago

> Employing 103 couriers at 12 hubs around the world, the DCS boasts a delivery success rate that would be the envy of FedEx and UPS. Do they? The article never backs that up: > Nobody at the service could remember a single lost pouch or unsuccessful delivery in the service’s modern history, though missions can be aborted for political, weather, or mechanical reasons if necessary. The service did once manage to lose a baby grand piano along the Orient Express in 1919. Evidently, the courier—David K E Bruce, later a renowned diplomat—slept beneath it on a railway platform in Bulgaria and woke to find the piano was gone. I'd count cancelled missions as unsuccessful, just as I'd count a cancelled delivery by UPS. Given that the Diplomatic Couriers Service must have orders of magnitude fewer packages than e.g. UPS or FedEx, it's entirely possible that those few failures are a higher failure rate than the commercial carriers. None of that's to detract from the DCS's really cool achievements — I just dislike journalistic hyperbole.