American Diplomat

By Ambassador (Retired) Pete Romero and Writer/Producer Laura Bennett

Education Government & Organizations Non-Profit

What's American Diplomat about?

American Diplomat goes behind the scenes to hear real stories from diplomats who lived newsworthy events overseas. Experience the Cuban revolution, Central American insurgencies, the end of apartheid and more through the eyes of those who were there.

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Nothing is Impossible, with...

10.21.2021

Ted Osius retired from his post as US Ambassador to Vietnam when asked to implement covertly-devised deportation policies he found morally repugnant and un-American. Hear about his crisis of conscience and also of the heroic service of senators John McCain ...

American Diplomat episodes:

10.21.2021 Nothing is Impossible, with Ted Osius Ted Osius retired from his post as US Ambassador to Vietnam when asked to implement covertly-devised deportation policies he found morally repugnant and un-American. Hear about his crisis of conscience and also of the heroic service of senators John McCain ...
10.14.2021 From Soaking Wet to Very Big Business It's 1990, and Ian Brownlee, out walking his dog, meets a man whose visa application he had refused just that very morning. The man is about to swim across the river to his probable death, so Ian advises him of ...
10.12.2021 Toobah is Free! But what of the rest of her countrywomen? Here's a quick midweek update with our Afghan friend Toobah, in her words. Enjoy!
10.07.2021 Nicaragua, Nicaragüita "Never, ever allow free and fair elections" is Fidel's advice to Daniel Ortega, today's strongman leader of Nicaragua. Bob Callahan describes today's authoritarian regime in this Central American nation.
10.01.2021 The Summer of the Cockroaches Pardis Mahdavi relays her experience of the Iranian sexual revolution and similar movements in the Middle East, including Afghanistan. Why was the summer of the cockroaches her favorite? There weren't enough cockroaches for everybody! And this is to say nothing ...
09.23.2021 9/11, Personal Inventory and a New Career Nancy Ostrowski experienced the events of 9/11 first-hand, which inspired her to embark on a journey to a more satisfying, new career with USAID. See also her article in the Sept 2021 Foreign Service Journal, "Getting Off the X", and ...
09.16.2021 The Last Officer at Abbey Gate Consular officer Alan Eaton helped scores of Afghans at risk evacuate from Kabul, working from inside the Abbey Gate at the airport at exactly the moment when our friend Toobah was on the other side of the gate, trying to ...
09.09.2021 The Future of American Diplomacy Eric Rubin sums it up with one word. If we want to be successful in our diplomacy, we need to adopt a position of humility with respect to the rest of the world.
09.07.2021 Toobah Evacuation Update Our friend is still there, fearing for her life. What is going on in Afghanistan right now? Laura shares Toobah's most recent experience as evacuations stall and no one really knows why. Pete helps us understand what it all means.
09.03.2021 These Are Not My Beautiful Feet For Pride Month (belatedly posted due to events in Afghanistan and our coverage of those), Austin Richey-Allen recounts his story of gender transition in the Foreign Service. A trans kid, he discovered in adulthood that there is a term for ...
08.30.2021 This Didn't Have to Happen Our disastrous departure from Afghanistan. Hugo Llorens shares his knowledge of the Taliban's subgroups (hint: none abide by the Geneva Convention), his perspective on US domestic politics and its impact on the human tragedy in Afghanistan, and his view on ...
08.27.2021 And What of Our Friend Toobah? Wouldn't we all like to know. She's alive, at least. Bad luck becomes good luck as she is turned away on her way to the airport just before the bombs go off.
08.20.2021 Whaddaya Do? People's lives are at stake in the most urgent way. Policy is a macro-level thing, and utterly necessary. But what about the people themselves? What about Toobah? What should Biden have done? People are hanging from the fuselage. Afghanistan, August ...
08.12.2021 Encore: The Ugly American Or a traitor, anyway. In an eerily quiet region during the Vietnam war, from a banana grove in the middle of the night, Lionel Rosenblatt discovers that a US military official is guilty of supplying the enemy with life-saving medicine ...
08.05.2021 Encore: Bahrain, So Small, So Important The Arab Spring – Tunisia, Egypt – we know about these places. But Bahrain is almost never in the news. What is its geopolitical significance, and strategic importance to the US? And why was Ambassador Tom Krajeski in a tight ...
07.29.2021 They Will Cut Our Heads, Of Course! Amb. Ryan Crocker, Middle East expert, explains the value of Foreign Service Nationals and brings it all home with a story of the day that local staff saved his life. Toobah, a former employee of USAID, then tells us of ...
07.23.2021 Don't Let Us Be Killed HT, an Afghan interpreter who worked alongside US forces and has been denied a visa to come to the United States explains how he served, who in his family has been killed as a consequence of his service, and how ...
07.15.2021 Encore: Send Lawyers, Guns and Money Consular officer Kate Canavan on the many things that can go wrong in Tijuana. Two air traffic controllers, fired for going on strike, go into (very) private industry. Pete’s words: “Breaking Bad, in the skies.”
07.10.2021 Encore: We’ll Always Have Paris Communism drives immigration decisions, 1956. Hank Cohen is in love. It’s his first tour, and he’s in Paris. The Soviets invade Hungary and Hank helps thousands of refugees flee Communist aggression and make new lives in the US. But what ...
06.30.2021 Encore: Who Lost China? It is the 1950s. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn target and humiliate our diplomats for accurately reporting an eventual Mao victory in China. Jack Service and his family are at the center of the storm. How are ...
06.24.2021 Encore: Stay Home and Pour the Tea A social worker by profession, Bonnie Miller traveled the world with her spouse Ambassador Tom Miller and created the first-ever course in Psychosocial Consequences of War in response to trauma she witnessed in Sarajevo. But the life changing moment came ...
06.16.2021 Dull, Duller, Dulles Trick Question: What happened in Yalta in 1945? Probably more than you think! And why did those proceedings hold up the confirmation of Ambassador Avis Bohlen's father Charles Bohlen as Ambassador to the Soviet Union? Plus: Are things better in ...
06.12.2021 Encore: Pedro Pan and the Guerrillas Pete sends Phil Chicola to guerrilla country to investigate the deaths of American linguist missionaries, and both Pete and Phil are accused of negotiating with the FARC. All of this concurrent with the Clinton impeachment, and as Pete explains, it ...
06.04.2021 The Sky is Green! Phil Shull is back, this time connecting our earlier discussion of Chinese culture to practical business and policy challenges faced by Westerners doing business in that country.
05.28.2021 Scarcity Colors Everything Why does the West find China so confounding in matters of business and diplomacy? Phil Shull, retired Foreign Agricultural Service officer, explains: China's culture and history may be best understood by its written character for "population", which is comprised of ...
05.20.2021 A Bag of Doritos: It's Happening What do 840 people, 96 hours, a hamster, a newborn, a bag of Doritos and a husband expecting to fly first class all add up to? The zombie apocalypse, or, the evacuation of Americans from Wuhan, China, at the start ...
05.13.2021 Biden Gets an Incomplete (So Far) Dennis Jett, recidivist American Diplomat guest, regales and opines on hostage-taking in Peru, the Cuban missile crisis, the JFK assassination, and (drum roll, please) Joe Biden's first 100 days in foreign policy. Quiz: State dinners or the Iran nuclear deal ...
05.06.2021 The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories In our third of three episodes on the assassination of JFK, we learn what the eminently reasonable Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former CIA operations officer, has learned by focusing purely on the facts. But questions remain. Among them: Can we trust our ...
04.29.2021 Her Fathers' Death: It Just Doesn't Add Up Why did her diplomat father take his own life? Her mother kept her in the dark. Why? To protect her? From what? Zelda just wants some answers.
04.22.2021 A JFK Assassination Tipster's Demise Charles Thomas had intel, valuable intel, on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And to thank him for his efforts to share this intel, he was "selected out" of the Foreign Service, or, fired. This led to his suicide not ...
04.15.2021 Diversity Across the Generations at State Ambassador Jim Gadsen and mid-career officer Paloma Gonzalez share their stories of diversity and inclusion, one a Black man whose career was launched in part by the Civil Rights Movement, the other a Latina whose parents came to the US ...
04.08.2021 Is 757 Years Enough? It's 5:30am, and Kala Bokelman of the Diplomatic Security Service is one of many staking out a professional photographer named Solano's house on a skinny on a dead-end street in Costa Rica. Together with Costa Rican security, the DSS helps ...
03.31.2021 Smuggling Cubans Party at Carla's house! Kala Bokelman, diplomatic security special agent, tells of a raid on a house straddling the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border. The goal? To stop coyotes smuggling people from Cuba to the US via Ecuador and every state in ...
03.26.2021 Combatting Anti-Blackness as a Diplomat of Color As a diplomat of color, how did the murder of George Floyd inspire Christian Loubeau, Security Council negotiator for the United States mission to the United Nations, to create change at USUN? And, how exactly do you conduct multilateral negotiation ...
03.18.2021 Onboarding Online Andrew Shinn onboards as a new Foreign Service Officer during the pandemic. But what is he onboarding to? There's no place to go, and even State doesn't really know what to do with these newbies. Do you swear in wearing ...
03.11.2021 F.W. de Klerk, Winnie Mandela and Cyril Ramaposa We all know the importance of Nelson Mandela, but great as he was, he did not work alone. Each of these figures brought their motives and personalities to shape South Africa's transition from apartheid to the present. John Campbell, political ...
03.04.2021 Trifecta It all began with a call from the police. Andrew Byrley, a young officer and former robotics expert, shares tales of a harrowing month assisting Americans in crisis in Belize. What can, what cannot, and what must the American consulate ...
02.25.2021 Bahrain, So Small, So Important The Arab Spring - Tunisia, Egypt - we know about these places. But Bahrain is almost never in the news. What is its geopolitical significance, and strategic importance to the US? And why was Ambassador Tom Krajeski in a tight ...
02.18.2021 The Shining City on the Hill? "But we're Americans. We don't lose wars." False! Ambassador and former National Security Advisor Tony Lake takes a hard look at American leadership in the world from Kennedy until the present time, when like so many countries, our democracy needs ...
02.12.2021 The Secret Dinners Like Chicago mobsters, hard line parties grab to divvy up the riches after the genocide in Bosnia has stopped. Ambassador Tom Miller, together with the British ambassador, organizes "secret dinners" that lead to a peaceable coalition of factions that brings ...
02.04.2021 The Ugly American Or a traitor, anyway. In an eerily quiet region during the Vietnam war, from a banana grove in the middle of the night, Lionel Rosenblatt discovers that a US military official is guilty of supplying the enemy with life-saving medicine ...
02.01.2021 Bonus Repost: That Day I Had to Run Again in honor both of Black History Month and Linda Thomas-Greenfield's recent appointment as US ambassador to the United Nations, we repost our second chat with Linda from last summer: April 7, 1994, Rwanda. Not a good day to be ...
01.27.2021 December 17, 2010 Mohammed Bouazizi, an underemployed fruit seller, sets himself on fire, launching what we later began calling the Arab Spring. Ambassador Gordon Gray walks us through life on the ground in Tunisia, when things in the Arab world began to change. ...
01.25.2021 Bouns Repost - A Few Choice Words In honor of upcoming Black History Month, and in honor of the new administration, we repost our first episode with Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden's new Ambassador to the UN. Go, Linda! Here's the episode: “I respect your culture, but I do ...
01.21.2021 The Nile Just Keeps Flowing Dan Kurtzer, Ambassador to both Egypt and Israel, parses this complex part of the world from his experience on the ground. Why was Anwar Sadat killed? What social forces produced the revolution of February 2011? And how is the average ...
01.14.2021 The Merchant of Death The worst of the worst: Victor Bout, Russian arms dealer, is not the only one. A a host of other nogoodnicks invest their nefarious proceeds in American cities such as Louisville, Dallas, Cleveland, unbeknownst to city officials. These criminals receive ...
01.07.2021 The Dirty Money Tracker What exactly is dirty money, and how is it laundered? How much of it flows through the world, and the United States in particular? And how does it impact regular Americans going about our daily lives? Kathleen Doherty, aka "the ...
12.31.2020 Hiatus Post - More with Gina Winstanley For some even better discussion with Gina, here's our second of two with her: Religious police stop Gina and terrorists attack the consulate general in Jeddah. See you next week with new original content. Happy New Year!
12.26.2020 Hiatus post: Gina Winstanley's Adventures in the Middle East Bet you haven't heard this one! We recorded this story when we began the show a few years ago and no one knew about us yet. Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley regales, in her first of two episodes. Do you know where to ...
12.17.2020 Hiatus Post - Pete Goes Native Pete visits the Huarani Indians, botches up a boar hunt, drinks the mystery drink chicha, and receives upon his departure a marriage proposal, ambiguously addressed either to himself one of the other fine young gringos. Follows first episode, titled “Cowboys ...

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