Madam Ambassador

Women diplomats have risen to the highest levels in some of the world's most dangerous places, but not without a fight.

In the early days of the Iraqi army's occupation of Kuwait in August 1990, Barbara Bodine, then the second-highest-ranking U.S. official in the country, shuttled between the American embassy and a hotel across the street, where a number of U.S. citizens and other Westerners were held hostage. Surreptitiously, Bodine collected intelligence about their welfare, plans to get them out of the country, and the activities of the Iraqi secret police, who were preparing to quarter there. Bodine sat with the hotel manager, an Austrian, in his office, "talking about silly stuff while writing notes back and forth . . . [because] we didn't know if the room had been bugged," she says.

Before heading to the hotel, she mustered her cunning and an outward display of control so she wouldn't get shot. Between the embassy and the hotel was a checkpoint manned by young Iraqi guards, probably conscripts, toting AK-47 assault rifles and using "very poor gun protocol," Bodine recalls.

As she approached the guard post, they shouted at her in Arabic, "Mamnuah! Mamnuah!" (Forbidden! Forbidden!) Bodine, a Navy brat, rejoined, "Masmuah. Masmuah" (Allowed. Allowed.), then waved and sauntered on. "In Iraq, everything was 'mamnuah,' " Bodine says. "The idea that something was 'masmuah' was beyond comprehension, and anyone who said it must be so empowered. Anyone who acted as an authority figure was assumed to be one. In this case, the mixed signals-authority figure, but a woman-seemed to have just shorted their system. They didn't know what to make of it."

Bodine is a tall woman-5 feet 9 inches. When she enters a room, people notice her, because she stands up straight, looks them in the eye and walks deliberately. She is authoritative. But recollecting the 137-day siege in Kuwait City, and her exploits with the guards, she says, "How do you know it is going to work? You don't. They could just as easily have shot me in the back as I waltzed through."

Bodine accrued authority, and a penchant for dramatic assignments, over a 33-year career in the Foreign Service. She was ambassador to Yemen in 2000 when al Qaeda suicide bombers in an explosive-laden raft attacked the USS Cole in the Port of Aden, killing 17 sailors. Controversially, she blocked the FBI's lead counterterrorism investigator, John O'Neill, a divisive figure in his own right, from re-entering the country, contending he offended and terrified Yemeni authorities and lied to her on numerous occasions. (The decision earned her enduring animosity in the hearts of some FBI agents. O'Neill was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11.) Before retiring in 2003, Bodine served a final tour in the Middle East. She was one of the first American officials to enter Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, earning her the title "Mayor of Baghdad" from the news media. In the midst of rampant looting and a burgeoning insurgency, she tried to gear up reconstruction projects in and around the densely populated capital.

In her early days as a junior Foreign Service officer, Bodine reasonably could have assumed that a life of authority and adventure would elude her. In 1974, she was posted as a political-military affairs officer-a coveted job-to the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, only her second assignment. At the time, women were breaking out of administrative dumping grounds and into prestigious reaches of the Foreign Service. However, the old guard remained in many places, and Bangkok was one. The No. 3 official at the embassy averred that women couldn't cut it, as political-military officers or any other kind, Bodine says. His choice of working quarters for the 24-year-old illustrated his estimation of her potential.

"I was put in the room that had the hot plate, the refrigerator," Bodine says. "I was put in the kitchen." The placement was literal and figurative. "I was given nothing to do. I was given no responsibilities. He did everything he possibly could to get rid of me." Eventually, the ambassador himself interceded, and the No. 3 official was sent back to Washington.

The narrative of Bodine's Foreign Service career-from hot plates to hot zones-is not unique, and it says something about the role of women in the career diplomatic corps in the past four decades: They've had to fight harder, both for recognition and promotion, than men. Bodine and her colleagues-senior career diplomats-say they haven't faced much overt discrimination on the job. The kitchen in Bangkok was the only one to which Bodine was ever relegated.

But sometimes, women have succeeded only by acting as men presume other men should-"Masmuah. Masmuah." On other occasions, especially in the male-dominated societies in which Foreign Service women serve with great frequency, they've manipulated traditional expectations about how women should behave and the roles they should play.

Women have risen to the highest ranks. They've served in some of the world's most perilous places. They have shaped the conduct and character of U.S. foreign policy. They've come a long way. And yet, some women wonder, is it far enough?

Blowback

In 1986, at 40, Ann Wright decided to start over. Bowing to pressure from a class action lawsuit, which she had joined years earlier, the State Department invited her and a number of other women to retake the daylong oral portion of the Foreign Service exam, the requisite test for diplomatic aspirants, which Wright had failed 10 years before. The lawsuit had alleged that the exam and its grading were unfairly biased against women. Now, the first 75 women who could pass the orals, as well a medical and security check, would be admitted into the Foreign Service.

Wright always had liked taking tests, and she performed well on them. She was a National Merit Scholarship finalist in high school. She scored well on her law school boards. She thought the Foreign Service exam was a "good test," no harder or easier than the others. "But then," she says, "I got back this little dingle berry postcard from the Foreign Service saying, 'Oh, we're sorry. You didn't pass this exam.' " Wright was confused. "My thought was, 'I'd sure like to know what the scoring is on this. They must have a pretty high cutoff point for passing it.' "

Years later, a federal judge determined that the exam illegally discriminated against women-men passed about twice as often, a statistical impossibility for a gender-neutral test. That ruling and others, stemming from an original suit filed in 1976 by Alison Palmer, a Foreign Service officer, became the key instruments for disassembling the legal barriers that had kept women from advancing in the diplomatic corps or entering it at all.

Wright retook the exam and passed. In the intervening years, she had joined the Army. She told her commanding officer that she was retiring. She desperately wanted to become a defense attaché, the military adviser in a U.S. embassy. She had the credentials. In 1986, as an Army lieutenant colonel, she was helping run the Reagan administration's "civic action programs" in Honduras, which she describes as a quid pro quo arrangement in which U.S. troops built roads, schools and clinics in return for the Honduran government's agreement to serve as a base of operations for U.S.-backed Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the socialist government in neighboring Nicaragua. Wright wanted to get deeper into Central American policy, but "the Army gave me blowback . . . because I was a woman," she says. Officials argued that Wright couldn't operate effectively in the region's macho, militaristic societies. "I said, well, excuse me, but that's exactly what I've been doing for three years."

Wright left active duty in January 1987 and joined the Army Reserve. A month later, she began a new career as an entry-level consular officer, stamping passports and processing visa applications in, of all places, Managua, Nicaragua. Years later, Wright tapped her military training to lead the evacuation of 2,500 people from the U.S. embassy in Sierra Leone during a civil war. The embassy exodus was the largest from a U.S. diplomatic facility since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Before retiring in 2003 to protest the Bush administration's apparent plan to invade Iraq, Wright served as the deputy chief of mission-the No. 2 slot-at the U.S. embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Near East Oasis

Many Foreign Service women view the filing of the Palmer suit as a watershed. "There was discrimination against women. [Palmer] was right," says Mary Ryan, who joined the Foreign Service in 1966 and achieved the rank of career ambassador, the diplomatic equivalent of a four-star Army general. Until 1970, for example, a female Foreign Service officer had to resign if she married because, convention held, the role of wife and mother would prevent her from pursuing the globe-trotting life of a diplomat.

"I'm no longer sure whether men did it deliberately, to hold [women] back, or whether they thought they were being kind, kind of a paternal attitude," Ryan says. But clearly, women didn't enter the service in the numbers they should have given their representation in the U.S. population. So, Ryan joined the Palmer case as a named plaintiff. "It was an obvious decision," she says. By the time Ryan retired in 2002 as the assistant secretary for consular affairs, she was State's most senior career officer.

But not all women wanted to throw in with Palmer. In particular, women in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs had found an oasis, where discrimination was rare. "[Palmer] was a very controversial case within the women [of Near Eastern Affairs]," says Bodine, who spent most of her career in the bureau. Life was different, and better, for them. Women didn't have to beg for language training, for instance. On the contrary, the State Department was eager to add staff and teach them Arabic after shuttering embassies in the Middle East from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Language training began in earnest and by the late 1970s, "It was very clear that NEA was out recruiting like crazy," Bo-dine says. "There was a woman in every office in NEA in Washington and in every embassy. Granted, we were very junior, but we were there."

Bodine and others credit the men of the Near East bureau, particularly the younger ones, for aiding their advance. "Almost all the women in NEA will say that the mentoring that we got [from the men] was just absolutely fantastic," Bo-dine says. "NEA was out recruiting us. They weren't forced to do it. They were ahead of everybody else." So, when given the chance to join the Palmer suit, Bodine says the NEA women gathered informally and decided to say no. She remembers thinking, "We cannot in good conscience join this because this would be a slam at the men in this bureau who are not part of the problem. . . . These guys are fixing it."

"There was just an attitude in the leadership at the time . . . that whoever wanted to do the work, come on. Come on, help us out," says Elizabeth Jones, who entered the Foreign Service in 1970 and served four tours in Middle Eastern countries. "We were still a bit of a minority. It wasn't almost 50-50 like it is now. But anybody who wanted to give it a shot was certainly welcome," adds Jones, who retired in March as the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs, a highly prestigious post.

The idea that women would be embraced by a bureau whose portfolio includes some of the most patriarchal and totalitarian regimes in the world strikes some as counterintuitive. Did Jones ever feel her gender impeded her ability to interact with Arab officials? "No, no. That was the cool thing," she says. "I was seen as an official of the U.S. government." One of her first assignments was at the U.S. Interests Section in Cairo, in 1973, during Egypt's war with Israel and the ensuing shuttle diplomacy of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. "I was seen as an American official . . . not as male or female," she says. "And that makes you very effective. . . . I actually thought it was an advantage to be a woman, because everybody knew who I was. I could walk into the foreign ministry [building], past all the guards, and they'd say, 'Elizabeth! Hello!' And it was all right. Whereas the men all had to show ID cards, because they couldn't keep them straight."

The women of the Foreign Service inhabit a peculiar gender reality. In one sense, their female identity is erased. They become representatives of the most powerful nation on earth, carriers of cachet, wielders of influence and, perhaps most important, conferrers of financial aid. Sometimes, their gender makes them a novelty. Other times, it makes them a threat. The trick is knowing which role to play.

Mourning in Pink

In 1996, the U.S. government sent Prudence Bushnell to Kenya as ambassador. Her predecessor was a woman, too. Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi thought he was being punished.

Bushnell, like Ann Wright, is a direct beneficiary of the Palmer era. She entered the Foreign Service in 1981, skipping entry-level posts and moving directly to a mid-level position as part of a program to attract women and minorities. She recognized the scrutiny she was under and felt keenly the need to prove herself-both to her colleagues and to African strongmen, some of whom considered it a personal affront for America to send them a "lady."

Bushnell has little to prove. Her career is remarkable. In 1998, she was ambassador to Kenya when al Qaeda blew up the embassy there. Bushnell is widely credited with getting the embassy back on its feet.

Four years earlier, as the deputy assistant secretary for African affairs at the State Department, Bushnell found herself at odds with the Clinton administration's response to genocide in Rwanda, where ethnic Hutus systematically executed their sworn enemies, the Tutsis. When the killing frenzy finally ceased, more than 800,000 people were dead. Bushnell earned accolades for being one of the few U.S. officials to directly confront Rwandan leaders for their complicity and involvement in the bloodshed.

But for all that, Bushnell still has had to overcome challenges due to her gender. In meetings with Kenyan officials and U.S. embassy staff, she instructed male colleagues to look at her when she spoke, never at the Kenyan men, who inevitably turned to their male counterparts as if to get the real story. When Bushnell talked, the Kenyans found the only pair of eyes with which they could lock belonged to her.

Bushnell also set limits. She would wear a skirt in public, honoring Kenya's conservative decorum, but she never would wear a veil. She let her staff call her "Pru" in private, as her friends do, but in public, always "Madam Ambassador."

With male foreign dignitaries, Bushnell never used familiar forms of address. As ambassador to Guatemala, from 1999 until 2002, she always referred to a government official as "usted," the formal Spanish form of "you," never as "tú," the informal. The limits were products of necessity. "I had to create a distance because, as a woman, it would not be created," Bushnell says. "There isn't an established protocol with men. So we have to be the one to establish it."

But being a woman enabled Bushnell to talk to male heads of state in a way few men could. Many men are accustomed to taking orders from women-their mothers or their wives. Some are less threatened by women than men. A womanly smile and a pleasant tone of voice can make even the thorniest discussion go more smoothly, and when necessary, Bushnell used her advantages.

Guatemalan President Alfonoso Portillo Cabrera once told a group of journalists that he appreciated his relationship with the ambassador, and that, when she needed to, she "pulled me by the ears." He had a dual appreciation of her, Bushnell explains: part government official, part chiding schoolteacher. The dynamic created an openness in which Bushnell could bring up the most sensitive subjects. Once, she told Cabrera that the United States knew some of his close associates were involved in financial corruption. "I suppose you think this means it leads back to me," Bushnell recalls Cabrera saying sheepishly. "Mr. President," she replied, calmly, firmly, "What else am I supposed to think?"

Bushnell used femininity to open channels to those she never met. After al Qaeda bombers destroyed the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in August 1998, she went before television cameras to show that the Americans still controlled the Kenyan facility. So, instead of wearing the customary black of mourning, Bushnell opted for bright colors-blues, pink and red. Most women's wardrobes are more varied than men's, Bushnell notes.

"I didn't need to show our mourning for the people I was burying," she says. In photographs, Bushnell is seen walking amid the rubble, grieving next to flag-draped coffins of embassy staff as they're loaded onto airplanes, scattering roses on makeshift memorials. Her bright clothes defy the horror. "I wanted to show Osama bin Laden that he didn't kill me," Bushnell says. "I was in pink."

'Really, Really Good'

In the 1920s, State Department officials proposed banning women from the department altogether. Today, most men in the Foreign Service never would challenge women's intellectual ability to conduct diplomacy. But the Foreign Service is one of the most competitive environments in the government. All diplomats, regardless of gender, consider themselves fortunate to get an ambassadorial post, considering many of the best slots go to political allies of the administration in power. But at the senior levels, the lines dividing the sexes grow stark and more confining.

Numbers tell part of the story. Of the 148 ambassadors posted as of 2004, 99 were career members of the Foreign Service. However, only 23 of them-less than 25 percent-were women. That's not even within striking distance of the State Department's stated goal of creating a diplomatic corps that mirrors the nation's gender makeup-half female.

Privately, women acknowledge, and bemoan, other differences with their male colleagues that statistics don't capture: Men can scream; women can't. Men can throw telephones; women can't. Men can exert an assertive, commanding style of leadership. Women who do so develop, to put it charitably, reputations. For example, when Bushnell met her longtime assistant, Linda Howard, she told her, "I have worked only once for a woman before, and it was awful."

"That sort of summed up what a lot of people thought at the time," Bushnell says. But, she hastens to add, "I think that is going away."

Perhaps that's because women have proved themselves. They are more comfortable in their jobs, and colleagues and staffers are more comfortable with them. "There's no sense at all that any of us got here too quickly," Jones says. "We all have come up through the ranks in a very appropriate way. . . . The only question I ever hear is: Why aren't there more women? I don't know," Jones admits. But then she pauses, seeming to reflect on her own career, from the foreign ministry building in Cairo to the upper echelons of State. "You still have to be really, really good. You can't be just like everybody else."