Many U.S. government personnel serving overseas are yet to receive a coronavirus vaccine. They're wondering why officials in Washington have been vaccinated, while they, on the front lines, remain unprotected.
In a video call this week to embassy staff in Mexico City, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly promised to fix things. It was a welcome acknowledgment of the situation. Still, swift action is needed.
A primary job of U.S. national security professionals abroad is to interact with the local population. That means meeting officials from a host government and the rank and file on the street. Whether you're a diplomat or an intelligence officer, you are not even marginally effective when holed up in an embassy or other U.S. government facility. But our personnel are also subject to a host government's response to the pandemic. While some foreign governments (such as Israel) have handled this crisis in fine fashion, others have far less auspicious records. I cannot imagine what our overseas personnel and their families are going through in some of the most coronavirus-ravaged countries. Especially those where intensive care beds and ventilators are not ubiquitous.
The failure to vaccinate these Americans strikes a raw nerve with me. It violates two critical principles that I always held to while serving at the CIA: Those in the field come first, and leaders must always take care of their people.
The job of any headquarters is to support the field. This entails the daily provision of requisite resources, personnel, operational support, and yes, the provision of critical medical care when warranted. If I were still in government service in the Washington area, had received the vaccine, yet the overseas personnel I supported had not, I do not know how I would sleep at night. I recall many times in my career when our support personnel in headquarters performed spectacularly, to include caring for the evacuation of U.S. officials from overseas postings due to terrorist threats, mass diplomatic expulsions, or even when a family needed medical care and a simple airport pickup and transfer to a hospital. To be clear, the CIA's support personnel routinely performed in a herculean fashion, and I remain forever grateful on a personal level. My beef is not at all with the rank-and-file administrative and support cadres at the State Department or CIA.
But we must ask the questions. How has this failure to get the vaccines to our people overseas occurred? Is it a failure in the top ranks of multiple agencies to plan accordingly? Why was there not a plan and then another backup plan? Why have we not called on the U.S. military, the greatest logistical masters on the planet, to assist in this effort?
Were I in charge, I would not rest until every overseas U.S. official and his or her family were vaccinated. If necessary, I would send folks home in staggered chunks to obtain the vaccine. I would direct that this be done regardless of cost.
This failure is ultimately down to a failure in imagination. Not vaccinating our overseas personnel on an expeditious basis violates the basic tenet of leadership in the national security arena. We ask our people to volunteer to go into harm's way. But they do so with the assumption that we will go through hoops to take care of them.
That this pact appears to have been broken is unconscionable. It must be rectified immediately.
Marc Polymeropoulos is a former CIA senior operations officer. He retired in 2019 after a 26-year career serving in the Near East and South Asia. His book Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA will be published in June 2021 by Harper Collins.
