Wretchard:
Having been assigned to 9 different embassies over the 27-year course of a US diplomatic career, I’ll have to take exception to your example of the US Marines in embassies. They are not there to fight the locals, and in fact one of the toughest tests they have to face is unruly mobs or similar action that they could easily put down with a little more SPE (diplospeak for Special Protective Equipment = guns). No, they are there to give the folks inside time to destroy certain files and equipment that are deemed too sensitive to fall into other hands. They’re there to hold the defensive lines at the front door while the rest of us burn our secrets.
A good example of what happens when those secrets are compromised comes from the embassy takeover in Teheran, were files of embassy contacts were captured by the Revolutionary Guards and the people in those files ruthlessly hunted down and killed. We have destruction capability for our files, but it requires some time to work.
When I first went overseas the destruction capability was 55 gallon drums lined with some kind of intense oxidizer. Dump paper files inside the drum, throw a match on top and inside 30 seconds you have a fireball 25 feet high. One embassy where I worked had a drum go off inadvertantly — it burned through several concrete floors (they were usually on the embassy roof, as crowds would take the longest to arrive there).
We used to hold “bag-and-drag” drills where we’d put old files in a bag (diplomatic pouches, actually) and drag them to the communications vault, where they’d be destroyed by a large machine that pulped everything you put into it. The purpose of the exercise was to determine how long it took to destroy 12 linear feet (or some such number) of top secret files, only the exercise was routinely held with unimportant office documents.
With the development of other technologies (microfiches, computer disks, etc), different destruction methods were developed. But they all require a certain delay from the moment the person in charge says “destroy”.
Anyway, the Marines aren’t there to shoot at the bad guys, they’re there to hold the bad guys at bay with tear gas and the like.
F
