Hardening Embassies, Softening Relations

Castle keep meets community center.

By Suzanne Kubota
Senior Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio.com

U.S. embassies around the world are getting facelifts or moving, like the embassy in London.

Will Colston is Deputy Managing Director of Project Development, Coordination and Support for the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations at the State Department. Colston tells FederalNewsRadio the move is actually part of a larger program.

Our focus was to replace aging facilities that weren’t safe and didn’t meet security standards. When we embarked on that we had about 192 embassies that we were focused on completing. Since that time we’ve been able to complete 61 and we’ve moved a little bit over 18,000 people into safer, more secure and functional facilities.

In choosing security over history, how can the US avoid looking more fortress-like?

That’s probably one of our biggest challenges confronting us today. …In order to have security, you have to have stand-off, you have to have security measures that kind of put you at arm’s length. At the same time, we have an extremely important mission that requires us to interface directly with the local community, with the local officials, the host governments… and so there’s a real balancing act that has to occur.

The List of 80

With hundreds of facilities all over the world, how does State decide which needs get addressed first? Colston says it all starts with one resource.

It’s a list developed by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and they assess all of our facilities world-wide, not just the 80, but all 256 or so posts. They array them based on the vulnerability and the concern at that specific location. We take that list and take a look at it and say, number one, do we have property available to build there, and if we do, then that tells us that the project is doable depending on local conditions. So it’s a combination of looking at the security posture as well as the doability of the project itself.

Fortunately, there’s lots of time for the London building. The United States has a 999-year lease on the land that will not expire until 2959.

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On the Web:

State Dept. – Overseas Buildings Operations

FederalNewsRadio – US to build new embassy in suburban London

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