Consular services changed after 9/11

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America's other Army: Inside the Foreign Service

Fifth in a series

At first glance, David T. Donahue's experience on September 11, 2001, was not much different from that of most other Americans.

"I heard the first plane had already hit the World Trade Center, and then watched the second live on television, like everybody else," he recalled recently.

But although most Americans were at home or at work when the terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. Donahue was in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where the plot that killed about 3,000 Americans most likely was hatched.

He had been dealing for days with the country's Taliban regime, which had provided safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network since 1996.

Mr. Donahue, the U.S. consul-general in Islamabad, the capital of neighboring Pakistan, was on a mission to rescue two U.S. citizens, Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer. The Christian relief workers, along with six Germans and Australians, had been detained five weeks earlier on proselytizing charges and faced possible death sentences.

"We had a beautiful morning," Mr. Donahue recalled. "We were out with a Taliban official, visiting the old German school where his son went. In the middle of the tour, we received a call that we had been granted permission to visit the girls, talk to them in depth and discuss legal representation for the first time."