Consular services changed after 9/11

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.”

Mr. Donahue was unable to secure the release of the women, who were freed only when the Taliban were overthrown in a U.S.-led war that November, but he continued to monitor their case from Islamabad.

“The war was going on, and I would call the Foreign Ministry as bombs rained down on the city. They would check on them and give us reports back,” he said in an interview at the embassy in Manila, where he has been working since 2002.

As a Foreign Service officer with 18 years’ experience, Mr. Donahue knew immediately after the September 11 attacks that the work of American diplomats overseas was bound to change. More than 2 years later, those changes have been most profound in his line of work — consular affairs.

Protecting the interests of Americans abroad, as Mr. Donahue did in Kabul, is only part of that work. Consular officers also are the people responsible for issuing U.S. entry visas to foreigners.

That function, which is performed at 211 missions around the world, has come under intense scrutiny in Washington since it was discovered that the 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks had entered the United States on legally obtained visas.

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