By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

The Marines like to boast that they never leave their wounded behind.

You won’t hear that line at the State Department these days.

That’s because of Foggy Bottom’s dirty little secret: Its bureaucrats can’t be counted on to take care of their own casualties of war.

And that’s why, say the foreign service’s defenders, State Department employees are wary of going to Iraq: Unlike soldiers, they can’t count on a safety net if they’re hurt.

Wrecked physically and mentally from terrorist attacks or duty in combat zones, State Department employees from senior diplomats on down to foreign aid workers say they have too often had to fend for themselves when they were hurt.

“The idea of being killed or injured is real,” says Frank Pressley, who was badly wounded during a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998, “and if you are injured, you had better believe that you will be forgotten by the very employer that asked and needed your help.”

Pressley is one of several former and present foreign service officers who told me unsettling stories of their travails with the State Department — and the Labor Department’s Office of Workers Compensation — over the decade since they were wounded.

Pressley was a veteran communications officer at the Nairobi embassy when a powerful al Qaeda bomb blast ripped through a wall, leaving holes in his face and shredding an arm, requiring a series of surgeries. His wife was also injured.

In 2002, he told The Washington Post, “I get no assistance, no options, no real help.” By the time the piece was published, however, the bureaucrats had suddenly came up with a check.

Last week I called Pressley to ask him if the system had changed since then.

“Honestly, nothing much,” he said. “There was some improvement with the Department of State, as they created an office to work directly with the [State Department] Director General’s Office for Victims, such as myself. But, in the long run, the system is broken.”

Pressley eventually healed enough to go back to work. But then he was checked again by bureaucratic indifference.

He asked for an assignment to Ankara, where his Turkish wife’s family could help take care of him.

Sorry, that’s taken, the bureaucrats said. How about Germany? “There’s lots of Turks there,” he was told.

“They were heartless and totally without compassion,” said Pressley, who is still on a regimen of pain killers and antibiotics.

‘Horrific Nightmares’

Another senior State Department officer in Nairobi told me how he escaped physical injury but developed serious psychological problems after he was assigned to search through the city’s chaotic, unrefrigerated morgues for the remains of embassy personnel. Most of the bodies he saw were “just pieces,” he said.

Then he was delegated to be the embassy’s representative at scores of funerals for the Kenyan victims of the attack, often the lone American there.

Later, he was visited nightly by “horrific nightmares,” he told me. ”I mean horrendous, Friday the 13th kind of nightmares.”

As time passed, they got worse. He slid into a valley of unrelenting depression and thoughts of suicide — symptoms that many combat survivors have described and been treated for.

Finally he sought help from a State Department medical officer.

“He told me to take St. Johns Wort,” an over-the-counter herb, said the former diplomat, who asked not to be named because it could hurt future job prospects.

He got therapy and prescriptions on his own, and appealed for help with his medical bills. He was told his problem “was not work related.” He fell into debt.

Driven to the edge, he finally booked himself into a private psychiatric hospital in Arizona.

The State Department took away his security clearance.

He was broken — and broke. He resigned.

“I’m 58,” he said, “and I have no savings.”

Departmental Differences

Worley Lee Reed, another foreign service officer badly injured in the Nairobi blast, along with his wife Joyce, says Foggy Bottom’s casualty assistance office is “very responsive, except when a person’s needs conflict with the department’s policies.”

“If you get wounded,” he says bitterly, “they dump you on the Labor Department and forget about you.”

State would not help him untangle problems with Labor getting medical assistance and checks for lost wages.

But, like all the others, Reed reserves plenty of vitriol for the Labor Department.

“I fought nine years to get the smallest thing out of them,” he said. He finally won compensation for lost wages. Yet today, he says, “My wife I continually have to fight the Labor Department to prove we’re still permanently disabled.”

The Labor Department’s public affairs office did not return a telephone call asking for comment.

Ellen Bomer, a Commerce Department official on duty at the embassy, was not only disfigured and blinded by the blast, she contracted AIDS after she was “stacked like wood” on a cart with several bleeding Kenyans rushed to a hospital.

The Labor Department refused her compensation, she said, “because it’s not an injury to an organ.”

“I’ve had to fight tooth and nail for every dime, every treatment,” she says.

But unlike the State Department, Commerce constantly advocated for her benefits.

“Anytime I needed something, I’d pick up the phone and they would grease the skids,” she told me. “When I called them, they would call me right back. And they always held out a job for me.”

In sharp contrast, Pressley maintains, at the State Department “you are thrown away as an outcast and no longer relevant, at the same time you are trying to assure your family, friends and relatives that you are OK, but honestly, inside, you are not.”

As true as such stories ring, it’s still tempting to think they must be exceptions.

Indeed, State Department representative read me a statement saying, “All of the families of the American and FSN (foreign nationals employed by an embassy) bombing victims, as well as all of those injured, have received the benefits for which they are eligible under existing law.”

But you keep hearing horror stories, each one a little different but equally horrifying.

“The government was negligent in East Africa,” Edith Bartley, whose father and brother died in Nairobi, told the Post in 2002. “The State Department has been our biggest stumbling block. It would make your eyes spin to know what has gone on.”

“We’ve been forgotten,” echoed Howard Kavaler, who lost his wife, Prabhi, a foreign service officer in Kenya. He was awarded $65,000 for her death.

Legislative Solutions

In October a bill (HR 2828) to provide death benefits for the families of State Department officers killed in the line of duty, sponsored by Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, D-Ill., passed in the House. Its quick passage by the Senate seems certain.

Another House bill (HR 2764), sponsored by Nita M. Lowey , D-N.Y., cleared the Senate in September, providing $4 million for relatives of the 12 Americans killed in Nairobi.

In contrast, the families of the 1,995 men and women killed in the Sept. 11 attacks were awarded checks averaging nearly $1.5 million each.

But what about taking care of those who survived, the walking wounded?

Reed speaks for many when he says, “Unlike the 9/11 bills and laws, no one in Congress asked the question, ‘Where are the disabled and injured?’ While all East Africa bombing survivors agree that the families of the deceased should be compensated, the disabled and injured suffer from their wounds everyday, as do their families. The bill is neither properly inclusive nor fair.”

Last week, Jackson said he “was troubled to hear about U.S. officials who were wounded in the 1998 Africa embassy bombings and then abandoned by the State Department. That’s unacceptable.

“Having served and sacrificed overseas, these Americans should not be forsaken here at home,” Jackson said in a statement. “While only recently learning of their plight, I think Congress should examine ways to assist these walking wounded. I’m ready and willing to do my part.”

Another bill (S 1944), introduced by Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg , D-N.J., would make it easier for victims of terrorist acts to sue and get judgments from foreign governments and organizations.

The departments of State and Justice have long lobbied against such legislation, arguing such suits would invite foreign governments to retaliate by seizing U.S. property on their soil.

But a Senate expert on the legislation counters that “there is not one single incident they can point to where U.S. diplomatic assets were seized.”

Washington attorney Thomas Fay, who represents a half dozen victims of the Nairobi attack in a suit against Iran and Sudan for the roles he maintains they played in the plot, says “the Justice Department has continuously interfered with this case.”

Coming Home With Nightmares

The State Department rank and file have an advocacy organization, the American Foreign Service Association. Last week its vice president, Steven B. Kashkett, told me by e-mail that “we believe the State Department Office of Medical Services IS making a sincere effort (on) PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” which he called “a brand-new area for State because we have traditionally NOT kept unarmed diplomats assigned in the middle of combat areas, where they might be exposed on a regular basis to the same kinds of traumatic events that soldiers experience.”

The 104 State Department personnel who have died from terrorist attacks through the years, not to mention the foreign service veterans of wars in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and other conflicts might quibble.

But no matter: the war in Iraq is everywhere.

Iraq is so dangerous, say both the foreign service’s critics and supporters, that few of them leave the highly fortified Green Zone for long, if at all.

Now, however, others are being increasingly deployed to insurgent-infested areas of Iraq in provincial reconstruction teams.

And now they are coming home with nightmares, discovering much the same kind of treatment as the last generation.

One State Department worker, who cannot be quoted because she has been instructed not to talk to the press, says that after a few months in reconstruction projects, she realized that Iraqis seen talking with her were being assassinated.

The stress was overwhelming. During a brief respite in Washington, she sought psychological help at the department.

She said a counselor told her all she needed was a good night’s sleep.

She returned to Iraq, still shaken. When she came home months later, she immediately sought out a private doctor, who diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder — a malady the Pentagon identified and started treating decades ago.

According to congressional testimony by the State Department’s top doctor, Laurence G. Brown, “The Department’s Office of Medical Services has been aware for many years that employees can develop a variety of anxiety and stress related problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder as a reaction to stressors while living overseas.”

But what has it done about it?

“All families and foreign service officers . . .” said State Department spokesperson Nancy Beck, “have received benefits available under federal law.” She rattled off a long list of federal programs designed to benefit the department’s wounded and dead: “Compensation under the federal employees compensation act, State death gratuities, one year’s salary under the Foreign Service Act and death gratuities under the Victims of Terrorism Compensation Act (PL 99-399).

“There is federal employees group life insurance,” Beck continued, “refund of retirement contributions, final salary and annual leave and payment from the thrift savings plan, where applicable. A scholarship fund was established for those with children.”

Four new medical office positions were created in September, she added, to assist injured employees.

Sounds impressive.

Yet Pressley insists that the problems he and others described to me ”are just a tip of the iceberg. I can only imagine how many other horror stories are not reported.”

Good Reason to Be Worried

A few weeks ago, the State Department took a severe public relations beating (including here) when a few of them complained publicly about assignments to Iraq.

“That’s a potential death sentence, and you know it,” one despaired. “Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?”

His remarks drew near-universal scorn.

Yet Pressley says they had good reason to be worried.

“I know their lives will be a hell from the very day any incident happens,” he says.

“Not only will they have to deal with their health, survival, medicines and treatment for the rest of their lives, but also the bureaucracy of getting medical doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and other professionals to see them, payment from OWCP [the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs at Labor Department] and other government offices.”

Every one of the wounded from Nairobi and Iraq I talked to agreed.

“I get sick,” said one, “every time I see a bumper sticker that says, ‘Support Our Troops.’ ”

The troops get plenty of support, he said. It’s the government’s civilians who get screwed.

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

Tough Week for the FBI . . .

Wisecracks were rife last week at X-gboys.org, a private Web site maintained by former FBI agents, following the Nov. 13 revelations that the Bureau (and CIA) had been infiltrated by a Lebanese-born woman whose brother-in-law is a Hezbollah-linked businessman. According to the charging documents, she also improperly rooted through the FBI’s obsolete computer system for information about her relatives and links they might have to the Iran-backed organization, which has a terrorist arm.

The FBI said Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, an immigrant who faked a marriage to an American to get citizenship, passed “a complete, full (background) investigation” before becoming an FBI special agent in 1999. She moved to the CIA in 2003.

The X-gboys were appalled by the security breech.

“It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback,” cracked one. “But it may be fit to say, ‘Sleep well tonight, the FBI is.’ ”

As it turned out, the Senate Intelligence Committee was holding an open oversight hearing the very same day.

And of the FBI, panel member Ron Wyden , D-Ore., said “we managed to pry out of these senior officials that only two of the 24 senior intelligence analyst positions created by Congress had been filled, and that a very substantial portion of these analysts and agents, at this point, do not have access to the Internet at their desks.”

Former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton, D-Ind., who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, told Wyden that “my sense of that, Sen. Wyden, is that they [the FBI] just have huge management problems . . .”

Speaking of the FBI . . .

The Bureau took strong exception to last week’s attention-getting column, which reported on an FBI counterterrorism experiment that involved sifting through marketing data gathered by grocery stores in the south San Francisco area to see if they could find terrorists by examining sales of Middle Eastern food.

Ridicule was heaped on the FBI from all corners of the Internet.

The FBI challenged my reporting in a letter to CQ Editor Mike Riley. We print it in full.

Dear Editor:

We at the FBI were surprised to read about a supposed FBI program to monitor the sales of Middle Eastern food products in the San Francisco Bay area in support of counterterrorism intelligence gathering (“FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here,” November 2, 2007).

Having never heard of this, I spoke to the counterterrorism managers who were identified in the story as having hatched the plan, as well as everyone else who would have had any knowledge of it. Nobody did. At one point in the story, writer Jeff Stein opines “as ridiculous as it sounds,” in reference to the alleged food monitoring plan, which reportedly was described to Mr. Stein by “well-informed sources.”

In this case, too ridiculous to be true.

While the story may have been the source of some amusement, I appreciate the opportunity to set the record straight on something that touches on something so important as national security and civil liberties.

John Miller

Assistant Director for Public Affairs

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Our response, directed to Michael P. Kortan, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s office of public affairs:

Mr. Kortan:

Like you, we take the issues of national security and civil liberties very seriously, which is why Jeff Stein thought it important to write about the domain management program. His sources described to him the intelligence-gathering program that involved the sales of Middle Eastern food in some detail, and we had no reason to believe that those sources inaccurately portrayed it when the column was published. After conferring further with them upon receipt of your letter, Mr. Stein and Congressional Quarterly stand by the column.

The FBI’s San Francisco office was given repeated opportunities by Mr. Stein to respond to his column before it was published, and declined. An FBI spokesman in Washington did respond, choosing neither to confirm nor deny the existence of the program, and his comments were included in the column. An after-the-fact denial is of less use to readers than one that could have run with the column, but, in the interest of fairness, we will publish it with Mr. Stein’s next column.

If you have any further questions about this matter, please don’t hesitate to contact me. We appreciate you taking the time to communicate your concerns to us. And we appreciate your service to our country.

Sincerely,

Mike Riley

Editor

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.