Bigger than the Russian embassy
===============================

John Kiriakou has described the size of American diplomatic facilities overseas as a competitive artefact of the Cold War rather than a function of any national interest. His account rests on a question he says he asked early in his CIA career and the answer he was given.

The question in a piddling country

Kiriakou said his first tours took him to what he called "little teeny tiny piddling countries that nobody would even pay any attention to," and that in each of them the United States maintained "massive gigantic American embassies that would take up like an entire city block." The disproportion prompted him to ask about it directly. He is candid that he no longer remembers which posting it was, "I forget what country I was in. It was like Ethiopia maybe", but he recalls the question he put: why does the United States have an embassy this large in a country where it has no national interest?

The station chief's answer, in Kiriakou's telling, was a single consideration: "because we have to make sure it's bigger than the Russian embassy." When his co-host Ted Rall reduced this to a matter of national vanity, Kiriakou agreed without qualification: "That's exactly what it is."

A continent-wide pattern

Kiriakou presented the Ethiopian case not as an anomaly but as the rule. "You go to any African country and our embassies are absolutely gigantic," he said, "and it's because the Soviets had big embassies, so ours had to be bigger." The design logic, on this account, ran outward from a rival's floor plan rather than from any assessment of what the mission needed to do.

Asked about the American embassy in Cairo, Kiriakou hedged before answering, "there's a lot I probably shouldn't say about the US Embassy in Cairo", and then confirmed the same pattern in the same terms: it is an enormous facility, and the Russian embassy there is equally enormous. The refusal to elaborate further is characteristic; he marks the boundary rather than crossing it.

Related caution

The same conversation turned immediately to the rules against photographing embassies from the street, which Kiriakou explained as policy rather than law, on the grounds that such photographs can be used to case a building. The two subjects sit together in his account of embassy life: a structure built to be seen and outdone, and a perimeter its guards do not want recorded.

Kiriakou's broader account of embassy architecture after 2001, the shift toward fortification and distance from city centres, is treated separately.

See also

- Embassy fortification after 9/11
- The Desert Sunset Photograph
- The embassy swap
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Ted Rall
