Coping with the Extremes of Consular Work in the Foreign Service
Evacuations from the Covid-19 epicenter in China and the advancing Taliban in Afghanistan pushed my fellow officers and me to the limit.
Millions were fleeing the Chinese city of Wuhan in early 2020, just before the government quarantined the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic. My husband and I, however, headed in the opposite direction. We had barely been evacuated from our diplomatic post, the U.S. Consulate General in another Chinese city, Chengdu, where we were both consular officers. But we volunteered to help U.S. citizens in Wuhan return home. We flew to Seoul, where we met with State Department medical officials and quickly learned how to use a respirator, put on personal protective equipment and sanitize a bathroom. Then we boarded a chartered plane for the flight to Wuhan.
Although this wasn’t typical work for a U.S. diplomat, assisting Americans abroad is a top priority for all our diplomatic missions. In times of natural disasters, pandemics or violence, we pause our routine duties and shift into high gear to help U.S. citizens out of harm’s way.
We first heard of Wuhan and reports of a viral outbreak while on vacation in Thailand, which we cut short out of concern that China might close its borders. Within an hour of landing in Chengdu, our embassy in Beijing authorized the voluntary departure of non-essential staff at the embassy and all our consulates in China.
In a situation like this, the questions are usually more than the answers anyone can provide. Which positions were considered essential? How long would we be gone? Where would we go and what work would we do there? What work would we do if we stayed? How dangerous could the situation get? How big of a risk would we be taking if we remained? The embassy soon ordered the mandatory departure of family members under the age of 21. When we decided to leave, we initially planned on flying to Washington, D.C. But then we heard that the State Department was negotiating with the Chinese government to evacuate hundreds of U.S. citizens from Wuhan despite the city’s shutdown, and the department was looking for volunteers to join a consular “fly-away team” to carry out the operation.
When we arrived in Wuhan, we found the evacuees waiting in the passenger terminal, exhausted and shocked to see us emerge in head-to-toe protective gear and masks. There were 250 jerry-rigged seats for them on the plane we had flown from Seoul, and we became their case workers, interpreters, flight attendants and immigration officers. Those duties were a far cry from our daily consular work of interviewing applicants for U.S. visas and helping Americans obtain or renew passports or other documents. We flew from Wuhan to San Francisco, and after just six hours on the ground, we returned to Wuhan to evacuate more trapped Americans. This time, we took them to San Diego. My meal after landing was the best burrito I’ve ever had.
A few months later, while we continued to live in our new Covid-19 reality, I began a more typical consular assignment in South Africa. In the summer of 2021, however, the State Department had to orchestrate an evacuation much larger and more dangerous than the Wuhan operation. As the Taliban advanced on Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, to retake power faster than anyone anticipated, the department issued a call for 40 consular officers to help hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghans fearing for their lives to leave the country. I was one of the 40. That experience pushed us to the extreme. Amid nothing short of a societal collapse and total chaos at Kabul’s airport, we struggled to create some semblance of order, working in 12-hour shifts, without a day off.
With enough seats on U.S. military aircraft to evacuate only a fraction of the 100,000 people who desperately wanted to leave, our main job was to identify those Afghans most eligible based on criteria determined by the U.S. government, such as the threat level against them in Afghanistan and their contributions to U.S. operations there for 20 years. It was an impossible job. It seemed as if every American who had worked on Afghanistan matters during that period wanted us to find one or more Afghan colleagues or friends to evacuate. Those included White House staff, employees from the State Department, the Pentagon and other agencies, members of Congress, think-tank experts and NGO workers.
We usually work behind bulletproof windows in embassies or consulates, with computer access to multiple law-enforcement and immigration systems. But in Kabul, we were out in the open at the airport, where U.S. and other allied military personnel had to push back throngs of people. At the airport’s now-notorious Abbey Gate, we didn’t have windows or computers, but only our instincts and U.S. Marines. Flash-bangs and gunfire were omnipresent. We had to grit our teeth and continue to interview family after family to help them get to the waiting evacuation planes.
U.S. consular officers are masters of logistics. Visa applicants flow through a consular section in a stream of paperwork, snake lines, fingerprinting, data collection and interviews. We applied the same techniques in Kabul. We had line control, but this time it was concertina wire and Marines. We interviewed people, but with interpreters and specific criteria for this evacuation. By our final day there, a person was processed and put on a plane within an hour.
On August 26, 2021, militants bombed Abbey Gate, killing 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghan civilians. I worked at the gate until about two hours before the blast.
Alan Eaton is a Foreign Services officer whose overseas tours include Mauritius, Brazil, China and South Africa. In addition to China and Afghanistan, he has worked on evacuations in Sudan and Jordan. He and his spouse received the State Department Award for Heroism for their efforts in Wuhan.
The views and characterizations in this article belong to the author and don’t necessarily represent those of the U.S. government.