Interviews > Charlie Ries
​
What was the biggest challenge as PDAS and the most important impact you made on the bureau during your time as PDAS?
I started my job during a major renovation of the EUR office suites. This may seem like a very trivial issue, but it mattered a great deal to all of the officers involved and, with the expansion of the European Union, and formation of new countries that were carved out after the Soviet Union fell, I felt change was needed. I rejected the first five plans submitted by EUR/EX because I felt that they were insufficiently equitable. It was good that I spent so much time on this because it mattered so much to our people.
Also, I was PDAS during 9/11. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon transformed the bureau as well as American foreign policy. We had to start working intensely with the Europeans on anti-terrorism measures of all sorts. One of the things that was probably the best thing that I did was, without a whole lot of forethought, started September 12. After spending all 9/11 talking with all our posts in Europe, I realized that the countries throughout Europe really needed to know what was happening, so on September 12th, I decided what we needed to do was to send a wrap-up email to all the posts and all the Ambassadors. So I sat down at 6 o’clock in the evening, and wrote a four page email, each paragraph explaining what had happened in this dimension or that dimension. I got lots of kudos so keep sending an email that had my voice, that was informed by what was happening, included what people were telling me was happening, and outlined what issues the Administration was working on. By the end of the week I titled the email “The Broad Coalition”. This had not been done before and presaged the form that you see now with Politico’s “Playbook.” But no one had really done that in a classified form, and posts found it really useful.
The Department continued to send instructions by telegram that would be fully cleared. But this email offered a sense of what was happening and I carried on doing that every single day until the end of 2001. It really knitted together the bureau and made it a much more effective force in carrying out the president's and administration’s requirements in those first couple of months.
I stopped it at the end of 2001 and then started again from March 2003 when the Iraq war started, until May 2003. I called that one “The Willing Coalition”. When you're in the midst of a crisis, I think it actually was an efficient way to keep the Bureau and the posts abroad linked up in terms of understanding the many strands of policymaking and policy implementation.
What is the most important thing you would tell a mid-level economic cone officer they should try to do? What would you tell a non-econ officer about economic work?
I've always been very emphatic about the fact that the work of an economic officer is actually not so different from political work. As an economic officer you have to be literate on economics and the rules of the World Trade Organization, the IMF, and so forth. Those are sort of the technical parts. But if you think that economic work is just being a staff economist for the IMF, then you have missed the opportunity to advance the nation's interests in economic diplomacy. I make the flip side argument for political officers that economics is not some special hermetically sealed technical problem. It is very much a part of the political landscape and central in the political debate. When leaders run for re-election, economic issues are part of it and political officers who are covering the Party Conference shouldn't think that they can ignore trade policy just because it is an economic issue. It is imperative to understand that economic issues and political issues go in both directions and should be seen as they are - connected.
How did you manage your tandem career? What was the key to making it work? The hardest aspect?
On the tandem issue, it's important to understand that Marcie and I met in graduate school and got married before we ever took the Foreign Service exam. In that era, that was very unusual. There were very few tandems, as they had changed the rules only in 1974 to allow officers that had stepped down when they got married to be reinstated. Most of those were women. When I entered in 1977 we had both taken and passed the exam. We did that on an agreement between us, a pact that we would take the exam, but we wouldn’t go in unless we both passed. The numbers weren’t all that encouraging and we didn’t expect to both pass, but we did. And so we thought we would try it out for a few years. I think we benefited from the fact that we were the first wave, shall we say, comparably ranked tandem officers that came in at roughly the same time. It wasn't common then, and is much more common now. So how did we make it work? First of all, we always assumed that we had options outside. We thought we would do it assignment by assignment and see how it worked. Over time, we thought about it as a career, but at the outset we decided to throw ourselves into it. We always had to compromise on assignments.
From the very first assignment, we approached it as a pair and we looked for where there were pairs of jobs, where we would be competitive and then we went after them and sometimes we won, sometimes we didn't win, and we always had to be flexible. There was a time when I was eligible and actually being recruited to be a DCM but if I took the DCM job, my wife couldn’t work in the same post and so I did not take that offer. I don't know if I would have gotten it, but I didn’t put my name forward for the job.
The third aspect of our tandem arrangements is that we agreed we wouldn’t take separate postings abroad while the kids were at home. My children were born in 1982 and 1984 and that actually meant that we didn't take separate overseas postings until 2003 when my wife went to Kosovo and then subsequently, we took a lot of separate postings, because once you’re an Ambassador, you can’t work at the same post. So those were firm parts of our underlying deal.
I have a great deal of sympathy for people these days because there are so many more tandems, that it’s much tougher to do it the way we did it, so I don't think that our experience is completely applicable. I think people have to be much more flexible, and especially about hardship tours. We did go to Baghdad together in 2007 so it wasn't all soft places.
Who was your best diplomatic coach? Why and what did you learn to do? Not to do?
I recall vividly the first negotiation that I took part in when I was in Turkey and we negotiated the terms of our bilateral investment treaties and the lead negotiator was USTR’s AUSTR Bruce Wilson.
Bruce was very skilled in negotiation and he had a personal style. He was kind, not too cold as a negotiator. He was a friend of the Turks and tried to make the negotiation all about how we could find mutually beneficial solutions. I recall being really impressed with that at the time.
I tried to adopt Bruce’s negotiation style throughout the rest of my career. I think everybody has to find their own negotiating style, but if you have the benefit of sitting with a really skilled negotiator who has done lots of agreements, it doesn't really matter what the agreements are. So that opportunity is a treasure and you need to pay attention to how the experienced negotiators negotiate. Think about how they tackled the tough issues, closed the brackets. From that point forward, I always wondered, “How would Bruce solve this problem?”
What was the most useful skill you brought to your career? What did you learn in your career?
I was always a student of history. I spent a lot of time studying history that, I think, gives you a grounding and understanding of larger trends and helps you not get carried away by the news of the day.
I learned to write more effectively and to be more focused. Still, ten years after retiring, I’ll write a summary paragraph first or I'll write a piece and then write a summary paragraph as if I were writing a telegram. Writing is very fundamental. I always say that people to be successful in the Foreign Service need three things. First, they need to write well because so much of the work is written. Second, they need to be good with people because so much of our business is about gaining confidence and trust and understanding of other people both internally and externally. The third thing might be surprising but I think it's critical to have stamina. So much work in the Foreign Service, particularly in crisis situations, involves 18-hour days and enormous stress. and Great officers like Al Larson or Marc Grossman have enormous stamina. They can get off of a transatlantic airplane, work 12 to 14 hours a day and apparently never get tired.
Any regrets? What would you redo?
I don't really have any regrets. I enjoyed being in the Foreign Service everyday. I’ve made bad decisions, but overall, I think I was very lucky in the issues that I got to work on. I don't have any regrets.
What are your keys to successful interagency meetings? What do you always do or not do?
Well I think successful interagency meetings are like meetings in general. No meeting should last longer than an hour. Every meeting should have a clear purpose and every meeting should have a clear chairman or chairperson. The chair should be clear about what that meeting is all about and maintain control of the meeting. So if people go off on tangents, the chairperson will nicely redirect the person going off on a tangent back to the subject. That's really important.
The chairperson has to be visibly in control, not unpleasantly so, but very much in control and that includes setting out your objectives at the beginning and summing up what has been agreed or not agreed at the end. These principles are important for interagency meetings or internal meetings or meetings at an embassy or anywhere. If a meeting is informational, that should be clear. If a meeting is to make a decision or craft a way forward on this or that issue, you make that clear. If you actually apply these simple principles, the meeting will be much more successful and you'll find people come to your meetings and are prepared to do work and work with you toward outcomes.
What is your principle of personnel/hiring? How do you get the right people on your team?
When I was PDAS, everyone wanted to see me about a job, and I would see all of them—not for a long time, only for 10 or 15 minutes each, but I always wanted anybody to know that they could come to me and I would listen. I would see them and that opened up a great deal of information that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. It is critical to talk to people and that's how you can make better personnel decisions.
One of the things that I think is really, really important is to look for people who will speak truth to power. That's especially important for deputies. You must have deputies who are going to tell you when things are going awry or when the staff is upset. I've always found the strongest deputies to be the most self-confident.
If there are personnel problems in a bureau, then people will be unhappy. Hiring is incredibly important.
Reaching out to someone to actively recruit them for a job can be unbelievably powerful because very few people do that. So, if I call someone in Peru and say, I really want you to consider bidding for this position in my embassy, then it would be really hard for that person to say no because that doesn’t happen often.
When could you make that type of call to recruit someone? When you're in the Senior Foreign service?
Even if it's for the immigrant Visa section of your consulate, if you are involved in hiring, then you can try to recruit people. If you make a compelling case, it may not win every time, but people will be really touched. I had a case of someone who came to me to apply for a job. I was overseas as the section chief and I talked to them for quite some time and I ultimately chose somebody else. But I called all the candidates that I interviewed to tell them that I had chosen somebody else. A couple of weeks later the same person came back to me and said that they wanted to apply for another job in my section. And I said, I'm surprised that you've come back. He said, “well I want to work for you because you explained to me why you chose the other guy, and that's the kind of person I want to work for.” In the end, I did hire that person.
What advice would you give someone considering joining the Foreign Service? What skills do you think are most useful in the career in foreign service?
From the standpoint of someone considering joining the Foreign Service, it offers an opportunity from the very first days—when you're interviewing visa applicants as a vice consul—to actually make decisions, be in the foreign policy arena, and get things done. It doesn't work all the time, you don't always succeed. Things don't get done the way you hope that they would for many reasons, but you can actually affect outcomes and I think that that's quite compelling for people. It's a great career because you get to move every two or three years. Having to move every two to three years keeps you young and vibrant because you're always learning a new job and a new place. The third reason of course is to serve abroad in places that you maybe never anticipated wanting to go to but once you're there you find things that are interesting about them. If you're the kind of person that likes to do all those things then you should really do this.
What is the biggest blind spot FSOs have?
In dealing with other agencies State Department officers may try to become junior members of that agency and take that agency’s attitude towards policy. Say you are in the Economic Bureau and you work with the Treasury Department about IMF loan applications from countries like Argentina, there is a tendency to become a junior treasury person. You adopt the policy perspectives and insights of the Treasury and take that back to the State Department. Instead, my view is that State officers working in the interagency should leverage what State has that the Treasury doesn't have, which is to say all these economic sections in embassies all over the world that can be mobilized to give the State Department influence on outcomes.
So when you're in a functional Bureau, you really have to develop the ties to the embassies that actually have ground troops. And that's your ticket to influence the interagency process. I don't think enough people think of it that way.
​
​