In a windowless attic in Washington, under a maze of exposed pipes, a group of U.S. diplomats is working on Libya. They study maps. They scan Arabic-language TV. They reach out to their contacts in embattled villages.
When the phones ring, they answer, “U.S. Embassy Tripoli.”
(Photo by Todd Cheng/US EMBASSY TRIPOLI) - Lt. Col. Brian Linville, of Embassy Tripoli’s Defense Attache Office, hands charge d’affairs Joan Polaschik the last U.S. flag to fly over Embassy Tripoli on Feb. 25.
This makeshift office in a State Department annex, reachable by a freight elevator, is a ghost of the mission the diplomats were forced to abandon in February as Tripoli erupted in gunfire. “We have constituted, in effect, an Embassy Libya-on-the-Potomac,” said Gene Cretz, who still holds the title of U.S. ambassador.
The unconventional mission has kept together the handful of U.S. diplomats who have experience in Libya, and the group has provided critical information during the war on Moammar Gaddafi’s forces. But the attic has been the scene of anguish as well, as the diplomats have watched the destruction of their embassy compound and worried about the fate of their Libyan staff and friends.
“When the fighting was really kind of bad, we were getting calls daily from people in Libya saying: ‘Oh, my God, Gaddafi forces are at the foot of the mountains — they’re going to kill us. Please help us!’ ” recalled Joan Polaschik, the deputy chief of mission. “That was stressful and horrible.”
Several other U.S. embassies in the region have been partially evacuated during the Arab Spring protests. But the embassy in Tripoli shut completely — the first U.S. mission to do so in 12 years, Polaschik said. She stayed up the night before the final evacuation, destroying computers.
After a hair-raising escape from Libya — in which the U.S. diplomats split up between a ferry and a plane, with a single suitcase each — they eventually reunited in Washington, eager to continue their work. But bureaucratic regulations don’t allow for a U.S. embassy in Foggy Bottom.
Still, with the U.S. government desperate for expertise on Libya, the embassy was allowed to re-create itself — sort of. Few other people in the Foreign Service knew Libya, which had had hostile relations with Washington for decades, until it renounced terrorism and its nuclear weapons ambitions in 2004. Before Cretz arrived in late 2008, there had been no U.S. ambassador in Tripoli for 36 years.
The diplomats “are people who for two years had a hands-on feel for what was going on in Libya, to the extent anyone could know it,” Cretz said. “They have provided an important piece of the puzzle” to policymakers.
The orphan embassy also has provided key contacts.
On a Tuesday night in March, cultural officer Jared Caplan was returning to his temporary digs in Dupont Circle after happy hour when his cellphone rang. On the other end was the owner of an English-language school in Benghazi that had received U.S. educational grants.
“Hold on,” the man told Caplan. “There’s someone you need to talk to.”
The Libyan passed the phone to a U.S. Air Force officer whose F-15 fighter jet had just crashed outside Benghazi. He had been rescued by local villagers.
It was, Caplan recalled, “surreal.”
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