Blimey! Your Passport's Been Stolen! Now What?

John Caulfield is the consul general of the U.S. Embassy in London, where American travelers can go for emergency assistance. (Daniel Berehulak)

An American tourist arrives in London on an overnight flight, often on a first trip abroad, and excitement masks his exhaustion. So, after checking in at his hotel, he hits the streets. After many turns, he realizes he's lost. And he can't remember the name of his hotel.

He ends up at the U.S. Embassy.

"Happens all the time," says John Caulfield, the embassy's consul general. The response to the hapless tourist is just another service provided to American citizens on a routine day in the life of what is, outside of Canada, the busiest U.S. embassy in the world.

The building on Grosvenor Square in central London is boxy, an ugly example of a nondescript, modern architectural style. But just inside the lobby doors, you remember what a prestigious posting this is when viewing the paintings of previous ambassadors to the Court of St. James's: John Adams, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan. About a thousand Americans a day stream through the embassy -- a mini-American city that publishes a daily handout of breaking news from the States, houses an Internal Revenue Service office and employs 300 Americans and 600 Brits.

By 9 a.m., a ragged line a block long has formed of foreigners seeking work visas. Americans have a separate entrance and gain quicker access. Their waiting room looks a bit like a pediatrician's office during cold and flu season, given all the babies in car seats and prams. (On a given day, dozens of American parents living in the United Kingdom come here to register their children as Americans -- 6,000 babies last year.)

Half a dozen American Foreign Service officers sit at windows similar to those at the DMV, except that these workers are trained diplomats, so they're nicer.

There's a bit of an assembly-line quality to the work at the window, but behind the scenes, all sorts of human dramas are playing out. Liz, a longtime British employee of the embassy who requested that her last name not be used for security reasons, says she has seen "every type of problem you can imagine." Her first piece of advice to travelers: "If you fall in love online, come for a vacation to meet the person before quitting your job and selling all your worldly goods."

Stolen Belongings

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First up at vice consul Richard Swart's window is a family of four who are among the quarter-million Americans living in the United Kingdom. The parents want to renew passports for their teenagers -- a boy and a girl with such pronounced British accents that you have to assume their connections to their homeland are pretty thin.

Swart's next customer has a familiar problem: a snatched purse in a pub. Happens nearly every day, officials say. Invariably, if there's a husband involved in the case, he's put his passport and other valuables into his wife's purse, so that when it turns up missing from the back of her chair, both of them are out of cash, credit cards and proof of identity. A traveler's tip from Caulfield: Don't let one person carry all the valuables.

Then comes Clem Ferris, a missionary from Chapel Hill, N.C., who tells Swart he was in Oxfordshire for a convention and that while he was having lunch at a pub, thieves broke into his host's car and stole his briefcase.

A little more than an hour after his arrival, Ferris walks out with a new passport. "It was quicker than checking in at Heathrow and quicker than getting a license at the [department of] motor vehicles," he says.

(A little secret: As long as you're near an embassy on a weekday, losing your passport isn't as big a deal as you might imagine. Thanks to digital photographs and online records, an embassy official can call up your file and reissue your passport in about 15 minutes. The replacement costs $97 and is good for only a year, but can be exchanged at no charge for a regular 10-year passport.)