
The Diplomatic Couriers Who Deliver America's Secret Mail - ALee
https://www.wired.com/story/diplomatic-courier-service/
======
will_brown
For those that are interested my Dad was a Diplomatic Courier and published 10
years worth of personal letters traveling the world in the Navy and then as a
Courier from 1956-1966.

[https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-
ebook/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-
ebook/dp/B01MR2ZQ5W)

“DEAR MOM” is a book told through 591 letters to my parents while living
throughout the world. The letters seen here are transcriptions of all letters
I wrote to my parents for ten years following college graduation. They record
my daily life in surprising detail from Navy Officer Candidate School until
resigning from the U.S. Foreign Service in Viet Nam. This was a decade of
practically non-stop travel throughout most of the world – some 4 million
miles.

~~~
wizardforhire
My aunt was a courier in Brussels in the 90s/2000s! I visited her when I was
backpacking and she gave me the low down. It was pretty funny, really boring
job but she had to get security clearance, get hand to hand and firearm
training. It came up because she was giving me a ride somewhere and when I
first got in her car she was like “now be careful, there’s a gun here, here,
here, there, there, under the seat between the seats behind the seats, in the
glove box” just all over the place!!!

~~~
withdavidli
Did she ever get pulled over by the cops? Asked if there were any weapons in
the car lol. Or do they get diplomatic plates?

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nraynaud
My aunt opened an unlicensed orphanage in northern Ivory Coast after WWII, and
she had the Queen of the Netherland as a donor. Every year around Christmas
the Dutch diplomatic mail service would come, heavily armed and very serious,
to deliver boxes of sweet treats for the children.

~~~
Theodores
Amazing story, if I was a fiction writer then not in a million Sundays would I
imagine such a thing.

I don't think I have seen the word 'unlicensed' followed by the word
'orphanage' before, I might just add '2' on the end and use that for my
password.

~~~
nraynaud
The whole story is crazy, they were 2 women, and they couldn’t get the papers
to open the orphanage, so they legally adopted the kids, one woman adopting
the girls and the other one the boys (the idea is to let them inter-marry if
they wanted to).

I don’t know how safe it is to give the google keywords to find the place.

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Fezzik
The pay starts pretty low, but they apparently have many job openings:
[https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-
service/specialist/ca...](https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-
service/specialist/career-tracks/diplomatic-courier/)

~~~
Someone1234
Honestly even with "75% travel" I'm surprised they're struggling so much to
find people. Seems like a lot of people want to travel, and would love to
spend part of their 20s doing so.

Would be interesting to know just how dangerous it is though, particularly for
relatively low pay. The article covers some plane crashes, but doesn't really
explore the question in detail.

~~~
packetslave
I would imagine the requirement for a TS/SCI clearance cuts down on the number
of candidates that make it through the hiring process substantially.

~~~
Someone1234
That's a good point. I doubt I could get that clearance for example.

~~~
techsupporter
Depending on how strenuous the clearing agency is, a lot of people are knocked
out for seemingly banal reasons. I work with people who have to have
clearances for various projects and people have been knocked off of those
teams for:

\- Being a dual citizen (and, far worse, holding a passport from the other
country) even if they were born citizens of the US and the other country

\- Having traveled to several countries, like China or Russia, for reasons
other than a short tourism stay

\- Being married to a non-US-citizen, even a permanent resident

\- Owing a lot of money on student loans

\- Parents being born in or citizens of the "wrong" country

\- Psychiatric or psychology counseling for certain conditions

\- A history of regular gambling

From what I can tell, the investigators want someone who was born in the US to
parents whose ancestry can both be traced to the Mayflower and who does
nothing except stay at home and read National Geographic while sitting by the
fire next to an equally-suitable spouse.

~~~
mason55
It’s all about how easy you’d be to bribe. If you owe a lot of money or gamble
a lot then that’s viewed as you being susceptible to selling secrets.

They don’t care if you like to go out drinking

------
zeveb
> Employing 103 couriers at 12 hubs around the world, the DCS boasts a
> delivery success rate that would be the envy of FedEx and UPS.

Do they? The article never backs that up:

> Nobody at the service could remember a single lost pouch or unsuccessful
> delivery in the service’s modern history, though missions can be aborted for
> political, weather, or mechanical reasons if necessary. The service did once
> manage to lose a baby grand piano along the Orient Express in 1919.
> Evidently, the courier—David K E Bruce, later a renowned diplomat—slept
> beneath it on a railway platform in Bulgaria and woke to find the piano was
> gone.

I'd count cancelled missions as unsuccessful, just as I'd count a cancelled
delivery by UPS.

Given that the Diplomatic Couriers Service _must_ have orders of magnitude
fewer packages than e.g. UPS or FedEx, it's entirely possible that those few
failures are a higher failure rate than the commercial carriers.

None of that's to detract from the DCS's really cool achievements — I just
dislike journalistic hyperbole.

------
grouseway
They even carry furniture. Not unexpected given the lengths that spies go to.
It reminds me of the IBM Selectric bug (apparently planted during a customs
inspection).

[http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/](http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/)

------
windows_tips
All government communications are subject to inspection and should be
disclosed as soon as possible.

Why does the State Department need to take such extreme measures and have
special exemption from processes meant to detect and stop all manner of
nefarious activity?

~~~
pjc50
Quite a lot of this stuff is private (e.g. employment-related), other people's
stuff (passports, visas, etc), or actually classified secret.

~~~
bradknowles
The SECRET stuff can actually be sent by the USPS. It just has to be packaged
correctly, properly labeled, and you have to select the appropriate options
for sending it.

I did the courier job briefly when I was working for what was then the Defense
Communications Agency, and we were transmitting SECRET documents. I had the
hand-carried copy, and they sent a second copy via USPS.

I even had a nifty courier badge, which was created by using a typewriter to
fill out a small government form that was printed on orange card stock, and
then the whole thing was laminated together. No pictures, no fingerprints, no
signatures. The security agents at Washington Regional Airport sure took
notice....

~~~
masonic
Presumably using Registered Mail, which is kept under lock and key.

