The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development are benefiting from a welcome, long-overdue infusion of talent, thanks in large part to the efforts of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

Special missions, or special envoys, are persons sent abroad to conduct diplomacy with a limited purpose for a limited time.

When Ambassador Chris Hill went into a refugee camp in Macedonia in the middle of the night, quelled a riot, and saved the lives of Roma refugees under attack, it was not covered on CNN.

Foreign Service Nationals, the local employees working in U.S. embassies and consulates at every U.S. post of the world, provide the institutional memory for the missions. They remain at post as the American Foreign Service employees with whom they work move to new assignments every two to four years.

Carmen Martinez runs U.S. Consulate General Sao Paolo, one of the largest U.S. consulates in the world. She has returned to the post of her first Foreign Service assignment 22 years ago. The consulate is staffed by 70 Americans and over 180 Foreign Service Nationals.

The deputy chief of mission (DCM) at an embassy is second in command and serves as the chief operating officer of the embassy, coordinating the different embassy sections and varying goals in an effort to create one strong united team. The DCM must always know what’s going on inside and outside the embassy, keeping the ‘big picture’ in mind. "Without the DCM, the ambassador risks becoming overwhelmed with management tasks, and section heads would be left to their own devices to pursue priorities and make decisions that may not reflect the larger policy or management interests of the U.S. government,” explains Danny Russel, the DCM at Embassy Nicosia.

Every person working in an embassy plays a vital role, and the following profiles will illustrate just what those roles are. […] Some of the largest U.S. embassies have over a thousand employees, while some of the smallest have just a few.…[T]he most interesting happenings do not always take place in the capital city, and consulates can be just as significant to the overall relationship with the country as the embassy in the capital.

Until sixty years ago, diplomacy was largely the preserve of an international aristocratic class, and the rules of behaviour that it adopted were very much the rules of their own society. However, after the upheavals of two world wars, society became more fluid and the Foreign Office began to make conscious efforts to recruit more widely.