Full text of Ryan Crocker's memo to Condoleezza Rice

It is the largest and most expensive diplomatic mission in the world, but the US Embassy in Baghdad needs more and better-qualified staff to carry out what the ambassador has called “America’s most important foreign policy mission”.

In a blunt memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, Ryan Crocker, the newly installed American envoy to Baghdad, told Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, that Washington needed to make Iraq its top priority.

“Several of the recommendations [of an internal report] are critical to our mission, and I hope they will have your personal support. One is recruitment and staffing. Simply put, we cannot do the nation’s most important work if we do not have the department’s best people. HR [human resources] has made heroic efforts to staff the embassy, but to a large extent HR has been working alone,” wrote Mr Crocker, in a cable dated May 31.

He asked Dr Rice to send a “clear message” to her deputies in Washington that “staffing Iraq is an imperative”. Mr Crocker, a veteran of hotspots such as Beirut and Islamabad, is the first career diplomat to become ambassador in Baghdad since the US invasion of Iraq four years ago.

He also requested that security for American officials, who operate under heavy guard in the capital’s green zone, be relaxed to let them do their work under the same conditions as the military. American officials in Baghdad said that Mr Crocker wanted to empha-sise the importance of a diplomatic surge to match the US military surge now under way.

His remarks are likely to cause consternation in Washington, where opponents of President Bush’s policy want America to reduce, not expand, its presence in Iraq.

The US Embassy employs 1,000 American officials and an estimated 4,000 foreign citizens. Its budget this year is more than $1 billion (£500 million).

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