In Russia, Embassy Staff Left Behind Face Targeting, Harassment

In August 2014, as he was boarding a flight at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport for a long-awaited vacation, Vadim Tetenkin was pulled aside at passport control. He instantly guessed that the holdup was related to his job in the consular section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

A man took Tetenkin aside, and he was relieved of his mobile phone, luggage, and passport. The man introduced himself as Nikolai and said he worked for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB. Nikolai was friendly, as these first approaches tend to be.

There were tensions between the United States and Russia, he told Tetenkin. Russia had seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine earlier that year. As a Russian citizen, Tetenkin should be helping his country, Nikolai said, before enquiring about his work at the U.S. Embassy. Like all locally employed staff working at U.S. diplomatic missions in Russia, Tetenkin had been briefed about what to do in such a situation. If the security services wanted to talk about his work, then they should make a formal request to the embassy, he told them. When he was released some 15 minutes later, Tetenkin immediately sent a text to one of his colleagues to alert his supervisor of the approach.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has employed thousands of Russians to support its work at embassies and consulates across Russia, where they often worked closely with U.S. diplomats. Their identities were known to Russian security services, and many people, like Tetenkin, were approached with veiled—and sometimes not-so-veiled—threats against them or their families in a bid to turn them into informers.

As tensions spiraled amid a series of mutual diplomatic expulsions, the Russian government forced the U.S. State Department to whittle its diplomatic footprint in the country by around 60 percent in 2017, which led to some 600 Russian members of staff being let go. The remaining Russian staff were laid off in 2021 as Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree prohibiting Russians from working for U.S diplomatic missions.

Now, with war raging in Ukraine and U.S.-Russia relations plunging to historic lows, many of these former staff have been left in the lurch, with little support from the State Department and facing an uncertain future while enduring targeting and harassment from Russian security services. In a pattern that has been repeated around the world from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Yemen, local staff have been left behind amid crisis and chaos, even as their work for the United States heightens the risk these employees face.

Foreign Policy spoke to 10 current and former foreign service officers for this piece as well as seven Russian nationals who worked for U.S. diplomatic missions in Russia.

Foreign workers at U.S. embassies and their families can be eligible for visas to the United States after at least 15 years of service under a system known as the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program. As Washington wound down its diplomatic footprint in Russia, many who were eligible filed their paperwork to emigrate to the United States. Those with less than 15 years of experience had no such escape hatch.

Former local staff say their work for the U.S. Embassy left them de facto blacklisted from professional jobs in Russia and subject to increased scrutiny by its security services. Some see few options other than to leave the country as Moscow wages an unsparing crackdown on dissent in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.

A recently retired senior diplomat who served at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as the mission was forced to let go of hundreds of Russian staffers said they were aware of the difficulties that locals would face.

“We knew that [locally employed staff] were going to have a very difficult time getting on with employment because they were already being harassed by the FSB regularly,” they said. They detailed the lengths the State Department went to try to soften the blow by attempting to hire some back indirectly through local contractors as well as by providing generous severance packages, including an option to remain on the embassy’s health insurance plan, according to people familiar with the situation.

For locally employed staff who fell just short of the requisite 15 years of service and were required to apply for a U.S. visa, diplomats were encouraged to work with colleagues at other embassies in the region to hire Russian staff to enable them to meet their requisite minimum tenure, they said.

Still, other State Department officials conceded that the department hadn’t done enough to support its former employees.

“They’re being persecuted by Russian security services,” said one senior State Department official. “A majority of them have not gotten SIVs; there’s a bunch who have, but most of them are just stuck. The FSB makes sure they can’t get another job. It’s really awful.”

Locally employed staff are critical to keeping U.S. diplomatic posts humming around the world, bringing much-needed local knowledge and language skills. They receive little attention or accolades but are critical to an embassy’s day-to-day operations and serve as the embassy’s institutional knowledge when U.S. diplomats cycle in and out of a country every few years.

“They are the backbone of all of our embassies and missions,” said Harry Thomas, a former senior career diplomat who served as director-general of the U.S. Foreign Service. Thomas, now a scholar at Yale University, also served as U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, the Philippines, and Bangladesh.

“Quite frankly, they are the continuity that ensures our embassies are not thrown into dysfunction every two or three years when U.S. foreign service officers circulate out,” said Brett Bruen, a former career U.S. diplomat and head of the Global Situation Room, a consulting firm. “As an American officer, you can show up to post with no transition from your predecessor. So you’re entirely reliant on local staff in those first few months.”

The State Department works hard to support local employees, current and former officials said, offering competitive wages and training, support services, and the prospect of moving to the United States under the SIV program. But often, the department is restricted in how much it can aid those employees due to a combination of U.S. federal regulations, funding from Congress, and a host country’s employment laws.

A State Department official, who requested anonymity to discuss the department’s support of former locally employed staff, said, “In each circumstance, such as for local staff in Ukraine or Russia, we continue to review the situation to determine what assistance we can provide to our [locally employed] staff.” They underscored that the conditions that determine the issuance of special immigrant visas are governed by U.S. immigration law and cannot be waived or adjusted by the State Department.

Working for a U.S. embassy can put a target on your back. In Russia, other authoritarian states, or countries riven with chronic instability, local employees face targeting, threats, and harassment from security services or insurgent groups as they work to keep the U.S. embassies functioning.

“In almost every country, foreign service national staff are pressured by their country’s version of the FSB to tell them what’s going on in an embassy,” Thomas said.

Most of the diplomats Foreign Policy spoke to underscored that although individual foreign service officers often went to great lengths to assist their former Russian colleagues, the State Department as a whole fell short of what it could do.

“We’ve seen on successive occasions that local staff are not just a lower priority but they are not considered a part of our responsibility when countries are thrown into chaos,” Bruen said.

Those locally employed staff who were able to emigrate to the United States got their visas from the State Department—and then nothing after that. Masha Lvova, who worked for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow for 22 years, described her move to the United States as “very hard.” “I only have my 20 years of service pin,” she said.

Other people underscored the difficulties involved in starting a new life in the United States while middle age—with older parents, property, and retirement accounts back in Russia. Banks, wary of running afoul of Western sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of its invasion, have been over-compliant in many instances, making it exceptionally difficult for former locally employed staff to move their savings out of the country, while the higher cost of living in the United States has rendered their Russian state pensions nearly worthless.

Many described having difficulty finding work once they arrived in the United States. In Russia, their work for the State Department singled them out as enemies of the state, but once they arrived in the United States, they were just “someone with a Russian name and a Russian passport,” said one Russian who worked in the U.S. Embassy for more than two decades before moving to the United States on a special immigrant visa. This person spoke on condition of anonymity.

Russians who served at U.S. diplomatic missions report being routinely approached and harassed by security services on multiple occasions over the years—going back as far as the late 1990s during a relatively bright spot in the U.S.-Russia relationship, long before current Russian President Vladimir Putin took a fully authoritarian bent.

Not all locally employed staff that spoke with Foreign Policy were harassed by Russia’s security services, but they had little idea as to why they may have been spared. Those who were singled out report receiving strange telephone calls, being approached in the subway or tailed by the security services when out on embassy business, and coming home to find evidence that someone had entered their apartment while they were out.

“We were harassed left and right,” said a longtime Russian staffer.

“It created an atmosphere of fear and insecurity for me and my family,” said a second person who worked for the embassy for more than a decade.

“I did feel pressure. I was harassed often. It was a commonplace thing for us,” said a third person who worked for the embassy for more than a decade.

Locally employed staff were instructed to immediately report any approaches to the embassy’s Regional Security Officer and the chief security advisor; and in some instances, they were called in for an in-person debriefing. “The FSB would regularly call in our local staff to get them to divulge information about what the Americans were doing, who they were meeting with, where they were traveling,” said a retired senior diplomat.

Collaborating with the security services was a dismissible offense, but cognizant of the pressures faced by local staff, “we tried not to be jerks about it,” said the diplomat. “They’re between a rock and a hard place.”

Current and former U.S. officials stress that they have precautions in place to prevent sensitive materials in embassies from being leaked to foreign governments through local staff, including restricting access to sections of an embassy for sensitive and classified materials.

As the U.S.-Russia relationship deteriorated after Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, harassment of both Russian staff serving at the embassy as well as U.S. diplomats escalated dramatically—extending to Michael McFaul, then-U.S. ambassador to Russia, and his family. A 2013 report by the State Department’s internal watchdog noted that “Across Mission Russia, employees face intensified pressure by the Russian security services at a level not seen since the days of the Cold War.”

The embassy was under such intense scrutiny from the Russian security services that the regional security officer encouraged diplomats to use secured conference rooms if they needed to have a heated talk with their spouse to prevent any revelations in the course of an argument from being used as blackmail against them later, said the former senior diplomat.

U.S.-Russia relations deteriorated further after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine and illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 as well as the high-profile poisoning of a former Russian military officer and double agent for the United Kingdom, Sergei Skripal, with a nerve agent in England in 2018. The Skripal poisoning led to a tit-for-tat round of diplomatic expulsions between Russia and Western countries.

While foreign service officers are shielded from local law enforcement by protocols of diplomatic immunity, such protections do not extend to local staff working at the embassy and consulates. A third Russian who worked for the United States for a number of years said their American colleagues were “very supportive” and would raise concerns about harassment with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but ultimately, local staff remained exposed to the security services. “We had no protection,” they said.

Similar stories have played out with local staff in other parts of the world. In Ukraine, locally employed staff were left behind as the U.S. Embassy hastily evacuated to Poland in the opening days of the Russian invasion in 2022, prompting those employees to send open letters to State Department officials begging for help.

When the U.S. Embassy in Yemen relocated to neighboring Saudi Arabia after the outbreak of the Yemeni civil war, local employees were left behind. Houthi rebels fighting the Saudi-backed Yemeni government began arresting them in 2021, and 10 people are still behind bars while an 11th person has died while in Houthi custody. Their former colleagues believe the State Department isn’t doing enough to fight to secure their release.

In Afghanistan, tens of thousands of former Afghans who worked for the U.S. government or aided the war effort in some capacity were left behind as the Taliban seized control of the country while the United States and its allies withdrew. The Biden administration is grappling with an estimated 150,000 SIV applicants from Afghanistan—in a visa system mired in red tape and bureaucratic backlogs.

The former locally employed staff still stuck in Russia say they aren’t holding out hope that Washington would offer them any new lifelines. Some who found a way to leave the country say they may never go back.

“It won’t be safe for me and my family there,” said another Russian who worked at the U.S. Embassy and has since left the country. “Not as long as Putin is alive.”