Inside a U.S. Embassy is widely recognized as the essential guide to the Foreign Service. This all-new third edition takes readers to more than fifty U.S. missions around the world, introducing Foreign Service professionals and providing detailed descriptions of their jobs and firsthand accounts of diplomacy in action. In addition to profiles of diplomats and specialists around the world-from the ambassador to the consular officer, the public diplomacy officer to the security specialist-is a selection from more than twenty countries of day-in-the-life accounts, each describing an actual day on.

This booklet contains instructions and guidance relating to the arrest and detention of foreign nationals, deaths of foreign nationals, the appointment of guardians for minors or incompetent adults who are foreign nationals, and related issues pertaining to the provision of consular services to foreign nationals in the United States. This booklet is designed to help ensure that foreign governments can extend appropriate consular services to their nationals in the United States and that the United States complies with its legal obligations to such governments. The instructions and guidance herein should be followed by all federal, state, and local government officials, whether law enforcement, judicial, or other, insofar as they pertain to foreign nationals subject to such officials' authority or to matters within such officials' competence.

"As a British colony Americans relied on the far-flung British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants, but after the Revolution they had to scramble to create an American service. While the U.S. diplomatic establishment was confined to the major capitals of the world, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. As consular appointments were often used as a reward for authors and other talented people, the U.S. Consular Service could boast of such noteworthy members as Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, and William Dean Howells. Winston Churchill's grandfather was an American consul, as was Fiorello La Guardia, later mayor of New York"--Unedited summary from book cover.