At this sad time for American diplomacy ("A suicide car bomb in southern Afghanistan killed three American soldiers and two American civilians, including a State Department Foreign Service officer"), it has become known that the murdered State Department diplomat
Anne Smedinghoff worked in public diplomacy.
It is somewhat disconcerting to this blogger, as someone involved in U.S. public diplomacy for many years, that the source of this information about a courageous woman's activities in Afghanistan did not come from Secretary of State John Kerry's official statement on her death (granted, the statement does say that "Our American officials and their Afghan colleagues were on their way to donate books to students in a school in Qalat.")
Rather, the nature of what Smedinghoff's work entailed (to be sure, not described in detail) came from a private source, "Chicago's Very Own" WGNtv, on an internet entry, "State Department diplomat with Chicago ties killed in Afghanistan," which states that she was a "young diplomat from River Forest" and quotes her father:
Mr. Smedinghoff said Anne went into the Foreign Service right out of college. Her first post was in Venezuela and she volunteered to go to Afghanistan where she’d been since last July. As a diplomat, she was working in the public diplomacy department for the local population. She was helping women and working for equality for women, and with schools and local businesses there. Anne simply adored her job, her father said. 'She was living in a compound that was heavily fortified and she was always trying to get out and do things for the population.'”Such State Department neglect of mentioning the public diplomacy side of its activities -- need I say that public diplomacy is not intended to be "classified" information -- was also regrettably evident in its reporting on the tragic death of Ambassador Stevens.
UPDATE: Re additional coverage of Smedinghoff in the media, which include Kerry's later statements about her, see (1) and (2).
Smedinghoff image from