A diplomatic bag, also known as a diplomatic pouch, is a container with
certain legal protections used for carrying official correspondence or
other items between a diplomatic mission and its home government or other
diplomatic, consular, or otherwise official entities. The physical concept
of a "diplomatic bag" is flexible and therefore can take many forms.
Additionally, a diplomatic bag usually has some form of lock and/or
tamper-evident seal attached to it in order to deter interference by
unauthorized third parties. The most important point is that as long as it is
externally marked to show its status, the "bag" has diplomatic immunity from
search or seizure, as codified in article 27 of the 1961 Vienna Convention
on Diplomatic Relations. It may only contain articles intended for official
use. It need not be a bag; in fact, no size limit is specified by the
convention. It is often escorted by a diplomatic courier, who is similarly
immune from arrest and detention. Cryptography
In discussions of cryptography, the diplomatic bag is conventionally used as
an example of the ultimate secure channel used to exchange keys,
codebooks, and other necessarily secret materials. Like Alice and Bob, it is an
example of a metasyntactic variable when used this way.
In contemporary practice, diplomatic bags are indeed used for exactly this
purpose. An illustration is the strenuous protest made by German
diplomats in Poland in the late 1920s when a cypher machine being shipped to
the German Embassy in Warsaw – a commercial version of the famous Enigma
machine – was mistakenly not marked as protected baggage and was opened, under
protest, by Polish Customs. It was released to them, supposedly without
much apology, on the following Monday, but had perhaps been subjected to
inspection by Polish cryptography personnel over the weekend.
Noteworthy shipments During World War II, Winston Churchill
reportedly received shipments of Cuban cigars by this means.
Triplex was a British espionage operation in World War II which involved
secretly copying the contents of diplomatic pouches of neutral countries.
In 1964, a Moroccan-born Israeli double agent named Mordechai Ben Masoud Louk
was drugged, bound, and placed in a diplomatic bag at the Egyptian Embassy
in Rome, but was rescued by Italian authorities. The crate that he had been
placed in appeared to have been used for a similar purpose before, possibly for
an Egyptian military official who had defected to Italy several years before
but then disappeared without a trace before reappearing under Egyptian
custody and facing trial. During the 1982 Falklands War, the
Argentine government used a diplomatic bag to smuggle several limpet mines to
their embassy in Spain, to be used in the covert Operation Algeciras, in which
Argentine agents were to blow up a British warship in the Royal Navy
Dockyard at Gibraltar. The plot was uncovered and stopped by the Spanish
police before the explosives could be set.
In the 1984 Dikko Affair, a former Nigerian government minister, Umaru
Dikko, was kidnapped and placed in a shipping crate in an attempt to
transport him from the United Kingdom back to Nigeria for trial. However, it
was not marked as a diplomatic bag, which allowed British customs to open
it. In 1984, the Sterling submachine gun
used to shoot dead WPC Yvonne Fletcher from inside the Libyan Embassy in London
was smuggled out of the UK in one of 21 diplomatic bags.
In March 2000 Zimbabwe was the object of political interest internationally when
it opened a British diplomatic shipment. In May 2008, a replacement pump for the
toilet on the International Space Station was sent in a diplomatic pouch
from Russia to the United States in order to arrive before liftoff of the
next shuttle mission. In 2012, a 16 kg shipment of cocaine was
sent to the United Nations in New York in a bag masquerading as a diplomatic
pouch. In January 2012, Italy detected 40
kilograms of cocaine smuggled in a diplomatic pouch from Ecuador, arresting
five. Ecuador insisted it had inspected the shipment for drugs at the foreign
ministry before it was sent to Milan. In November 2013, the UK government
alleged that a British diplomatic bag had been opened by the Guardia Civil at
the Gibraltar-Spanish border, sparking a formal diplomatic protest. The Spanish
government responded that the bag, being transported from the Governor of
Gibraltar by a courier company within a mailbag containing other packages, did
not meet the criteria of being in transit between a diplomatic mission and
a home government. See also
Military mail Diplomatic cable
References External links
eDiplomat.com: Glossary of Diplomatic Terms
"Is there such a thing as a diplomatic pouch?". Straight Dope. December 20,
2005. Retrieved September 23, 2012. article with extensive detailed
references.