What was almost certainly in the email Powell sent Clinton was the story of his successful efforts to drag the State Department into the modern age. I worked for State during that period of time, and watched it happen.
When the rest of the world was working on PCs and using then-modern software in their offices, State clung to an old, clunky mainframe system made by the now-defunct company WANG. WANG's version of a word processor was only a basic text editor with no font or formatting tools. Spell check was an option many locations did not have installed. IBM had bid on a contract to move State to PCs in 1990, but was rejected in favor of a renewal of the WANG mainframes.
WANG email, itself seen inside State Department as a major innovation when launched in 1991 (dates are approximate, as upgrades took place globally on a rolling basis), worked only inside the Department until around 1995 or so, when it could finally be used to send and receive outside email via a cumbersome workaround. Until then, State could not communicate by email with any other government agency, never mind a public rapidly moving online.
Until Powell demanded the change, internet at State was limited to stand-alone, dial up access that had to be procured locally. Offices had, if they were lucky, one stand alone PC off in the corner connected to a noisy modem. If you wanted to use it, you needed in most cases to stand in line and wait your turn.
A US citizen was arrested during an immigration raid in downtown Los Angeles this week in...
