Maura Harty

aura Harty, a career Foreign Service officer, has risen to the rank of assistant secretary of State and taken charge of the troubled Bureau of Consular Affairs, which plays a role in stopping terrorism inside the country's borders. But before her appointment to the new post was approved, she came under fire from the families of some who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs issues visas to foreigners who are not seeking permanent residence in the United States. It is the bureau that permitted many of the 9/11 terrorists to enter the country, despite irregularities in their applications. The State Department inspector general has criticized the bureau's lax procedures for determining who should get a visa.

The victims' families wrote to senators, asking them to block Harty's nomination. They said she had been "intimately involved in forming the open-door policy exploited by the terrorists." Political conservatives, meanwhile, said she was too much of a State Department insider. The Senate approved her nomination in November, but some senators remain unpersuaded that she is moving fast enough to solve the problems.

Although Harty's earlier career was less controversial, she has long been a high-profile official, serving in a variety of posts in Washington and abroad since joining the Foreign Service in 1981. In 1988, she volunteered to work at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Colombia-a particularly dangerous post-where she headed the visa section.

She was the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay from 1997 to 1999, then returned to Washington as deputy chief of the Bureau of Consular Affairs. An assignment as executive secretary of the State Department, working closely with Secretary of State Colin Powell, preceded her nomination to head the Bureau of Consular Affairs. After the opposition emerged, Powell reportedly lobbied hard for her confirmation, and Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage told a television interviewer that "she's feisty, she's tough, she knows the issues inside and out."

She still has to convince some doubters. In a January 2003 letter to Powell, for example, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, accused Harty of engaging in "unproductive finger-pointing" about responsibility for the bureau's problems and demanded an update on reforms.