I would not have been a good candidate for "petroleum attache" or "minerals attache"

"You'll never work for the State Department" threatened a coal slurry pipeline lobbyist from Bechtel 40 years ago.    My response was, "ma'am I don want to work for the State Department.

At the time, I was a 21 year old Georgetown undergraduate investigating nasty pipeline eminent domain legislation.  My 11,500 investigative article helped defeat it.

Interesting: U.S. State Department Foreign Service officers have titles like "petroleum attache" and "minerals attache."  Big Oil and other exploitative extractive industries have long owned the State Department.  From State Department archives there's a gnarly a 1959 memo from Gulf Oil on Kuwait. Read it here.