The U.S. Embassy in Kuwait _ the latest storm center of the growing Persian Gulf crisis _ is recalled by diplomats who served there as a cluster of modest buildings across a six-lane highway from the beach. It normally has a contingent of about a half-dozen Marines, who were withdrawn Thursday as today's Iraqi-set deadline for the closing of foreign embassies in Kuwait approached. ``It's not a very fancy embassy, but a very functional one,'' said Francois Dickman, a retired Foreign Service officer who was U.S. ambassador to Kuwait from 1979 to 1983. ``It's not one of the new fortresses that many American embassies around the world are increasingly,'' said another diplomat who has served in Kuwait, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Dickman, speaking by telephone from his home in Laramie, Wyo., said the embassy is in a compound surrounded by a wall eight or nine feet high. It is a rectangle running north and south with the east side facing Gulf Road, a six-lane highway. Just east of the highway is the Persian Gulf. ``It's not much of a beach,'' said Dickman. The compound is roughly two city blocks wide by four blocks long, the former ambassador said. Directly to the south is a Hilton hotel, seven or eight stories high. The only entrance to the compound is a steel gate on the west side, about 100 feet from the southwest corner. ``As you enter, you see the chancery,'' he said. ``The chancery is one story. It was a plain stone building with a corrugated roof.'' Dickman said the road then bends north to the site of the administration building, a brick structure that was destroyed in a terrorist bombing on Dec. 12, 1983. The building has since been rebuilt. Also in the compound are the two-story ambassador's residence, a warehouse, a parking lot and a garden just east of the ambassador's house, in which vegetables were grown in Dickman's day. There also is a swimming pool. In the 1983 bombing, Shia Moslem terrorists crashed a truck loaded with gas cylinders through the steel gates. It smashed into the administration building, demolishing it and also damaging the chancery and warehouse, Dickman said. Six people were killed, including the truck driver, but none were Americans. Since then the security system has been strengthened, according to the diplomat who spoke anonymously. ``I suppose a tank, like an Iraqi tank, could get through, but it has been reinforced, the wall has been upgraded and the entry gates,'' this diplomat said. Dickman said that when he was ambassador the Marines lived a block away from the embassy compound, but he later heard they were living within the enclosure. He applauded the decision to withdraw them. ``It makes sense,'' he said. ``These Marines can't do anything. There are only six of them. It is possible the number has been increased, but normally it is only a contingent of six.'' ``They don't really serve as guards,'' Dickman said. ``They man the entrance to the chancery and in the evening they make sure that things are locked up and provide elementary security.'' The diplomats obviously had pleasant memories of the place. ``The time I was there we had a little victory garden along the edge of the wall,'' said Dickman. ``I remember it being very green and pretty,'' said his colleague.
