Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (42 page)

I had known Ray from the time he was Secretary Rice’s military liaison. He is a man whose passion for achieving success in Iraq was even more
imposing than his size. I also met with Ryan Crocker, who had just left Iraq. Unlike Petraeus, Crocker painted a grim view of the situation on the ground (“we’ve been very lucky”) and was not optimistic about the future or about the embassy’s capacity to deal with it. Given the annual turnover at the embassy, he expressed concern about whether there was anyone left who had useful contacts with the Iraqis (in other words, you’re not very lucky). His body language seemed that of a severe critic of the war, in contrast to public statements in which he called for more investment of resources. I asked how much he had engaged in Iraq’s internal politics and he surprised me by saying that he stayed away from it except on the candidacy of the justice minister, who he felt would be inclined to open up the detention centers.

Crocker left no opportunity for personal banter and never smiled. He deflected questions about the new embassy, explaining that he had hardly been there, since it had just opened weeks before. I asked whether he thought we had ever met before. He said only if I had been stationed in the Middle East. After about ten minutes, he said, “Okay?” suggesting that he was ready to leave. I thanked him for his time and never saw him again.

I moved a small box of personal things from my sixth-floor office in EAP, which would remain empty until the new assistant secretary would arrive some six months later, down to the Iraq section of NEA. Unlike my EAP office with its view of the Potomac River, the Iraq desk was located in a windowless office suite on the second floor of the State Department. It was grim surroundings, but I was struck by how dedicated the desk officers were.

In the State Department, every country, large or small, has a desk. Some desks have two officers, some even more. The Korea and China offices in the EAP Bureau had some twenty-five officers and staff. The Iraq desk sprawled out through the northwest end of the second floor in hastily designed office space. Everyone was packed into tiny cubicles, working ten-to-twelve-hour days. Most were Foreign Service officers, some were regular civil service employees, but others were one-year contract employees brought in to handle the surge of work.

I also started to get acquainted with NSC staff engaged with Iraq. National Security Council staffs serve the president and are relatively small, especially at the start of an administration, when the president has made a pledge (which will soon be broken) to keep the NSC staff to bare bones and rely instead on the State Department and other national security departments.

Whereas the State Department might have twenty persons working on a given geographical or function issue, the NSC staff would have only a handful and therefore have to outsource memos to the State Department. When the president is meeting a foreign leader, the NSC directorate will ask the State Department for a memo, which becomes grist for an NSC paper.

NSC staff have a well-deserved reputation for being bright, in many cases the best and the brightest. Many come from other USG agencies and do not have political profiles. But they also have a reputation for being quick and instinctive about where power resides. These traits are especially on display in the hand-off from one administration to the next, when a staff person for the previous administration hoping to stay on will want to demonstrate competence and a capacity to transfer loyalty. Ideally, the NSC staff works well with the State Department’s bureaucracy, especially the geographic bureau, but this is not always the case. The State Department’s layered look involves numerous clearances that frequently slow down a decision.

In a highly charged place on an issue like Iraq, the pace is relentless, nerves are frayed, and bad-mouthing of other agencies abounds. The State Department comes in for more than its share of this because of the lingering sense that it is an elite organization whose officers often seem more interested in admiring problems than in solving them.

But often the State Department doesn’t deserve the skepticism. One fairly junior-level NSC director, originally from the CIA, when briefing me on the situation in Iraq kept referring to so-and-so as a “typical Foreign Service officer.” The third time I stopped her and asked how long
she had been in the government. When she said six years I said that I was not sure she had earned the right to criticize people on that basis, that she was free to criticize individuals, but that I too was an FSO and I didn’t appreciate it. I am sure that from that day I got added to the ranks of “typical FSO.”

In February 2009 I was returning from a quick overnight trip to Jacksonville, Florida, where I had addressed the World Affairs Council. (The subject was North Korea, not Iraq, since nominees must be very careful to hold their comments until after confirmation by the Senate. Nominees are strongly advised to say nothing about their future assignment until they have testified to the relevant Senate committee, which in the case of ambassadors is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.) I found on my BlackBerry that there was a story in various news outlets that morning to the effect that the administration had offered the Iraq ambassadorship to a former CENTCOM commander, retired four-star general Anthony Zinni, but had pulled back and given it to me instead. Worse yet, the on-the-record source of the stories was a very upset General Zinni, who explained that he had been promised the job and had started the process of divesting himself of any activities that could have been interpreted as a conflict of interest, only to be told he wasn’t getting it. Zinni made no secret of the fact that he was hopping mad and provided details of the alleged failure of senior officials, including his soon-to-be best ex-friend of thirty years, National Security Advisor Jim Jones, explaining that the administration had decided to go with a career Foreign Service officer. According to Zinni, Jones went on to offer Zinni something else, possibly the ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia, which Zinni promptly dismissed.

An ambassadorial nominee can find bad news in a winning lottery ticket, so I started enumerating what could go wrong and braced myself for the nomination headaches that were sure to come. The first problem was the mere existence of a “controversy” even though it had nothing to do with me. I talked to Bill Burns, who had figured in Zinni’s account as one of the officials who had failed to call him back. Bill has the world’s
most impeccable phone manners (we used to joke he would return the call of a telemarketer). He expressed skepticism that Zinni had been offered the position, but I could sense there was probably more to the story than just a preliminary sounding out of interest.

I didn’t want to appear too interested, but I checked with a few friends at the Pentagon and the NSC staff and, sure enough, the version of events was pretty much as Zinni had described them, but with a definite twist: this was not a military versus FSO issue. Rather, when some senior army generals heard that a retired CENTCOM commander—a marine, no less—was slated to be the ambassador to Iraq, they quickly went into action to protect their own four-star on the scene, General Ray Odierno.

Secretary of Defense Bob Gates shared the concern that eight stars in Bagdad might be excessive, and made the case with Clinton that at a time when the United States was seeking to civilianize the Iraq mission, we should not send a former senior military officer there as ambassador. She had supported her old friend Zinni, one of many military leaders she had cultivated during her time as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but quickly understood Gates’s message and went to work to find a Foreign Service officer. The search hadn’t gone well. Former European assistant secretary Beth Jones, an officer with considerable Middle East and South Asian experience, including as a deputy assistant secretary for NEA, was willing and highly regarded, but she ran into vetting problems due to her work with a consulting firm.

From my point of view, however, the damage was done. Dick Holbrooke’s name got dragged in as someone who was trying to install one of his protégés and therefore extend his own empire of activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, some of Zinni’s friends rallied to his cause saying that he was a victim of the Foreign Service. Blogs sympathetic to him and suspicious of the new administration’s commitment to the Iraq mission and to me, given my North Korea experience, implied that I had schemed my way into this “plum” assignment.

Two days later, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), a close friend of
Zinni, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) issued a news release questioning my qualifications for the post. McCain would later say to the full Senate that “we have a choice here, between Hill and Zinni,” as if it were to be a run-off competition. The McCain-Graham press release referred to my “controversial” role in the North Korean negotiations. Suddenly my nomination, according to an Associated Press story, was in doubt and “embattled.”

Not to be outdone, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) issued a statement announcing that I had “lied to the Senate” in my North Korean negotiations and that he would have no choice but to place a hold on the nomination.

My “lie” was the following: Senator Brownback strongly opposed the Six Party nuclear negotiations with North Korea, and in the summer of 2008 had held the ambassadorial nominee to the Republic of Korea, Kathleen Stephens, for four months while he figured out what he wanted in return. With the intervention of Senator John Warner (R-VA), who fully understood the madness of not sending an ambassador to one of our most important partners in the world, Brownback agreed to lift his hold, provided I would say in testimony that if we got to the stage with the North Koreans of negotiating normalization of relations with them, I would agree to open a separate track to discuss North Korea’s abysmal human rights record. I told Senator Brownback in testimony that I would invite our North Korean human rights envoy, Jay Lefkowitz, to any and all Six Party meetings, which I did though he never had the time to make it out to Beijing.

The sad truth was that nobody in the Six Party Talks had the slightest interest in inviting the U.S. North Korean human rights envoy to the meetings. As my Russian colleague asked, “What is problem? You don’t think getting DPRK [North Korea] to give up nuclear weapons is hard enough?!” In fact, were we to get to normalization talks it would have been entirely appropriate and essential to include human rights in the negotiations, just as we have done in many other such talks with
in-from-the-cold dictatorships. Of course, we never got to the stage with North Korea that we would normalize, nor, frankly, did I think we ever would. But the request to raise human rights in that context was entirely reasonable, and in any event I was committed to making it a separate track if the normalization talks had ever proceeded.

There was another issue. Congress had worked hard to get the Bush administration to name a human rights envoy. The decision to name Lefkowitz, a close confidant of Brownback with an impressive background in forging the Bush administration’s position on the stem cell issue, was controversial because he had a full-time job in New York as a litigator. It was not clear to many of his critics that he would have the time to devote to unpaid chores as a human rights envoy for North Korea, a subject with which he had zero familiarity. Some congressmen and senators, concerned about whether the envoy would have enough time to devote to the duties, wrote into the legislation that the person must not be “double hatted,” that is, cannot also hold another job in the State Department, but should be paid and considered a full-time Department of State employee.

Since he was sometimes reported to be critical of the bureaucracy for not implementing his approach to North Korea, I made sure that my entire North Korea team understood that they were to support him and never try to edit his op-eds. In the interagency meetings I went out of my way to support him on ideas that had come to him from various Korean groups in the United States to beam propaganda to North Korea via radio or, my favorite, leaflets carried inside giant helium-filled balloons that had the shape of huge condoms.

In mid-February I went up to my family’s farmhouse in Rhode Island for a weekend alone. After picking up the newspapers on Sunday morning in the general store I went home to sit down with coffee in my favorite mug and watch CNN’s
Late Edition
. Dick Cheney was John King’s guest. I watched with growing surprise at the degree to which the former vice president, only weeks out of office, was willing to take direct swipes
at the new president. Cheney’s approach to the new administration was in stark contrast to the gracious way President Bush had conducted himself in departing office. As I studied the
Boston Globe
sports section to see how some of the Red Sox pitching prospects looked on the eve of the first spring training games, King asked the former veep: So what do you think of the president’s choice of Chris Hill to be ambassador to Iraq? I looked up to see the former vice president respond, “There are a lot of better candidates than that.”

I sat in my late mother’s recliner, motionless, one hand clasped around my Joshua L. Chamberlain Museum coffee cup, the other keeping my jaw from dropping to the floor. I shook my head slowly and asked no one in particular what it takes for a former vice president, who for a period of eight (very) long years was only a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the universe, to stoop to a cheap shot like that on national television against a nominee for service in Iraq.

As I was preparing for my confirmation, the
New York Times
ran a front-page story about a new insurgency tactic. The insurgents were making handkerchief-sized parachutes so that the explosive device, upon being hurled in the air, would come down slowly on the less protected roofs of U.S. vehicles. I read that story and thought, maybe Brownback likes me after all.

• • •

The nomination process is never quite as bad as it seems at the time, and indeed many senators from both sides of the aisle came forward in support. Importantly, I met with Lindsey Graham, who told me that he had talked to a number of U.S. generals who had worked with me over the years and strongly supported my nomination. General Petraeus and General Odierno signaled their support, as did all the former U.S. ambassadors to Iraq. “If you are good enough for them, you are good enough for me,” Senator Graham told me (he was to visit twice while I was in Baghdad). I asked him for advice on Brownback. “I can’t help you with Brownback,” suggesting they were not the closest of friends.
On a domestic airplane trip I had sat next to Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), who subsequently supported me. On the Senator Foreign Relations Committee both Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Senator John Kerry (D-MA) promised strong support, as did most of the other members. I reached out to as many senators as would see me, and was honored that one of my own senators from Rhode Island, Jack Reed, a Vietnam veteran and an expert on Iraq, agreed to introduce me at the hearing.