The Secretary (10 page)

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the street, accusing Damascus of killing
him. He had started to push back against Syria’s influence, and it was widely reported
that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had promised to “break Lebanon on his head.”
The demonstrators not only demanded justice; they wanted Syria’s thirty thousand troops
out of the country. It was the Beirut Spring. In April 2005, after thirty years of
military occupation, fear, and humiliation, the Syrians finally left. Their Lebanese
allies, Hezbollah and others, felt exposed. The country was deeply divided between
those who had wanted Syria out and those for whom Damascus and Tehran represented
a worldview they could connect with: anti-Western and anti-imperialist. Lebanon was
a mosaic of faiths and had often split along religious lines during the war. But the
divide this time was ideological and partisan: I had Shiite, Sunni, and Christian
friends who despised Syria and Hezbollah, and I had other friends, also Shiite, Sunni,
and Christian, who either liked Syria and Hezbollah or at least preferred them to
the West.

*   *   *

The Mediterranean was in sight. I could see the tip of Beirut jutting into the dark
blue sea. SAM had barely landed when my colleagues’ chatter began to fill the air.
They were all on the phone to their editors breaking the news of their arrival while
frantically typing on their computers.

I made a very different kind of phone call, to my eldest sister.

“Ingrid, it’s me. I’m in Beirut with Hillary,” I said.

“I thought you might be coming—we heard rumors about her visit early this morning,”
Ingrid replied. “Why is she here? Will it be good for us?”

We had been asking ourselves these kinds of questions since we were children. But
I didn’t have answers for my sister, not yet.

I walked onto the tarmac and into an armored four-wheel-drive Suburban for the ride
to the presidential palace. Along the highway leading out of the airport, yellow Hezbollah
flags with a green fist raising a Kalashnikov were hanging from lampposts, and billboards
were covered with the election campaign banners of members of the party running for
parliament in June. The airport was in a Shiite Muslim area, and this was Hezbollah
territory. The palace was a fifteen-minute drive away, in Baabda, a hilly Christian
suburb overlooking the capital.

The Bubble, always familiar, felt alien in Beirut. I was a stranger in my own country,
separated from the Lebanese by tinted windows, armor, Fred and his team of Diplomatic
Security agents, a Lebanese police escort. I was in the motorcade that irritated the
hell out of me when I was living in Beirut, stuck in a traffic jam because roads had
been blocked off for the American ambassador. For years after the civil war, even
as Beirut reclaimed its title as glitzy party town of the Middle East, American embassy
motorcades remained an elaborate affair, with machine gun turrets mounted on massive
white SUVs. Today the U.S. embassy still has the most visible diplomatic motorcades.
We rolled our eyes every time they drove past. In January 2008, an explosion targeted
the embassy convoy, but it was a decoy, and the ambassador, Jeffrey Feltman, was unharmed.
I was now in his convoy. He was in my convoy.

It was a surreal homecoming; an emotional moment at the end of a tortuous journey
from Beirut war child to Washington State Department correspondent. Only much later
did I realize that on that day I had embarked on another journey, within myself, as
I tried to come to terms with my misgivings about American power. For now, all I really
wanted was to go for a walk on the Corniche, the city seaside promenade. I didn’t
miss Lebanon now that I was living in Washington: too many painful memories. But I
missed the Mediterranean, the sea breeze, the endless horizon that made me feel free
even during the darkest days of fighting.

*   *   *

We had called it the war of others on our land: America sent in the marines. Israel
invaded a few times, as did Syria, which was a client state of the Soviet Union. Palestinian
militants hoping to reclaim what they saw as their lost land, now the State of Israel,
used Lebanon as their launchpad, and Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries set up shop on
the Mediterranean by helping to form Hezbollah. From 1975 to 1990, at the height of
the Cold War, all the different players and countries were fighting out their battles
on our streets. America was just one of them, but as the superpower, it received the
most attention, the most blame. We were convinced it was pulling all the strings—the
war was a plot devised in the Oval Office, on a Sunday afternoon, with people poking
pins into maps to divide the city between warring factions, President Ronald Reagan
and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev discussing war spoils over the phone, deciding our
fate. Growing up, that was my favorite image, and it was every Lebanese’s favorite
explanation to make sense of the chaos and killing surrounding us. The war didn’t
make sense to us, but it made sense to someone. We took strange comfort in that thought;
it made our own powerlessness easier to bear; we were too busy trying to stay alive.
The blame also allowed our warlords to abdicate their own responsibility to end the
war. And just like millions of other people in fragile countries, repressive states,
and dictatorships, my two sisters and I, my parents, our friends—we all lived and
breathed politics every day: politics happened outside our front door; politics could
be loud and dangerous; politics could kill you. My family was lucky to survive unscathed.

I was only thirteen when the war ended in 1990, but I remember so much of it, so vividly.
I remember the nights cowering in the underground shelter, sleeping on mattresses
we had brought down with us from our third-floor apartment, and the screaming as our
building shook from the impact of bombs falling nearby. In the morning, my father
would take my two sisters and me to school. At one point in the war, we would say
good-bye to him at a checkpoint, walk for ten interminable minutes through a no-man’s-land,
then past some gunmen to get onto the blue bus that would take us to our school on
the other side of our divided city. Every afternoon, we made the return journey, hoping
our father had survived the day and was waiting for us. He would be sitting in his
car, listening to the radio for reports of any shelling or sniper attacks as he waited
for three girls with backpacks to appear from behind the barricades. We drove home
and, if the shelling permitted, we stopped for some groceries at Abu Moussa’s shop,
mostly fruit and vegetables that my father loved to pick by hand, one by one.

*   *   *

Clinton’s convoy was speeding up the hill, the roads cleared of all traffic. We cut
across a large boulevard that led back into a different part of Beirut. I could see
the intersection less than half a mile away below which had been a crossing point
between East and West Beirut during the war and was named after the furniture shop
on one corner—Galerie Semaan. With sand barriers and tall buildings overlooking it,
it had been a favorite sniper outpost. My family and I had lived just off that intersection.
During the war, radio announcers kept citizens informed with news flashes about where
fighting had erupted and “Galerie Semaan” was in the news often. Whenever I tried
to explain to people where I lived, all I had to say was Galerie Semaan—their eyes
widened, their reaction ranging from disbelief to pity. Needless to say, we never
had any visitors. Sometimes we referred to the area by its original name—Hay el Amerkan,
the neighborhood of the Americans. When my family had settled there before the start
of the war, it was a charming middle-class area, favored by expatriates and surrounded
by orange groves. A year into the violence, the only expatriates were my mother and
invading armies who all chose to set up their headquarters in our small cluster of
buildings. Galerie Semaan didn’t just sit on the dividing line between the Muslim
West and Christian East sides of the capital, it was on the southern edge of the city.
North of us was Christian Beirut and beyond it the mostly Christian north of Lebanon.
South of us was dominantly Muslim territory, Sunni and then Shiite in the deep south,
along the border with Israel.

Israel, which already invaded southern Lebanon once in 1978, invaded again on June
6, 1982. Palestinian guerrilla fighters, using Lebanon as their staging post to liberate
the Holy Land, were all over south Lebanon and the western part of Beirut, and some
of their gunmen had set up positions in our building. As Israeli tanks started advancing
toward Beirut and Galerie Semaan, we fled farther north, deep into Christian territory,
to escape the ferocious fighting. When we returned in the early fall, the Palestinian
guerrillas and their ragtag Mercedes cars had been replaced by Israeli soldiers rounding
up blindfolded men and driving them away in tanks. In our apartment on the third floor,
I found my bedroom gutted by a shell, curtains torn, shrapnel holes on every wall,
my toys and clothes covered by grime and dust. I was only five but intensely aware
of my surroundings and the reality of war, yet unable to comprehend why I was being
punished in such a fashion and by whom. I also didn’t understand why they couldn’t
instead have destroyed the awful green carpet and orange bed frame, which survived
the whole war.

*   *   *

Now, I was home again. This time I felt strange, like a traitor, as if I had crossed
to the other side. I was in a big American convoy, and I had become part of the American
press pack that I had once perceived as arrogant, pushy, and entitled. (The traveling
press corps was in fact one of the most collegial group of journalists I had ever
worked with.) Unlike local reporters, those of us in the Bubble didn’t have to show
up hours in advance to go through security; we could usually just waltz in a few minutes
before the press conference started. We didn’t have to hustle for seats because two
rows were always reserved for us. We always got a turn to ask a question.

Around the country, families sitting down for Sunday lunch or driving to their favorite
restaurant were turning on the television or radio for their midday fix of politics.
Depending on their political leaning, they tuned in to the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation
(LBC), a Christian right-wing television station; Al-Manar television, Hezbollah’s
outfit; or Voice of Lebanon, for something in between the two. Each station presented
its own, often wildly diverging, version of the truth. Most of them would carry Clinton’s
press conference live.

In her bright blue pantsuit, Clinton stood in the wood-paneled press conference room
smiling for the television cameras, a gold Lebanese cedar stamped on the lectern in
front of her, the top of a Roman column affixed to the walls on either side. She talked
about the need for Lebanon to have a fair election, free of outside influence.

On Al-Manar television, she was being excoriated for interfering in Lebanon’s affairs
before the summer elections—an irony since Hezbollah of course had its own foreign
backers. On LBC, they were talking about Clinton’s show of support for the country
as it prepared for the vote. It was my turn to ask a question.

“Madame Secretary, welcome to Lebanon. I know you don’t want to speculate about the
results of the elections, but it does look likely that Syria’s allies, including Hezbollah,
will make a strong comeback. How will that affect your support for the Lebanese army
that you just discussed? You said it was a pillar of cooperation between the two countries.
Would you reevaluate that cooperation with the Lebanese army?”

“Well, Kim, first let me say that it’s a great delight to have you with me on this
trip. As some of you know, Kim is Lebanese and has been so excited about coming back
to a country that she loves, and I am pleased that I could be the reason she got to
come back at this particular time.”

I felt flattered: she remembered me and our conversation. But she had also made my
feelings known in public on national Lebanese television, in front of all the local
press. I knew it was a small moment, but I felt she used me to make a connection with
the Lebanese people at a time of tension in the country, when the United States was
trying to shore up support for Western-friendly politicians.

Much later, she would tell me that she had made the comment on the spur of the moment
because she was deeply moved to see me return to Lebanon with her after all I had
lived through. She had looked at me standing there with a microphone and seen someone
who symbolized what Lebanon could be. But in that moment, long before I would ask
her about it, the interaction left me feeling deeply unsettled. In Lebanon, as a journalist
or a politician or anyone with even the tiniest bit of a profile or influence, you
were considered either a stooge of the United States or an agent of its local opponents:
Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria. Clinton’s casual comment meant I had just been tainted
by an American stamp—or graced, depending on who was judging.

*   *   *

We drove back toward the Mediterranean, into the center of the city. Ottoman Empire
and French Mandate–era buildings gutted by the civil war fighting had been painstakingly
restored to their ancient glory. Whatever could not be saved had been razed to the
ground. Empty plots of land and cranes dotted the landscape. Clinton was going to
pay her respects at the tomb of Hariri, buried in the heart of the capital, near the
mosque he had helped build, the largest in Lebanon. He had been prime minister during
all the years that she had been a First Lady. Bill called him a personal friend. Once
out of power, the two men had stayed in touch and had met at length just two months
before Hariri was killed. Hariri’s son Saad had taken on the political mantle and
stood by Hillary’s side as she laid a wreath.

We had arrived barely two hours before, and it was already time to leave. But I was
exiting the Bubble and staying behind in Beirut to see my family. Lew Lukens had given
me my passport back. I took my suitcase out of the press van. My colleagues, the secretary,
Jake, Jeff, Huma, and all the others got into the armored motorcade. One by one, the
black cars took off, police sirens wailed. I watched the convoy drive up the road
toward the airport and disappear beyond the small hill.