Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir

by Christopher R. Hill

  A month later, I went to the post office and checked the mail. I had a thick envelope from the State Department.

  3

  FIRST MENTOR

  I entered the Foreign Service in October 1977 and began the series of required training programs in preparation for my first assignment. The U.S. Foreign Service is a career in which advancement is not unlike many others. There is an entrance exam process, an entry class, followed by a scramble for first assignments that seem so much more important than they really are in the context of a full career. After all that, it becomes pretty much what the person makes of it: what area of the world one chooses, for example, Europe or Africa; what issues, such as refugees or helping businesspeople abroad.

  Though the Foreign Service emerges on the stage every so often—Benghazi, Libya, being one of the most recent examples—it is not well-known outside Washington, D.C. Nor does the State Department have much continued resonance anywhere in the United States other than certain offices in Washington. “The state department of what?” is a question I would often get in response to my explaining where I worked.

  The depiction of it in movies is especially disheartening. Usually, a Foreign Service officer is shown sitting all too comfortably behind a large desk, an American flag on display in the background, and explaining ruefully but firmly to a frantic American tourist why he (Hollywood has long concluded that only white males work in the Foreign Service) cannot offer any help. Most unhelpfully, the Foreign Service officer is sometimes depicted cravenly explaining that local laws don’t allow him to do anything for that frantic tourist, often a parent trying to recover an abducted child.

  Hollywood’s view of the Foreign Service is in sharp contrast with its overall appraisal of the military as bold and unflinching from the vigorous pursuit of U.S. interests. The Foreign Service seems, to many Americans, to be more interested in the other country’s interests than in our own.

  I had the perfect model for what a Foreign Service officer should be when I arrived in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in July 1978, for my first assignment. I met our ambassador, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, soon after my arrival in his office at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade for my required “courtesy call,” a stress-inducing event on every newcomer’s arrival checklist. I had just arrived as the “assistant commercial attaché,” a modest perch appropriate to a twenty-five-year-old junior Foreign Service officer, a couple of notches below the “fast track” political and economic officers.

  When the opportunity to go to Belgrade came up, I worked hard to convince the assignment officers that I was the right person for the post. After all, I had been there when I was eight years old. Probably more in spite of my lobbying efforts than because of them (junior officer lobbying is not well received by assignment officers), I got the assignment, and after six months of learning to speak Serbo-Croatian, I arrived in Belgrade and checked into a small two-bedroom apartment behind the embassy. There were no signs of any ant columns, and for a former Peace Corps volunteer, everything was perfect except for the oversized king bed in the tiny bedroom. (It was unceremoniously removed the next day when the embassy’s logistical services realized it belonged not in Apartment C-22, but in the ambassador’s residence.)

  In the morning, I began my checking-in process, beginning with the call on the ambassador. Eagleburger offered me a seat on his couch and spoke to me in a way that made me believe that it was the first time he had ever given the briefing, such were the powers of his performance art. He explained what he was trying to do in Yugoslavia in the twilight of President Josip Broz Tito’s life: to weave a “web of relations” with Yugoslavia in such a way that it would keep the country from going in another direction. He had, after all, first been assigned to Yugoslavia in 1963, and had become known as “Lawrence of Macedonia” for his masterly relief work after the earthquake in southern Yugoslavia that destroyed Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, in August of that year. His energy and enthusiasm, sardonic humor, and apparent enjoyment of talking to a junior officer on his first day at work blew me away. I was in awe.

  I listened carefully to his explanation of my role in the “web of relations.” He linked my remedial tasks of assisting visiting U.S. businessmen with their hotel reservations and appointments to his strategic goal of managing the coming post-Tito Yugoslavia. I had been scared to death for the entire twenty-minute meeting, but I walked out a little taller. I felt instantly a sense of loyalty to him, maybe because I sensed that he would be loyal to me as well. I was going to be on the team, and he made me feel like he had picked me!

  Of course, another reason I had been so frightened to enter his office was his legendary temper. I would see it many times on the tennis court. As one of the most junior officers in the embassy, I was often summoned as an emergency fourth player for tennis at the ambassador’s residence. Eagleburger, who was short and somewhat hefty, would range over the court, not particularly mindful that he was playing doubles. He wielded a Wilson T-2000, an all-aluminum, state-of-the-art racket at the time, ugly (perhaps the worst-looking product that sporting goods brand had ever produced), unbreakable (though bendable), and potentially lethal when hurled at warp speed after a failed lunging shot. A couple of times I dove for my life to the clay to the sound of the menacing whir of the flying metal racket, accompanied by Eagleburger cursing at himself.

  Tito, one of the last of the World War II leaders, had steered Yugoslavia along its tightrope between East and West. He fell ill in January 1980 and would remain in a hospital in northern Yugoslavia for five months, suffering from the terminal phases of circulatory and heart disease. News about his health appeared every day in a top corner of every newspaper, in the form of a short medical bulletin: “The general condition of Comrade Josip Broz Tito remains the same” (or, increasingly as the months went by, “has worsened”). “Intensive measures continue.”

  On Sunday evening, May 4, 1980, as I carried camping equipment from my car back into my apartment behind the embassy from a weekend trip to Kosovo and Macedonia, I could see lights had started going on in the upper floors of the embassy. I knew what that meant. Tito had died and the government had just made the announcement.

  What would come next was the question of the hour for the future of Yugoslavia. The Soviet Union was beginning to show its frailties, but only six months after its invasion of Afghanistan, it still seemed ready for more. (The Yugoslav joke about potential Soviet intervention: “Danas u Afganistanu, sutra u vaem stanu.” Today in Afghanistan, tomorrow in your apartment.) Since 1948, Yugoslavia had charted its independent way, a communist country that had left the communist bloc and assumed the mantle of “nonalignment.” Could Yugoslav’s Communist Party set a new course for Yugoslavia back into the Eastern Bloc, from which it had been expelled by Stalin thirty-two years before?

  Or would Yugoslavia’s restive nationalities—the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, the founding members of this post–World War I state—each decide to go its own way? Dangerous as this course could be, it was seen as the less likely option in 1980, even though much of the internal deliberations in the embassy had to do with the growing frictions between the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia and those in the south, including the autonomous region of Kosovo.

  Eagleburger was agitated in the embassy staff meetings that followed as we prepared for the international event that the state funeral would surely be. He explained to us that he had argued forcefully but unsuccessfully with the Carter White House that the president should lead the U.S. delegation. Eagleburger had a special relationship with junior officers in the embassy, and those of us at the low end of the ranks often were treated to even more candor than sometimes his senior officers heard. I tried to spend as much time with him as I could. A close confidant of Henry Kissinger and a devotee of a realpolitik view of the world, he had no patience with President Jimmy Carter or his focus on human rights, referring to those views as “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

  And he never shrank from ta
king on Washington or letting officials there know what he thought. “I didn’t come here to preside over a post office,” he told me as I delivered a paper to him that he threw over to his inbox, then continued his rant about what he considered a feckless instruction he had just received from the State Department (feckless was a high-frequency word in Eagleburger’s lexicon). Then he explained his preferred course of action to me, as I stood in front of his desk wondering why he was sharing all this. It was reminiscent of the way my father would talk to me during a home carpentry project, when in fact he was just talking to himself. I learned a lot being Eagleburger’s faux audience. “Pique is no substitute for policy,” he then told me. I nodded (having figured he wasn’t really interested in my opinion), but I always remembered that line and had the occasion to use it now and then in my later career.

  Vice President Walter Mondale arrived in Belgrade to represent the United States at the funeral, one of the only deputy heads of government to attend. He was accompanied by Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian, who was wearing white. She explained to a puzzled group of embassy officers on the funeral day that when she had been a Peace Corps volunteer in India, white was the color people wore to funerals. That may have been true in India, but in Belgrade, people wore black. So in the sea of black that moved slowly up the steps of the parliament building to where Tito’s body lay in state, our delegation, or at least one member, stood out.

  President Carter’s decision to send his vice president and his white-dress-clad mother didn’t answer the mail, so to speak, in Belgrade, and so a month later the president of the United States himself rolled into Belgrade for a visit to express solidarity with a country in grief. He was concerned that it could become the next victim of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the people in Yugoslavia were busy pulling their long knives and other weapons out of the attic to use on each other. As we worried about the Soviets, they knew where the looming catastrophe would likely come from.

  After Yugoslavia, Eagleburger went on to bigger and better things. He was undersecretary of political affairs in 1989 during the Polish and central European revolutions, overseeing and spearheading U.S. assistance, and soon was made Secretary of State James Baker’s deputy in the George H. W. Bush administration. It was an extraordinary career, made so by the fact that he threw himself into each job as if there were no tomorrow—or for that matter, no next job.

  His health, but never his sense of humor, had started to fail him. As the State Department’s desk officer for Poland, I accompanied the intrepid Polish democratic revolutionary Jacek Kuron to Eagleburger’s enormous seventh-floor office. Eagleburger, in a wheelchair because of his knees and phlebitis, coughing from his cigarette habit and asthma, instantly recognized a kindred spirit in Kuron. When Kuron asked if he could have a cigarette, Eagleburger, frustrated perhaps by his doctors’ nagging advice and new State Department regulations, responded, “You smoke? Fantastic! I’ve got some.” Whereupon he whirled his wheelchair 180 degrees and headed at breakneck speed to look for them in his desk, risking what I feared would become a bizarre workplace accident. He and Kuron lit up, and it took hours to pull them apart.

  As I prepared to go to Iraq in early 2009, I visited Eagleburger at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. He had grown very old since I had last seen him, some years before. He was now hugely overweight, his face even more puffy, perhaps from medication. I knew he didn’t have much longer to live and I wasn’t going to miss the chance to see him one more time. Two years before, when he and I were both made honorary citizens of Skopje, Macedonia, he for having helped rebuild it in 1963, and me for having been ambassador there during a difficult time in the late 1990s, I called him at his home in Virginia from the central square in Skopje to tell him I had just read his letter at the ceremony, as he had asked me to do. I also wanted him to know how much he was remembered there more than forty years later. The famously gruff Eagleburger seemed to choke up at that point. He recovered to ask how the city looked. “Better than when you were working here in the aftermath of the earthquake,” I told him. He then asked, “What do you think? Are we going to get to use the city buses for free?”

  In his home that afternoon two years later, we talked for a few hours, his thoughts lucid and rapid, and his sense of humor unfailing, as if it were his best and last companion. He wanted to know all about the negotiations with North Korea that I had been conducting during the four years of the second George W. Bush administration, when I had been appointed as assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs and also made the head of the U.S. delegation to the Six Party Talks on North Korea. He was skeptical that the North Koreans would ever follow through on their commitment to denuclearize, but he understood the necessity of working with the Chinese, and indeed, that working with China and other countries, including South Korea, was the main dividend of the process. “That’s it,” he said, after a puff on his asthma inhaler and before taking out another cigarette. “People who think China is there to be ignored or fought with understand nothing about what we are dealing with today,” he added. I could see that his sense of pragmatism had also not abandoned him in his final days.

  I gave him some details of the negotiations, including what I had been dealing with from not only Pyongyang, but also various quarters in Washington. I described some of the more theatrical moments with the North Koreans. He laughed between coughs and alternating puffs from his inhaler and his cigarette at my admitting that I had borrowed some of his performance art. “That’s all right, Hill”—he never called me Chris and I sure never called him Larry—“glad you learned something from me.”

  “How do you think the Foreign Service is doing?” he asked. He worried that we’d surrendered too much of our role to the military. I told him that the Foreign Service would be fine, and that we would do our duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, military engagements about which he had great concerns.

  “Just make sure our people show some guts,” he responded, then lit another cigarette.

  4

  A FORCE OF NATURE

  After my first assignment in Belgrade, I went back to the State Department in the summer of 1980 and worked as a watch officer in the Operations Center for a year, before transferring to the Policy Planning Staff as a staff assistant, also a one-year assignment. The Operations Center is the eyes and ears of the State Department, a twenty-four-hour facility on the seventh floor where telephone calls, telegrams, and news wires come fast and furious, some requiring alerts to senior officials in the department, often in the dead of night. One moment there is a call from someone in a distant embassy reporting a coup. The next, it is a senior department official asking to be put through to another. Though it’s a glorified switchboard position, it is nonetheless considered a prestigious job requiring the recommendation of a senior officer, in my case Ambassador Eagleburger. But for anyone who joined the State Department to have an impact on policy, it was far from that. It is tough being a junior officer in the State Department. Pay is low, as is the self-esteem of someone so junior to everyone else and so distant from any decision making.

  My duties in the Policy Planning Staff (an office created in 1947 and whose first director was the iconic diplomat George Kennan) included maintaining a looseleaf binder of “talking points” that covered virtually every subject in the world for use by senior officials in public settings. My job wasn’t to write them, but to collect them from grouchy midlevel officers manning desks throughout the State Department who were responsible for writing them and getting them cleared by other relevant offices. In the era before email, the job involved logging a lot of miles running through the department halls to collect the latest versions of the guidance.

  After Belgrade, my next overseas assignment was Warsaw, Poland. I arrived there in July 1983, after nine months of Polish language training at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, with my growing family of a son, Nathaniel, and a daughter, Amelia, on the way. Poland in 1983 was a sad place indeed. The Solidar
ity era of 1979–81 was long gone after the imposition of martial law by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981 and the rounding up and imprisonment of Solidarity’s senior leadership. It was a gloomy country that seemed painted in so many shades of gray. Trips to West Berlin, eight hours away on Poland’s narrow, bumpy highways, were a welcome respite. As we would pull through the checkpoint, it was just like The Wizard of Oz: black-and-white would suddenly turn to color. Once on a Friday afternoon dash to Berlin, a Polish policeman stopped me outside Lodz, about halfway to Berlin, for speeding and asked rhetorically why I was going so fast. My explanation that I was “going west” was more than enough for him and he waved me on.

  There was something indefatigable about Poland’s people. Abandoned to their fate on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain in 1945, they never seemed to give up on where their rightful place should be, even if many of us—myself included—thought at the time that nothing could ever be done.

  During those years in the mid-1980s, there was little to cheer for. The heady days of Solidarity had given way to Jaruzelski’s martial law, which in the Polish language is literally translated as “state of war.” Even the Catholic Church, which for centuries had been the protector of Poland’s independent nationhood, seemed exhausted by the lack of hope for the future. One Sunday in St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw’s old town, I heard for the first time the expression “inner emigration,” and the concern expressed by the priest giving the sermon that the Polish people were tuning out and otherwise giving up. In October 1984, a Catholic priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, was found murdered, a victim of members of the secret police. Hundreds of thousands of Poles turned out in the streets for his funeral.