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

by Christopher R. Hill

  Forty-five minutes later we walked into the State Department, and I thought I had had the best D.C. mass-transit conversation on Europe I would ever have. I was wondering when I would get to talk to him again.

  At 8 P.M. I left Kornblum’s office to meet with the Bosnian team and introduce myself as their new boss. I stopped to call my family and my dad in Little Compton, Rhode Island. I told him about what had happened, that I was very pleased but could not be sure that Holbrooke might not fire me the next day. “I doubt it,” he said in his laconic New England style. “He doesn’t strike me as someone who likes to admit making a mistake.” I weighed how much of a compliment that was, but decided that Dad probably had a point about my job security.

  At 8:30 P.M., the Bosnian team was still hard at work in their offices. I sat with a few of them: Sue Bremner, working on Bosnia; Chris Hoh, on Croatia; and Phil Goldberg, on the Balkan humanitarian portfolio. They were writing talking points for the secretary’s meeting with Balkan leaders for the UN General Assembly meetings. I asked to see all the materials, explaining I wanted to know how they viewed the situation.

  The Balkan unit of the Office of Eastern European and Yugoslav Affairs had been a demoralized group. Several had quit in protest at a do-nothing U.S. policy. George Kenney, Marshall Harris, and Steve Walker had all resigned, and eight others in the Office of Eastern European Affairs sent a joint letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher to protest the policy. When Phil Goldberg, who later became the chief Bosnian desk officer, listed his accomplishments at the end of the performance-rating period (an assignment some officers take five pages to complete), he did it in four words, “I did not resign.”

  I grabbed everything I could find on the Balkans and headed home for a weekend of nonstop reading that would help prepare me for Sunday in New York.

  On Sunday at noon I was at LaGuardia Airport waiting for Holbrooke, who was arriving an hour later on the Washington shuttle. Twenty minutes before he was to land I began a frantic search for his Town Car. The driver seemed to be cutting things rather close. I called the EUR office at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel to make sure it had been ordered, and finally found the driver, who explained that he had been caught in traffic delivering his previous customer to UN-gridlocked Manhattan. The car arrived just as Holbrooke cheerfully emerged from the gate area. He never broke stride walking toward me and finally getting into the back of the car.

  “How old are you?” he asked. I told him. “Then why do I have more hair than you?” I thought for a second, recalling especially the last twenty-five minutes tracking down his Town Car, and answered, “Because you don’t worry nearly as much as I do.”

  Holbrooke chuckled, and then turned to business:

  “What time is Izetbegovic arriving?”

  “Two thirty, Kennedy, Austrian Airlines.”

  “Let’s get out there and greet him at the plane.”

  Our car swerved onto the exit of the expressway and started making its way to Kennedy. Holbrooke reached for the car phone, his huge fingers somehow finding their target on the keypad.

  “John, yeah . . . this will work out . . . gotta go.”

  I took it that I was not going to be fired, at least that day, and tried to concentrate on the briefing materials in the thick binder I was carrying.

  “Tom, I’m on my way to meet Izetbegovic at Kennedy. This is crucial. We need to reach him first. I’ll meet Chris [Secretary Christopher] and tell him to call Hurd [British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd] and brief him on what we are doing. Someone needs to talk to Sandy [Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor] . . . no I’ll call him.”

  Holbrooke started to place the phone back on the stand. It would not immediately comply, so he started grinding it onto the stand as if it were mill corn. I interceded and turned it ninety degrees to make sure it settled onto the cradle. I remembered my dad had told me never to force a mechanical object. As soon as I got it placed properly, it rang and Holbrooke reached forward to grab it. It was the State Department Operations Center.

  “No, I can’t talk to him now. I have another call. I can’t hear you. We’re going through a tunnel.” There was no tunnel.

  I handed him the briefing papers. He gave them right back to me.

  “Is there anything here I need to know?” he asked, referring to the two-inch-thick papers, complete with lettered tabs carefully punched into a binder, the words DEPARTMENT OF STATE emblazoned on the cover.

  “I think you might want to look at some of the background material on—”

  The car phone rang. This time I grabbed it, realizing the plastic stand was beginning to show some distress. It was the Op Center again and he grabbed it from my hand.

  “I really want to talk to him. Tell him I’m really sorry, but can’t just now. Tell him I will call him in ten minutes.”

  I didn’t know who it was, and at that point I really didn’t want to.

  The car turned onto the ramp for the international terminal area at Kennedy Airport.

  I realized we were about to go through every security check at Kennedy to reach our destination and meet the Bosnian president at planeside. I turned to Holbrooke and asked: “Do you have your State Department ID?”

  He looked at me with a mixture of contempt and pity, as if I had asked the world’s dumbest question and combined it with a brain seizure. I never asked him about his ID again.

  Within minutes, he had recruited a policeman and another security person to escort us through the airport. Many blurry-eyed passengers just getting off international flights had their New York wake-up call as they were unceremoniously cast aside to create a path for Holbrooke, who was power-walking with a stride that the diminutive police officer, sweat now beginning to bead on his forehead, could only match with a jog.

  We marched through the metal detector exit, Holbrooke in the lead, making conversation with the wheezing police officer. Still clutching the precious State Department briefing book, I pulled up the rear, stopping a couple of times to check the boards to see whether the flight had already arrived.

  We reached the plane just as the ground crew opened the front doorway. Izetbegovic stepped out.

  “Mr. President, welcome to America,” Holbrooke said, acting as if we had been waiting patiently for some time. Holbrooke introduced him to the police officer who was still at our side, as if part of an official welcoming party.

  “Mr. President, I want you to meet my new deputy for Bosnia, Chris Hill. Anything you need to tell me you can tell Chris.”

  Izetbegovic shook my hand with even less enthusiasm than he had shown in greeting the police officer. The Bosnian foreign minister, the very media-savvy U.S. citizen Muhamed Sacirbey, stepped forward to greet me, saying sardonically, “Congratulations. Bosnia is the graveyard of diplomats.”

  Holbrooke and I made our way back to our car and headed through the Sunday afternoon traffic to the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. For decades, during the two weeks in the latter part of every September, the Waldorf houses several international delegations, including that of the United States, for the opening of the United Nations.

  For most Americans, September is back-to-school month, or the start of the football season. But for international diplomats—as well as hapless New Yorkers stuck in traffic at all hours of day and night—it is the opening of the United Nations General Assembly during the last two weeks of the month. The General Assembly (UNGA) has 193 member states, and just about everybody is represented at the head of government level, or, alternatively, by the foreign minister. Midtown hotel rooms, booked months in advance, are at a premium as the world descends on New York, and every head of government or foreign minister gives a speech to the assembly, often to a sparse audience, but always to the television cameras.

  Ignored as most of the speeches may be in New York, they are often headline news back in the home country, where the public may be unaware of the other 192 that will be given during the two-week opening. The international media picks up some fo
reign leaders’ speeches—Fidel Castro, the president of Iran, and other notorious figures, of course—but others will have to resort to props to gather some limelight. Bolivia’s President Evo Morales earned the attention of the U.S. media by carrying a coca leaf to the podium in an effort to explain that coca farmers in his impoverished country use the leaf for many purposes, apart from processing into cocaine. The champa-clad president had been known to consume coca leaves in front of bemused international delegations.

  For the U.S. delegation, the UNGA is nothing short of a scheduling nightmare. Many of the delegations want an individual meeting for their head of delegation with the U.S. president, who can accommodate around ten such bilaterals, plus his reception, which turns into a two-hour-long grip-’n’-grin receiving line. The secretary of state is asked to take the rest of them, and since that schedule is also physically impossible, the undersecretary for political affairs meets many of them, as do the regional assistant secretaries, each of whom stays for at least a week in a suite in the Waldorf, meeting foreign ministers and heads of government representing smaller countries who did not rate a meeting with the secretary.

  And then there’s the traffic. Motorcades carrying heads of state crisscross New York’s avenues and midtown streets, while New Yorkers not lucky enough to have headed out of town must endure the invasion. In 2009, the then Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi, seeming more buffoon than evil, endeared himself to some New Yorkers when he complained in his annual speech to a perplexed UNGA audience that traveling to New York caused too much jet lag for delegations from the Eastern Hemisphere and proposed moving the UN headquarters somewhere else. He probably could have won some votes in New York for that suggestion.

  Holbrooke and I pulled up to the curb on East Forty-Seventh Street, the side entrance to the Waldorf-Astoria that leads directly to the Waldorf Towers, where Secretary Christopher and his staff had set up their offices on the thirty-fifth floor. The Towers are inadequately served by just a couple of elevators, a fact that Holbrooke was aware of. As I stood there on the sidewalk with him just outside the building, he promptly recruited an unsuspecting security person to escort us up a service elevator. We arrived on the thirty-fifth floor, squeezed our way past carts full of towels, sheets, and small shampoo bottles and began to head down the corridor to the secretary and his staff. While still in the service area, with Holbrooke in the lead (where else?) followed by the security person, he spotted some canapés on a tray being staged for an event. Not having eaten all day, he indelicately reached for one of them as an on-the-go snack. Not noticing they were all covered by tightly stretched clear wrap, he pawed at the canapés, barely breaking his stride in the process. By the time I walked past the tray, all was still intact, save for the pawlike scratch marks on the clear wrap. It looked like a bear was on the loose in the hotel.

  We were met by Special Assistant Bob Bradtke, who tried to explain to Holbrooke that the secretary could not see him because he was studying his briefing book. At that moment, the irresistible force met the quite movable object and Bob, like so many other people that day, was unceremoniously pushed aside as Holbrooke kept moving. I turned back to Bob with my palms up, trying to apologize without falling too far behind Holbrooke, who by then had knocked perfunctorily on the door to the secretary’s study and entered.

  Secretary Christopher, impeccably dressed in a gleaming white shirt and silk tie, just as I had seen him in numerous photos, looked up from his desk without expression (which I suspected was the best he could do in the circumstances) and greeted us languidly. Bob had followed us into the large study, as had another aide. Holbrooke said to the secretary, “Chris, have you met Chris?” Holbrooke chuckled at his own “Chris meet Chris” line. Christopher seemed less amused.

  “No, I don’t believe I have met Chris.”

  “Well, Chris is my new director for the Balkans.”

  I shook hands with the secretary, while briefly contemplating leaping out the thirty-fifth-floor window.

  “Chris,” Holbrooke said to Secretary Christopher, “you need to call [British foreign secretary Douglas] Hurd immediately. There is lots of speculation today in the press that we are prepared to give in to the Congress and support the ‘lift and strike’ resolution.”

  “Lift and strike” was a proposed measure in the Congress to unilaterally amend the UN-imposed arms embargo on the countries of the former Yugoslavia by exempting Bosnia, generally understood to be the victim in the wars. Since it was widely believed that lifting the embargo on Bosnia would trigger a massive Serb and Bosnia-Serb response, the idea was that the United States would then “strike” Serb forces and buy the Bosnians time to procure arms from abroad and defend themselves better. There was another serious problem: the Europeans had troops on the ground as part of the UN peacekeeping mission. They were concerned that the violence that would surely follow the resolution would endanger their troops. Thus “lift and strike,” whether it actually helped the Bosnians or not, was almost certain to cause a major rift in the Atlantic relationship.

  “You need to speak to him before he says anything publicly.”

  “Okay, Dick, but what do you want me to say precisely to the foreign secretary?” I was wondering that myself.

  “Chris will do up some talking points for you.” Turning to me Dick said, “Chris, do up talking points for the secretary.”

  It was a good thing the window was closed. I went over to a hard-backed chair nearby, put down my two-inch binder briefing book, thought for a second what I would want to say to Douglas Hurd, and began in the best handwriting I could muster to write five pages of talking points on what the Clinton administration’s strategy was to resist the “lift and strike” congressional resolution but how public comments by allies would be counterproductive to our efforts. I tore the pages off the spiral, careful not to allow any flecks of paper to fall to the floor, and handed them to Holbrooke. He took about one second per page to look at them and handed them over to the secretary.

  Christopher, fastidiously removing some of the remaining specks of paper I had missed from the jagged top of the pages, placed them on his desk in a row, and with his left index finger pointing at each point (there were three or four per page in block letters, with lots of space between them), read them all under his breath. He placed the call to Hurd.

  Hurd could not be reached at that moment, but the call was set up for later in the day, and Holbrooke, with me in tow, left the room telling the secretary he would be meeting with Izetbegovic.

  During the coming days, we did what good diplomats do. We began building relationships with all the parties, and in particular we created trust with the Bosnians where little had been before. We didn’t offer them pity, or even claim to be on their side as the aggrieved party in a war, gaining trust as someone who wouldn’t ever give up. The Bosnians had had plenty of sympathy in the years before. What they had lacked was a diplomatic team that would stay with the problem until it was closed.

  5

  FRASURE

  Eleven months later, at about five thirty on a Saturday morning in August 1995, the telephone rang. The State Department Operations Center was on the line with a call from our ambassador in Sarajevo. In a very agitated voice, John Menzies told me to get down to the Operations Center.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “There has been a terrible road accident,” John replied, and explained he was not at liberty to say more on the telephone.

  “Is everybody okay?”

  “No,” he answered. “Just come to the Op Center.”

  It was August 19, 1995, and after months of joint U.S. and European diplomacy, what the international press and other critics were calling “feckless” and “dithering,” a serious, and we hoped decisive, U.S. effort was under way to bring the parties—the Serbs, Bosnian Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats—around a peace plan that had been outlined more than a year earlier by Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, countries known collectively as
the Contact Group. Violence was escalating over the summer. It started in the spring with successful tactical cooperation between the Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim forces in the Livno Valley (itself a product of U.S. diplomacy some two years before under Ambassador Chuck Redman, which put these two entities together in a “Federation”). It continued with a brutal Bosnian Serb response, culminating in the capture of the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in July. That in turn led to the hunting down and murder of many of its male inhabitants in the forests between Srebrenica and the Bosnian lines near Tuzla. Finally, Croatia’s own “Operation Storm,” a swift and decisive military assault that kicked off on August 1 against the Serb enclave of Krajina, where Serbs had lived for centuries, culminated with the spectacle of long lines of Serb refugees leaving Krajina for the last time, after burning their homes so that Croats could not move into them. Murderous as much of the fighting had been (it usually pitted one side’s military against another’s civilians), the map of Bosnia, which had been 70–80 percent held by the Bosnian Serbs, was beginning to appear more like that envisioned by the Contact Group countries in the summer of 1994, a 51–49 percent split, with the Bosnians and Croats to possess the 51 percent majority share.

  Those of us who had worked on Bosnia during the past year welcomed the Bosnian and Croat advances, a payback for all the Serb brutality of the previous three years. The Bosnians began to succeed more on the battlefield due to cooperation with the Croats and a more regular flow of arms despite the UN embargo. But with every success, they became less interested in peace or in cohabitating with the Serbs in an eventual federated state.

  Fifty-one percent seemed out of reach only months before, but now it seemed too modest a share given the battlefield advances that had begun to pile up. Moreover, it was increasingly clear that Milosevic was fast losing interest in the fight.