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

by Christopher R. Hill

  After one of those meetings where nothing was decided and the administration seemed content to allow the situation to continue forever, Frasure walked back in his office and, as he often did after a frustrating encounter, headed over to the window and looked out on the Lincoln Memorial.

  “What happened, Bob?” I asked him as I entered his office anxious for a report of the meeting. I knew that it was another desultory, unproductive discussion, but I still wanted to hear the details. He had his hands in his pockets and barely turned to see me in as he gazed out the window. I could tell he was very unhappy with what had just transpired. He answered still looking at the Lincoln Memorial.

  “In the Civil War, troops in the field assembling for battle would always want to know the identity of the units in the battle formation on their sides to give a better sense of whether they could be expected to be flanked or not. So you can imagine you are out there, battle drums sounding, and you yell to your sergeant: ‘Sarge, who’s that yonder to our right?’ And imagine the fear that must have swept through the lines when the answer came back, ‘Don’t worry, boys. That’s the Interagency Brigade.’  ”

  • • •

  Bob had become very special to all of us, both in the State Department and out at Embassy Sarajevo, where John Menzies was now calling me that Saturday in August at 5:30 A.M. I sped down to the department through Rock Creek Park, listening to the radio news in my car for anything about our team in Bosnia. Earlier in August, the president and secretary of state had overruled the objections of many and decided to name Holbrooke as the negotiator, sending him to the region at the head of an interagency team. Bob Frasure had accompanied Holbrooke primarily to introduce him to Milosevic, whom Dick had never met, and then to accompany him to Zagreb and to Sarajevo, the other two stops on the circuit, both places that Holbrooke had visited within the last year.

  Frasure had been on the road constantly in the past year, often with me in tow, but always with one of the officers from my office, including Phil Goldberg. This was to be Frasure’s last trip. In the future, I would travel with Holbrooke, and Frasure would cover our back in the interagency process, where the real combat was. Given that Holbrooke would be the one in the field, Bob’s job would be a tough one. I was excited at the prospect of serving on Holbrooke’s team. It was everything I ever wanted to be as a U.S. diplomat, and having served in the Balkans, once in Belgrade and another in Albania, I felt prepared.

  I drove into the State Department garage at breakneck speed, barely stopping to show my ID to the security guard. I parked as close to the elevator as possible and didn’t stop pressing the elevator button, as if it operated pneumatically, until the doors slowly opened. I entered the Operations Center on the seventh floor.

  There were now press reports that there had been an accident on the dirt road that came up from the south and over Mount Igman into Sarajevo. Bosnian Serb soldiers manning checkpoints and taking bribes controlled all the other roads into the city, and “tolls” (bribes again) were often levied, raising the price of the goods. UNPROFOR commander Rupert Smith had once remarked to me that “every boy in this country grows up wanting to run his own checkpoint.”

  I took the telephone from the watch officer and got back on the phone with John Menzies.

  Before he could say anything I asked: “What about Bob?”

  “He’s dead.”

  I paused.

  “Who else?”

  “Kruzel and Drew,” referring to Joe Kruzel, the representative of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Nelson Drew, the representative from the National Security Council staff’s European Directorate.

  I was horrified about Bob, a daily companion whose company I missed whenever he was out of town. But the report about Nelson Drew was also terrifying in its randomness. Nelson had hardly been involved with Bosnia, a last-minute add-on to the trip when the senior director of the Europe Directorate had decided not to go.

  I wanted details. “Anyone else?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” There were some injuries. Some bad.

  “Holbrooke and Clark [three-star general Wes Clark, director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J-5, for Plans and Policy] were in a Humvee in the front. The French armored personnel carrier was behind and couldn’t keep up. It went over the edge of the road. That’s all we know now.”

  “Are you sure about Bob and the other two?”

  He paused. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  I called John Kornblum, who was the acting assistant secretary in Holbrooke’s absence, to alert him, but he was already heading to the department. It was now after 7 A.M. and other members of the Bosnian team were arriving at the Operations Center. We set up shop in a small room with a table and telephones and began to plan our day, such as it was. We kept an open line to the embassy in Sarajevo and fed what information we had to the watch team.

  The watch team that morning was extremely busy putting together conference calls involving National Security Advisor Berger, Deputy Secretary Talbott, and many others. There was a good deal of frustration at not getting more details about what had actually happened. I mentally replayed my calls with John Menzies and within seconds he was pulled into the conference call himself to repeat what he had told me earlier. After making his way down Mount Igman, Holbrooke was patched into calls with the president and the secretary of state. Later in the morning, press reports started coming in with short quotes from Holbrooke that appeared to provide additional information, inflaming people in Washington.

  • • •

  Soon thereafter, John Kornblum and I drove out to Falls Church, Virginia, to tell Katharina Frasure that her husband was missing and feared dead. It was a typically sultry, humid August day in Washington, with no sign at all of any early fall. We drove in John’s car through leafy Northern Virginia and arrived at the Frasures’ home. Katharina answered the door, already looking stricken, and led us into the living room. One of Bob’s teenage daughters walked into the kitchen, staying away from the brief discussion in the living room. John took the lead, explaining what we knew, not wanting to pass on unconfirmed reports but also avoiding speculation that Bob was okay. His body had not been recovered, or at least the recovery had not been confirmed. At the same time, John had been very clear that Bob had not survived.

  Back in the Operations Center, details were now flowing in, and all of the Balkan team had arrived. We were staffed up, manning the phones, writing memos, and beginning some of the technical tasks of getting the delegation home. Holbrooke insisted that the surviving team members accompany the fallen. I took a walk out of the Operations Center down the corridor to be alone for a second. I stopped for a moment and Deputy Secretary Talbott walked up to me. Strobe, whom I had never really talked with, said some kind words about our team’s efforts on this tragic day. He had just gone out to Katharina Frasure’s house to confirm to her the recovery of the body.

  A few days later the delegation returned together to Andrews Air Force Base with the bodies of Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel, and Nelson Drew. President Clinton came to the memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery a few days later and afterward huddled with the reconstituted negotiating team that I was part of, along with Jim Pardew from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Don Kerrick from the European Directorate at the National Security Council staff.

  I visited with Katharina once more, a few days before heading out on our first trip after the funeral and memorial services. It was the first week of her loss, and she was visibly pained. She told me that her two teenage daughters had shown no signs yet of recovering from the shock. We reminisced a little more about Bob, and I told her that I had brought my three young children, Nathaniel, Amy, and Clara, into the office one Saturday morning to meet him. Clara, then eight, told Bob what we needed to do about Milosevic and the Serbs, and Bob had run over to his desk to get a pencil and paper to write down the suggestions, such was our need for fresh ideas. As I headed a few steps down the front walk, Katharina stoo
d at the door and her expression turned very dark. She called out to me, “How can you do this to your family?” I stopped and looked back at her. While I had asked much of my children, the idea that they could lose their father was too much. I told her I would be careful. She nodded slightly, as if she had heard that before, and gently closed the front door.

  6

  A PEACE SHUTTLE

  Early in the morning on Monday, August 28, 1995, I arrived with Dick Holbrooke and the rest of the team at a military airport in Paris, nine days after losing our colleagues on the Mount Igman Road. The mood in our six-person interagency delegation was of grim determination to pick up where Bob and the others had left off. But what were we doing in Paris? A number of us asked each other. We had landed in the French capital apparently for no other reason than for Holbrooke to hang out with Pamela Harriman, the intrepid socialite ambassador and scion of Democratic Party politics, whom Holbrooke described as “brilliant” and insightful. The stop seemed to have little to do with our mission. We had preliminary meetings arranged with the French, one of the Contact Group members, so no harm there. We also had arranged for Bosnian president Izetbegovic, who was on a visit to Paris, to meet us and discuss what an eventual peace document could look like, as well as, most important, the shape of the map of Bosnia.

  Holbrooke, as I knew from being at his side for the past year, was not at his best around people like Pamela Harriman. He was effective at many things, but pouring unreciprocated flattery on someone whose approval he was desperately seeking was not one of them. As Harriman, the wartime wife of Winston Churchill’s son, the mother of Winston Churchill’s grandson, a mistress to numerous men of power and wealth, and the widow of Averell Harriman, put it to Bob Owen, “Dick is very affectionate, but he still hasn’t been housebroken.”

  Both on the airplane and as we settled into our rooms on the second floor at Harriman’s residence, I was getting to know Roberts “call-me-Bob” Owen, our team lawyer, team player, and a close friend of Secretary Christopher. Bob was extremely accomplished in his field, the State Department’s legal advisor to Secretary Cyrus Vance in the late 1970s, negotiator with Iran for the hostage release in 1980, and a man whose legal mind was coupled with a refreshing down-to-earth modesty. More recently Christopher had him working on the vexing problems within the Bosnian Federation, a shotgun alliance between the Croats and the Muslim communities in Bosnia that required constant marriage counseling. Rumor had it that Secretary Christopher wanted Bob on the reconstituted travel team as his eyes and ears. It was probably true, but Bob also brought to the table a very sensible, straightforward drafting style that would eventually form the basis for the entire Dayton Accords. “It’s like writing wills,” Bob said about many of the document’s provisions and their need for absolute clarity. And while Holbrooke did not choose Bob, he was pleased to have him on the team.

  Holbrooke was keenly aware of Bob’s closeness to Secretary Christopher and often turned his clumsy efforts at flattery on him. They worked about as well as they did on Harriman. “Bob, this is brilliant!” “Dick, it’s not brilliant, it has nothing to do with brilliant. It’s not even close to being brilliant. In fact, Dick, it’s fairly basic stuff. . . .” Bob kept Dick from using the word brilliant for at least twenty minutes, something for which we were all very grateful. Like the rest of us, though, Bob did eventually fall prey to his charm. Such was the Holbrooke force field, where, if nothing else, people would begin to sympathize with this imposing figure who seemed also to possess equally imposing vulnerabilities and insecurities.

  I was struck by how carefully Holbrooke selected his small interagency team, going over with me names of people as if the future of the world depended on his choices. He looked for loyalty, or potential loyalty, but he was also on the lookout for particular skills, especially those that he did not have, such as organization, follow-up, and timeliness. He realized that his laserlike focus on an issue at a given moment might leave other crucial problems completely unattended. I was keenly aware of Holbrooke’s detractors in Washington and the fact that a negotiator in the field needs backup in the capital, especially when things go wrong. And when it came to Holbrooke, backing him up wasn’t always people’s top priority.

  Dick was particularly cautious about the choice of a representative from the National Security Council staff. When the NSC staff proposed army Brigadier General Don Kerrick to join Holbrooke’s team, Holbrooke agreed only after several of us gave Don glowing personal references for his restraint, during the dreaded morning teleconference. “Dick, he never tasks the department. Never!” I lied. I added: “He’s a great admirer of yours” (thinking that he could become a great admirer), if only Holbrooke could get over the issue of the NSC representative so the rest of us could get back to work. I started getting somewhere with him. “Dick, he thinks you’re the only person who really understands what to do in the Balkans,” I lied again.

  “Okay, I’ll try him out.” Dick and Don went on to be the closest of friends.

  In Paris, Dick was very much in the saddle and enjoying every minute of the ride. He turned Pamela Harriman’s ambassadorial residence into the salon of salons, holding court in various rooms of the mansion with different personages. An upstairs drawing room was converted to a map room. General Wesley Clark, accompanied by several junior military staffers, spread an enormous map of Bosnia from wall to wall, “actual size,” I quipped to Bob Owen as we walked in for a discussion along the fringe of the map with President Izetbegovic and his foreign minister Muhamed (Mo) Sacirbey.

  With his American-accented English and media presence, Sacirbey had become the spokesperson for the Bosnians on CNN and other networks. Sacirbey had played linebacker for Tulane University, apparently without a helmet, as Holbrooke would quip to me after many difficult meetings with him.

  Some people could not stand to be in the same room as Sacirbey. But not Holbrooke. As I explained to him, “When we see a problem person we see a problem. But when you see a problem, you see an opportunity.” For what opportunity, of course, Holbrooke wasn’t quite sure, but he knew that he would need every asset, every relationship he could muster for the battles to come.

  On Monday afternoon, CNN broke into its regular programming to report what became known as “the market bombing.” A 120mm mortar shell had hit a line of civilians in a Sarajevo market, resulting in heavy casualties; the Serbs claimed the Bosnian had done it to their own people to gain sympathy. CNN’s live footage brought the scene not only into Americans’ living rooms but also into every senior official’s office in Washington. There would be a response.

  Our team began manning phones to Sarajevo and Washington. Holbrooke made numerous calls to Strobe Talbott and Sandy Berger while Wes Clark kept in close contact with the Joint Chiefs. It was clear that President Clinton was not going to punt on this one, and Holbrooke saw an opportunity—albeit a high-risk one—in having bombs fall on the Serbs in Bosnia as we met with Milosevic on Wednesday night, two days away. Holbrooke asked each of us, as if we were a lobbying firm ahead of an important congressional vote, whom we had called to make sure the bombing would happen. I did not have anyone I could call to ensure that President Clinton’s response to the market attack in Sarajevo would be in the form of air strikes against the Serbs.

  “Who were you talking with?” Holbrooke asked, having noticed me on my cell phone.

  “I was talking with Phil Goldberg,” I replied. Keeping our team in Washington up-to-date on what we were doing in Paris was one of those chores that had to be done.

  “Chris, I love Phil. You know that. But there is nothing he can do from his position to . . .”

  • • •

  A few hours later, U.S. fighter-bombers were in the air out of bases in Italy, hitting Serb targets with a sustained force that had not been seen before. The UN peacekeepers, under British General Rupert Smith’s command, had been pulled into more defensible positions, thus minimizing the possibility that Serb militias, as they had d
one in the past, would grab peacekeepers and use them as “human shields.”

  We discussed the onward leg of the mission to Belgrade and whether it would be feasible while NATO aircraft, mainly American, were hitting Bosnian Serb targets as never before. My own view, and Holbrooke’s, too, was that there was never a better time to go to Belgrade.

  Milosevic greeted our delegation warmly as we filed into his large, ornate receiving room. Standing next to him was his foreign ministry advisor, Bojan Bugarcic, who spoke perfect English. Milosevic directed us to a large circle of heavily stuffed brown chairs and couches gathered around two glass-topped coffee tables. A waiter in a white jacket appeared almost instantly to offer us the choice of mineral water or numerous Balkan fruit drinks. Holbrooke, thirsty from the plane ride in from Paris, looked at the selection of waters and other drinks and asked Milosevic: “May I take two?”

  “Ambassador Holbrooke, please take three.”

  Milosevic began with expressions of condolences on the death of Bob Frasure, with whom he had spent many hours over the course of the spring. The Serb leader was dressed in a double-breasted blue blazer and red tie. I sat next to Holbrooke, occasionally looking over at him as Milosevic continued his sorrowful eulogy for Bob. I knew well that Bob would not have reciprocated the kind words, because, like the rest of us, he held Milosevic accountable for the destruction of Yugoslavia and its peoples. Listening to Milosevic I realized how successful Bob had been in building a relationship with such a person, and how that relationship, even after his death, was now going to help us get to yes.