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

by Christopher R. Hill

  Paul and Sung worked through the day with Ri Gun and his team, while Kim Gye Gwan and I stayed away from the actual negotiation, a practice we had employed in the past by which Kim and I would take up in the evening the issues unresolved from the day. This time, there were too many of those.

  We returned from Pyongyang through the demilitarized zone, where, comically, there was a large group of Chinese tourists who asked us to pose for photos, our team having become quite the celebrities in China. We crossed the DMZ by foot, empty-handed, with little to show for our efforts. A few weeks later, in November, the Six Parties met once more, but it was over. The North Koreans were not serious about the verification protocol, and we could not go forward with what we had in hand from them, a verification protocol that only included the facilities that we were already completely familiar with in the first place. I called Secretary Rice, pulled her off her elliptical machine one last time, and told her we had to break it off. She understood. “Come home,” she said. “That’s a wise decision. You’ve done all you can do.”

  I had worked on the North Korean nuclear issue since February 2005, through almost four years and some forty trips to China, South Korea, and Japan. The U.S. reputation in Asia had been transformed due to our willingness to engage as a partner in a process, and the onus of blame was put where it belonged, with the North Koreans. It was step-by-step, “action for action,” meaning that our concessions never got out ahead of what we gained and we never gave up something for nothing. We had also led that process, and in so doing had built on the relationship with China by working cooperatively on something that mattered to both of us. The gaps we had with the South Koreans that were threatening the quality of our alliance had been closed. Indeed, when the South Koreans held a presidential election in 2007, the U.S. relationship was not an issue and no candidate employed anti-Americanism.

  President Barack Obama had been elected in the meantime, and his administration was expected to take up the negotiations quickly. But as the months and years rolled by without any resumption, it was clear to everyone that the North Koreans were at fault. Unlike in the past, nobody blamed the United States.

  20

  GLOBAL SERVICE

  The secretary wants to see you at five thirty,” my assistant, Evelyn Polidoro, called into my office at 4 P.M. One of the many odd things about election transitions is the seamless way the career Foreign Service reacts to the fact that the title of “Secretary” after January 20 now refers to an entirely different person. Evelyn was referring to Secretary Hillary Clinton, who had begun her duties days before. I didn’t think much of the request to see me, assuming as I did that Secretary Clinton wanted to talk with me yet again about North Korea and what it would take to get the denuclearization talks restarted.

  Since camping out in a first-floor State Department office with her incoming staff in December, Secretary Clinton had been interested in my views about the talks and whether they could be restarted after collapsing in the fall of 2008 over the North Korean refusal to agree to an adequate verification regime. She was most interested in exploring the idea that the North Koreans had essentially broken off the talks in anticipation of working with a new administration in Washington, which, if true, suggested a willingness on their part to get them moving again without too much loss of time.

  Theories abounded on this point, though I was of the view that the North Korean resistance to go further in the fall of 2008 had more to do with an internal decision that we could surmise had been complicated by Kim Jong Il’s stroke and his incapacitation that summer. I couldn’t rule out, however, that fresh faces in Washington could help the situation. Many North Korean watchers had viewed with dismay, during the 2001 presidential transition, incoming President Bush’s unwillingness to pursue the Clinton administration’s “Agreed Framework” in which the U.S. side held direct talks with the North Koreans on a set of agreements whose essence was to provide North Korea with two light water reactors in return for dismantling their existing nuclear program. The incoming Bush administration officials were especially concerned about mounting evidence that the North Koreans had continued to engage in clandestine purchases of equipment for a uranium program. The result was that the talks went into hiatus while the nuclear program accelerated.

  This time, that danger still existed, but it was the North Koreans who had stopped the talks, not us. Moreover, it was not clear what we could do to continue them, since the issues had come down to the essential one of agreeing on a verification regime. Without an agreement on, for example, allowing inspectors the right to inspect a site previously not on the declaration, we could not begin to verify the North Korean nuclear declaration, a document we already knew to be incomplete in its absence of any references to a uranium enrichment program, past or present. The disagreement was a serious one: we were not prepared to accept a verification regime limited to known plutonium sites, and insisted on the right to inspect undeclared sites, especially ones that we might in the future develop information about. The North Koreans had dug in their heels in a way that even for them was unusually stubborn. It invited different theories within the analytical community as to whether they were waiting for a new administration or for Kim Jong Il’s health status to be clarified.

  The nuclear talks had consumed me as nothing I had ever been involved with, but with the North Korean nuclear reactor shut down and no longer producing the spent fuel rods for plutonium, and with the U.S.–South Korean relationship now in good shape, unlike before the Six Party Talks, when many South Koreans believed the impediment to progress was the bellicose United States rather than the truculent North Koreans, I felt the negotiations were at a good moment to pause; it was a propitious time to pass it on to a new administration that had shown a strong interest in continuing them and avoiding the kinds of problems with the South Koreans that had occurred in the first term of the Bush administration when it hit the pause button. So much of what one does in government is to pass on problems to the next generation with the understanding that they should be passed on in better shape than when one found them. I felt we had come to such a moment with North Korea.

  I was also, after some thirty-two years, ready to move on from the Foreign Service to take a lecturing and writing position at Yale University. I had had three ambassadorships, in Macedonia, Poland, and South Korea, had been special envoy to Kosovo, a member of Ambassador Holbrooke’s team in ending the Bosnian War, and was finishing up as assistant secretary of state for East Asia, which had come with another hat as chief of the North Korean negotiations.

  My involvement in the North Korean negotiations had the life cycle of a typical Washington story. The press, looking for signs of a new approach to diplomacy at the start of the second Bush term, settled on the talks as the poster child. At first, I was heralded in press profiles, and in one New York Times editorial had received the death sentence when it suggested to Secretary Rice that in dealing with Iran she should ask: “What would Chris Hill have done?” (I skipped the senior staff meeting that day.) Later, as talks stalled, they became known as “failed talks.”

  At about 5 P.M., I reviewed the latest information about the Six Party Talks, checking to see if there was anything new in the intelligence that day that would have prompted the secretary to call for me. At 5:25 P.M. I went up to her office suite and was waved in by her assistant Claire. Clinton met me at the door of her outer office and motioned me to one of the two wing chairs that sat on either side of the large fireplace. I noticed that some furniture rearranging had taken place in the past couple of days.

  But before I could think about whether it was good feng shui for the room or not, I was a little startled to see that in three hard-backed chairs sat incoming Deputy Secretary Jim Steinberg, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and a worried-looking undersecretary for political affairs and the most senior career Foreign Service officer, Bill Burns. I thought: North Korea policy is getting upgraded.

  Secretary Clinton opened the discussion
by saying some very nice things about my service, especially my handling of the North Korean negotiations. I sat back in my wing chair thinking how pleasant can this be, a last scene in a feel-good movie, as if I were a sort of Foreign Service Bilbo Baggins at the conclusion of my adventures. I glanced over at Bill Burns, who continued to have a troubled look on his face. I thought perhaps he had eaten one of the specials in the State Department cafeteria that day.

  And then the secretary said, “And, so I would like to ask just one more thing of you.”

  (Oh dear, I thought, another memo on our next steps with the “Norks”—I was on a Lord of the Rings riff in my head, rhyming the acronym for the North Koreans with Tolkien’s “Orcs.”)

  “. . . I would like to ask you to replace Ryan Crocker in Baghdad.”

  My mind raced forward. Oh my God, Iraq, the real fire of Mordor, wait! I thought dealing with North Korea was the fire of Mordor!?

  I snapped out of it and said, “I’m very honored you would ask. I know the importance of this, but I am going to have to think about it.”

  “Of course, of course,” she replied with a graciousness that was a pleasure to hear. She explained that she would back me up, including through the Senate confirmation process, which was increasingly looking more like a gauntlet than a process. I knew, and she knew as well, that there were several senators who did not support the negotiations with the North Koreans and held me personally responsible, as if I were merrily conducting my own foreign policy without any instructions from above.

  Secretary Clinton knew (and I knew as well) that the negotiating process with the North Koreans had become an emotion-laden exercise, with the opponents regarding it as a dangerous violation of the theory of the case that “bad guys” (and who on earth fits the description better than the North Koreans?) are people one should never talk to. My instructions for my Six Party negotiating sessions in Beijing forbidding me to join in any toasts in the presence of the North Koreans had become a source of amusement around the department.

  Clinton went on to explain that this would be a critical year for the United States in Iraq. It would represent a moment when the United States would be “civilianizing” its mission. She said the situation required a strong presence, someone who could in effect wrest control from the military and explain to the media and the public what we were doing. She noted that Ryan Crocker would be leaving in a matter of days and that I would have to be prepared to move quickly. I told her I understood but nonetheless would need to sleep on it.

  I staggered back to my office, and Evelyn, joined by the bureau’s special assistant, Yuri Kim, asked me what it had been about. Evelyn had never believed it was about North Korea.

  “If you go, I’ll go,” Evelyn said.

  “Hey, me too,” Yuri chimed in. Actually, Yuri was already set to go out to a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Anbar Province in western Iraq, but I knew that if I went to Baghdad she was going to work there in a senior position in the political section. I told them I really needed to think about all this. I had never thought about going to Iraq, but I knew that tonight I would be doing just that.

  That night, I thought long and hard. Service in Iraq was not popular in the State Department. The war had started on a very wrong note, with the sidelining of the State Department’s role in favor of a civilian mission that was inspired and directed by the Pentagon. The Foreign Service was vilified for not “stepping up,” even though the role it was asked to play was a very subservient one, that of civilian avatars for the military. The embassy I knew was the largest in the world, but it had a reputation for being supersized out of a misplaced need to keep pace with the military personnel system whose appetite for sending more people seemed endless. Story after story came back from Iraq of people having little to do, of sitting around in endless meetings and writing telegrams that no one wanted to read. Most of the Near Eastern Bureau’s Arabists had gone for their service there, come back having checked the box, and vowed not to go again.

  The people who served repeated tours in Iraq, as opposed to those who simply wanted to check that box, were often seen as those who could not get jobs elsewhere, or who viewed Iraq as a place to go to line up a next assignment to a cozy job in Europe. The State Department’s personnel system had been skewed as a result of Iraq, with those who had returned being offered jobs ahead of everyone else. I had dealt with some of the distortions in our own personnel exercises in the East Asian Bureau when we were told that we had to accept a person for a position in Bangkok solely for the reason that he or she had served in Iraq. Iraq, it was said, had also become a kind of French Foreign Legion, where after a particularly unsuccessful assignment somewhere, a person could wipe the slate clean and start afresh.

  I later learned how complex the picture was. Some of the criticism was well deserved, but much was not. No doubt a very few of those assigned to Iraq and especially to some of its Provincial Reconstruction Teams—our presence in the provinces, sort of proto-consulates—were unfit for other assignments, but others were doing their best in the worst of circumstances, where venturing outside the barbed wire was a difficult and courageous effort.

  The nadir of this dismal dynamic had come earlier in 2008 when the Foreign Service’s director general, the person responsible for assignments, had hosted a “town hall” meeting in the State Department at noontime to discuss assignments in Iraq (and Afghanistan) and why all Foreign Service officers should expect to serve a tour there. The meeting was, for reasons no one can now recall or understand, caught on video by CNN as employee after employee posed hostile and provocative questions to the embattled director general. A Foreign Service officer who gave the appearance of never having served east of the Rhine River posed the one melodramatic question that was played over and over again on CNN. “If we must go, who will take care of our children?”

  At precisely the time the director general was answering those questions, eight floors above, Secretary of State Rice was bidding farewell to her undersecretary for public affairs, Karen Hughes, who was returning to Texas. The highlight of that gentle affair was the secretary telling the polite audience that Karen made a great sacrifice in coming to Washington all the way from Texas and disrupting her children’s lives. It was a kind of upstairs, downstairs story.

  I shuddered as I remembered those meetings, and how the press covered the downstairs meeting as a sample of the Foreign Service’s lack of dedication, while on the eighth floor the self-congratulatory talk of sacrifice and service in Washington was celebrated. Global service was something every Foreign Service officer agreed to on entering the service, and essentially, I was now being asked to fulfill that obligation.

  21

  TAKING THE FIFTH

  When I woke up, early, I had decided I was going to Iraq. I arrived early at the office and found that my executive assistant, Evelyn Polidoro, had talked to her husband and was prepared to go. Yuri Kim, the bureau’s special assistant, was also ready, as was Deputy Assistant Secretary Patricia Haslach. Chris Klein, our bureau chief of staff and member of the North Korean team the previous summer, called from his new post at the Paris embassy to say he had heard I had been offered the job and that he wanted to join the team as well. Cameron Munter, who had served as the deputy chief of mission in Warsaw with me seven years before, called in from Belgrade, where he was ambassador, to ask if what he had heard was true, because he was ready to come, too. Glyn Davies, the bureau’s principal deputy assistant secretary and one of the best FSOs I ever worked with, told me, “You gotta do this. I wish I could join you.”

  My office was filling up with people at that point as front office personnel came in for our “morning huddle” staff meeting, to review events that day and anything overnight from the region. From the morning huddle I would go straight to the secretary’s large staff meeting, attended by my counterparts from other functional and geographic bureaus. My morning huddle was important because I did not want to have someone in the secretary’s meeting rai
se an issue related to East Asia that I was not aware of. If there was a big story in the U.S. morning papers about, say, a new trade problem with Japan, I wanted to make sure I was familiar with the latest developments on the issue and, more important, what we were doing to address it.

  Early in the morning my own office looks like a train station at rush hour. Desk officers try to catch their front-office bosses to clear press guidance that they anticipate will be requested by the press office. Every morning the press office prepares the spokesperson to brief on the State Department’s reaction to events overnight. The spokesperson gives the briefing based on guidance received from the bureaus, usually written early in the morning by the desk officers who know their areas best and can anticipate what the spokesperson might be asked. More often than not there are far more pieces of guidance than are used (no matter what happened in Papua New Guinea overnight, the spokesperson is not going to get a question about a Pacific Island state), but an overprepared spokesperson is better than the alternative, and part of our mission was to make sure the spokesperson had the answers and didn’t have to promise to get back to the reporter later, or worse yet, have to wing it.

  Even though people had different pieces of paper in their hands, they had all figured out what was going on with me. Okay, I thought, I’d better tell the secretary that I am going before one of these guys does.

  I had a few minutes to detour to Dick Holbrooke’s office to track him down and tell him of my decision to go. Back in government with the return of the Democrats, Dick was on his way to another meeting (catching Holbrooke in a sitting position was pretty much impossible), but we talked in the corridor outside his office for a few minutes as streams of State Department employees walked past us with early morning coffee. Dick had not tried to encourage or discourage me, but emphasized that the secretary really needed to know that it was a top priority to fill the position and to begin a transition from the military to a civilian lead. He had expressed on many occasions his concern about a “militarized” foreign policy and said putting it back in the hands of the State Department would not be easy. “But that is what she wants you to do.” He hesitated, and added, “Chris, you understand how ugly the issue of Iraq is in our country. For some people, nothing this administration will do in Iraq will ever receive credit. Anything good that happens will be credited to your predecessors, and anything bad to you.”