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

by Christopher R. Hill

  “Dick, it’s not that stark.”

  “You’re right,” he responded, in what seemed like more of an effort to convince himself than me.

  In late morning Bill Burns called to apologize for not having warned me about the agenda of the secretary’s meeting. I told him not to worry, that I could see from the look on his face that he was as surprised as I was. He then mentioned a new development. Clinton had asked him whether he thought I would take the job and whether a call from the president would help me decide affirmatively. He said he tried to discourage it, and I assured him that such a call was not going to be necessary. Being asked by the secretary of state was enough for me. I told him about the recruitments going on in my office that morning. Bill, a career FSO, was pleased to hear it.

  I wasn’t able to get an appointment with Secretary Clinton until 4:30 P.M. I told her my decision, but also made clear (as I had done with all the day’s volunteers for Iraq) that I could commit for only a year. I had accepted an academic position and could put that off for a year, but I did not want to do so for any longer. She said that was fair and repeated her promise to be personally supportive through the Senate confirmation process. I had gone through Senate confirmations four times (three ambassadorships and one assistant secretary position), but in the current state of political acrimony I knew that an easy confirmation even for a career FSO could not be taken for granted. “This is the fifth time,” I told her. “Don’t worry,” she repeated. “We will back you.”

  The meeting with the secretary was brief, but for me, poignant. Just a few days on the job, Secretary Clinton was booked with back-to-back meetings, so I took just a few minutes of her valuable time to talk to her in a less used corner of her outer office. I sat perched on a chair near the window on the other side of the room from the fireplace and wing chairs where we had been the day before, while she sat on the end of a couch under the window. Over her right shoulder I could see Arlington National Cemetery in the twilight and I could not help but reflect on the Iraq War as we spoke about its legacy for our generation. Emotional moments like that are rare in the pace of the State Department. Four thirty in the afternoon is almost midday given how the building grinds on until late in the evening. Often one has to be home in bed before even realizing the importance of a conversation conducted during the hustle of the day. She seemed relieved I had taken the job. I could almost see her mentally crossing off the item from her to-do list. (“Find someone to replace Crocker. Done.”)

  As I walked out of her office, I ran into Holbrooke. He was heading to the secretary’s office for her next set of meetings on his portfolio of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He asked if I had told her I was going to take the job and I told him yes. He put his hand gently on my shoulder and said we would talk later. My eyes watered a bit, a combination of a delayed reaction to the sight of Arlington out the secretary’s window, but also to my legacy with Dick. We had worked together in the 1990s, had been friends since, and now, even though he was not dealing directly with Iraq, we would be working together again. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction at that thought as he rushed to her office and I headed downstairs.

  I exited onto the sixth floor and turned in the opposite direction from my office along the long corridor that parallels C Street below. The State Department building plan consists of even- and odd-numbered corridors that form a grid. The “first corridor” on the sixth floor stretches from the EAP front office at one end with its view of C and Twenty-Third Streets, down past the front office of the Africa Bureau, on to the Near East Bureau (NEA), located much closer to C and Twenty-First Streets. For the first time that I could ever recall I walked into the NEA front office. I thought momentarily of the fact that I had never even had an assignment in NEA, but was immediately seized by the usual FSO competitiveness as I checked out the furnishings to make sure they had nothing on us in EAP. The office was adorned with numerous photos of the Middle East peace process. Pictures of various NEA officials and ambassadors shaking hands with robed Persian Gulf sheiks were a reminder that NEA was more than just about the Israeli-Palestinian issues. I did not immediately see anything from Iraq. I began to reflect on the criticism of NEA that it was inadequately seized with the problem of Iraq, that NEA somehow had collectively determined that Iraq was the military’s problem. But just as I spotted some photos of Iraq, Deputy Assistant Secretary Rick Schmierer came out of his small office.

  I had never met Rick. I told him I was looking for reading material to get myself going on the assignment. He hadn’t heard I was going to be the nominee, but he didn’t miss a beat in welcoming me to the club. Foreign Service officers specializing in different parts of the world often have a reputation for being very clubby and dismissive of anyone not from that club, and NEA, due in part from the need to spend years studying Arabic, had that reputation. Arabists were often accused in the popular media of not being sufficiently seized with Israel’s plight, and for being excessively solicitous of the Sunni Arab perspective throughout a region that others had exploited for their natural resources. But typical of such stereotypes, it did not hold up at the first person I met. I explained to Rick that I had read all the recent books on the war, including two excellent books by Tom Ricks: Fiasco, in which the military could do nothing right, and The Gamble, where some of the same generals could do nothing wrong. There were also an extraordinary four books by Bob Woodward; George Packer’s brilliant Assassin’s Gate, which weaves the two realities of Washington and Baghdad; Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s horrific Imperial Life in the Emerald City; and others that were more from a Washington perspective. I asked Rick for suggestions that could help me with the history. I deadpanned that I needed something on the six thousand years that preceded the 2003 invasion. Rick laughed. “I can help you with that too,” as he went to his bookshelves for more.

  As we talked I realized that without any prompting from anyone I was doing exactly what every other FSO does on receiving an assignment: head to the library and start reading until your eyes fall out. Rick immediately did what every self-respecting FSO who has written a book does first: he handed me a brand-new copy of it. Then he turned to a truly impressive collection of Iraq books on the shelf beyond his desk and for each gave a review worthy of the New York Review of Books. It was clear he had read them all.

  It was a day when I was so proud to be an FSO. First, I did the right thing. Then my colleagues did the right thing. And finally, I had just met someone on the other end of the sixth floor whom I had never laid eyes on before, but who opened up his heart and his bookshelf to make sure I was going to get off to a good start.

  I had read a great deal of Balkan history, but to learn about the other end of the Ottoman Empire was instructive as I found familiar patterns. I was particularly struck by the sectarian divide in Iraq, and by the short shrift that it received in the U.S. media. The Kurdish question was well understood in the United States, mainly because it offered the promise of the creation of a new state. But the Shia-Sunni divide was now exacerbated by the U.S. invasion, which had taken a Sunni-run Arab-majority state and turned it into the first Shia-led state in the Middle East, with the farcical notion that a divide which spanned centuries could be repaired in a matter of months. “Ancient hatreds” had been overblown in the Balkans, an intellectual shortcut to understanding ethnic enmity there. I was certainly prepared to believe that sectarianism in Iraq was also exaggerated.

  In the Balkans the tasks of conciliation fell to the participants. Iraq was an example of the “Pottery Barn rule,” famously attributed to Colin Powell. If you break it, you own it. I watched a clip of General Petraeus’s and Ambassador Crocker’s testimony to Congress, a tour de force in handling a skeptical Congress by providing a plethora of facts and figures, and ground truth, the totality of which suggested to the audience that we were on top of everything in every village. It was clear from the testimony that nothing happened there without our guiding hand, and that achieving our goals of democratizing this most undemocratic
of states was very possible as long as we stayed the course, and, of course, believed in the secret sauce of counterinsurgency, the surge. I thought momentarily about Holbrooke’s comment that all the credit for Iraq has already been handed out, and that the successors would have a difficult time.

  On Monday I started filling out forms for the Senate confirmation process—my fifth. The paperwork is a little like trying to get admitted to a hospital. Many of the questions are posed over and over again in different formats. Could the State Department after thirty-one years really not know my Social Security number or my date of birth? There is also a background report that needs to be submitted by the State Department’s Diplomatic Security (DS) Bureau, the gist of which is filled in by a DS agent, who among other duties visits one’s neighborhood and asks neighbors whether the person “who is being considered for a senior-level post in the U.S. government” has shown any signs of unexplained wealth or has behaved oddly in any way, and could be recommended for a “position of trust” in the government.

  Contrary to an undeserved reputation, the State Department takes security very seriously. Security officers in the department and U.S. marine guards at overseas embassies rummage through offices at night looking for unlocked safes, or for classified papers that might have been left out on the desk, or inadvertently thrown in a trash can along with a potato chip wrapper or a soda can. Computer-based records ensure that “security violations” or their less serious cousins, “security incidents,” stick to one’s file like flypaper for years. Three violations and one can expect to be suspended without pay for a few days. I was proud not to have had a security violation in decades. How did you manage that? a junior officer once asked me, upset over a violation in the form of a pink slip left on his desk by the marine security guard overnight. I told him, “If you were on my desk at the end of the day, I would have locked you in the safe as well.”

  After the FBI and IRS reports are in, after the nominee has returned all the forms to the presidential appointments office, and after the DS security background check has been completed, the nominee is invited for an interview with a paralegal in the presidential appointments office, the purpose of which is to find out whether there are any other issues. These may be ones the nominee has honestly forgotten, or is simply too embarrassed to want to tell anyone about. The purpose of this interview is to protect the nominee and the president’s staff from being blindsided during the Senate hearing. If known ahead of time, the issue can be managed with Senate staff. If not, last-minute problems can be fatal.

  I sat down with a young woman who had gone to Wellesley College at about the same time as my daughter Amelia. The opening went something like this:

  “Ambassador Hill, it is such a pleasure to meet you. I have completely reviewed your file and I am so impressed by all the things you have done for our country. You have served in so many difficult places and have been a three-time ambassador. It is such an honor for me to meet someone like you.

  “So if you don’t mind I just have a few questions on this questionnaire that we ask all our prospective appointees. The first is: Have you ever been arrested for public drunkenness?”

  By February the nomination was ready to go to the Senate for confirmation, and the president was ready to announce it in the course of a speech about Iraq policy. The problem was that a key step had not yet been taken: agrément.

  Agrément, French for “agreement,” refers to the process by which the government to which the ambassador is to be accredited has the opportunity to search its own police files and make sure that the nominee has not broken any of its laws. Agrément is very rarely withheld, and when it is refused the reason is often political factors (for example, a nominee, perhaps an academic, has a written record of criticism toward the receiving country, or perhaps insulted the king of the accrediting state), something that normally would have come out at some earlier point in the course of the vetting process. Therefore, with no expectation of any problems, and with a speech to be given in Camp Lejeune only hours away, President Obama telephoned Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and received the Iraqi government’s agrément for my appointment.

  With my nomination now in the public domain, the pace of preparations accelerated. I met with General Petraeus, then the new head of U.S. Central Command, who told me about the enormous strides Iraq had made, more optimistic in his tone than in the recent hearings. Totally engaging and thoroughly likable despite the excessive use of the vertical pronoun “I” to describe his role in all the good things going on in Iraq, he told me about efforts to beautify the road in from the airport and how nice it looked these days with flowers compared to before. A few days later General Ray Odierno, who had replaced Petraeus in Iraq and was in Washington for a few meetings, stopped by to tell me about his concerns about the difficulties ahead.

  Ray, a giant of a man with a shaven head, who looked every bit like the football lineman he once was, didn’t much care whether or not any flowers had been planted on the airport road. He was more concerned about the political calendar that needed to unfold in order to keep the U.S. troop withdrawals on schedule. Ray listed the issues ruefully, starting with an election law that would need to be passed by the summer if the Iraqis were to hold parliamentary elections by the end of the year or the start of 2010. And he confirmed what Colin Powell had pointed out to me four years before, that the airport road, flowers or no, was still unsafe.

  I had known Ray from the time he was Secretary Rice’s military liaison. He is a man whose passion for achieving success in Iraq was even more imposing than his size. I also met with Ryan Crocker, who had just left Iraq. Unlike Petraeus, Crocker painted a grim view of the situation on the ground (“we’ve been very lucky”) and was not optimistic about the future or about the embassy’s capacity to deal with it. Given the annual turnover at the embassy, he expressed concern about whether there was anyone left who had useful contacts with the Iraqis (in other words, you’re not very lucky). His body language seemed that of a severe critic of the war, in contrast to public statements in which he called for more investment of resources. I asked how much he had engaged in Iraq’s internal politics and he surprised me by saying that he stayed away from it except on the candidacy of the justice minister, who he felt would be inclined to open up the detention centers.

  Crocker left no opportunity for personal banter and never smiled. He deflected questions about the new embassy, explaining that he had hardly been there, since it had just opened weeks before. I asked whether he thought we had ever met before. He said only if I had been stationed in the Middle East. After about ten minutes, he said, “Okay?” suggesting that he was ready to leave. I thanked him for his time and never saw him again.

  I moved a small box of personal things from my sixth-floor office in EAP, which would remain empty until the new assistant secretary would arrive some six months later, down to the Iraq section of NEA. Unlike my EAP office with its view of the Potomac River, the Iraq desk was located in a windowless office suite on the second floor of the State Department. It was grim surroundings, but I was struck by how dedicated the desk officers were.

  In the State Department, every country, large or small, has a desk. Some desks have two officers, some even more. The Korea and China offices in the EAP Bureau had some twenty-five officers and staff. The Iraq desk sprawled out through the northwest end of the second floor in hastily designed office space. Everyone was packed into tiny cubicles, working ten-to-twelve-hour days. Most were Foreign Service officers, some were regular civil service employees, but others were one-year contract employees brought in to handle the surge of work.

  I also started to get acquainted with NSC staff engaged with Iraq. National Security Council staffs serve the president and are relatively small, especially at the start of an administration, when the president has made a pledge (which will soon be broken) to keep the NSC staff to bare bones and rely instead on the State Department and other national security departments.

  Wh
ereas the State Department might have twenty persons working on a given geographical or function issue, the NSC staff would have only a handful and therefore have to outsource memos to the State Department. When the president is meeting a foreign leader, the NSC directorate will ask the State Department for a memo, which becomes grist for an NSC paper.

  NSC staff have a well-deserved reputation for being bright, in many cases the best and the brightest. Many come from other USG agencies and do not have political profiles. But they also have a reputation for being quick and instinctive about where power resides. These traits are especially on display in the hand-off from one administration to the next, when a staff person for the previous administration hoping to stay on will want to demonstrate competence and a capacity to transfer loyalty. Ideally, the NSC staff works well with the State Department’s bureaucracy, especially the geographic bureau, but this is not always the case. The State Department’s layered look involves numerous clearances that frequently slow down a decision.

  In a highly charged place on an issue like Iraq, the pace is relentless, nerves are frayed, and bad-mouthing of other agencies abounds. The State Department comes in for more than its share of this because of the lingering sense that it is an elite organization whose officers often seem more interested in admiring problems than in solving them.