by Ronan Farrow
In the relationship with Colombia, unlike so many other similar alliances, there was a holistic development plan surrounding the arms and the human rights waivers. The nonmilitary and military components of the deal reinforced one another. “We tried to get Congress to do a Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, we supported [Colombian president] Uribe in his democratic security efforts to rebuild institutions in Colombia,” Condoleezza Rice recalled. “But the FARC had to be defeated. The reason you have reasonable peace negotiations now is the FARC couldn’t hold Cartagena and Bogota hostage any longer.” That more balanced integration of diplomatic and security strategy was at the heart of what ultimately brought peace to an embattled nation. At the end of the day, McCaffrey said, “We’re talking about the most successful policy intervention by the US since World War II.”
The United States’ military alliances around the world present a record of tragedy and chaos, but there are also lessons to be learned. “If you look at Plan Colombia,” Rice said, “diplomacy led.” But in the years that followed, the Trump administration would struggle to apply elsewhere the lessons that had made Colombia an atypical model of success. As sweeping budget cuts made the kind of comprehensive, integrated development assistance that had anchored Plan Colombia scarce, and a new wave of arms deals and calls to strongmen appeared to unmoor American foreign policy from human rights concerns, there was little indication those lessons had registered at all.
PART III
PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION
WASHINGTON, DC, 2017
NORTH KOREA, 2007
There ain’t no truce or negotiatin’ with thug lords
Tried conversatin’ but he won’t listen
—2PAC, GRAB THE MIC
22
THE STATE OF THE SECRETARY
REX TILLERSON’S TEAM was fighting again. “So, who’s going to go in with him?” Margaret Peterlin, his chief of staff, was saying. She looked me up and down with an expression that suggested she’d discovered a pest in the house. We were standing on Mahogany Row, at the wide double doors into the secretary of state’s office. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Steven Goldstein folded his arms and stared daggers at Peterlin. “Well, I guess I won’t be,” he told her. “Heather can go.” He tilted his head toward Tillerson’s spokesperson, the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert. Peterlin narrowed her eyes at Goldstein. “Are you sure?” she said, with theatrical displeasure. Goldstein didn’t reply. Tillerson strode up to the door, cutting the tension.
Such discord often simmered just under the surface in the months before Tillerson’s unceremonious firing in March 2018, according to multiple members of his embattled inner circle. Often, it emanated from Peterlin, a formidable attorney and former congressional staffer who helped draft the Patriot Act after the September 11 attacks and guided Tillerson through his confirmation process. When she was passed a note indicating I’d arrived that day, she’d given the rest of the team an ultimatum: from the public relations staff, only Goldstein would be permitted in the interview. Goldstein had pointed out that Nauert, as spokesperson, would be the one responsible for answering ensuing public questions. Peterlin had insisted there was simply no room. Two staffers said there was another motivation: Peterlin had been lobbying to get Nauert fired. The standoff hadn’t been resolved by the time I was ushered in to see Tillerson, nor as I left, when a second contretemps ensued over who would stay behind with the secretary. (Goldstein again insisted on Nauert, visibly vexing Peterlin.)
This squabbling barely qualified as drama, but it was unusual behavior to display so openly in front of a reporter, and at odds with the kind of tightly organized messaging prized by most of Tillerson’s predecessors. It provided a small window into a State Department that appeared to be plunged into chaos at every level. As the Trump administration ceded policy authority to the Pentagon and the growing number of generals within the White House, this was the sole counterbalance: an enfeebled State Department, led by Secretaries seemingly drafted into the job based on their willingness to serve as diplomacy’s executioners—and, in Tillerson’s case, fired just as quickly for their failure to do so.
WHEN WE MET IN JANUARY 2018, Tillerson was wearing a charcoal suit and a canary yellow tie, patterned with horseshoes. He was sitting, legs crossed, relaxed, in one of the blue-and-gold upholstered chairs in the secretary’s office, a few feet from the spot where Richard Holbrooke’s heart had burst seven years before. The office looked much as it had that day, except for the art: when Tillerson first set up shop, he’d replaced the portraits of dead diplomats with scenes of the American West. Tillerson got compared to a cowboy a lot, and between the decor and the horseshoes, appeared to be leaning into it. The name helped: Rex Wayne Tillerson, after Rex Allen and John Wayne, the actors behind some of Hollywood’s most indelible swaggering cowboys.
Tillerson was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, and was raised there and in neighboring Oklahoma by parents of modest means. His father “drove a truck selling bread at grocery stores,” his mother raised the kids. The couple had met through the Boy Scouts, when his mother visited her brother at the camp where Tillerson’s father worked. Tillerson honored that legacy by remaining active in Boy Scouts leadership for much of his career. His biography was marked by earnest overachievement: he was an Eagle Scout, and then a member of his high school band, in which he played the kettle and snare drums, and which yielded a marching band scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin. Over the course of more than forty years at ExxonMobil, culminating in his decade-long tenure as CEO, he’d amassed a personal fortune of at least three hundred million dollars—not including the roughly one hundred and eighty million dollar retirement package he received upon his departure from the firm to enter government. The call to serve in the Trump administration had thrown into disarray plans for retirement, to his wife Renda and two horse and cattle ranches in Texas. “I didn’t want this job,” he said. “My wife told me I’m supposed to do this. . . . I was going to go to the ranch to be with my grandkids.” When I asked if, a year in, he thought he’d made the right call taking the job, he laughed. Peterlin shot him a warning look. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s been” —he furrowed his brow, appearing to search for the word— “interesting.”
WHEN TRUMP NOMINATED TILLERSON to the job, his experience running one of the largest multinational corporations in the world inspired optimism among career officials. Maybe, several said, he’d be a fierce defender of the Department. Maybe he’d bring to the job a private sector knack for institutional growth—or at least savvy, targeted trimming. And Tillerson’s first remarks to his workforce—about ten minutes of them, standing on the stairs of the packed State Department lobby—had been well received. “I’m the new guy,” he’d affably informed the crowd. He’d mentioned the walls at either end of the lobby, where the names of hundreds of Foreign Service officers killed in the line of duty are engraved in marble. “The buzz was okay,” recalled Erin Clancy, the Foreign Service officer who narrowly avoided firing during the Mahogany Row massacre, shortly after Tillerson was confirmed. “Things were blue skies. His business record was promising.” A source close to the Trump White House echoed that sentiment. “What a different choice,” that individual recalled thinking when first consulted about Tillerson. “What a cool guy.”
The problems mounted quickly. After arriving at State, Tillerson disappeared. He granted few interviews and throttled press access to an unprecedented extent. For his first Asia trip, he ruffled feathers in the press corps by bringing only a lone writer from a conservative website. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who’d championed Tillerson’s nomination, was among many who expressed dismay. “You have to take the press on the plane,” several individuals close to her recalled her saying. “It’s called a democracy. That’s what we advocate for when we travel on government-funded planes as secretary of state. Why isn’t he taking the press on the plane?” When I asked Rice about her views on Tillerson, she was more politi
c. “I can’t assess what’s going on inside,” she said. “I hear news stories and I know the tendency when they’re unhappy to put out a version. I just know Rex Tillerson is a very strong person and a good manager and I think he’s a good leader but I can’t speak to the specifics of how he’s running it.”
Tillerson and his aides readily admitted to having a messaging problem. “I don’t play the game outside the house, it’s not what I do,” Tillerson said. “That probably is from my forty-one-and-a-half years in the private sector. I’m just disciplined that way. That’s how I do things, and it’s frustrated a lot of people, I get it.” He laughed. “But I’m not going to change!” But Tillerson’s reticence to talk exacted a cost. The source close to the White House who initially expressed optimism about Tillerson put it bluntly: “They alienated the press.” Gossip items began to make the rounds in DC, portraying him as aloof and insulated from the Department. Some were exaggerated, like the Washington Post’s claim that Margaret Peterlin had told career diplomats not to make eye contact with the secretary of state. Several sources, including one on Tillerson’s security detail, disputed the idea that she’d enforced such a rule. But Peterlin did guard Tillerson so fiercely that many officers agreed with public reports describing her as a “bottleneck.” Even peers, like Condoleezza Rice, were reportedly unable to reach him without first going through Peterlin. “I can’t get through,” Rice remarked in frustration, according to the recollections of one of the individuals close to her. “Margaret screened my call.”
More consequential was Tillerson’s inaccessibility inside the Department. After the remarks on his first day, he didn’t speak to the workforce again until an initial town hall in May—unusually late in an administration for a new secretary of state. With his contained, stoic body language—small, confident gestures, no movement above the elbows—he’d given employees an overview of the basics of world conflicts. Some found it condescending. “It was an exercise in, ‘I can read a map,’ ” recalled one Foreign Service officer in attendance. When Tillerson told a story about attending a Model UN session and telling a twelve-year-old participant how much the Foreign Service inspired him, a middle-aged officer began feverishly muttering, “You don’t know us!” at a decibel level audible to three rows of the auditorium. “The fact is that Mr. Tillerson is not witting of everything going on in the Department and he can’t be if he’s just relying on his little political cabal that’s around him,” Colin Powell said. “And they seem to spend their time making sure he doesn’t get anything from the State Department.”
Several staffers said Tillerson’s inaccessibility extended to foreign counterparts. “He is not a proactive seeker of conversations or outreach,” an officer in the State Department’s Operations Center, who spent months connecting Tillerson’s calls, told me. “The vast majority of the calls we managed with the secretary while I was there were with people in the administration. . . . It felt like a lot of internal navel-gazing.” The existence of those internal calls wasn’t unusual. But the ratio of internal to external conversations was, according to officers who worked in Operations under multiple secretaries of state. When new secretaries are sworn in, for instance, they typically receive a flood of courtesy calls from foreign ministers and heads of state around the world. More than sixty came into the Operations Center for Tillerson. He declined to take more than three a day.
Later, when the United States initiated strikes on Syria, the administration entirely skipped the conventional step of notifying NATO allies. Tillerson received a flood of calls. “When news broke, alarmed allies, including the Czechs—who are our protecting power in Syria—were calling, saying ‘I would like to speak to Secretary Tillerson,’ ” the Operations officer told me. It was early on a Sunday afternoon, and Tillerson was in Washington and unoccupied. “We were told that the secretary had a long weekend so he was going to go home and have dinner with his wife and call it a night.” No calls. The man was, career officers marveled, committed to work-life balance. But the decision also baffled some. “We just bombed Syria without telling our allies,” said the Operations officer, exasperated. “You might have to do some phone calls, even from home. That floored me.”
Tillerson appeared unwilling to fill the perceived vacuum of leadership by leaning on others inside the Department. Instead, rumors mounted about the sidelining of career experts and their opinions. Aides described Tillerson as an intensive researcher, who prepped deeply for meetings. But his ruthless efficiency also raised eyebrows. “I do read all these memos that come to me . . . ” Tillerson had said at that first, long-awaited town hall. “I appreciate those of you that get them on one page, because I’m not a fast reader.” He wasn’t kidding. Under Tillerson, the formal guidelines for memos bore an all-red, boldfaced warning: “there is a two-page limit.” Informally, several officials said, a one-page limit was being enforced. Every secretary of state enforces different guidelines for the kind of briefing papers they like to see. Preventing bloated paperwork was, in theory, a rational goal. But several senior officials said that, in this case, they felt unable to properly convey nuance to a secretary with little background on the intricate relationships he was now tasked with overseeing. Even the brief papers permitted to reach the secretary’s office were often withheld for long stretches of time, languishing, awaiting Peterlin’s review. According to two officials, special assistants in the secretary’s office postdated some memos to reduce the risk of public scandal associated with the backlog.
The source close to the White House was one of many in Tillerson’s orbit who struggled to reconcile his peerless track record of private-sector management with his approach to the State Department. “Forty years at Exxon, in the God Pod, telling people to jump based on how high the price of oil is up,” the source said, using the pet term for Tillerson’s office suite within ExxonMobil. “I’m not trying to be shitty, but, you know, there’s a way to run that company.” Government, where no man is god except the president, was something else. “At first I thought ‘uh oh, this is growing pains; a private-sector guy, realizing how hard Washington is,’ ” the source close to the White House continued. “And just, what I started to see, week after week, month after month, was someone who, not only didn’t get it, but there was just no self-reflection.”
UNTIL TILLERSON WAS FINALLY FIRED in March 2018, rumors of his demise were relentless. Former CIA director Mike Pompeo, who ultimately replaced him, was one popularly cited successor. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, whose potential ascendancy to Tillerson’s job was the subject of aggressive strategic leaks from the Trump White House, was another. The perceived rivalry with Haley appeared to be a source of particular vexation for Tillerson and his team. The day I arrived to meet with the secretary, they were still reeling from an announcement Haley had made on the withholding of funding for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees. Tillerson hadn’t been consulted. In a series of tense emails, Haley’s press office told Tillerson staffers that it had checked with the White House directly, rather than work through the secretary of state. Several weeks later, when Tillerson delivered well-received, tough remarks on Syria, Haley put out her own statement on the same subject at virtually the same time, prompting grumbling from Tillerson’s team that Haley was publicly undermining him. Tensions between secretaries of state and US ambassadors to the United Nations were nothing new, but this particular enmity seemed to run deeper. “Holy shit,” the source close to the White House said, “I’ve never seen anything like the way he’s treated her . . . it’s shocking.” Multiple White House sources expressed similar sentiments, with one saying Tillerson’s “rage” toward Haley had drawn the disapproval of even the president. Tillerson’s team disputed those accounts. Steven Goldstein, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, called Tillerson “a very caring, decent, principled person” and attributed unflattering accounts from White House sources to disgruntled rivals. “Whenever you have a foreign policy decision, there ar
e always competing interests and sometimes people aren’t happy with the decisions made,” he said. “But what is said is the furthest from the truth.”
Tillerson, for his part, said his focus lay elsewhere. “The only person that I have to worry about is the president of the United States,” he told me. “As long as he is happy with what I’m doing and wants me to keep doing it, that’s what I’m going to do.” But there were also reports of acrimony between Tillerson and Trump. In October 2017, a number of publications gleefully reported that Tillerson had, in one meeting, even referred to the president as a “moron.” Tillerson’s Texas swagger, the source close to the White House said, irked Trump. “You just can’t be an arrogant alpha male all the time with Trump. You have to do what Mattis does, which is ‘Mr. President, you’re the president, you’re smarter than me, you won, your instincts are always right, but let me just give you the other view, sir.’ Then you have this guy coming in,” the source said, referring to Tillerson, “going ‘Well, I guess because I worked for so many years in the oil business, I have something to say. You don’t know much about the region, so let me start with that.’ I mean, honestly, condescending.” Tillerson aides said their boss spent more time with the president than most cabinet members, and Tillerson insisted accounts of a rift were overstated. “The relationship that he and I have is not like a lot of secretaries of state had with the presidents they’ve served,” he explained, “because we did not know each other at all. So some of the dynamic between he and I is just learning who each other is. We didn’t know each other, and I’m a very different style of manager than he is, and sometimes those differences are evident to other people. It doesn’t mean we don’t work together, though.” The president, it came to pass, had a different view.
