HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  In October 2009, on her first trip to Pakistan as secretary, Hillary wore a head scarf, a sign of respect for the traditions of modesty—and female inequality—in parts of the Muslim world. But there was nothing modest or veiled about the message she delivered. She accused the Pakistani government of harboring and abetting Bin Laden, his Al Qaeda brethren, and the leaders of the Taliban. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to. Maybe that’s the case—maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know,” she told a group of Pakistani editors. “As far as we know, they are in Pakistan.”

  It was no secret that Obama didn’t trust Pakistan. “Let me be perfectly clear,” he said in a private conversation in the first half of his first term. “We know the Pakistanis are lying whenever they’re talking to us.” And he had said during the campaign that he would authorize unilateral strikes against targets there if the Pakistanis couldn’t or wouldn’t help. Hillary had criticized him at the time—but only for being so candid. “It may well be that the strategy we have to pursue on the basis of actionable intelligence—might lead to a certain action,” she said. “But I think it’s a very big mistake to telegraph that.”

  But in October 2009, as Obama’s top diplomat, Hillary was leaving unsaid exactly what Obama had articulated nearly two years earlier—that if Pakistan didn’t step up its coordination in the war against terrorists, America wouldn’t hesitate to act alone. Pakistanis shouldn’t be under the false impression that there was daylight between the secretary of state and the president on that.

  Hillary hadn’t asked for permission to step up public pressure on Pakistan’s leaders, and as her comments made international news, Jake Sullivan called back to Washington to check in with Ben Rhodes at the White House. Hillary wasn’t asking for forgiveness, but she did want to have a better idea of what the president wanted her to do when she was asked about it again—which would surely happen the next time she was around a reporter. Was what she had said all right? Had she gone too far? Should she walk it back?

  Rather than being upset, the president’s adviser said he loved Hillary’s candor and aggressiveness. If anything, Obama’s review of American policy in the “Af/Pak” region had made him more distrustful of Pakistan. “Double down,” Rhodes told Sullivan, prompting Hillary to repeat the charge later on the trip.

  Bin Laden was the holy grail of national security for Obama. But where Pakistan was concerned, America had a delicate task. Aside from Bin Laden, the United States needed Pakistani help in prosecuting the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and in striking other terrorists in the Pakistani tribal region along the Afghan border. American spies needed to be able to operate within Pakistani borders; the Pentagon needed to be able to coordinate with the Pakistani military; intelligence had to be shared; and the United States needed access to the supply route roads between the port city of Karachi and Afghanistan.

  America had to maintain good enough ties in the short term with Pakistan—both its government and its people—to justify continued cooperation even in the face of unpopular American and NATO missions inside Pakistan, which were increasing in frequency and which sometimes killed the wrong targets. But at least at the start of the Obama administration, American officials were optimistic that they could build a better long-term relationship with the Pakistanis.

  Hillary’s diplomacy was, necessarily, aimed at both the short- and the long-term goals. In conjunction with Holbrooke, she was in charge of providing Pakistan with civilian aid, in terms of dollars and, more important, technical support for everything from agriculture to electricity to education. At home, she concentrated on building relationships between the State Department and the Pakistani American community in an effort to funnel donations to the right places and turn Pakistani Americans into informal ambassadors to their families in Pakistan. Like the other diaspora groups that Hillary connected with through Kris Balderston and his Global Partnerships Office, the Pakistani group offered both a way to strengthen America’s relationship with people living in Pakistan and a way for Hillary to forge a bond with activists and donors in the Pakistani American community. Of course, the anger Pakistanis felt over American violations of their country’s sovereignty—and the killing of civilians—would never be offset by the United States building roads and bridges, engaging the Pakistani people, or assisting in the modernization of the nation’s electricity infrastructure. But it was Hillary’s job to soften opposition to the American presence in Pakistan.

  The United States had a good story to tell about the assistance it was providing in Pakistan, Hillary believed, but nobody there seemed to be listening. Every time the Chinese built a road or a bridge in Pakistan—a clear deliverable—they would get credit for it. But American aid, given through earthquake relief, small business assistance, and other lower-profile projects, earned little appreciation. Hillary focused on drawing attention to the good she felt the United States was doing. “If the American taxpayer is going to pay to do things in Pakistan because we’re trying to curry favor and understanding and appreciation,” she said, “let’s do it right.”

  In Pakistan, she met not just with the top government officials but also with opinion leaders and the general public, another example of her belief in making direct contact with the people of a country—and their American relatives—to influence policy in the foreign nation. In a format that became familiar during her tenure, she met with Pakistani citizens and journalists in town-hall-style events reminiscent of those she had run as a New York senator. In one forum, a Peshawar University student drew a parallel between terrorist attacks on civilians and U.S. drone strikes. “In the United States, do you perceive both victims as victims of terrorism?” the student asked.

  “No,” Hillary replied. “I do not.”

  On the surface, and in reality, Hillary was the face of America’s effort to build a better long-term relationship with Pakistan. But tacitly, she was also creating space for the CIA and the military to continue the short-run covert operations that infuriated the Pakistani people and made it more difficult for the Pakistani government to cooperate with the United States, according to sources in the intelligence and diplomatic communities.

  “You have the above-the-water issues and below-the-water issues,” said one senior administration official who worked on Pakistan. “Above-the-water issues are development, diplomacy, foreign aid, even security assistance. All those things had to be visible and seen so that you could do all the below-the-waterline things that could happen. And all those things were drones, counterterrorism cooperation, Pakistanis sharing intelligence.”

  On May 1, 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani American working with the Pakistani Taliban, tried and failed to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. Thereafter, American officials redoubled their efforts to put agents on the ground. Days after the failed attempt, Panetta and national security adviser Jim Jones flew to Pakistan to deliver a stark warning. They showed Pakistanis information about links between Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Pakistani jihadists, and sectarian groups operating out of Pakistan. Your country is under siege, and you don’t even know it, the American officials told their Pakistani counterparts, using the failed Times Square plot as a pretext for increased covert American activity in Pakistan.

  “If this happens again, and it works—if somebody else bombs something in the United States—and it is linked back to Pakistan, we’re going to do something,” Panetta said, according to a source who was present. Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari countered by saying Shahzad was an American and that the United States should be doing more to monitor its own citizens’ ties to terrorism.

  “I saw [Panetta and Jones] as trying to build the case for unilateral action through each of these kinds of mistakes that kept happening,” the source in the room said, adding that the American attitude became one of pushing the envelope on covert activities in Pakistan under the guiding theory that Pakistani officials were abetti
ng terrorists. “All of that process, I think, helped facilitate the investigation to where Bin Laden was. They were trying to create this environment.”

  Indeed, in 2010 the number of drone strikes within Pakistan, which required intelligence scouting on the ground, doubled, and that infuriated the Pakistanis, especially when they didn’t feel that they had been properly informed or when the attacks killed non-combatants. That left Hillary with the delicate task of acting as a buffer for the military and intelligence communities. “She had done a lot of meetings, she had done a lot of town halls, she had done a lot of local press, she had done a lot of outreach, and it really just changed the whole tenor of the discussion,” the intelligence official said. “It really paved the way for us to get the job done.”

  The tension between the two countries came to a head in late January 2011, when Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor bearing diplomatic credentials, shot and killed two Pakistanis who had approached his car on a motorcycle. Pakistani authorities found a camera in his car that contained pictures of military assets, and some believed he was trying to prove ties between the Pakistani intelligence service and the terrorist group that had carried out a deadly assault in Mumbai, India, in late 2008. It was a diplomatic nightmare for the United States: a spy carrying State credentials had killed two Pakistanis. Obama suddenly found himself in the position of arguing that the spy should be exempt from prosecution under international diplomatic immunity standards—even though it was obvious to everyone that he was no diplomat. Hot on Bin Laden’s trail, a fact that was still known to only a handful of people in the American government, the United States could ill afford further complications in the relationship with Pakistan. But neither could the United States sit by as Pakistan prosecuted an American agent for murder. Hillary pressed Zardari to release Davis, and to signal displeasure with Pakistan’s refusal to do so, the State Department canceled a planned meeting among the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

  Fortunately for Davis, and for the United States, the situation was resolved on March 16 with a $2.3 million restitution payment to the families of the victims, negotiated in part by Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), who was a central congressional player in providing aid to Pakistan, and by Panetta as part of a larger agreement involving Pakistan’s long-standing demand that America identify its operatives working in-country. Hillary, speaking in Egypt during the trip in which she put together the coalition for the Libya intervention, denied that the United States had paid “blood money” for Davis’s release, but that simply meant there was a way of laundering the transaction. “The understanding is the Pakistani government settled with the family, and the United States will compensate the Pakistanis one way or the other,” a senior Pakistani official told Foreign Policy magazine blogger Josh Rogin.

  There had been a substantial shift in America’s approach to Pakistan since the start of the Obama administration. While some senior administration officials believe Hillary consciously used the soft-power tools of diplomacy and development to facilitate U.S. military and intelligence operations in Pakistan from early on in her tenure, others say she was forced by events to move the goalposts.

  “At the beginning, there was a kind of theory that there could be this deeper relationship that could be developed with Pakistan,” an Obama national security aide said. “The goals evolved from one of more ambitious elevation of the relationship to management of crises.… Whether that was a conscious ‘this is their role’ or whether that was more just ‘events took us to that place’ is hard to say.”

  For Hillary, there was no such confusion. The two sides were intertwined. “We did look at it that way,” she said.

  The Davis incident couldn’t have come at a less auspicious time for the United States, as a small circle of senior officials knew at the time that there might soon be a unilateral U.S. strike on Bin Laden. “It would have been that much more difficult to do the [Bin Laden] operation knowing that you had this unresolved situation,” said a White House national security official. “That’s not to say that we wouldn’t have done it that way.”

  By that point, the CIA had identified Bin Laden’s courier, followed him to a compound in Abbottabad, and spent months trying to figure out whether Bin Laden was living there, too. But the level of distrust between the Pakistanis and Americans was at a boiling point, and there was no telling if or when the Bin Laden hunt would be disrupted. Panetta believed it was time to act, and he believed Hillary would help press the case.

  She kept the secret to herself, not even disclosing what she had learned from Panetta to top aides. But they knew something was up. She went to meetings that weren’t on her public schedule. She disappeared for a few hours at a time, with no explanation of where she had been or with whom she had met. Sometimes she would show up at the White House without most of her State staff knowing how she had gotten there. The White House had instructed Hillary’s highly trusted personal scheduler, Lona Valmoro, to list only “meeting” on the private schedule distributed to her aides. It was an unusual notation.

  From mid-March 2011, when Libya was front and center, to the end of April, Obama chaired at least five National Security Council meetings on Bin Laden’s whereabouts and options for trying to kill him, and there were about two dozen Situation Room meetings among top military, diplomatic, intelligence, and counterterrorism officials. Bill Burns, the deputy secretary of state for policy, was the only one of Hillary’s lieutenants who participated in Situation Room meetings on Bin Laden. He and Hillary would be charged with negotiating with Pakistan in the aftermath of an attack, particularly if it went south. Even if the raid was executed perfectly, the State Department had to be ready for a backlash not just in Pakistan but in other countries. There had to be a plan in place for defending embassies and consulates against retaliatory violence.

  The small-circle discussion in Washington revolved around two central questions: Should Obama order an attack even if intelligence officials weren’t sure that Bin Laden was at the compound? And if he did order an attack, should it be carried out by bomb, raid, or perhaps an unproven small drone that could narrowly target Bin Laden?

  Hillary typically left herself room to maneuver during Situation Room meetings. But it was clear from the first days of discussion that she favored a strike, whether by plane, drone, or SEAL team, according to Pentagon and intelligence officials involved in, and briefed on, the deliberations.

  “Secretary Clinton was very focused on the fact that we had to move sooner rather than later,” said a senior intelligence official, “that this was the best case we had against Bin Laden since Tora Bora, that we shouldn’t in any way involve other countries, including the Pakistanis, or worry about them in any way, and that we had to get the job done. Initially the weight of the discussion was around an air strike, and my recollection is that it was something she was comfortable with.”

  Over the course of six weeks, various officials raised a litany of concerns and red flags, the most serious of which was that they still couldn’t be certain that Bin Laden was actually in the compound in Abbottabad. In one of the meetings, Obama’s advisers discussed whether to try to collaborate with the Pakistanis on a mission. The idea was dismissed pretty quickly because of the risk that the plans could leak—or that the Pakistanis could warn Bin Laden.

  A question was then raised, rather harmlessly according to a source in the room, about whether the Pakistanis’ honor would be offended by a unilateral strike. “What about our honor?!” Hillary exclaimed.

  Another concern briefly preoccupied the small set of leaders who knew what was in the offing. As one official noted, the Bin Laden raid was scheduled to go down the same night—Saturday—as the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a high-cachet black-tie affair that draws Washington’s media elite, government bigwigs, and even a handful of Hollywood celebrities. There was a discussion of whether it would draw attention if the entire intelligence community skipped the dinner or if it would be worse if
they all attended and the raid failed.

  “Her view was that we had to do whatever we needed to do to preserve the discretion of the mission,” said a source in the room.

  When she’d heard enough of the back-and-forth about the optics, Clinton stated her position plainly: “Fuck the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”

  She had a more pressing concern. She believed that the circle of officials who had been “read in” to the plan had grown too large to keep it secret for much longer. If it leaked, Bin Laden could slip through American fingers, just as he had at Tora Bora in the aftermath of the American invasion of Afghanistan.

  Over time the discussion had moved away from an air strike, which would have required too much ordnance to be certain of killing Bin Laden, and toward a special forces raid. Hillary supported either option, and she was persuaded that, as one aide put it, it was better to get Bin Laden up close than to have to “just peel DNA off some rock” after a bombing run.

  Admiral Bill McRaven, the commander on the ground, was persuasive in bringing Hillary to the conclusion that a SEAL-team raid was the best option.

  “Look, we know how to do this,” McRaven said. “We’ve done so many in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are good at this now.”

  “But you’re going deep into Pakistani territory,” Hillary replied. “You’ve got to plan for everything.”