HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Legacy was clearly on Hillary’s mind when she gathered her senior aides to her outer office in early January 2012. An aquamarine sofa and upholstered chairs sat around a small coffee table atop a gigantic blue and red Persian carpet. Hillary often met there one-on-one with visiting dignitaries such as Afghan president Hamid Karzai, sitting at one corner of the sofa while her guest took a pink-upholstered chair. Across the room, there was an old fireplace that no longer worked, and a midsize conference table with eight or ten chairs stood in the back of the room, near the entrance to Hillary’s personal office.

  On this day, with only a year left in their term together, Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, Tom Nides, Bill Burns, Wendy Sherman, Harold Koh, and a handful of other aides gathered around Hillary, who had come prepared with one of her trademark long legal pads. She had written action items on page after page of ruled sheets. As she went around the world, frozen conflict by frozen conflict, to see what new approaches might be taken, what efforts might be redoubled to achieve a breakthrough, there was a collective sigh of exhaustion that was as real as it was inaudible. Three years after Burns had given her a presentation on the state of affairs all across the world in the transition space on the ground floor, Hillary was now delivering the same kind of country-by-country, issue-by-issue analysis from the comparatively ritzy confines of her seventh-floor office.

  “There was a whole discussion about the Arab Spring fallout,” said a source who was in the room. Beginning with Libya, the region offered the best chance to prove the wisdom of the smart-power approach. But there was still much work to do there—and in Burma, the best prospect for State to make its mark in the much-ballyhooed pivot of American focus from the Western world to Asia.

  Hillary had just been to Burma the previous month, marking the first time an American secretary of state had been to the country in more than half a century and foreshadowing a smart-power success narrative in which the Burmese government instituted political and economic reforms and the United States responded by easing long-standing sanctions.

  For decades, the United States and its international partners had ratcheted up pressure on the government of Burma—called Myanmar by its dictators—but had nothing to show for it by the time Obama took office. The American sanctions campaign, a bipartisan effort spanning four presidencies and attracting members of Congress as diverse as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, simply wasn’t working. Hillary’s view, at odds with many of her allies in the bipartisan push for Burmese freedom, was that there had to be a few carrots mixed in with the sanctions stick.

  If Burma opened up, Hillary had been promising since 2009, the United States would respond by pulling back crippling penalties and fostering new relationships between Burma and the American business community. The United States had two primary interests in Burma—human rights and the balance of geopolitical power. The regime had systematically abused the human rights of dissidents, including Nobel Peace Prize–winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been under house arrest for most of the previous two decades; and the small nation was heavily influenced by China, America’s leading rival for international power. In late 2010, the Burmese junta demonstrated its good faith by releasing Suu Kyi, and Hillary’s visit a year later signaled America’s continued interest in promoting democratic reforms. Burma’s revitalized relationship with the United States, which would soon include the release of hundreds more political prisoners and the concomitant restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries, represented a challenge to China’s dominance in its own neighborhood. The small country, therefore, held outsize importance both for the smart-power approach to foreign policy and for America’s focus on enhancing its influence in Asia.

  Burma was on the path to becoming an unqualified success story for Hillary and for Obama, but when Hillary and her aides met in January 2012, many of America’s larger foreign policy concerns were still unresolved. They talked about the democracy movement in Syria, the Russia reset, the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations (which the two sides had walked away from more than a year earlier), elections in Kenya, and even efforts to combat wildlife trafficking, which put cash in the pockets of warlords. Perhaps the biggest indication that Hillary was concerned with her legacy, though, was what one source at the meeting described as an emphasis on pushing her top lieutenants to find ways to institutionalize various changes she had made to the department during her first three years. She had developed the QDDR, articulating a vision for the department and restructuring it, created a series of public-private partnerships dealing with issues affecting women and girls, and pushed State onto better footing with the Pentagon and other national security agencies. Hillary was worried that if her aides didn’t spend time and energy sewing changes deep into the fabric of the department, they could be easily undone by the next secretary of state.

  After the meeting, Sherman, the undersecretary for political affairs, marched down the hall to her own spacious office, adorned with similar furniture and a gigantic old-school electric globe featuring outdated national borders. She summoned the assistant secretaries for the seven regions of the world to deliver the news that the last leg of Hillary’s four-year relay would be a dead sprint. She opened up a bottle of wine and laid out snacks, all the better to soften the blow. “Y’all may think we’re coasting for the last year,” Sherman began. “Here’s the agenda.”

  It would be a busy year—far busier and far more perilous than Hillary could have expected, and she was desperate to find a lasting legacy achievement before she left. As she built her policy portfolio in 2011 and 2012, she reaped a public relations windfall that her press team could never have concocted in its wildest dreams. Her image was about to get a surprise boost that would act as a sleeper agent in modernizing the public perception of her style as secretary.

  On a quiet Wednesday night in early April, with Congress in recess, Stacy Lambe and Adam Smith, ambitious young public relations pros, were throwing back drinks at Nellie’s, a pioneer in the cottage industry of gay sports bars where the big draws were drag bingo and buckets of chili-and-cheese onion rings.

  Over cheap vodka and soda, the two men began talking about Diana Walker’s Time magazine photo of Hillary, which was making the rounds in their circle of friends. Hillary looked like a total badass, Lambe thought.

  “Who’s she texting?” Lambe asked rhetorically. “What is she texting?”

  He couldn’t get the thought out of his head on the way home, and he started looking for pictures to match with the Time shot. He found one of Obama lying on a couch, looking at his BlackBerry, with David Axelrod and a “Change We Can Believe In” sign in the background. Bingo.

  Lambe devised a fake exchange and posted the pictures to a page on Tumblr, a blogging platform on which photographs can be put together to create a story line. The page that Lambe shared with Smith would be used to spoof what Hillary and fellow celebrities in the worlds of politics and entertainment might text to each other.

  “Hey Hil, Watchu doing?” Lambe wrote over the Obama photo.

  “Running the world,” he wrote over Hillary.

  Just like that, at one a.m., a meme was born. Lambe, who went on to work at the media website BuzzFeed and at VH1, had tapped into a public desire to see more of Hillary’s personality. The Tumblr page, called Texts from Hillary, quickly became a fascination in newsrooms in Washington and New York, then spread beyond to the point that it became a cultural touchstone for the political intelligentsia. Hillary’s aides hadn’t created the meme, but they recognized its capacity to help transform a leader who had been pilloried as the PC to Obama’s Mac into a Technorati texter. During the 2008 campaign, Hillary had discovered that voters liked it when she showed her personality and her humanity. Any number of political and military leaders swore up and down that she was a riot behind closed doors. But as secretary, it was usually more tell than show.

  Suddenly two guys outside her shop had given her lightning in
a bottle. They had projected her as commanding, human, and funny all at the same time. Hillary told Chelsea that her favorite faux exchange was the one featuring Ryan Gosling.

  “Hey girl …” the Gosling back-and-forth began.

  “… It’s Madam Secretary,” came the reply.

  Chelsea couldn’t believe her mother had even heard of the hunky movie star. Once Hillary was in on the joke, Reines invited Lambe and Smith to meet with her at the State Department. He even sent them a submission from Hillary, which they weren’t certain was real. But they were convinced enough by the time they arrived at State to hit “publish” and send dialogue written by Hillary’s staff out to the world.

  Hillary met briefly with Lambe and Smith, took pictures with them, and autographed printed copies of her own post on the Tumblr page. “Love the site, ‘Hilz,’ ” she signed.

  “These last couple of years, she’s been kicking ass, and this was a photo, regardless of our Texts from Hillary, that captured her in this moment, and I think that’s why so many people were sharing it,” Lambe said later. The Tumblr page ran updates for only a week, but it was one of the most memorable, and politically valuable, episodes of Hillary’s four years at State.

  Two weeks later, when she was photographed drinking a beer and dancing in a Colombian night club, the Huffington Post, Washington Post, and New York Post featured the photos on their websites. The revelry was quickly overshadowed by a Secret Service prostitution scandal arising from the same conference that she and Obama were attending, but Hillary would get another dance later that summer—this time captured on video—at a dinner hosted by the South African foreign minister in Pretoria.

  Hillary, hair in a ponytail, followed the female singer’s lead, shimmying low as she clapped and laughed.

  “It was really sort of a magic moment in a way because we were all having such a good time,” said Undersecretary Bob Hormats, who joined in the group dancing along with American ambassador Don Gips, and Export-Import Bank chairman Fred Hochberg. One of the songs they danced to was “Shosholoza,” the Zulu laborers’ folk song featured in the movie Invictus. Hillary didn’t seem bothered by the title of the song, which means “move forward for the next man.”

  But the next day, after a trip to see Nelson Mandela, Hillary confided to Hormats that she couldn’t understand why the video had gone viral. “I don’t really know what to make of it,” she said. “Why would people be so interested in my dancing in South Africa?” The buttoned-down “madam secretary” was becoming fun-loving Hillary to her fans. It was exactly the kind of image a politician would want to project in advance of a run for office.

  Hillary would have to continue to protect Obama’s international blind side while he sought reelection because Republican nominee Mitt Romney was looking to exploit what his strategists believed was a softness in the marks voters gave Obama on foreign policy. “There’s always a foreign policy strength when you’re an incumbent. But we always felt like his numbers as an incumbent could have been higher and should have been higher,” said Romney adviser Kevin Madden. “They were good, but they weren’t fantastic. We felt we could still win persuadable voters.”

  Romney’s attacks on Obama’s foreign policy amounted to two main arguments: Obama had gone on an “apology tour” that lowered America’s proud head in a bow to other countries, and Obama wasn’t doing enough to promote democratic movements around the world. There was scant evidence to prove those claims when Romney started making them, but it was particularly important to Obama’s reelection hopes to avoid new episodes that played into Romney’s narrative. During the early stages of the campaign, Hillary was confronted with two crises that had the power to reinforce Romney’s attacks: one that tugged at the theme of the government’s competence in promoting democratic values and one in which the United States, through Hillary, actually issued an apology to Pakistan.

  Late one night in April, Hillary got a call from Jake Sullivan. He was on his way to the State Department, he told her, where he would set up a secure conference call so that she could discuss a highly sensitive emerging issue with several of her senior aides. Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese dissident imprisoned for his criticism of forced abortions, had escaped from house arrest in Shandong Province, had broken his foot in a stumble during his journey, and was now in Beijing asking the American embassy for asylum.

  There were risks to aiding him and refusing him. To give harbor to an escaped Chinese prisoner could badly damage relations between the two countries. But to turn Chen away would be a slap to human rights and America’s rhetoric on freedom; that he was well regarded among anti-abortion forces in the United States raised the stakes even higher.

  Sullivan and Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, converged on State and conducted a series of secure calls with the American embassy and with a small group of senior officials including Hillary, deputy secretary of state Bill Burns, Cheryl Mills, and Harold Koh, the chief State Department lawyer and veteran human rights activist, who was, as one colleague put it, already “in the middle of nowhere in China.”

  There were two major questions that had to be resolved. First and foremost, could the United States admit Chen to the embassy under international law? Second, what rationale could America use to admit him that wouldn’t result in a situation in which every political dissident around the world sought asylum on similar terms?

  Hillary’s team had confronted a similar conundrum in January, when Wang Lijun, a local official in the city of Chongqing, had sought asylum because he feared retribution when he accused a superior’s wife of being involved in the murder of a British businessman. Wang was let into an American consulate long enough for him to secure assurances of his safety from Chinese officials, but he was not given more permanent asylum because the State Department determined his record of human rights abuses made him legally ineligible for safe harbor under American law. Still, the Wang incident gave State staff a useful trial run for dealing with the delicate negotiations surrounding asylum requests.

  “Everyone who worked on [Chen] from the State Department side had worked on the Wang Lijun issue,” said one State official.

  Koh determined that there was ample precedent for giving Chen sanctuary, on a short-term basis, for the purpose of providing medical care. The broken foot, ironically, would allow Chen to walk into the embassy. But there were other complications, not the least of which was the diplomatic crisis that could ensue if the United States interfered in China’s relationship with one of its own citizens. Hillary was about to travel to China for a round of the Strategic & Economic Dialogue and, her aides said, was very well aware of the potential for the Chen situation to roil the conference.

  “This is actually kind of an easy one for me,” said Hillary at one a.m. “We cannot turn this person away. I’m clear-eyed about the difficulties—we can manage them—but I feel very confident about this. Let’s do it. And let the White House know we’re doing this, so that they have visibility. Go get him.”

  Then she went back to bed, leaving her aides to work out the final details.

  “It was another example of not running away from a problem,” said a person who was involved in the discussion. “You could have lawyered that particular problem to death, because if you just dragged it out, inaction would have been its own decision, because he wouldn’t have gotten in.”

  If the decision was an easy one, the nuts and bolts of executing it would prove more complicated. On a practical level, Chen was a fugitive. If he hitched a ride with a Chinese friend to the embassy gates, they could both be stopped and arrested. The way around that was for the United States to send a van to a rendezvous point where Chen, riding in another van, would be delivered. The American van would then bring him safely back to the embassy. Technically, he probably wouldn’t have immunity just by climbing into an American car outside the embassy, but State officials determined that it was highly unlikely that the Chinese would create an
incident by pulling over an American car.

  In a car chase scene out of an action film, the drivers of both vans realized they had been tailed to the rendezvous point. One van turned into an alley, and the other pulled up alongside it, facing the other direction. The sliding side doors were opened, and American officials grabbed Chen by the lapels, yanked him into their van, and sped off to the safety of the embassy. The Chinese cars, in hot pursuit along the way, stopped once the van carrying Chen was inside the embassy gate.

  Over the course of a few days, American ambassador Gary Locke, along with Koh and Campbell, who had converged on Beijing, worked to “find out what Chen wanted and then to cut a deal with the Chinese that gave Chen what he wanted,” according to a source familiar with the discussions.

  Chen, who was something of a celebrity within the tight-knit international human rights community but hardly a kitchen-table name, wanted to be treated at a hospital, be reunited with his family, and then be allowed to attend a university in China; he did not want long-term asylum at the embassy or in the United States. The Chinese signed off on the deal. Campbell called Hillary’s plane, which was en route to Beijing for the S&ED session, and said the agreement was in place. The State Department, in dramatic fashion, had struck a blow for freedom. Or so it seemed.

  A few hours later Campbell called back to say that Chen had balked and was still at the American embassy, unwilling to leave his secure spot for the hospital even with assurances from the Chinese government that he would not be seized. “Chen is a very jittery guy,” said one American official, “and it’s not because he doesn’t have reason to be jittery.” But he had a deal blessed by the Chinese and American governments in hand yet still didn’t feel safe.