Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  A month later, the administration faced an even worse crisis. On October 12, suicide bombers attacked a U.S. warship, the USS Cole, in the harbor at Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed; thirty-nine others were injured. Almost immediately, intelligence officials told me that the bombing had all the hallmarks of al Qaeda. According to the report of the 9/11 Commission, on November 25, 2000, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and his deputy, Richard Clarke, wrote President Clinton that although the FBI and CIA had not reached formal conclusions, they believed a large al Qaeda cell was responsible. Still, the Clinton administration did not retaliate. Clinton and Berger later testified to the 9/11 Commission that they did not think the case was solid enough to go to war. And by then, the 2000 election recount was under way. Bill Clinton did not believe it wise to launch a military strike at a time when the nation’s political leadership was so unsettled.

  Only five days after George Bush was sworn in, CIA director George Tenet briefed the new president about al Qaeda’s likely role in the Cole attack. Clarke recommended military action, but nothing was done. Bush told the 9/11 investigators, according to their report, he was concerned “lest an ineffective air strike just serve to give bin Laden a propaganda advantage.” Two American presidents had been urged to take action against Osama bin Laden and neither had. It was nine months before 9/11.

  Despite setbacks that would have discouraged most leaders, Clinton still didn’t give up on the Middle East. That fall, with time running out on his presidency, he rushed to an emergency summit in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, for one last effort to broker the agreement that had eluded him for eight years. There was little time to prepare, and the combination of the new intifada and the attack on the Cole created an ominous backdrop as the world leaders gathered to discuss peace. I went along, eager to see whether Clinton could make any headway, despite the escalating tensions. The setting for the meeting was in sharp contrast to the mayhem in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza. We arrived at a lush Red Sea hotel that could as easily have been a resort outside Phoenix or near Palm Springs. To add to the sense that we were disconnected from the real events in Israel and the Palestinian territories, this final summit of the Clinton years was held on a golf course carved out of the desert called the Jollyville Golf Resort. No summit venue could have been more poorly named.

  For the next few days, I juggled covering the peace talks for Nightly News with taping interviews for my cable show. There were low expectations for the peace talks, and they were fulfilled. Once again, Arafat refused to budge. I flew back overnight on the White House press charter so I could anchor my show in Washington the next day.

  Despite the newest reversal, in January, with only eighteen days left in office, Clinton summoned Arafat for one last round of White House talks. For Clinton, it punctuated eight years of frustrating peace efforts. It was clear where Clinton placed the blame. After he left office, he told me that Arafat had misled him. According to Clinton, the Palestinian leader had promised that if the president devoted time and political capital to the issue, the Palestinians would compromise. Clinton invested the time. Arafat didn’t deliver.

  What angered Clinton most was that with time running out on his presidency, he could have focused on either the Middle East or North Korea, but not both. Based on Arafat’s assurances, he had foregone the chance to follow up on a diplomatic overture from Pyongyang that might have led to normalized relations with North Korea. It was a decision he deeply regretted. Clinton thought, perhaps too optimistically, that if he had met Kim Jong Il in person, he could have won acceptable terms for establishing diplomatic relations for the first time.

  Were the North Koreans really ready to open up to the West? It was difficult to imagine, given what I had experienced that fall in Pyongyang. The communist country was a major exporter of missiles, was still designated by the State Department as a terrorist state, and was reportedly developing nuclear weapons. Its million-man army was considered enough of a threat to have warranted the deployment of thirty-eight thousand American troops on its border for the last half century.

  In a surprising breakthrough that October, two weeks before the 2000 election, Madeleine Albright was going to have the opportunity to meet with the Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il, and see if there was an opportunity for diplomacy. She would be the first American secretary of state to visit the North in fifty-five years, since the communist state was first created. I had seen the country only from afar, through binoculars from U.S. military outposts along the border of the demilitarized zone, during separate trips with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Albright herself. Now Albright was going to get to the North Korean capital, and I’d have a chance finally to explore the “hermit kingdom” that had long been closed to American journalists.

  North Korea had sent an emissary to Washington with a letter inviting the president to Pyongyang. The State Department felt that North Korea was ready to deal, and Clinton ordered Albright to explore the possibilities. The North had lost millions of people to famine in the nineties. Now, it was also suffering from the ravages of a recent typhoon. The UN’s World Food Programme was feeding almost eight million people there with a bare minimum of food. The need for more aid was massive. North Korea’s economic plight was the only plausible explanation for the regime’s willingness to reach out to the United States, even to the extent of tolerating a press entourage to accompany Albright. But while the North Koreans may have thought in the abstract that they were ready for media coverage, they—and we—were completely unprepared for the encounter.

  We landed in North Korea at dusk. Already, the streets were dark. I don’t think I’d ever been in another major city of two million people where there were no lights of any kind. No streetlights, traffic signals, or illuminated signs, and few if any pedestrians or other signs of life. By the time we got to the hotel, it was pitch-black. The hotel lobby was lit with a few bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. As we soon learned, even those few lights were there to impress the Western press. Electricity was scarce, which is why they had a dusk-to-dawn blackout. Whatever resources they had were plowed into their oversized military, not into raising the standard of living for average Koreans.

  Understandably, since I was the first NBC correspondent to get into Pyongyang in years, the Nightly News producers wanted me to roam the streets and capture a sense of what life was like in this secretive place. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the North Koreans didn’t want us to do. We were all assigned “minders” from the Foreign Ministry, who functioned as censors. We could go only where we were told, and were escorted to places where there was nothing to shoot. The system worked perfectly, for them. They showed us a lot of Stalinist-style monuments and empty parks, but we never saw any people. Our video could have been an outtake from a horror movie, the kind with nightmare sequences of empty cities and no signs of human life.

  Here I was in the forbidden kingdom, and all I could show was the official architecture of Kim Jong Il’s capital. My producer in New York kept saying, “I want to see people in the street; I want to see stores—give us a sense of what life is like.” It was a perfectly reasonable request, but there was no way to accomplish it without breaking the rules.

  After hours of being told I could not take pictures of our surroundings, I was desperate. As soon as my minder went to lunch, I sneaked out of the hotel with a small handheld camera, along with another reporter. Wandering through the streets on our own, we walked for blocks, grabbing pictures when we could. We were able to show a traffic policeman going through an elaborately choreographed series of moves as though he were directing traffic. Except that there was no traffic to direct. There were few if any cars, and if there had been vehicles, they wouldn’t have had gasoline. That didn’t stop the policeman from waving and pointing as though there were. Perhaps he performed this elaborate charade because, in the North Korean system, once assigned to a job, you made sure you did it. As we walked on, the few people on the streets looked at us strang
ely, but left us alone.

  No one stopped us until we wandered into a barbershop to see if people would chat. As soon as we tried to ask the patrons a few innocuous questions about everyday life, they ran. We knew we were in trouble. Moments later, they returned with two soldiers who’d been patrolling nearby. We were arrested, brought back to our hotel, and turned over to furious North Korean officials.

  Right away, the North Koreans tried to take the tape, but I hid it inside my clothing and insisted that they let me call Albright’s aides. They were staying separately, in an official guesthouse, but came quickly to bail me out of trouble. I was able to surreptitiously swap the tape for a blank, which I happily turned over. We saved our real tape, and were able to get it out on the satellite. I did reports for Nightly News and our cable show, showing our viewers more of Pyongyang than any Westerners had ever before seen.

  Later that day, the same helpful State Department officials got me into the press pool that was going to cover Albright and Kim’s historic meeting. The CIA had been profiling Kim, the eccentric son of North Korea’s founder, for years. I never knew whether their reports of a scotch-drinking xenophobe with a taste for Swedish actresses and porn movies was real intelligence or copied from an old James Bond movie. We did know that he had a taste for Western food and good wine, and that he was afraid to fly. When he had to travel it was in a lavishly appointed railroad car.

  We were told to wait in an elaborate, ceremonial hallway. The carpets were luxuriously thick. The ceilings glowed with the light from enormous chandeliers. North Korea couldn’t feed its people, but it still had money for pomp and ceremony. There we waited for the much-anticipated photo opportunity between the American secretary of state and the communist leader known to his people as the Dear Leader.

  When Kim finally walked in, I thought of The Wizard of Oz. He was wearing a khaki military-style suit, but what made the situation so comical were his feet. The diminutive dictator was wearing elevated lifts on his shoes. Combined with his pouffed hair teased into a mini-beehive, the lifts added several inches to his small stature making him appear almost at eye level with the American secretary of state. As I scribbled rapid notes, a separate voice in my head was saying, “This is amazing. I am standing a few feet away from one of the world’s most notorious tyrants, and he’s smiling and shaking hands like the host of a dinner party.”

  Kim proceeded to engage Albright and her delegation in what they later described as a polite, serious conversation. They had been expecting a monster, and were stunned when he behaved normally, exchanging diplomatic niceties such as, “If both sides are genuine and serious, there is no thing we will not be able to do.” Encouraged that they might be receiving a peace overture, Albright hastily accepted Kim’s invitation to what she thought would be a simple May Day celebration.

  Instead, sitting at Kim’s side in an enormous Olympic-sized stadium, Albright was treated to a display of military might that had all the trappings of a rally in Nazi Germany. There were one hundred thousand performers, and twice that number in the stands applauding on cue. Children danced, people flew in on small rockets, soldiers performed with their bayonets. As Albright has described it in her memoir, Madam Secretary, the show’s finale was a display simulating the launch of North Korea’s most threatening weapon, the Taepo Dong missile—the very weapon she had hoped to persuade Kim to eliminate from his arsenal.

  Still, Kim invited Clinton to visit Pyongyang himself before his term expired that winter. Albright felt there was a possibility to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough, but the president was tied down with the Middle East negotiations. The moment of opportunity with North Korea passed. During the transition, I learned from members of the incoming Bush team that Condoleezza Rice felt very strongly that the U.S. should not negotiate with North Korea. Either she was reflecting the new president’s point of view, or he hers. But early in the new administration, in the spring of 2001, his decisions about North Korea became an early signal that hard-liners were in control of his foreign policy team. Bush overruled his secretary of state, Colin Powell, who had wanted to follow up on Albright’s initiative.

  Powell was humiliated. It was his first major setback, and a very public one. Later, the Bush White House discovered that North Korea had been cheating on an agreement they’d signed with the Clinton administration calling for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program in exchange for money for fuel and power plants. The hard-liners felt vindicated. By the following year, all talk of diplomacy was dead. North Korea became a charter member of the president’s “axis of evil.”

  Two weeks after the North Korea trip, on election night, I was back on Hillary duty in New York. I waited for the returns in an overheated ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Hotel near Grand Central Terminal, perched on a riser with hundreds of camera crews jammed onto a wooden platform. The early exit polls had made it clear that she was going to win big, and by the time I arrived after Nightly News, her supporters were already celebrating. It was a mob scene, but a happy mob.

  The crowd was even more buoyed by word that Florida was looking good for Gore. The drama began in the twelve-minute period between 7:50 and 8:02 p.m., when the major networks awarded Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes to Al Gore. But within the next ninety minutes, the Voter News Service, which at the time conducted the exit polls for most of the nation’s news organizations, warned the networks that the information was wrong. The networks discovered that the actual vote in several sections of Tampa was less Democratic than the exit polls had projected. At the same time, the Bush campaign—armed with data from Florida’s governor, the Republican nominee’s brother—was raising hell with the networks, trying to roll back their Florida projection.

  At 9:50, the Democratic stalwarts at Hillary headquarters got very quiet as one by one the networks started reversing their calls. Florida was back in play and the people near television screens began passing the word. By then, the president and Hillary were on stage for her victory speech. I climbed down from the camera platform and pushed my way through the crowd to the foot of the stage, to see if Clinton had any inside information about Gore’s situation. As I reached up with my microphone, hoping vainly that I could somehow get his attention, he saw me and said, “How’s Al doing in Florida?” If he didn’t know, I surely didn’t have a good answer.

  Clinton had been a peripheral figure in the Gore campaign, much to the president’s annoyance and frustration. Some Clinton aides still think that if Gore had used Clinton as a campaign surrogate in Arkansas, Gore would have won the state, and hence, the election. But Gore was so angry about the Lewinsky affair, and concerned about its political fallout, that he had decided to keep the president offstage.

  With the presidential race still undecided, at midnight I left Hillary’s happy warriors and walked back to Rockefeller Center. As I wrote my Today show story on Hillary’s election, the numbers in Florida were flipping back and forth. Having been wrong once, no one wanted to be wrong again. The networks waited until shortly after two a.m. to give Florida, and the presidency, to Bush. The Gore camp was understandably outraged. No one went to bed. Worst of all, we became the story, because of the premature call of the Florida race. As Tom Brokaw said so memorably at dawn, the networks have “not just egg on their face, but a whole omelet.”

  The next thirty-four days were a kaleidoscope of dangling chads, legal briefs, and spin. The American political process was being tested as it hadn’t been for almost two centuries. Battalions of legal warriors descended on Florida. Al Gore brought in a team led by former secretary of state Warren Christopher, along with David Boies, one of the nation’s most successful litigators. But as it turned out, the postelection contest was less a matter of legal skill than a game of defining the battleground. And there was no one better at the political ground game than former president Bush’s longtime advisor, James Addison Baker III.

  Although the most senior veteran of the Ford, Reagan, and Bush administrations, he had for t
he most part sat out this campaign. While the younger Bush was eager to surround himself with some of his father’s advisors, like Dick Cheney, he seemed to resent others of that generation, particularly Baker and his father’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft.

  Baker and the younger Bush had an uncomfortable history dating back to the 1992 campaign, when Bush felt his father might have won reelection had Baker taken charge before the convention. Now the stakes were too high to dwell on past disagreements. Baker was in his car when he got the call from Bush’s campaign chairman, Don Evans, asking him to head to Florida. The biggest thing on his schedule was a hunting trip in Britain with former president Bush. Suddenly, loyalty to the elder Bush called for a change in plans. Baker flew to Florida, bringing along his trusted lieutenants, Robert Zoellick and Margaret Tutwiler.

  Washington was a strange place during those thirty-six days. I had friends in both camps, and relationships were strained. At private dinners, members of the Supreme Court were clearly agonizing over their role and wishing it had not landed on their doorstep. Programming a nightly political program on cable was a nightmare. It didn’t matter whether we were in midsentence with the leader of the Senate—if a clerk walked out of a courthouse in Florida to announce a bathroom break, the network would break away to carry it live. There were nights when my show was squeezed into a brief segment or two between commercials.

  When it was over, we all praised Al Gore for being statesmanlike,and promptly started focusing on the new administration. What gets lost, often, is the personal drama behind the election results. Gore, whom I’d known since he was a young congressman, was devastated. Out of respect for him, and to be supportive, Alan went to New York to speak to one of his classes at Columbia, where Gore had started teaching. That April, three months after Gore left office, he and Tipper invited us for dinner at their home in Arlington, Virginia, on a Saturday night.