We were not experimenting, or using Albanians as a laboratory, because almost everything we were doing in Albania was being done elsewhere in the newly independent states of the post–Cold War period. In Albania, USAID funded still one more project. The Albanian dictatorship had created a gulag of prison camps located in some of the most remote places in this remote country. People sent to prison spent decades in these prison farms, as did their families, who had been evicted from their apartments for having had a “bad biography” (Albania’s contribution to the lexicon of twentieth-century communist dictatorships). They lived in these rural barracks without schooling or any other amenities that would equip them for life in a modern state.
It was difficult to explain such systemic cruelty to American visitors. When Deputy Treasury Secretary John Robson visited, I asked our Albanian assistant to pull together a group of ex-political prisoners who had suffered internal exile in the gulag system. “We need at least fifteen of them,” I told Kestrina. “No problem,” she answered. “And I’d like that each has been in prison for twenty years to show the extent of the issue.” “No problem,” she answered, shrugging her shoulders at the simplicity of fulfilling the request.
Kestrina’s group of twenty ex-political prisoners who had served twenty years apiece met with Robson in a small room in the embassy. The most senior was Osman Kazazi, who had been in internal exile for forty-six years and was now eighty-seven years old. Robson listened to all of them telling stories of their horrific lives. “We all need to think about the future,” Robson concluded, while Kazazi nodded in agreement, albeit somewhat confused. USAID Deputy Administrator Carol Adelman then put together a training program for the victims and especially their families, teaching them to manage hotels that we believed were sure to come. With Robson serving as bureaucratic top cover, Adelman made clear to the cumbersome USAID bureaucracy (and perhaps with the aging Kazazi in mind) that we didn’t have a lot of time. We needed to get this done now. Over the months and years, a country whose system had been based on terror was, thanks in part to U.S. assistance, being transformed into a country that could begin to live and breathe.
In a part of Europe where war clouds were gathering fast, despite the forecast of a sunny and warm post–Cold War era, Albania managed to stay out of trouble. It stayed on the right track with a modicum of foreign aid but with a great deal of support from the United States. Albania would later send troops to Iraq and by 2007 would be invited to join NATO. It wasn’t the number one issue in Europe, but I had learned a lot about how to manage these situations.
After completing my tour in Albania, I returned to work in the State Department’s European Bureau, with responsibility for all the countries of northern Central Europe, including the newly independent Baltic states and Hungary, the Czech and Slovak republics, and of course Poland.
• • •
In September 1994, the new assistant secretary for Europe, Richard Holbrooke, asked to meet me. I had never met him, nor had anyone explained to me why he had asked to see me. But given that we were in the first chaotic days of his tenure as the assistant secretary of the bureau (EUR), which oversees the primary implementation of U.S. policy in Europe, I thought it might be in connection with a reassignment, perhaps something to do with the Balkans. I was right.
Ambassador Holbrooke had taken over EUR two weeks before with a mandate to improve it in any way he could, to make it responsive to the problems now coming fast and furious in the post–Cold War world. He began to put together a strong leadership team to deal with these challenges. For his principal deputy he selected John Kornblum, an officer known throughout European policy circles for his work in helping to create that continent’s post–Cold War multilateral architecture. For the newly liberated states of Eastern Europe, renamed Central Europe, he selected Bob Frasure, who had served as the first U.S. ambassador to Estonia. Bob, a negotiator at heart, had played a crucial role in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from that fledgling state.
The most urgent of these changes was to find a team that could work with Bob Frasure to help devise a policy to address the violence in the Balkans, which was making a mockery of international standards of human rights—the slogan of a Europe “whole, free and at peace.” The ongoing fighting in the Balkans was also contributing mightily to the fraying of the transatlantic relations. The breakup of Yugoslavia was fast shaping up as a major post–Cold War crisis gripping the young Clinton administration.
But the complexity of it exceeded people’s patience in trying to understand it. On the one hand, there was the interest of the northern republics, Slovenia and Croatia, to exit a state consisting of poorer regions and republics that they felt were holding them back. To want to leave seemed fair enough, especially when these aspirations were consistent with long-standing U.S. sympathy for self-determination. But changing of international borders was not something lightly regarded in Europe, or in the United States or anywhere for that matter. Croatian and Slovene nationalists regarded Yugoslavia as a conspiracy to enshrine the hegemony of Serbia. Yet the origins of the Yugoslav state were far more complex, and in fact in the early twentieth century those two republics wanted to join forces with Serbia to resist the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
From the Serb nationalist point of view, another narrative flowed, that of Yugoslavia being a conspiracy to make the great nation of the Serbs a one-eighth player among five other republics and two autonomous regions, in effect denying the Serbs their sovereign place in Europe. This latter narrative in Serbia, so cynically and shamelessly exploited by its leader, Slobodan Milosevic, ultimately worked with Croatian and Slovene nationalism to break up Yugoslavia.
But breaking up is hard to do, and with the internal political maps of Yugoslavia not corresponding to the internal ethnic map, war, a phenomenon well-known in the Balkans, was a present danger. When the European Union countries gave diplomatic recognition to Bosnia, having encouraged the Bosnians to hold a referendum, they hoped that diplomatic recognition would end the matter. Instead, the Serbs sharpened their pitchforks.
Many Serbs had lived in Croatia and Bosnia for centuries. When these republics seceded, Serbia claimed parts of each of them.
Amid all this history, the supply of which certainly exceeded the demand for it, the State Department’s European bureau was far better set up to deal with the need for thoughtful, well-drafted, and typo-free memos to prepare senior officials for polite discussions with European senior officials than it was for the direct diplomacy required to deal with those responsible for murder and mayhem in distant Balkan villages.
Bureaucratically, the Balkans was still handled as a kind of backwater, the issues tucked away in the so-called southern tier of the Office of Eastern Europe and Yugoslav Affairs, located on a floor below that of the assistant secretary. Meanwhile, offices that dealt with Europe’s “architecture,” including NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the European Union, were all located within shouting distance of the assistant secretary.
Holbrooke’s first step was to make EUR more like the East Asian and Pacific Affairs (EAP) bureau, which he had run during the Carter administration—make the offices smaller and eliminate middle management, that is, the deputy directors, and thus remove the “layered look” and turn it into a bureau with an operational mandate capable of dealing with the real crises of the day.
A week before I had been enjoying my new role as the deputy director in the Office of Eastern European Affairs. I was responsible for the northern tier of countries, which included all the Baltic states and the upper tier of east-central European states, including Poland, where I had served just three years before. But as much as I was interested in working on these countries, I realized that by the summer of 1994 they had lost a lot of their luster. There were no crises to manage. Soviet troops were fast withdrawing from bases in the now-independent Baltic States, and some of the relationships were burgeoning—namely, with Poland—with the expectation that NATO me
mbership might be extended to some of them. The lack of urgency, however, meant that these countries had become very much secondary in the minds of senior policy makers. In fact, a week before my summons to Holbrooke’s office, I had learned that my position was slated to be abolished as part of his reforms.
The European Bureau is the proudest, one of the busiest, and, viewed from the rest of the State Department, the least-liked of the bureaus. Every Foreign Service officer wants to have a foothold there because that is where the good jobs are. The Latin American bureau can offer a position in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires, but that is about it in terms of family-friendly assignments. The list of cushy assignments in Europe goes on and on. Of course, such a state of affairs does not necessarily attract the most agreeable staff, and the stories of Foreign Service officers trying to get into EUR are replete with examples of arrogance from their EUR counterparts. When I was preparing to leave Seoul, I had applied in 1988 to be the desk officer for Bulgaria, a modest perch if ever there was one. The deputy director of the office of Eastern Europe told me cheerfully about my chances: “You haven’t done badly: you are fifth on our list.”
I stood at Holbrooke’s doorway and looked into the oddly darkened wood-paneled office, the ceiling fluorescents all turned off, with the only lighting coming from a couple of table lamps nearby that illuminated the couch and upholstered chairs for visitors. He motioned me in and I walked across the room. He rose from behind the desk to introduce himself and shake my hand, still keeping his eye on the NBC Nightly News on the small television sitting on the windowsill, the view of the Lincoln Memorial beyond. He offered me a seat on one of the two hard-backed chairs positioned in front of his large desk while correspondent Andrea Mitchell talked onscreen. The walls were covered with pictures of Holbrooke with famous people, often from his days of managing our country’s relationships in Asia. I thought about the extraordinary career he was having, truly one of the giants of U.S. foreign policy, even though as a political appointee of the Democrats he had sat out the Reagan and Bush administrations in the private sector. What a country, I thought, that can afford to take a talent like this and sit him on the bench for twelve years. I continued to survey the scene of this larger-than-life figure who was in effect keeping me on hold as Mitchell concluded her story. There was a small door in the back wall that was left open, the toilet visible and the seat up.
Holbrooke finally asked me, one of his eyes still fixed on the television, now showing an antacid commercial, “What do you think of the changes I have made to EUR?” These reforms had, of course, included abolishing the deputy director job I had just started two months before, but before I could answer he held up his right hand as if directing traffic and went back to full-time listening to the news. He turned to me again, this time asking, “What should we do with Yugoslavia?” As I was about to answer, he raised his hand again, though this time he absentmindedly pointed the remote control at me. I didn’t mute immediately, but I understood that he wanted to focus on the Nightly News.
At that moment Holbrooke, still watching television with his body turned to me as if we were in the midst of a conversation, managed to triple-task by motioning into his office Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary John Kornblum, who had appeared in the doorway. John walked into the room and sat down in the other hard-backed chair to join in the competition for Holbrooke’s attention.
“Okay, I’ll hire him,” Holbrooke told John. He muted the TV, and then turning to me, he added, “In case you didn’t notice, I just offered you a job.” I found myself thoroughly enjoying the scene. I had never had a remote pointed at me before. Holbrooke added yet another task: opening his thin brown leather briefcase to find a clean pair of socks to change into in the middle of all this. I had been looking at John taking his seat and watching a little of Andrea Mitchell’s newscast myself, still waiting for Holbrooke to reengage with whatever it was he had asked me to come to his office to discuss, then turned to him to ask, “That’s wonderful, but could you tell me what the job is?”
“I want you to be the new director of the Balkans for the new office I have just created: the Office of South Central European Affairs.”
I thought about insisting on a name change for the office before accepting (South Central Europe sounded more to me like Switzerland than the Balkans), but decided I could fight that one later. I accepted. He glanced at his watch to see that it was about 7:30 P.M. and that he was late for something. He threw some papers in his briefcase (as well as the dirty socks), explaining that John would tell me the details. Before he left, he encouraged me to make whatever personnel changes I wanted in the office and said, “See you in New York on Sunday at noon.”
John and I walked into his office, next to Holbrooke’s, where he filled me in on what would be happening in New York. The United Nations General Assembly would be starting its fall meetings. I was to accompany Holbrooke to meetings in New York that would take up most of the week and would be primarily focused on the Bosnian delegation, expected Sunday afternoon. The task was to convince the Bosnians, and others, that lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia, as many in the U.S. Congress were calling for, would not so much help the Bosnians as it would embolden the Serbs and increase the bloodshed.
However, the U.S. position needed to go beyond simply opposing the lifting of the arms embargo. We needed to show the Bosnians, starting with President Alija Izetbegovic, that we were serious about finding a solution to a crisis that had spanned two administrations, caused thousands of civilian causalities and human rights violations on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II, and was ruining the transatlantic relationship just when it needed to become stronger in addressing post–Cold War challenges. Izetbegovic needed to know that America was committed to ending the war and achieving a just solution for the Bosnians. We would not abandon the problem, or leave the Bosnians to their fate. We would be committed to the end.
Since my time in Yugoslavia with Ambassador Eagleburger, things had not gone well there. Yugoslavia, relatively small though it was, was a symbol for both East and West, having defied Stalin, but never integrating with the West. It also was a leader in what was then called the Third World and was a key player in the so-called North-South dialogue. In the beginning of the twentieth century, south Slavic peoples came together to resist the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was seeking to replace the Ottoman Empire, now in fast retreat. The collective interests of those south Slavic peoples had long given way to centrifugal forces as each republic, especially the more economic advantaged northern ones, looked for a way out of Yugoslavia. Slovenia’s exit was relatively painless, but the fact that large Serb minorities had lived in Croatia and Bosnia for centuries would make the declaration of independence of those two republics far more problematic. The fact that Bosnia’s population was some 30–35 percent Serb would make its own declaration especially difficult. Immediately after the holding of the independence referendum by the Muslim-dominated government, the Serbs, especially those in the rural areas of eastern Bosnia, rose up to declare their own right of self-determination so that they would not be a minority in a new Bosnian state.
Sitting with John after the “interview” with Holbrooke, I asked him if that was how most decisions were being made in there, pointing over at Holbrooke’s now-empty office. He smiled and said, “No, most are far more chaotic than that.”
John explained what had led Holbrooke to change directors earlier in the day. John had recommended me for the job in the morning, and Holbrooke agreed, with the proviso that he had to meet me personally.
I had met John Kornblum for the first time just the previous day, quite randomly. I usually walked to the Tenleytown Metro station from my home in Washington, D.C., but running a few minutes late I had hopped on the M-4 commuter bus, recognized John, and sat down next to him. He was absorbed in the sports page, and so I introduced myself as the deputy director for the northern tier of the soon-to-be-defunct Office of Eastern European and Yugoslav Affairs, se
veral rungs below the principal deputy assistant secretary.
John was one of the great career Foreign Service officers, a person whose knowledge of Europe was unmatched. He had been in the center of many of the crucial decisions about Germany since the early 1970s: the Four Party Arrangements, which enhanced stability in Germany; and the East-West process in the mid-1970s, which created the Helsinki Final Act and in turn had created the Conference of Security and Co-operation in Europe, later the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. These were the main elements of the political and security architecture in Europe that normalized relations with the Soviet Union and introduced the concept of human rights as an element of European policy. He was one of the great minds in NATO and understood the delicate balance of U.S. leadership and European ownership. He understood the threat that instability posed in the Balkans to all that had been achieved—and would need to be achieved—in the transatlantic alliance.
He also had flair and knew how to get things done—something that obviously had appealed to Holbrooke. A few years before, John was serving in Germany as the United States minister in Berlin. This was the senior civilian job in Berlin and it made John responsible for all U.S. policy in the city. He had proposed that President Reagan’s 1987 visit for Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebration be transformed into a political initiative. Against great opposition, John had worked out an agreement to have the president stand at the famous Brandenburg Gate on the border between East and West Berlin, and had proposed the key sentence in the president’s speech calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.
I thought about whether I should discuss the article he was reading on the Redskins and their quarterbacking woes at the time, whether Heath Shuler, the Redskins number one draft pick that year, was the answer (he was not, though he did go on to have a career in politics), or talk about the future of Europe.
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