But often the State Department doesn’t deserve the skepticism. One fairly junior-level NSC director, originally from the CIA, when briefing me on the situation in Iraq kept referring to so-and-so as a “typical Foreign Service officer.” The third time I stopped her and asked how long she had been in the government. When she said six years I said that I was not sure she had earned the right to criticize people on that basis, that she was free to criticize individuals, but that I too was an FSO and I didn’t appreciate it. I am sure that from that day I got added to the ranks of “typical FSO.”
In February 2009 I was returning from a quick overnight trip to Jacksonville, Florida, where I had addressed the World Affairs Council. (The subject was North Korea, not Iraq, since nominees must be very careful to hold their comments until after confirmation by the Senate. Nominees are strongly advised to say nothing about their future assignment until they have testified to the relevant Senate committee, which in the case of ambassadors is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.) I found on my BlackBerry that there was a story in various news outlets that morning to the effect that the administration had offered the Iraq ambassadorship to a former CENTCOM commander, retired four-star general Anthony Zinni, but had pulled back and given it to me instead. Worse yet, the on-the-record source of the stories was a very upset General Zinni, who explained that he had been promised the job and had started the process of divesting himself of any activities that could have been interpreted as a conflict of interest, only to be told he wasn’t getting it. Zinni made no secret of the fact that he was hopping mad and provided details of the alleged failure of senior officials, including his soon-to-be best ex-friend of thirty years, National Security Advisor Jim Jones, explaining that the administration had decided to go with a career Foreign Service officer. According to Zinni, Jones went on to offer Zinni something else, possibly the ambassadorship to Saudi Arabia, which Zinni promptly dismissed.
An ambassadorial nominee can find bad news in a winning lottery ticket, so I started enumerating what could go wrong and braced myself for the nomination headaches that were sure to come. The first problem was the mere existence of a “controversy” even though it had nothing to do with me. I talked to Bill Burns, who had figured in Zinni’s account as one of the officials who had failed to call him back. Bill has the world’s most impeccable phone manners (we used to joke he would return the call of a telemarketer). He expressed skepticism that Zinni had been offered the position, but I could sense there was probably more to the story than just a preliminary sounding out of interest.
I didn’t want to appear too interested, but I checked with a few friends at the Pentagon and the NSC staff and, sure enough, the version of events was pretty much as Zinni had described them, but with a definite twist: this was not a military versus FSO issue. Rather, when some senior army generals heard that a retired CENTCOM commander—a marine, no less—was slated to be the ambassador to Iraq, they quickly went into action to protect their own four-star on the scene, General Ray Odierno.
Secretary of Defense Bob Gates shared the concern that eight stars in Bagdad might be excessive, and made the case with Clinton that at a time when the United States was seeking to civilianize the Iraq mission, we should not send a former senior military officer there as ambassador. She had supported her old friend Zinni, one of many military leaders she had cultivated during her time as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but quickly understood Gates’s message and went to work to find a Foreign Service officer. The search hadn’t gone well. Former European assistant secretary Beth Jones, an officer with considerable Middle East and South Asian experience, including as a deputy assistant secretary for NEA, was willing and highly regarded, but she ran into vetting problems due to her work with a consulting firm.
From my point of view, however, the damage was done. Dick Holbrooke’s name got dragged in as someone who was trying to install one of his protégés and therefore extend his own empire of activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, some of Zinni’s friends rallied to his cause saying that he was a victim of the Foreign Service. Blogs sympathetic to him and suspicious of the new administration’s commitment to the Iraq mission and to me, given my North Korea experience, implied that I had schemed my way into this “plum” assignment.
Two days later, Senator John McCain (R-AZ), a close friend of Zinni, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) issued a news release questioning my qualifications for the post. McCain would later say to the full Senate that “we have a choice here, between Hill and Zinni,” as if it were to be a run-off competition. The McCain-Graham press release referred to my “controversial” role in the North Korean negotiations. Suddenly my nomination, according to an Associated Press story, was in doubt and “embattled.”
Not to be outdone, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) issued a statement announcing that I had “lied to the Senate” in my North Korean negotiations and that he would have no choice but to place a hold on the nomination.
My “lie” was the following: Senator Brownback strongly opposed the Six Party nuclear negotiations with North Korea, and in the summer of 2008 had held the ambassadorial nominee to the Republic of Korea, Kathleen Stephens, for four months while he figured out what he wanted in return. With the intervention of Senator John Warner (R-VA), who fully understood the madness of not sending an ambassador to one of our most important partners in the world, Brownback agreed to lift his hold, provided I would say in testimony that if we got to the stage with the North Koreans of negotiating normalization of relations with them, I would agree to open a separate track to discuss North Korea’s abysmal human rights record. I told Senator Brownback in testimony that I would invite our North Korean human rights envoy, Jay Lefkowitz, to any and all Six Party meetings, which I did though he never had the time to make it out to Beijing.
The sad truth was that nobody in the Six Party Talks had the slightest interest in inviting the U.S. North Korean human rights envoy to the meetings. As my Russian colleague asked, “What is problem? You don’t think getting DPRK [North Korea] to give up nuclear weapons is hard enough?!” In fact, were we to get to normalization talks it would have been entirely appropriate and essential to include human rights in the negotiations, just as we have done in many other such talks with in-from-the-cold dictatorships. Of course, we never got to the stage with North Korea that we would normalize, nor, frankly, did I think we ever would. But the request to raise human rights in that context was entirely reasonable, and in any event I was committed to making it a separate track if the normalization talks had ever proceeded.
There was another issue. Congress had worked hard to get the Bush administration to name a human rights envoy. The decision to name Lefkowitz, a close confidant of Brownback with an impressive background in forging the Bush administration’s position on the stem cell issue, was controversial because he had a full-time job in New York as a litigator. It was not clear to many of his critics that he would have the time to devote to unpaid chores as a human rights envoy for North Korea, a subject with which he had zero familiarity. Some congressmen and senators, concerned about whether the envoy would have enough time to devote to the duties, wrote into the legislation that the person must not be “double hatted,” that is, cannot also hold another job in the State Department, but should be paid and considered a full-time Department of State employee.
Since he was sometimes reported to be critical of the bureaucracy for not implementing his approach to North Korea, I made sure that my entire North Korea team understood that they were to support him and never try to edit his op-eds. In the interagency meetings I went out of my way to support him on ideas that had come to him from various Korean groups in the United States to beam propaganda to North Korea via radio or, my favorite, leaflets carried inside giant helium-filled balloons that had the shape of huge condoms.
In mid-February I went up to my family’s farmhouse in Rhode Island for a weekend alone. After picking up the newspapers on Sunday morning in the g
eneral store I went home to sit down with coffee in my favorite mug and watch CNN’s Late Edition. Dick Cheney was John King’s guest. I watched with growing surprise at the degree to which the former vice president, only weeks out of office, was willing to take direct swipes at the new president. Cheney’s approach to the new administration was in stark contrast to the gracious way President Bush had conducted himself in departing office. As I studied the Boston Globe sports section to see how some of the Red Sox pitching prospects looked on the eve of the first spring training games, King asked the former veep: So what do you think of the president’s choice of Chris Hill to be ambassador to Iraq? I looked up to see the former vice president respond, “There are a lot of better candidates than that.”
I sat in my late mother’s recliner, motionless, one hand clasped around my Joshua L. Chamberlain Museum coffee cup, the other keeping my jaw from dropping to the floor. I shook my head slowly and asked no one in particular what it takes for a former vice president, who for a period of eight (very) long years was only a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the universe, to stoop to a cheap shot like that on national television against a nominee for service in Iraq.
As I was preparing for my confirmation, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a new insurgency tactic. The insurgents were making handkerchief-sized parachutes so that the explosive device, upon being hurled in the air, would come down slowly on the less protected roofs of U.S. vehicles. I read that story and thought, maybe Brownback likes me after all.
• • •
The nomination process is never quite as bad as it seems at the time, and indeed many senators from both sides of the aisle came forward in support. Importantly, I met with Lindsey Graham, who told me that he had talked to a number of U.S. generals who had worked with me over the years and strongly supported my nomination. General Petraeus and General Odierno signaled their support, as did all the former U.S. ambassadors to Iraq. “If you are good enough for them, you are good enough for me,” Senator Graham told me (he was to visit twice while I was in Baghdad). I asked him for advice on Brownback. “I can’t help you with Brownback,” suggesting they were not the closest of friends. On a domestic airplane trip I had sat next to Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), who subsequently supported me. On the Senator Foreign Relations Committee both Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Senator John Kerry (D-MA) promised strong support, as did most of the other members. I reached out to as many senators as would see me, and was honored that one of my own senators from Rhode Island, Jack Reed, a Vietnam veteran and an expert on Iraq, agreed to introduce me at the hearing.
Senator McCain issued a stinging press announcement questioning my competence, seizing on the fact that I did not speak Arabic and raising Zinni again. As a prominent Republican explained to me, McCain had “nothing personal” against me; he opposed the nomination on principle because of Obama’s refusal during the campaign to give credit to the “surge” of U.S. troops into Iraq in 2007.
Before the Senate vote I went to McCain’s office to meet him for the first time. He was armed with talking points full of distorted comments attributed to me in connection with the North Korean negotiations. Months before, a Washington Post reporter asked me during an evening reception at the nonprofit organization Search for Common Ground’s annual awards what I thought of North Korea’s human rights record. I replied that every country, including our own, needs to work on its human rights record, but that North Korea had the most work to do because it had just about the worst human rights record on the planet. The article suggested the possibility that I had come to the conclusion that the U.S. and North Korean human rights record were somehow equivalent. McCain read from that story in a disgusted tone.
I was dumbfounded, but the confirmation process being what it is, I sat before the senator taking it all in, trying to occasionally draw his attention to my thirty-one-year record of service and my qualifications for the job. He was not interested. Instead he undertook an impassioned soliloquy on the surge and Obama’s perfidy in failing to acknowledge its role in winning the war.
I tried to suggest this was all rather over my pay grade. I told the senator that if confirmed I would look forward to working with him on the best policies for U.S. interests in Iraq. He continued to express his outrage over President Obama. He seemed so consumed by his anger that when the interview was over, he was uninterested even in shaking my hand, instead sitting in his chair, continuing his inner dialogue with himself about the president’s failure to endorse the surge. I contrasted what seemed like deep-seated, pent-up anger that was so out of proportion with anything I or the president for that matter had done, with his public persona, that look of earnest but rueful sorrow and seriousness, and playful sense of humor that he regularly displays on Sunday morning talk shows. “Great job!” his embarrassed staffer told me.
• • •
The committee hearing went fine, but Senator Brownback maintained his hold on the nomination, in effect demanding a floor debate and delaying my departure at least another three weeks due to the Easter break. Once floor action was scheduled it was a foregone conclusion that the Senate would approve the nomination, at which point one does begin to question the motivation of a person like Brownback, who had shown no interest in the Iraq War one way or the other, to hold up the departure of the ambassador.
A staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested privately that Brownback was perhaps fund-raising, that is, holding the nomination at the behest of special interest groups. I got on the Internet to look at Brownback’s donor list. It was a motley crew whose only common denominator seemed to be that many had nothing to do with Kansas, par for the course in modern political fund-raising. I was not able to find any group that would have been exercised about me or about sending an ambassador to Iraq, not surprising given that Brownback’s own views on Iraq seemed to be a blank slate. I concluded his opposition to me must have been based on the great line from the Star Wars bar scene when someone says to one of the protagonists: “He doesn’t like you!”
As I prepared for what turned out to be a desultory meeting with Brownback, some of my colleagues in EAP did some research to explore whether there was anything Brownback and I had in common. (Who knows, one of them said: “Maybe he likes the Red Sox.”) They reported that Brownback has a tremendous interest in Mother Teresa. Perhaps I could talk about my work with her. Since the time I worked with her in Albania, I had kept a few pictures in a frame in my office, including a note from her: “To Chris Hill, God love you for all the help you have given our poor. My gift is my prayer for you.”
I said, “Mother Teresa might be a way to break the ice with him.” Then my colleague added, “You should also know that every year around Easter, Senator Brownback washes the feet of his staffers.” I looked back at him and said nothing.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said.
I said on the record in my hearing that I would leave immediately for Iraq as soon as I was confirmed. I made the commitment for a couple of reasons. The first was that I was troubled by Ambassador Crocker’s comments that everyone who knew anything in the embassy had left, and second, my commitment to get on a plane immediately added to the sense of urgency of getting the nomination through.
My concern about an ambassadorless embassy was heightened when I received a call from NEA, asking me to call a contractor in the embassy’s political section and suggest he not submit for publication in the New York Times an impassioned plea to the Senate to confirm me. I asked why I should call, and was told that the State Department and Embassy Baghdad leadership both felt the op-ed could be counterproductive in the sense that some senators might be offended that the State Department was encroaching on their prerogatives. I asked in that case why didn’t the chargé (interim ambassador) or the employee’s immediate supervisor tell him not to publish it. After all, he was in Baghdad as a U.S. government employee, paid for by the U.S. government and not there to run his own foreign
policy. He won’t listen, I was told. I realized I was dealing with a different kind of embassy. My thoughts turned to how quickly Eagleburger would have handled that situation in Embassy Belgrade.
When the Senate floor debate finally came on April 20, it was essentially Kerry versus Brownback. Senator Kerry was energetic and generous in his support. I kept thinking about how I wished my parents were alive to hear him.
On the other hand, I was glad my parents were not around to hear Brownback’s half of the debate. He opened by reminding the Senate that this was Holocaust Remembrance Week. I asked Glyn Davies, who was standing in my office with me watching the debate on C-SPAN, “Where’s he going with this?”
“Maybe he thinks you’re Hitler.”
It soon became apparent that the connection to the Holocaust was that some FSOs in Switzerland in the late 1930s had refused visas to Jews, dooming them to return to Nazi Germany and certain death. In Brownback’s world, I was the living prodigy of that. As he droned on I was running a grainy slide show in my head of things I had done in the course of my government career. Peace Corps, the Solidarity movement in Poland, reporting on democracy demonstrations in South Korea in the spring of 1987, meeting in remote prison work camps with the families of political prisoners in Albania in 1991, gaining access to mass graves in Bosnia in 1995, meeting with displaced persons in central Kosovo and helping to provide them with food and shelter in the summer of 1998, a midnight visit to the Stenkovac refugee camp to protect Roma under attack from angry gangs of Kosovo refugees, working (quietly and effectively) with Chinese officials to allow North Korean refugees to get out of the diplomatic compound in Shenyang on to new homes in South Korea, convincing Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen to release immediately Kem Sokha and other arrested members of the human rights movement . . . I sat slumped in my chair watching the closing statement as the Senate readied a vote. McCain stood to denounce me, employing that mournful, concerned voice he uses in public.
Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir Page 33