by Susan Rice
This time, Ethiopia routed Eritrea. The U.S. led the U.N. Security Council in imposing an arms embargo on both countries, a step many observers argued we should have taken earlier, but that until then, we assessed, would have made tough negotiations even more difficult. When the offensive ebbed, we were able to persuade the parties to return to Algiers for further proximity talks in early June. After a few weeks of additional negotiations, Tony and our team gained both sides’ agreement to a formal cessation of hostilities and complex arrangements for separating and monitoring the opposing forces with a U.N. peacekeeping force. The parties also agreed to conclude a final and binding peace agreement that would define and demarcate the border, resolve all claims and disputes, and eventually restore ties between the countries. The Algiers Agreement was signed by the parties on December 12, 2000, and by Secretary Albright on behalf of the U.S. as a co-guarantor.
The deadliest inter-state conflict in the world had ended. The U.S. partnership with the OAU and Algeria to accomplish this goal was indispensable as well as unprecedented. The Clinton administration was given considerable credit for the eventual success of our negotiation by some of the same press outlets that had criticized us six months earlier. On behalf of President Clinton, for our work to resolve this horrific conflict, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger awarded Tony, me, and Gayle the Samuel Nelson Drew Memorial Award. This prize was deeply meaningful, as it recognized the sacrifice of my late NSC colleague, an Air Force colonel, who died in 1995 along with two other dedicated public servants, Joe Kruzel and Robert Frasure, in a fiery accident on a mountainside in Bosnia, while working with Richard Holbrooke to bring peace to the Balkans. Their loss is emblematic of the risks our unsung Foreign Service Officers and civil servants as well as our uniformed military, incur every day to bring peace and hope to the most dangerous parts of the world.
For over two years, our Ethiopia-Eritrea negotiating team was relentless in their high-stakes, high-stress diplomacy with two sides that needed and resented us in equal measure. I honed my skills as a negotiator, diplomat, and team leader, experiencing firsthand the extreme difficulty of trying to reconcile warring parties. I learned the immeasurable value of patience and persistence in a complex negotiation, the difficulty of overcoming the intransigence of stubborn leaders facing their own domestic pressures, and the importance of negotiating outside the glare of the public spotlight where positions only harden.
In this, as in many conflicts, U.S. diplomatic engagement was essential to achieving an agreement. No other country could have applied the resources, prestige, tenacity, and weight to press for resolution; yet, as we were repeatedly reminded, U.S. influence has limits. America cannot compel recalcitrant warring parties to make peace, even when they are poor and substantially dependent on us for assistance. While tireless effort is best exerted at every stage to try to end a war, I found that the breakthrough often only comes when one or both sides is exhausted and ready to relent. Until then, the conflict likely will not prove “ripe” for resolution through mediation.
In January 2001, shortly before the administration ended, I visited Eritrea for the last time. Over the prior three years, it had been Isaias who was most difficult throughout the negotiation, yet he was the one who insisted on taking me dancing at a popular nightclub in Asmara and out on the Red Sea in a small Eritrean military boat from the port of Massawa. Awkward, ironic, and in some ways gratifying, that visit would give me the chance to see him finally relax and revert briefly to his former jovial, if caustic, self. It would be the last time we had any fun together.
After the war concluded in December 2000, a long, cold peace ensued; but progress toward demarcating the border and normalizing relations between the two adversaries would remain frozen until 2018, when a new Ethiopian leader finally agreed to fully implement our original agreement unconditionally.
10 “I Remember When I Too Was a Young Assistant Secretary”
“Don’t forget, it can always get worse.”
Barely ten months into my job as assistant secretary of state for African affairs, on August 6, I was given memorable advice by Tony Lake as I struggled to juggle competing conflicts while establishing my leadership of the bureau. Tony—twenty-five years my senior—was just the person from whom I needed to get wisdom and perspective. Over dinner, I lamented the crush of crises, confessing it was starting to feel overwhelming. He listened intently, but instead of offering much needed reassurance, Tony warned quietly that more could still come.
Hours later, shortly after 3:40 a.m., the secure phone next to my bed rang. I answered to hear the familiar formality: “This is the State Department Operations Center with Ambassador Johnnie Carson for Assistant Secretary Rice.”
“This is she,” I said, rousing myself from a deep sleep.
My deputy, his voice laden with concern, reported, “There have been two near simultaneous attacks on our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. It seems they were truck bombs. Ambassador Bushnell in Kenya reports numerous casualties.”
I jumped out of bed. Within minutes, I was out the door and on my way to State. When I arrived ten minutes later, I went straight to the Operations Center on the seventh floor, the nerve center of the department, where watch officers answer calls from around the world, follow the news, cable traffic, and connect State personnel by voice- or videoconference to every embassy in the world and any department in Washington. I was pointed to a conference room, where a secure videoconference was already in progress.
My former boss, Dick Clarke, was on the screen chairing an emergency session of the Counter-terrorism Support Group, the interagency committee mandated to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks. He asked the military to transport U.S.-based civilian search-and-rescue teams to arrive as quickly as possible to recover victims from the wreckage. He directed the FBI to send teams immediately to Nairobi and Dar to investigate the attacks.
Early reports indicated that the bombings had all the hallmarks of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda—simultaneity, potency, American targets. In Kenya, twelve Americans—diplomats, family members, military and intelligence personnel—were killed, along with an estimated 200 Kenyan civilians, including over thirty who worked at the embassy, plus scores of passersby on the street. Thousands were wounded, many grievously by flying glass and debris. The building caved, the scene conjuring Dante’s Inferno. In Tanzania, eleven Tanzanians were killed but no Americans.
Nairobi was the deadliest attack on a U.S. embassy in American history. We learned later that morning that Al Qaeda also planned to strike a third U.S. embassy at the same time in Kampala, Uganda. By a fluke of luck, however, Ugandan authorities stopped the truck carrying explosives at the border and averted that bombing.
Never had I experienced a crisis of this magnitude—and right square in my chain of command. My colleagues had been killed. Our embassies across the continent remained at heightened risk. Many were vulnerable due to their proximity to roadways and their routine construction in the “pre-Inman” era (that is, before the 1983 Beirut bombing, after which most of our embassies were built to withstand such powerful blasts). Al Qaeda could strike again without notice. Families of Americans in Kenya were overwhelming the phones at the Operations Center seeking information and solace. We set up several twenty-four-hour task forces to support the embassies, monitor developments, and assist the families of victims. As we labored to save the injured, we evacuated many to U.S. military medical facilities in Germany and the U.S.
Throughout this ordeal, I was on the phone with our ambassadors in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, trying to meet their requests for support and intelligence. My deputies and I sought to comfort staff who had lost embassy co-workers and friends, even as we were all compelled to keep working in overdrive, with little sleep, throughout the aftermath of the bombings.
Shortly after the attacks, I received an unsolicited visit from a psychiatrist in the State Department Medical Unit. He came, he said, because he was concerned about morale
among the Washington-based staff in the Africa Bureau. With remarkable clumsiness for a shrink, he asked, “You understand, don’t you, how much stress and trauma your colleagues in the bureau feel?”
Indignant and impatient with this seemingly pedestrian intrusion, I said, “Of course, I do.” I thought, what the hell is your point?
He said he hoped that I could assist in reducing their anxiety by easing their workload and assuaging their fears.
Then I snapped, “We are all under stress. Understandably. We have just lost a dozen of our colleagues. They are not coming back. We are working around the clock to support their families and the embassy staff. I hardly see what you think we can stop doing at this stage. We are going to have to muscle through this as best we can. Thank you for your concern.”
Opening the door to let him out, I all but slammed it behind him. I had no patience for his touchy-feely platitudes. With hindsight, I better appreciate that it was his job to show concern and try to alleviate our collective distress. My frustration with the doctor stemmed from failing to see how I or anyone else could have measurably eased the burden we all felt. Additionally, I now wonder if my ability to compartmentalize and plow through pain left me unable to fully appreciate how others may process grief differently.
Days later, I traveled with Secretary Albright to Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. We visited grievously wounded embassy staff in Nairobi’s hospitals, several of whom had lost limbs and suffered life-changing injuries from glass and metal projectiles. We saw the shell of our destroyed embassy, a shocking monument to the potency of the blast. While mourning the Kenyans and Tanzanians killed and wounded, the secretary and I tried to lend emotional support to our country teams in both capitals. Throughout, I felt overwhelmed by loss, stricken by the power of evil, and submerged in the anger and grief of loved ones, especially as we flew eighteen hours back to Andrews Air Force Base in a C-17 military transport plane alongside the flag-draped coffins of our colleagues.
August 7, 1998, was the worst day of my professional life, as it was for many colleagues, from the secretary of state to desk officers in the Africa Bureau. Yet, our grief and devastation bore no comparison to that felt by Ambassador Bushnell, her brave team at Embassy Nairobi, and, above all, the families whose loved ones were killed. On that infamous day, terror took our foreign service officers. A Marine and airmen. Intelligence officers. Civil servants. An epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control. American public servants, all.
Susan Bartley lost both her husband and son. Julian Bartley Sr. was a senior embassy officer, and Julian “Jay” Jr. was interning at the mission over the summer. As with the others, Susan and her daughter, Edith’s, immeasurable pain saddens me to this day. Each colleague lost, each family bereft, weighed on me with almost suffocating force. These dedicated professionals were patriots doing their utmost for their country on August 7, just like they did every day.
Two weeks after the attacks, President Clinton retaliated by sending scores of Tomahawk missiles into an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The decision to attack and the target selection were closely held within a small group of cabinet-level principals. Dick Clarke, as counterterrorism czar, was in those meetings, but I was not. The attacks were criticized by Clinton’s political opponents as “Wag the Dog” distractions from the mounting Monica Lewinsky scandal. In fact, the U.S. reprisals were justified and barely proportionate responses to Al Qaeda’s terrorism and a warning that we could strike their facilities inside Afghanistan at will.
The Sudan target was a more controversial choice. It was selected largely because a soil sample analyzed by U.S. intelligence revealed the presence of EMPTA, a precursor compound for VX, a deadly chemical agent of the sort Al Qaeda threatened to weaponize against American targets. Bin Laden, who lived until 1995 in Sudan, was also believed to have had some financial stake in the factory. But the Sudanese government and some others maintained that the plant had always been a purely civilian, commercial facility that had been gratuitously hit due to American animus toward the country. The Sudanese claims were never validated.
In the months that followed, we operated on high alert, given the potential that additional U.S. facilities in Africa would be hit by Al Qaeda. We faced an unyielding stream of threat information, much of it specific, revealing plots to attack targets across the continent. It was like playing whack-a-mole, trying to stay ahead of the enemy and thwart any future strikes. I led the Africa Bureau through a detailed assessment of the vulnerability of our diplomatic posts on the continent, with the aim of having a strong basis for seeking additional funds from Congress to harden or rebuild those facilities that needed it most. In the late 1990s, many of our African posts were deemed both “high threat,” meaning we assessed there to be an Al Qaeda presence or ability to hit the target, and “high vulnerability.” We felt like sitting ducks.
Secretary Albright successfully pressed Congress to appropriate supplemental funds to reinforce existing embassies, including with such basic measures as placing Mylar on windows to reduce blast impact and prevent glass flying and installing makeshift barricades to achieve additional “setback” from the street. Albright also obtained funds to rebuild our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in safer locations and to accelerate the gradual pace of new construction to replace other vulnerable missions across Africa.
Within the Africa Bureau, our top priority was to avoid another attack, even at the expense of normal embassy operations. When one evening in December 1998 my principal deputy, Johnnie Carson, reported that we had multiple, credible, imminent threats targeting numerous U.S. embassies, I immediately ordered the shutdown of all our embassies in Africa for the following day. I then returned to the pressing issues at hand, working as usual late into the evening. The next morning, I received an early phone call from my immediate boss, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Pickering. Uncharacteristically irate, he yelled, “How the hell do you close all the embassies in Africa and neglect to inform the Seventh Floor?”
Only then did it hit me: I had forgotten to inform him or any of my superiors that I had unilaterally shut down the entire continent—an unprecedented move. Letting Pickering learn of my directive from the morning press added insult to injury. Apologizing profusely, I took full blame, telling him, “This was entirely my screw-up, a major one, and it won’t happen again.”
I relearned an old lesson. Under sustained pressure from the cumulative crises and fear for our personnel, I had been moving too fast.
My failure to keep Pickering in the loop was hardly my only misstep. Two days before Christmas 1998, and just over a year since I began as assistant secretary, Howard Wolpe invited me to lunch at the Magic Gourd, a mediocre Chinese restaurant near the State Department. Howard was serving with me in the Africa Bureau as President Clinton’s special envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa. His full-time role was to devote high-level effort to ending the conflicts in Congo and Burundi and trying to prevent further mass atrocities. Howard had served fourteen years as a member of Congress from Michigan. A PhD in political science specializing in African affairs, for a decade he was chairman of the House Africa Subcommittee and led efforts to enact legislation imposing sweeping sanctions on apartheid South Africa. A brilliant, principled, gentle man with a self-deprecating humor and goofiness that were incomparable, Howard was uniquely able to trip over his own feet, even fall, and then laugh hysterically at himself.
Twenty-five years my senior, Howard had decades of experience on me. As a respected elder and fellow political appointee, largely invulnerable to any potential vengeance, he gamely accepted the mission (I presume from my career deputies) to deliver some very tough counsel. Over sweet-and-sour something, he calmly explained how I had alienated most members of my team. “You are too hard-charging and hardheaded,” he said. Rather than listen well, he said, “You are overly directive and intimidate others so much that you quell dissent and stifle co
ntrary advice.” He allowed that I was smart, but too brash, knowledgeable but immature. He warned me bluntly that I would fail as assistant secretary if I did not correct course. Yet Howard also made clear that he wanted me to succeed and his advice came from a place of respect and affection.
At first, I was knocked back, not expecting to be taken to the woodshed. As the seriousness of Howard’s message sank in, I collected myself and listened carefully. Crushed by the weight of my own failure, I felt relieved—even in that very difficult moment—that I had someone nearby like Howard who was not afraid to administer the toughest kind of love. I asked clarifying questions, without defensiveness, fully understanding how important and urgent his message was. After thanking him profusely for his guts and generosity, I took the holiday to fully absorb and reflect on what he said.
I was hurt but sobered, chastened but not angry. He was right. I had to do better.
I needed to be more patient, have multiple speeds, slow down, and stop driving my team so hard and fast, as the State Department shrink had counseled. I had to listen and solicit competing opinions, build personal relationships, not simply direct but generate collective ownership of decisions. In addition, as my third-grade teacher had long ago advised, I had to learn to be more patient and forgiving of others and show more respect for the experience of my career colleagues.