by Susan Rice
At Treasury, Secretary Robert Rubin and later his successor, Larry Summers, at least initially viewed debt relief to most African countries as a costly moral hazard, which would encourage their further profligate spending. At State and the White House, we considered African countries’ bilateral and multilateral debt to be an unsustainable drag on their prospects for economic reform and growth. The battle was engaged on the eve of President Clinton’s first trip to Africa, after a meeting in the White House’s Cabinet Room where I had urged the announcement of a presidential push for international debt relief.
Bob Rubin, whom I like and deeply respect, grew furious at me as I pressed the issue. He launched into an uncharacteristic rage, concluding with a line that approximated “over my dead body!” Rubin’s influence and importance far exceeded mine, so I assumed I was defeated on the spot, but the proposal gradually gained traction within the interagency, thanks in large part to the combination of Gayle’s efforts within the White House and my persistence at State.
By 1999, when Larry Summers led Treasury, support had grown at the International Monetary Fund for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC). Frustrated with the growing momentum behind the push for debt relief, and particularly any consideration of relief for Nigeria, which he considered especially undeserving given its history of corrupt military rule, Summers summoned my immediate boss, Undersecretary Tom Pickering, and my deputy for economic policy Witney Schneidman, to a meeting in his office. He pointedly excluded me. Witney returned to report that Summers began the discussion by angrily asking Pickering: “Can you control Susan Rice?” Pickering replied undramatically, “No.” The meeting failed to thwart progress toward meaningful debt relief but underscored how much frustration greeted my tenacity in some quarters.
Among the Clinton administration’s notable accomplishments was the enactment of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in May 2000, following years of intensive effort by the administration and allies in Congress to grant duty-free, quota-free access to the U.S. market for most goods exported from Africa. This landmark legislation, which I championed as a top priority, finally accorded Africa the same status as many other regions, like the Caribbean, and promised to catalyze substantial growth in the economic ties between the U.S. and the continent. With strong bipartisan support, AGOA was extended by Congress in the Obama era and endures as the cornerstone of the U.S.-Africa economic relationship.
With backing from the White House and secretary of state, during my tenure the Africa Bureau launched significant initiatives in Africa to improve education, especially for girls. We worked with the U.S. Department of Transportation to strengthen aviation safety and security. With the Defense Department, we established the African Center for Strategic Studies, a war college for African officials to bolster civilian control of the military, and strengthened African capacity to conduct peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.
Faced with the mushrooming HIV/AIDS crisis, President Clinton declared the pandemic a national security threat, vastly increased American investment in HIV drugs and treatment in Africa, and pressured the pharmaceutical industry to reduce prices and substantially improve access to life-saving drugs in Africa. Subsequently, President George W. Bush built on these efforts and established PEPFAR, a historic, large-scale program to fight HIV/AIDS globally that has endured with strong bipartisan support and saved countless lives.
The advance of democracy in Africa, ever fitful and nonlinear, scored two major wins in the 1990s, supported by large American investments of diplomatic attention and financial resources. In South Africa, after Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994, the Clinton administration provided over $600 million in bilateral aid and established the U.S.–South Africa Binational Commission—co-chaired by Vice President Al Gore and South African deputy president Thabo Mbeki. This multi-agency commission helped spur bilateral cooperation across sectors ranging from sustainable energy to black economic empowerment. Through painstaking negotiations, the U.S. and South Africa also managed to resolve the notorious ARMSCOR case, which had prevented renewed bilateral military cooperation due to violations of U.S. export control laws by the apartheid regime. Though we struggled through disputes with South Africa over trade policy and HIV/AIDS, the Clinton administration managed to establish warm ties with South Africa’s new black majority government and to cooperate in addressing conflicts in Congo and Burundi.
Nigeria marked this period’s second major breakthrough for democracy in Africa. Following Abacha’s death by heart attack and Abiola’s untimely passing, the interim military leader kept his pledge to return Nigeria to democratic rule through free and fair elections. Thus, in 1999, the experienced and respected former president Olusegun Obasanjo was now elected president. Obasanjo is a wise, plainspoken former general, a devout Christian, and a down-to-earth leader who personally eschewed corruption and endeavored to return Nigeria to its regional leadership role as a military and diplomatic heavyweight.
Obasanjo and I enjoyed an easy and candid relationship, which facilitated deeper bilateral ties and effective policy coordination. One evening when Obasanjo was visiting New York, he called me and Gayle over to his suite in the U.N. Plaza Hotel for consultations. When we arrived, Obasanjo was arguing amiably with his sassy wife, Stella, while munching on scrawny, roasted chicken wings. As we sat talking about conflicts in West and Central Africa, Obasanjo punctuated his message by nonchalantly hurling well-picked chicken bones—much to our amusement—backward over his shoulders across the presidential suite.
This warm and strategic relationship yielded the establishment of a U.S.-Nigeria Bilateral Commission chaired by the secretary of state; a visit by President Clinton to Nigeria in 2000 on his second and final trip to the continent; and crucial U.S. military training and equipment to enable the deployment of five Nigerian battalions to help restore order and stability in Sierra Leone, where civil war had raged since 1991 and the capital was repeatedly threatened by rebel forces.
As difficult as this period was for Africa, given the proliferation of conflicts, which underscored the mismatch between Africa’s extraordinary potential and its proclivity for backtracking, during the Clinton era we accomplished much of which I remain proud. It was also a period of enormous professional growth for me, even if fitful and sometimes painful.
I learned that leadership is more like conducting a symphony than performing as a virtuoso player of any single instrument—often with multiple, potentially dissonant musicians and the need to achieve harmony among them. I also found that securing the buy-in and support of those career officials who will outlast any political appointee can be slow and cumbersome, but the extra effort and patience it takes to get there can pay lasting dividends. The most enduring outcomes are not always the swiftest ones; indeed, the best route from Point A to Point B is not always a straight line but could be a path with twists and turns.
Belatedly, I resolved to make enemies wisely: if it is not necessary to burn a bridge, don’t. Enemies you thought you left behind on the side of the road have a nasty habit of getting back up, dusting themselves off, and trying to chase you down. Another lesson learned: some adversaries aren’t worth the effort; they are better ignored or given the Heisman (a stiff-arm) than combated directly. Others merit combat. As a matter of temperament and morality, I always prefer to be direct, as my father taught me, and thus to launch a prompt frontal assault. But I have learned with time that sometimes patience is the best strategy for achieving the purest justice.
It was arguably a huge risk to give a thirty-two-year-old, breast-feeding, African American woman the job of assistant secretary for African affairs. If I were Madeleine Albright, knowing now what I didn’t know then, I’m not sure I would have offered me the job at that age. She had my back, however, at every turn and believed in my abilities.
Winning the respect of African leaders, my superiors in the cabinet outside of the White House and State, the bulk of my ambassadors
, and my Washington-based staff was a serious challenge. I met it, perhaps against the odds, because we were able, ultimately, to achieve significant policy results.
Despite tragedy and setbacks, for the first time American policy elevated Africa to a place of priority, not due to Cold War competition but rather mutual interest and mutual respect. By arguing strenuously that bolstering African security, prosperity, and democracy served both American interests and values, and by driving multiple complex policy initiatives and negotiations in tandem, my team and I helped enlist the whole of the U.S. government in concrete efforts to transform our economic and strategic relationship with this vast and rising continent.
Not only did I gain invaluable experience as a policymaker but also as a manager, diplomat, and spokesperson for U.S. policy. Through testimony before Congress, numerous speeches to wide-ranging audiences, television appearances, and press interviews, I grew adept and comfortable with the public-facing aspects of foreign policymaking. And I tasted both indisputable failure and harsh public criticism, arming me with the first layers of tough skin that I would need in greater thickness when the going got much rougher.
11 Going Global
It was a crystal-clear September morning, comfortably warm but not hot or humid—as beautiful as the day Ian and I were married almost exactly nine years earlier. I was looking forward to celebrating our anniversary the next day. Driving into the office with the top down and radio turned up in my red Honda S2000 (my “premature midlife crisis,” as I called it), the sunny skies and balmy warmth gave me one more reason to feel grateful for the latest developments in our lives.
Nine months earlier, on January 20, 2001, after eight years at the White House and State Department under President Clinton, I had left government, exhausted and ready to downshift. My son, Jake, was three and a half and had only known a mother who commuted to Africa with excessive frequency. Within a week after I left government, Jake said to me, “Mommy, I hated that job. I’m really glad it’s over.” Taken aback by his brutal honesty and self-awareness, I was also deeply grateful that he had the sensitivity to wait until after I left government to tell me how he really felt. One week earlier and I would have crumpled in tears.
It had taken me some time to reenter the real world. I had some immediate priorities: buy a cell phone for the first time; get my first personal email address; familiarize myself with using the internet, then a relatively new tool that I had ignored while in government; get a trainer and exercise regularly. Above all, I wanted to spend time with my son and try to have a second child. I knew I didn’t want to go back to work right away. I wanted to sleep, travel, and reflect.
For much of 2001, I managed to decompress and tend to the home front. We moved from our compact townhome in D.C.’s hip Adams Morgan neighborhood in the thick of city life—where we would wake occasionally to find a knife, errant passport, or a homeless person in our front yard—to the leafy, spacious area called Kent, in the far western corner of the city. We bought and decorated our current house, a property with plenty of space and a backyard pool, large deck, and grassy play area.
It was then, shortly after this move, on an otherwise exquisite morning in September as I drove to Georgetown, where I briefly consulted part-time at a start-up, that our world was shaken to the core.
Without warning or premonition, NPR’s breaking news caused me to accelerate inadvertently as my heart skipped a beat. At about 9:15 a.m., Bob Edwards interrupted the regularly scheduled Morning Edition programming and reported that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had each been struck by an aircraft. Flashing back to the near simultaneous bombings of our African embassies in August 1998, I knew immediately it must be Al Qaeda. It was an attack on the heart of New York City and a far deadlier do-over of the same target the Blind Sheikh had hit in 1993 eight years earlier.
Shortly before 10 a.m., after I arrived at the office, the first of the towers began to collapse, followed some thirty minutes later by the second. Already, the Pentagon had been struck. The State Department, White House, and Capitol were being evacuated for fear of yet another plane incoming to Washington. My mind immediately turned to my four-year-old son, Jake, who I was relieved to recall was safely at home with our nanny, Adela, since he only attended preschool in the afternoon. Ian was at the ABC News Bureau in Washington, and I realized he would probably be gone overnight as the networks would have to provide 24/7 coverage. I worried next about colleagues in the Pentagon and friends who were career employees at the White House and State, with whom I had worked intensively until just months ago. They all could be in the bull’s-eye.
Like every American, I was shocked, horrified, and furious but not entirely surprised. Al Qaeda was a formidable and committed adversary, as I had learned firsthand. What I, like many others, did not fully anticipate was the extent of their capacity to strike on American soil.
For weeks, planes stopped flying in and out of Washington. The border with Canada was shut. Bilateral trade, our shared lifeblood, ground to a halt. No one traveled. Muslims became targets of intensive, irrational ire. And we went to war in Afghanistan.
This first foreign attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor stoked outsize fear and unfounded suspicions. Still, I never anticipated it would touch me so directly. Until the Washington blame game began.
To deflect responsibility from the new Bush administration, its surrogates sought to blame Clinton administration officials and its holdovers who remained in government, notably my first boss at the NSC and counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, whom they falsely accused of failing to warn them adequately about the Al Qaeda threat. It got quite ugly, as Bush officials were blamed for ignoring intelligence warnings, Clinton officials were accused of missing opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden, and Congress established a joint investigative committee. Later, the independent 9/11 Commission was formed.
In December, a British freelance writer, David Rose, published an explosive article in the January 2002 edition of Vanity Fair entitled “The Osama Files.” He falsely accused me, as well as Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, of essentially being responsible for the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks. When I first saw the article, my blood boiled and skin crawled. I found it an outrageously deceitful and irresponsible excuse for investigative reporting and couldn’t believe Vanity Fair would publish such a hit job. The article began:
September 11 might have been prevented if the U.S. had accepted Sudan’s offers to share its intelligence files on Osama bin Laden and the growing al-Qaeda threat. Recently unearthed documents reveal that the Clinton administration repeatedly rejected the help of a country it unwisely perceived as an enemy.
Specifically, Rose alleged that I, with Berger’s and Albright’s assent, refused repeated offers by the government of Sudan to provide the U.S. government with Sudanese intelligence files that, had we only accepted, would have provided invaluable information about Al Qaeda operatives and their network. Thus, we would have been able to take down the terrorist organization. The accusation was basically that I refused the purported Sudanese offers or ordered others to refuse them, because of my irrational and implacable hatred of the Sudanese regime.
It was a wholly baseless and dishonest allegation, put forward by two self-avowed opponents of U.S. policy and of me personally, which benefitted the extremist government of Sudan. Nonetheless, given the breathtaking nature of the charge—that I was responsible for the deaths of over three thousand Americans in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil—it gained attention on CNN and elsewhere.
Albright, Berger, former undersecretary of state Tom Pickering, and I published a detailed rebuttal, the contents of which I also summarized on television shortly after the article was published. We wrote in the March 2002 edition of Vanity Fair:
The fact is members of the Clinton administration met repeatedly with Sudanese-government officials to seek their full cooperation on counterterrorism issues, both prior to the suspensi
on of our full-time embassy operations in Khartoum in February 1996 and in the years thereafter.
U.S.-government representatives met with Sudanese officials on terrorism issues on multiple occasions from 1996 to 2001 in venues ranging from Addis Ababa and Khartoum to Virginia, Washington, D.C., and New York. In none of those meetings, despite repeated U.S. requests for detailed information on bin Laden’s network, finances, and operatives and on other terrorist organizations, did the government of Sudan [G.O.S] hand over its alleged files or provide detailed information deemed of significant operational value by U.S.-government counterterrorism, law-enforcement, or C.I.A. officials. …
Since May 2000, the U.S. has had a full-time counterterrorism team in Khartoum for the precise purpose of obtaining detailed information from Sudan on terrorism. That Khartoum also apparently failed to share these alleged documents at any time prior to September 11, including with the Bush administration for more than eight months, suggests that Khartoum had no intention of sharing this information with the U.S. It seemingly did so only after September 11, fearing U.S. retaliation.
As false and outlandish as the claims against me were, it was still hard to fathom them. Former U.S. ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, who could never conceal his dislike for me and my Clinton administration colleagues, was a key, on-the-record accuser. Carney seemed to me to be seeking revenge for what he believed to be my role in closing his embassy in Khartoum in 1996 and for our disagreements over Sudan policy.
His sidekick was a Pakistani American businessman, Mansoor Ijaz, who had oil interests in Sudan. A generous donor to the Clinton presidential campaigns, he was apparently frustrated that he had failed to parlay his money into policy influence. Ijaz attempted to carry messages between the Sudanese leadership and the White House, and after the White House refused to utilize him as a private channel, I believe he became embittered enough to try to blame me and other Clinton officials for 9/11. Carney and Ijaz were joined in their defamatory allegations by a paid lobbyist for Sudan and senior Sudanese government officials. Sudan no doubt feared that President Bush might attack it again after 9/11 and therefore sought to absolve itself of any responsibility for harboring bin Laden by trying to shift culpability for their lack of counterterrorism cooperation to former U.S. officials.