It took nearly ten minutes for the guests to take their seats. Sam swished the scotch in his glass and listened to the ice cubes clink against one another agreeably.
The president of the Council, Dr. George Forrester, stepped up to the dais with the easy authority of a man used to commanding lecture halls. For all of the dignity that he sought to project, there was something about Forrester that reminded Sam of Ichabod Crane. He was tall and skinny, almost gangly, with a pronounced aquiline nose. It was rumored that Forrester had had LASIK surgery to help him with his tennis game, and the rectangular black-rimmed glasses he wore were a zero-prescription affectation that he hoped made him look like the university professor he never was. If so, his three-thousand-dollar bespoke suit somewhat spoiled that effect. Forrester was a “public intellectual,” one of the Brahmins who moved in and out of government. When he was out, Forrester’s home was one or more of the higher-end think tanks. The president of the Council on Foreign Relations was at the very top of that particular pyramid.
“Council members, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Our guest of honor tonight needs no introduction.” Forrester paused and there was the somewhat mischievous look on his face of a man about to tell a joke that he is quite certain is hysterically funny. “But he needs the introduction.”
The audience laughed in self-knowing fashion. The Washington elite loved to poke fun at their own pomposity and self-importance. Ironically, Sam thought, this only made them seem somehow even more pompous and self-important. Still, Sam laughed along with the others. It was pretty funny, if only because it was largely accurate. Sitting on a comfortable leather chair next to the podium, Richard Newton smiled at the joke that was ostensibly, but not really, at his expense.
Forrester offered a brief synopsis of the featured speaker’s many accomplishments and awards. Sam couldn’t help but think about his own, much skinnier résumé. He and Newton had started from essentially the same place. Now Sam was in the back of the lecture hall and Richard Newton was listening to his praises being sung at CFR. Newton had made his career in Washington and Sam had spent most of his overseas. “Out of sight, out of mind” was an old D.C. axiom, but Sam was self-aware enough to know that there was more to that particular story.
“Dr. Newton has most recently turned his impressive intellect to the challenges of nuclear rivalry on the Indian subcontinent,” Forrester continued, after finishing up the résumé part of his introduction. “His original and penetrating analysis has helped reshape our understanding of the volatile India-Pakistan dynamic and has focused global attention on Kashmir, the single point on the planet most likely to trigger a major regional and even potentially global conflict.”
Sam leaned forward in his chair, genuinely eager to hear what Newton had to say. His interest in the subject of the lecture was deeply personal. Sam was a South Asia specialist. His graduate school research had focused on the history of peacemaking efforts in Kashmir. Richard Newton, meanwhile, had written his thesis and his first book on Soviet foreign policy. He had always been drawn to power. The end of the Soviet Union had almost been the end of his career, but Newton had found a way to reinvent himself as a foreign policy generalist, a “big thinker” as happy to pontificate on Northern Ireland as on South Africa.
On the side, he ran a lucrative international consulting business and Sam had heard from people in a position to know that the government of Pakistan was one of his confidential clients. If true, that certainly called into question his ability to express impartial judgments. Still, Newton was both extremely sharp and extremely well connected. Sam wanted to hear what he had to say about the fascinatingly complex Kashmir puzzle. He would just have to price-in a possible pro-Pakistan bias. Everyone, he reasoned, had his or her own particular blinders.
Newton had excelled at SAIS, earning his degree in a near-record four years. Sam, in contrast, had never quite finished his dissertation. In truth, Sam knew, he wasn’t really cut out for the ivory towers of academia. He liked getting his hands dirty. Eventually, he had left SAIS to join the U.S. Foreign Service, spending most of his twenty-five years in the State Department bouncing around the subcontinent, including stints in Mumbai, New Delhi, Islamabad, and Karachi. It had been a good career, if not a spectacularly successful one. If he could rewind the tape, he wouldn’t have done it differently.
Mumbai is where he had met Janani. She would be almost forty-nine now. Sam was already a few months to the wrong side of fifty. He did not like thinking about that. Somehow, he had already made it onto the AARP mailing lists. They were relentless. Hell, it was probably AARP that had found Osama bin Laden when he turned fifty and qualified for a free subscription to the magazine.
“Dr. Newton is certainly among our best and brightest,” Forrester concluded. “He is also, it probably goes without saying, a long-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He’s fallen a little behind on his dues payments and has agreed to speak to you all tonight rather than wash the dishes from the CFR dining room. Thank you for coming tonight, Richard. This should cover about six months of the arrears.”
Newton laughed as he stepped up to the dais and the microphone. He looked like the power broker he was. His silver hair was gelled firmly in place. His spring tan hinted at a recent Caribbean vacation or maybe skiing in Davos. A video-friendly striped red tie stood out in sharp relief against the background of a blue suit and crisp white shirt. He spoke without notes.
“Thank you, George. I hope you know that I’m still waiting on the check from the magazine for ‘The Not-So-Great Game.’ I think we’re square.”
The audience laughed politely. Forrester nodded and smiled.
“Friends, colleagues,” Newton said, suddenly serious. “You should, all of you should, lie awake at night worrying about the India-Pakistan relationship. North Korea and Iran get the lion’s share of the headlines, but if at some point in the next twenty years, our world is consumed by nuclear fire, rest assured that the spark for that conflagration will almost certainly have been struck in Kashmir.”
The contested state of Jammu and Kashmir was the most serious point of contention in the fraught relationship between New Delhi and Islamabad. For complex historical and political reasons, the Muslim-majority province had remained part of mostly Hindu India when the British Raj had dissolved in 1947 rather than being attached to the new Dominion of Pakistan. In the half century that followed, the province triggered at least three wars between the two giants of South Asia. That had meant one thing when the bitter rivals had been too poor to fight a truly modern war. It meant something quite different now that they were both substantial nuclear powers.
Newton offered a relatively straightforward account of the Kashmir conflict that Sam thought was somewhat vanilla and unoriginal. The audience, however, seemed to hang on every word as though the speaker were on the cusp of offering some great revelation. Maybe Sam had been expecting too much. Newton was no doubt pitching his speech to a wider audience than South Asia specialists. It may have been unavoidable that the guts of the speech felt cobbled together by graduate students or junior researchers.
“Conditions along the Line of Actual Control are tense,” Newton continued. “As tense as they have been since the 1999 Kargil War. Moreover, the political relationship between New Delhi and Islamabad is at a new low. While the Pakistani government must surely shoulder its share of the responsibility, the new Indian prime minister must be held to account for his contribution to the growing crisis. Prime Minister Rangarajan has antagonized his Pakistani counterpart and has consistently rejected Islamabad’s overtures aimed at securing a political solution.”
“That’s bullshit, Richard.”
Sam looked around, wondering who had said that, before realizing sheepishly that he was responsible. For a brief moment, he clung to the hope that he had only whispered it, but the substantial number of heads turning in his direction argued otherwise. There was a boom
mike suspended from a long pole hanging directly over where he was sitting. It was there for the Q&A session that was supposed to follow the lecture, but Sam realized with a creeping sense of dread that someone had left it on. His sotto voce intervention had been caught out by every Washington politician’s nightmare—the hot mike.
Newton paused and looked out over the audience to spot the heckler. There were maybe a hundred people in the lecture hall. He quickly zeroed in on Sam.
“Sam, is that you?”
“Sorry for the interruption, Richard. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“I’m quite sure you didn’t. But having done so, I’d like to hear what you have to say. Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who don’t know my old classmate Sam Trainor, I can assure you that I am quite used to Sam’s somewhat impolitic interventions . . . at least in seminar.”
“Really, Richard, I apologize. I don’t want to interrupt the talk. I was just thinking that Rangarajan has bent over backwards to accommodate the sensibilities of the generals in Pakistan. He offered President Talwar a state visit, proposed the creation of an intelligence-sharing council aimed at minimizing the risk of overreactions stemming from misunderstanding, and even quashed a move by the opposition to authorize construction of a temple to Vishnu at Ayodhya on the ruins of the Babri Mosque. That hardly sounds like the work of a guy beating the drums of war.”
Even though he had pushed Sam to speak, Dr. Richard Newton seemed somewhat at a loss. Sam suspected that Newton’s thinking was very rarely challenged by the sycophants who surrounded him at the think tanks. Newton, however, had been in Washington long enough to have absorbed its mores and rules of behavior. One tried-and-true D.C. tactic was: If you don’t like the message, attack the messenger.
“Thank you, Sam, for that pithy and insightful riposte. Pity you couldn’t have put that down on paper. Maybe you would have managed to finish that Ph.D.”
Sam’s ears burned at the gratuitous slap. Newton was so much farther up the food chain than Sam that it seemed completely uncalled-for.
“You may have something there, Dr. Newton,” he found himself saying even as half his brain willed him to shut up and take his lumps. “I never did get the degree, but I do know that the Line of Actual Control is the effective border between India and China, not between India and Pakistan. That’s the Line of Control. You’re a former Soviet guy slumming in South Asia as a paid consultant for the Pakistani government. But, for those of us who know the region, the two are as different from each other as England and New England.”
Newton turned beet red and the Washington sophisticates in the CFR lecture hall turned away from Sam. It was difficult to tell whether they were embarrassed for him or by him. Newton resumed speaking. Sam did not really resume listening. He knew that he had dug himself a hole that would take time to climb out of.
• • •
After the lecture, the ever-efficient CFR staff served coffee and cake in an adjacent room with a panoramic wall of windows that offered a less-than-inspiring view of the boxlike office buildings lining F Street. Sam helped himself to a cup of coffee from the samovar and decided to skip the cake as both a form of penance and as a symbol of his resolve to get back into shape. As he walked around the room, Sam marveled at the new superpower he seemed to have acquired after his ill-advised confrontation with Richard Newton. He seemed to project an invisible force field that kept everyone else in the room at a distance of at least six feet. One senior Pentagon civilian almost tripped over his own feet in his rush to avoid engaging Sam in conversation. He was radioactive at this point and he could only hope that the half-life of his professional ostracism would be mercifully brief. This was not his first experience with the consequences of pointing out the emperor’s state of undress.
“Making friends fast, Sam.”
“I seem to have a talent for it, Andy.”
“You know you shouldn’t do stuff like that.”
“I know.”
Andy Krittenbrink was one of Sam’s favorite colleagues—former colleagues, he reminded himself—and he was glad for the company. Krittenbrink was a young analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which in the intel world was known by the almost accurate acronym INR. He was a specialist in the Pakistani leadership. Until a few months ago, INR had been Sam’s home institution as well. As the director of the bureau’s South Asia office, he had been Andy’s nominal boss. It was a lofty-sounding title, but, for a Foreign Service officer, INR was something of an elephant’s graveyard for diplomatic careers. That Sam’s evaluations were peppered with words such as abrasive, intemperate, and the more euphemistic but no less damning outspoken did not help his cause.
The Foreign Service, like the military, was a rank-in-person, up-or-out system. A civil servant could burrow into a position in the federal government and, assuming even a minimum level of competence, could essentially stay in the job until mandatory retirement at age seventy. The Foreign Service was more dog-eat-dog. At every grade, an officer had a fixed number of years to earn a competitive promotion against his or her peers. Fail to make the cut and your reward was early retirement. The jump from FS-01 into the Senior Foreign Service was equivalent to the jump from colonel to brigadier general. It was also where the most drastic cuts in numbers were made. FSOs called it the “Threshold.” INR was not a good springboard for making the leap, and Sam had failed to clear the Threshold on his final try. After that, it was just a matter of how long it took Human Resources to finish the retirement paperwork.
“So how is life in the real world? Are things as green as they say on the other side of the fence?” Krittenbrink’s Adam’s apple jumped up and down excitedly when he talked. His suit was at least two sizes too big across the shoulders. It looked like something he had borrowed from his father. Andy was the quintessential career analyst. A little schlubby, socially awkward, and sharp as a razor. As one Washington wag had once observed, you could spot the extrovert in the CIA’s analytical division, the Directorate of Intelligence, because he looked at your shoes when he talked to you.
“Not too bad,” Sam replied. “I took a job at Argus Systems in Arlington. They just got a big contract with the Agency to provide intelligence and analysis on South Asia, and I’m heading up the Indo-Pak team. It’s not too different from what I was doing in INR, so the learning curve’s not too steep.”
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t get promoted into the Seniors,” Andy said. “You were the best South Asia specialist in the department. It seems criminal to lose you.”
Sam smiled ruefully.
“Thanks, Andy. I appreciate the support. But you said it yourself. I was a specialist. That’s not a good thing to be at State. You’re civil service, and they hired you to be an expert in what you do. In the Foreign Service, we’re all supposed to be generalists, and there are consequences for being too specialized. I spent too much time in South Asia. My choice, and I loved every minute of it, so I can’t complain.”
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with that time you told the assistant secretary to go to hell, would it? You were dead right.”
“Maybe. But that’s not the point. Look at Richard and learn something from him. You’re young. You’ve got time. He’s spread so thin that he may not know very much about the issues he speaks and writes about, but he is as smooth as eighteen-year-old scotch and he plays the Washington political game as well as any elected official. Don’t underestimate that. It’s a real skill. It’s just not mine.”
“I was sorry to see you go. You were a great boss. The guy who came in behind you couldn’t find Bangladesh on a map of South Asia. Heck, I’m not sure he could find it on a map of Bangladesh.”
“I was sorry to leave. But I’ve made my peace with it. Let me be the voice of experience. Don’t fight with the new guy. Take it from me, there’s no percentage in it.” Privately, Sam wondered whet
her he really had accepted his forced retirement from diplomacy and the move to the private sector. He was ambivalent at best about taking a job at a Beltway Bandit consultancy, and he had thought hard about moving away to some small town in Montana or the Pacific Northwest and maybe finally finishing the Ph.D. He had even considered renting some fishing shack on the beach in Goa. In the end, there were personal ties that had kept him in Washington, and the job at Argus at least allowed him to stay in the policy game. It was a good holding position. Fortunes could swing rapidly in Washington. There was no telling what the future might hold. For now, he wanted to offer his onetime subordinate the best advice he could. Andy had a promising career in front of him if he could learn to play the game better than Sam had.
“I don’t want to fight,” Andy agreed. “But the layers of bureaucracy can wear you down. I don’t really like the way the intel machinery polishes all of the sharp edges of what we write. In the end, it’s all mushy, lowest-common-denominator analysis and I think that’s a disservice to the policy makers.”
“You’re almost certainly right about that. We have a little more freedom at Argus and my team tries to take full advantage of that. It’s our job to speak truth to power, but don’t expect that they’ll love you for it. Powerful and successful people will all tell you that they don’t want to be surrounded by sycophants and yes-men and every one of them is lying.”
Andy shook his head in disbelief.
“I know you’re right. But I didn’t come to Washington because I wanted to get ahead. I came here because I wanted to do big things. I wanted to make a difference in the world. The only thing I’m making now is condo payments.”
“You will make a difference, Andy. I’m sure of it. Patience, young grasshopper.” Krittenbrink had not been born when Kung Fu went off the air, but Sam was confident that he was geeky enough to get the reference.
Secrets of State Page 2