by Ronan Farrow
“Something horrible is happening,” he said.
A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.”
Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.”
When they told him about the risky nature of the procedure, he said, “I feel better. Now I know you’re not BS-ing me.” When one of his doctors, Jehan El-Bayoumi, made him promise to relax, he quipped, “You have to promise me that you’re going to end the war in Afghanistan.” Variations of the quote received so much coverage that P. J. Crowley, the State Department’s spokesperson, had to take to the podium in the press room and clarify that Holbrooke was joking. But the joke was only that he’d ever ask anybody else to do it.
THREE NIGHTS LATER, hundreds of guests packed the Ben Franklin Room as Hillary Clinton stood at the lecturn where, two years earlier, she’d announced Richard Holbrooke’s role. Foreign ambassadors to the United States were there, along with six members of Obama’s cabinet. “Ambassador Richard Holbrooke has been a giant of the diplomatic corps for almost fifty years,” she began. “And this week, his doctors are learning what diplomats and dictators around the world have long known: There’s nobody tougher than Richard Holbrooke. He’s a fierce negotiator. I’m sure there are some shoulders here tonight that are still a little bit sore from his arm-twisting.” She paid somber tribute to Holbrooke’s staff, and to the dignitaries in attendance. “Now, in a moment,” she said, her voice rising festively, “You will be treated to another holiday delight, a musical performance from the incomparable Marvin Hamlisch and J. Mark McVey!” She stepped aside, revealing a shiny black grand piano behind her. Hamlisch and McVey began to perform an upbeat rendition of “Deck the Halls.” The World Children’s Choir joined in. Bright, TV-style lights set up around the stage cast an antiseptic glare on the proceedings. Someone had decided that the most appropriate way to handle the annual State Department Christmas party for foreign ambassadors was to merge it with a Holbrooke tribute event. Standing there listening to the carols, I wasn’t sure.
The president arrived to briefly bop his head to the carols then say a few words. After a laugh line about Clinton’s bipartisan appeal outshining his own (a common observation at the time), he moved on to “our friend and partner Richard Holbrooke. Richard Holbrooke has been serving this nation with distinction for nearly fifty years. . . . He never stops, he never quits. Because he’s always believed that if we stay focused, if we act on our mutual interests, that progress is possible. Wars can end, peace can be forged.” He called out our dazed team, assembled in the crowd. “The SRAP team, where are they? Richard recruited them, he mentored them, and I want you to know that, in our meetings, he consistently gave you guys unbelievable credit. He was so proud, and is so proud, of the work that you do.” The foreign ambassadors applauded, murmuring appreciatively in several languages. We stared at the president. Holbrooke would have burst his aorta voluntarily if he’d known it would conjure up these fond recollections.
“America is more secure and the world is a safer place because of the work of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke,” Obama went on. “He is a tough son of a gun so we are confident that as hard as this is he is going to be putting up a tremendous fight.” He moved on, looking a little relieved, to a joke about Clinton’s travel schedule.
Three blocks away, Richard Holbrooke lay in an induced coma with his chest cut open. After twenty hours of surgery, he was, the doctors said vaguely, “hanging in there.” The day before the party, they’d performed an additional surgery to restore circulation to his lower extremities. They’d registered a faint pulse in his feet. The condition of his most celebrated attribute, his brain, was completely unknown.
Because they’d kept his chest open, no one was allowed in the room with him, but the team had spent the past three days by the door anyway. We divided hospital duties into two-hour shifts, each taken on by a pair of staffers. The pair on duty would greet the eye-popping luminaries who began arriving to pay tribute. I’d shown in Joe Biden, and John and Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Judy Woodruff. I sat with future treasury secretary Jack Lew and Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, as they tried not to look horrified at doctors’ sketches of the torn aorta on a nearby table. People talked in vague terms about Holbrooke “feeling” the “positive energy.” But it felt like a wake.
I had passed my tolerance for grim Christmas carols and returned to my desk on the first floor when Rina Amiri ran in and flung herself across the couch, sobbing. They were taking him off life support. I trudged through the night back to the hospital with Rosemarie Pauli, Holbrooke’s tough-as-nails chief of staff, with whom he’d worked since Bosnia. It was bitterly cold, and a high wind had picked up. “Afghans,” Rosemarie muttered, pulling her coat tight and leaning into the wind. “So dramatic.” (It’s true: Afghan grieving is unlike anything I’ve experienced elsewhere, with a customary forty-day mourning window.) Street signs rattled. We arrived at the hospital and stood in the lobby as they unplugged him.
Hillary Clinton had been on her way from the State Department party to a dinner at the White House when she got the call. She redirected quickly and arrived in time to be with him at the end. Still wearing a double-breasted, silver-and-gold striped jacket with a flouncy Peter Pan collar that made her look like she was gift-wrapped, she stood under the hospital lights and pulled together the weeping team. I handed out tissues. “There’s our NGO guy, always helping,” she managed. “He was the closest thing to a father I had,” I said quietly, surprising myself. She hugged me. For a woman who’d just lost a friend of many years, Clinton was generous. “Well, I don’t know about you,” she told the group, “but I’m going to the nearest bar.”
AS SNOW STARTED FALLING outside, we crowded into the nearby lobby bar of the Ritz-Carlton hotel. We were joined by a growing group of mourners. Maureen White, the wife of financier and Obama adviser Steven Rattner, opened a tab. Clinton held court. And everyone exchanged stories about the inimitable Richard Holbrooke. At the time of Holbrooke’s death, the US government was poised to release the first “Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review” (or QDDR), a long-term plan to reorganize the State Department and USAID to be more efficient and more in sync with broader changes in national security objectives. (For example, the first process elevated counterterrorism within the bureaucracy.) The aspirations of the project hearkened back to young Holbrooke’s essay in the first issue of Foreign Policy, calling for a
reorganization of the State Department bureaucracy he described as “the machine that fails.” The reality of the initiative, on the other hand, was of the kind of unwieldy and inefficient bureaucracy Holbrooke had decried all those years ago, with years of infighting leading to mostly subtle organizational changes. “Oh, the QDDR,” Clinton said wistfully. “He hated that document. We should dedicate it to him.” And she did.
“I really believed that if Richard had lived, we would have been able to present to the administration some kind of peace deal,” Clinton told me. “I really believe that. I’m not sure they would have accepted it, but with all the work he did, that Frank Ruggiero did, the meetings that were underway. . . . I was very hopeful that, with the meeting we’d have at Lisbon, the NATO conference, we’d be able to build on the peace efforts that Richard was leading. And obviously that didn’t happen because of what, terribly, happened to him that December.” And perhaps that’s true.
As we filed out into the night at around 2 a.m., a lone, drunk woman with lank, graying hair called at me from a nearby table. “I know who you are,” she slurred, leering at us. “I know who you all are.”
“Have a good night,” I said, turning to leave.
“Don’t take it too hard, sweetheart,” she called after me. I glanced over my shoulder. She was grinning wide, showing a row of blood-red, wine-stained teeth. “Everything ends.”
14
THE WHEELS COME OFF THE BUS
THE MONTH AFTER Richard Holbrooke died, a white Honda Civic pulled up to an intersection in Lahore, Pakistan and stopped at a red light. Known as the Mozang Chungi stop, the intersection marked the start of Ferozepur Road, a trade route that ran to the town of the same name in India. A short drive away, the crumbling arches of the ancient Walled City reflected Lahore’s history as a seat of power of the Mughal Empire. But the intersection embodied a more modern side of Lahore: crowded urban sprawl, fueled by a fast-expanding business sector. It was afternoon, and a pollution haze hung over the dense traffic of bikes, rickshaws, and beat-up cars from different eras.
Inside the Honda was a barrel-chested, broad-shouldered American. His salt-and-pepper hair was thinning, and he had a day of stubble on his chin. He wore a plaid work shirt over a white tee. Raised in the fading coal town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, he had wrestled at Powell Valley High, where friends remembered him as “solid muscle” and “an American Rambo.” He had served in the Army Special Forces. A career as a private security contractor followed. “Nobody here remembers the guy,” his commander at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, later told a reporter. “You could put him in a crowd of 50 people and he wouldn’t stand out,” echoed a former football coach at Powell Valley High. A few years later, even the high school was sold to a bank and torn down, another casualty of an American dream that had left coal towns like Big Stone Gap behind. At thirty-six, Raymond Davis never left much of a mark anywhere, until that afternoon in Lahore.
As Davis stopped, a black motorbike carrying two young Pakistani men approached from the opposite direction and swerved in front of the Honda. The rear passenger was carrying a gun. Davis pulled out a 9mm semiautomatic Glock and took aim from his seat behind the wheel. He fired five times, blowing a cluster of holes through the windshield and sending spidery fractals across the safety glass. The bullets hit one of the two men, nineteen-year-old street criminal Mohammed Faheem, in the stomach and arms. He hit the ground, dead. The second man, Faizan Haider, ran. He made it about thirty feet before Davis got out of the car and shot him several times in the back, killing him, too. Davis used a radio in the car to call for help, then took pictures of the bodies with his cell phone. “He was very peaceful and confident,” one onlooker said. “I was wondering how he could be like that after killing two people.”
Minutes later, a Toyota Land Cruiser barreled down the crowded street in the wrong direction, killing one pedestrian and scattering others. By the time the Land Cruiser reached the intersection, Davis was gone. The American driver waved a rifle at onlookers, ordering them to get out of the way, and made his way back to the US consulate. Davis, it turned out, had fled, making it about two miles before Pakistani police stopped him.
Grainy video shows Davis being questioned at Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail. “I just—I need to tell the embassy where I’m at,” he told officers in a light Southern accent, handing over a walkie-talkie from his pocket. “You’re from America?” one of the officers asked.
“Yes,” said Davis, stabbing a finger at an ID hanging from a lanyard around his neck. “USA.” He told them he worked at the consulate.
“As a . . . ?” the officer asked.
“Uh, I just work as a consultant there,” he replied.
For a consultant, Raymond Davis had remarkably good aim. The debris left behind at the intersection—ammunition, knives and gloves, a blindfold—suggested something else. As did Davis’s phone, which was full of surreptitiously taken photos of Pakistani military sites. Raymond Davis was, very clearly, a spy—more specifically, it came to pass, a CIA contractor. The realization dawned on the Pakistani public almost as quickly as it did on the ISI. From virtually the moment Davis was spirited away from the crowded intersection to Kot Lakhpat jail, the nation was convulsed, from street protests to searing, around-the-clock media coverage.
Two weeks later, President Obama, outraged, described Davis as “our diplomat” and called for his release under the “very simple principle” laid out in the Vienna Convention: “if our diplomats are in another country, then they are not subject to that country’s local prosecution.” Privately, Leon Panetta delivered a similar message to General Pasha and the ISI. When Pasha asked point-blank if Davis was a CIA agent, Panetta said: “No, he’s not one of ours.” Panetta didn’t comment on the specifics of that conversation, but said that, in general, “If we have to play both sides of the streets with these guys in order to make sure that, in the end, we are protecting our people, that’s what we’re going to do.” If the Pakistanis were going to lie to him, he, apparently, wasn’t above doing so back.
THE NEXT DAY, Mohsin Kamal, the lobbyist Mark Siegel had hired as the Kerry-Lugar-Berman imbroglio began, was in DC’s Chinatown neighborhood at their lobbying firm, Locke Lord. Kamal had a standard associate’s office with anonymous furnishings and a depressing view of the Verizon Center. It was just after 11 a.m. when the phone rang. It was General Butt, whom I’d schmoozed for my visa the year before. The two men had met years earlier when Kamal served in the army, and had an easy rapport. “Hey, where are you?” Butt asked.Kamal already knew what it was about—the Raymond Davis scandal had been making headlines in both the American and Pakistani press for the past twenty-four hours.
An hour later he was in Butt’s office on the fourth floor of the Pakistani embassy. An assistant poured tea. Kamal took his with milk and sugar. “You have to say very clearly to Congress that he does not have immunity,” Butt was saying. “He was a contractor and a CIA guy.” The incident had stung Pakistan deeply, tapping into existential insecurities about sovereignty. Maybe, Butt suggested, they could use the mess as an opportunity to push back against the CIA’s demands for more access. He told Kamal he was worried about Husain Haqqani, who in unclogging the flow of visas, had incurred more suspicion than ever. Had he been responsible for letting in Davis, and perhaps scores of other Raymond Davises? And would he try to help the Americans spirit out their spy?
“What role will Husain play in this?” Butt asked.
“A role none of us can guess,” replied Kamal. “He is a most unpredictable man.”
Kamal and Mark Siegel fanned out across Washington disseminating Pakistani outrage and dispensing lurid details from the ISI’s investigation. Davis had been living in a safe house with other spies. The American agents had referred to it as “La Whore House,” Kamal and Siegel told shocked staffers on the Hill. The CIA was risking the entire relationship with an important ally, they argued. A deal would have to be cut with the Pakistanis.
John Ker
ry was dispatched to Lahore to try to do just that. Before he left, Siegel gave one of Kerry’s aides, Jonah Blank, a full download of the Pakistani perspective. Kerry performed exactly as the Pakistani lobbyists had hoped. Massaging from him and the US ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, brought General Pasha around to a deal. Husain Haqqani, as Butt had predicted, helped the Americans devise the solution: the CIA would pay $2.3 million to the families of those killed in the Davis incident. Two senior Pakistani intelligence officers told me that there was another assurance made by the Americans; one that was never made public. The United States would severely curtail the CIA’s activities in Pakistan, for good. Mohsin Kamal said that’s how Butt described the deal to him. No American would confirm that there was an explicit commitment made. Whether it was part of a deal or a natural consequence of the strain the incident had put on the relationship, the agency quietly began pulling dozens of its undercover operatives out of Pakistan.
“THE WHEELS JUST CAME OFF the bus of the relationship at that point in time, coming after problems created by the WikiLeaks issues and unkind assessments of the Pakistanis in a book by Bob Woodward,” Petraeus told me. The Obama administration froze all high-level talks, including Holbrooke’s hard-fought Strategic Dialogue and trilateral working groups with Afghanistan. Clinton canceled a meeting with Foreign Minister Qureshi.
In the months that followed, the dominoes kept crashing down. Just after 11:00 p.m. one night in early May 2011, two Black Hawk helicopters, outfitted with brand new stealth technology to avoid radar detection, took off from Jalalabad, in Eastern Afghanistan. Two larger Chinooks followed in case the Black Hawks’ mission went awry. Collectively, the aircraft contained seventy-nine American commandos and a dog. (Name: Cairo. Breed: Belgian Malinois.) The rest is history: a team of Navy SEALs descended on the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, used C4 charges to blow through the gates of a walled residential compound, and shot Osama bin Laden in the head and chest. The Americans spirited away the body, and a backup sample of bone marrow, into the night. A single Black Hawk that had crashed during their initial descent was destroyed to keep its technology from the Pakistanis, leaving behind a smoldering helicopter tail and a lot of questions.