by Ronan Farrow
His anxiety peaked when, one Friday night in late January, the Supreme Court announced a sudden hearing for the following Monday. Hearings were never announced at night. There was a knock at the door. A businessman, whom Haqqani and others involved declined to name, gave him instructions: The Supreme Court would open briefly in the morning, despite it being a Saturday. Haqqani was to file an application to leave the country. Then he was to depart immediately, before the hearing. With Haqqani gone, the court proceeded ex parte, issuing a report based only on the testimony of Ijaz, who continued to point the finger at Haqqani. In an allegation later revived by Pakistani authorities in 2018, Haqqani was also accused of paying off Americans using a Pakistani slush fund and failing to report back home on the particulars. But, since Haqqani wasn’t present, there was no formal legal judgment. It was classic Pakistani political theater. The military and intelligence powers got the optics of acting against an American stooge, without any of the consequences.
Mansoor Ijaz maintained that Haqqani had dictated the memo to him but otherwise declined to comment. “There are material inaccuracies in this recantation,” he said of Haqqani’s version of events, “too many, I’m afraid, to take a lot of time to fix them.” Haqqani had his suspicions that Ijaz may have cooked up the memo at the behest of the ISI. But he conceded it was more likely that a serial fantasist got in over his head—and the ISI and the military seized the opportunity to eliminate an enemy.
AFEW YEARS LATER, I caught up with Haqqani in his small office at the Hudson Institute, the conservative think tank. A narrow window overlooked gray buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue. On the walls hung photographs of Haqqani shaking hands with George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In one picture, he was arm-in-arm with Richard Holbrooke. Haqqani sat at a table stacked with loose paper. It was 2017, and he was in a familiar position: under fire in the Pakistani press. In a Washington Post op-ed, he had defended Donald Trump’s contacts with the Russians, comparing them to his own entrees to the Obama administration. He suggested his outreach during Obama’s transition later helped the United States stage the bin Laden raid. It was true, indirectly. It ultimately fell to him to approve visas for Joint Special Operations commander Admiral McRaven and others involved in planning the operation. By the time the column reached Pakistan, it had been inflated into a long-awaited confirmation that Husain Haqqani built a network of CIA agents right under his bosses’ noses. “The veracity of concerns about his role in the entire issue also stands confirmed,” read a gleeful tweet from a Pakistan Army spokesperson.
In a sense, Haqqani had chosen this life as a pariah. But he never stopped wishing his homeland would understand his belief in dialogue, and his skepticism of a bilateral relationship built on transactions between generals. He handed me one document after another chronicling in minute detail the “memogate” controversy, which still loomed large in his imagination. Wearing a loose gray suit and a cyan tie dusted with white tridents, he looked tired. “Look, it’s taken an adjustment,” he said heavily. “In the view of many people in Pakistan, I’m not a patriot.”
“You’ve spent your whole life working for your government,” I said. “That must be painful.”
“Yeah. For my country, for democracy in my country. So it hurts me.”
He still wondered if he should go back, but he always had second thoughts. “What if someone really thinks I am a traitor and shoots me?” he pondered. Exile was bittersweet. Haqqani survived, but his life’s work—his fight to transform the relationship between the two countries, to build something more sustainable and less transactional—was done. In his final conversation with Richard Holbrooke at the Four Seasons, both men had pledged to keep going in their respective fights against entrenched military thinking until they couldn’t. A year after Holbrooke’s fight ended, so did Haqqani’s.
16
THE REAL THING
THAT AWFUL DAY IN 2014, Robin Raphel stood on her porch and stared at the warrant, and the espionage statute listed on it. The two young FBI agents looked at her. One asked: “Do you know any foreigners?” Raphel goggled. “A thousand,” she said. “I’m a diplomat.” The agents asked her about Pakistanis. She named Husain Haqqani and his successor as ambassador to the United States, Jalil Abbas Jilani. The agents glanced at each other.
“Do you have any classified material in the house?” the other agent pressed on.
“No,” said Raphel, “of course not.”
They handed her several State Department cables marked “CLASSIFIED” and dated back to her time as assistant secretary. They’d found them in a filing cabinet in Raphel’s basement. Raphel smacked a palm to her forehead remembering the moment later. Cleaning out her office years before, she had taken a number of items home and neglected to remove the cables. They “shouldn’t have been there,” she was quick to admit. “But it was just a case of me, when I left the office, not having the time to kind of look through everything.” She knew dozens of prominent officials with worse habits. We all did.
As the agents’ questioning grew more intense, Raphel tried to convince them there’d been a misunderstanding. “I mean, I was just such an idiot, complete idiot. Because I thought, ‘Oh, I can just explain!’ ” It was nearly two hours before she realized she needed a lawyer. She called one she knew—a government contracts specialist she met while lobbying at Cassidy & Associates.
A few hours later, she and her daughter Alexandra sat at DeCarlo’s, a nearby Italian restaurant with bread sticks on the tables and faded green carpeting that her kids had always called a “mafioso spot.” It was a frequent meeting place for CIA agents, according to neighborhood lore. They were joined by two lawyers: the one she’d called and a younger associate who’d raced over in an Uber to get there more quickly. Alexandra, a short, feisty redhead, was distraught. “How could you possibly have documents in the house,” she wailed. “What were you thinking?” Raphel tried to process what had happened. She ordered a glass of wine. “The truth is, I was in shock,” she later told me. “In medical terms.”
The next day, Diplomatic Security arrived at the house to confiscate her BlackBerry and work ID. She was summoned by State Department Human Resources and informed that her security clearance was suspended and her contract, which was up for renewal, would be allowed to lapse. It was the first time she had walked into State without Department ID in years. When the guard at the C Street entrance saw the name on her driver’s license, Raphel recalled him trembling visibly. Days later, the story hit the front page of the New York Times: “FBI Is Investigating Retired U.S. diplomat.” A State Department spokesperson told reporters only that the Department was cooperating with law enforcement. “Ms. Raphel’s appointment expired,” the spokesperson added. “She is no longer a Department employee.” Robin Raphel was never allowed back into her office. FBI agents scoured her desk, then sealed the doors.
A few weeks earlier, Raphel had arrived in Islamabad with a mission from Dan Feldman, from whom Holbrooke had jokingly requested a heart and who had recently assumed the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan job. Protesters were taking to the streets across Pakistan, railing against alleged vote rigging that, in 2013, propelled Nawaz Sharif back into power. Some commentators argued that a “soft coup” was under way, with Sharif quietly surrendering control to the military. Robin Raphel, with her peerless Rolodex in Islamabad, was there to ferret out information on whether the government would actually fall. She set to work, attending dinner parties and making notes about gossip she heard, which she reported back to Feldman and the ambassador in Islamabad, Richard Olson. “What she was doing,” Olson told me, “was diplomacy.” In the three years since the “annus horribilis” of 2011, the relationship between the countries had remained icy. Colleagues at State viewed Raphel as a vanishing asset: someone the Pakistanis still talked to.
She had no way of knowing that her every move during that trip to Islamabad was being watched by the FBI. Raphel’s brand of old-school diplomacy was struggling to f
ind purchase alongside not only the military domination of foreign policy but also the surveillance state that had evolved since 9/11. Face-to-face conversations had been steadily eclipsed by “signals intelligence” or intercepted communications. In early 2013, NSA analysts listening in on Pakistani politicians’ phone calls began to focus on an American in the conversations: Robin Raphel. She seemed to be discussing sensitive matters—drone strikes, coups. They sent an “811 referral”—indicating suspected chatter about classified material—to the FBI. The two agents Raphel later met on her porch were selected to lead the investigation for their focus on “65 work”—spy cases. They began to look at Raphel’s contacts, her personnel files at the State Department, her personal life. After a few months, they obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant to monitor her Skypes and calls with Pakistani officials.
It had been a year since Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, and the bureau was looking for moles and leakers. With Raphel, they hoped they’d hit pay dirt. Her background seemed to have all the hallmarks: decades spent largely abroad, her status as a registered lobbyist, her brazen sympathies with dubious Pakistan, of all places. (“Oh totally,” she told me when I asked if she felt that sentiment prejudiced the investigation. “Everybody hated Pakistan, so of course.”) The Pakistanis she spoke with sometimes went on to refer to her as a “source” and tout how informative she had been. And digging revealed further flags: she’d been cited for a handful of minor infractions related to the handling of classified material; leaving documents out or computers unlocked. And then there were the documents in the filing cabinet in her basement—which could carry a criminal charge, separate from the more serious espionage charges.
But the FBI investigation also flowed from multiple layers of misunderstanding. The intelligence and law-enforcement agencies searching for moles had little knowledge of the peculiar rituals of diplomacy in Pakistan. Anyone who had ever spent five minutes at a dinner party in Islamabad knew that the nominally “classified” topics Raphel had been discussing, like drone strikes, were an unavoidable matter of public debate. Bragging about Americans being sources of information was, similarly, a typically Pakistani expression of bravado.
Raphel was also up against a more general kind of confusion. The old-fashioned schmoozing and relationship-building she had built her career around was out of vogue and foreign for a generation raised in the surveillance age. Holbrooke’s SRAP team, which she had joined—with its interagency staff, all aimed at broadening rather than narrowing the conversations in the region—was particularly out of step with the times. “People didn’t understand the SRAP office, which I’m sure doesn’t surprise you,” Raphel recalled. “They didn’t understand the bureaucratic structure. Who were all these people? Who did they report to, what were they doing there? What was their scope of work?” The value of all this talk wasn’t self-evident. How could it be? In places like Pakistan, conversation had long been an afterthought to the business of generals and spies.
ONE EVENING about a week before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Robin Raphel came in from the Washington, DC, winter and took off her coat. We were at Garden Cafe, a quiet bistro around the corner from the State Department with peach walls decorated with bland paintings of flowers. Jazz played faintly. As always, her personal style reflected her years in Pakistan. She wore a taupe pashmina with silver embroidery thrown over one shoulder of a gray jacket, and her blond hair was swept into a French twist. She ordered a sauvignon blanc. “I look back on it now and I see the humor in it,” she said, with a tone that suggested she didn’t see the humor in it at all, “but it was . . . you know, anyway you slice it, it is profoundly wrong to do that to somebody.” She seemed unchanged: lips tightly pursed; chin held high; the same haughty delivery. But in fact, just about everything had changed for Robin Raphel.
As the FBI dug deeper, their case lost steam. Circling Raphel over the course of months, investigators had avoided talking to her coworkers at the State Department, not wanting to tip her off and lose a chance to catch her in the act. Once they began speaking with officials familiar with her work, they started to understand that Raphel’s incriminating behavior was in fact simply old-school, relationship-driven diplomacy. In early 2015, the US Attorney’s office overseeing the case told Raphel’s lawyer that it was dropping the espionage charges. Prosecutors still seemed to want to extract something to save face, like a plea in the lesser charge related to the classified material. Raphel wouldn’t budge—she knew those infractions were common and not grounds for significant criminal proceedings. In March 2016, prosecutors finally dropped the case entirely. It had been seventeen months since the raid on her house. She had spent more than $100,000 in legal fees. Friends banded together to help cover them, but she was still decimated financially and out of a job.
“I haven’t worked in two years,” she told me, “and I have significant responsibility still for my children, and legal bills, and stuff like that.” She laughed coldly. “It’s just beyond imagination that you spend forty years working hard, and this is what happens.” She was looking for work, but the cloud of suspicion made it difficult. “Nobody is going to hire you when the FBI has accused you of being a spy on the front page of the New York Times, above the fold.” The investigation’s announcement was a circus. Its resolution barely registered a blip. Later she took odd consulting jobs, part time—anything she could find to make ends meet.
Life on the outside was hard to adjust to. Raphel’s work had, for as long as she could remember, been her life. “I’m a working woman,” she said. “I’m not a homemaker. I mean I can cook and do various things, but I’ve never been a homebody.” She struggled to hold on to some semblance of her old world. Every day, she woke up early, sat at her dining room table in front of an aging laptop, and put out feelers for work. She advised nongovernmental groups on the subject of reconciliation in Afghanistan, a project the United States government had once again left for dead. She read copiously, especially about politics and Pakistan. She went to every think-tank and foreign policy event she could, especially anything about South Asia. In early 2016, I interviewed Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy about her documentary on honor killings in front of a small audience at the United States Institute of Peace. There was Robin Raphel in the front row, taking notes. A few attendees glanced at her curiously and exchanged whispers.
Her family had to adjust. Alexandra continued to feel “mortified . . . it was a real body blow to her,” Raphel said. She was engaged to be married and explaining the scandal to her in-laws became a family crisis. “She was afraid people wouldn’t come [to the wedding], that everyone would be thinking about this embarrassing thing. . . . ” she recalled. Raphel took the bus to New York and met with the bridegroom’s parents, a successful investment banker and his polished, yoga-going wife. “I’m not a spy,” she told them. “Oh,” they replied.
THAT NIGHT AT THE GARDEN CAFE, Raphel raked her red-lacquered nails across the white tablecloth with a “snnk” sound. “If anybody put these guys onto this,” she said, “it would have been an American.”
“An American who felt you were too close,” I said.
“Yep. And you know,” she said under her breath, leaning in conspiratorially, “The intelligence community is chock full of Indian Americans who have a huge chip on their shoulder about Pakistan. They’re there for their language skills. You see these people coming in from INR”—The State Department intelligence bureau—“to brief and they’re clueless. They have an attitude. They don’t know anything!” She leaned back and picked up her sauvignon blanc with a slosh. I spoke with more than a dozen of Raphel’s colleagues about the investigation. None thought she was a spy. Several questioned her coziness with a treacherous regime. The term “clientitis” sometimes came up. Robin Raphel was a loyal, even patriotic American public servant. But she had internalized Pakistani attitudes—right down to the tendency to blame India, even Americans of Indian descent.
R
aphel’s approach was imperfect. Unlike Richard Holbrooke, who used diplomacy to transform the strategic orientation of the relationships he tackled, she followed the rules. She used diplomacy to maintain the status quo, and for decades, the status quo in Pakistan had been holding things together just enough for military and intelligence cooperation to continue. Sometimes, that could look like appeasement. Empowered diplomacy, used as a frontline tool as Richard Holbrooke had urged, might have looked very different.
But Raphel was a believer in an old-fashioned diplomatic maxim: you never stop talking. Dating back to her advocacy for the Taliban, she had been an extreme embodiment of that ethos. Now, in an era where diplomacy of any kind was being sidelined in America’s most sensitive relationships, that behavior was more than unusual—it even looked criminal. “She was trying to work on the US national interest, doing things we all thought were important,” one senior official told me, on condition of anonymity since the investigation was still a sore point with law enforcement. “And by doing that she looked to someone like a spy. The danger of the whole thing was criminalizing diplomacy.”
When the Wall Street Journal profiled the Raphel case, it headlined the resulting article, “The Last Diplomat.” As Raphel rose from our table, she shook her head at the characterization. “Ronan, can we please get this straight? I have had foreign policy people come up and say, ‘You were doing the old-fashioned thing and now there’s a new thing.’ ” She fixed her blue eyes on me. “I wasn’t doing the wrong thing. I wasn’t doing the out of date thing. I was doing the real thing.” Robin Raphel pulled on her coat and stepped back out into the cold.