Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  The foreign minister had a photographic memory. Everyone knew that he preferred statistics to reasoning, data rather than a desk officer’s fumbling analyses. He often liked incredibly technical details about nuclear power plants, Russian combat vehicles, and other things that a foreign minister apparently had a use for. According to those who worked closest to him, he read everything. The Foreign Service produced hundreds of reports every day. Apparently he read all embassy reports, all major news, blogs, research—everything. Carina couldn’t understand how it was possible, but that was what they said. Orders from the foreign minister’s office often came with a slightly condescending reminder to the desk officer not to include “the normal” embassy reports, just facts and “the most relevant things.”

  In her eight years at the Ministry, she had sat eye to eye with the foreign minister on four occasions. He was unquestionably brilliant, but basically uninterested in people who weren’t foreign ministers.

  It occurred to her that the minister might not even be in Stockholm. If not, she would be forced to send the whole file as an encrypted e-mail to Kiev, call them, and get someone to drive it down to the Crimea to hand it over personally.

  She dug out her phone from under the papers and called the minister’s press secretary, but that diverted to a cell-phone voicemail. She pulled up the electronic phone directory and found the extension for one of the assistants.

  Call forwarded. Then some scraping noises and a whispering voice that answered: “Marianne.”

  Carina introduced herself. She explained briefly that she was preparing the minister’s file for Ukraine. Was the foreign minister in Stockholm today?

  “I don’t actually know.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s going to the Congo later this week—for the Dag Hammarskjöld ceremony. But I don’t know anything about Ukraine. Can I get back to you? Or maybe try Elisabeth?” the assistant whispered in a stressed tone.

  Carina hung up.

  Assistant number two didn’t answer. The foreign minister’s adviser, some young upstart straight out of the Young Conservatives, did pick up his cell. Wasn’t the minister in New York? He clearly had no idea. Carina ended the call quickly, leaned back in the chair, and thought through the options. He would be in Yalta within eighteen hours if he wasn’t there already. Then Africa, then New York and the UN.

  She really did need to know where the foreign minister was. Then the obvious solution occurred to her: check his blog. She went to the site and, naturally, he had already had time to blog in the morning. He was in parliament today—so still in Stockholm for at least another five hours.

  She wrote for half an hour uninterrupted. Her fingers rattled across the keyboard in a series of rapid movements. Points for a possible press conference: The Eastern partnership was of key importance to relations between the EU and Ukraine, she wrote, before adding a few sentences about the importance of a long-term relationship and about the country as part of Europe. General formulations. The EU had trading relations and aid as its two greatest weapons but it was the Russians who had true geopolitical power—they controlled access to oil and gas. It was vital that the message about the rule of law and human rights was clear, while not punching the Ukrainians in the nose and hurting their pride, which would make Yanukovych turn to Moscow. The Kremlin was already talking about discounted oil prices. In a few months it would be winter in Kiev and then political loyalty would be counted in dollars per barrel. She read through what she’d written, rapidly making additions and amendments until she had a decent draft. It was a quarter past nine.

  As the Security Policy Department’s EU coordinator, it was she who had to get the department’s seventy-five diplomats to sing from the same song sheet on everything to do with EU security policy. She was the one who had to keep up with EU procedures, put together negotiation instructions for Brussels and make sure that ministers and junior ministers had the right information. She was the one who sent out stern reminders to colleagues about keeping to deadlines and she was responsible for ensuring that everyone affected was informed and ready to react.

  The last few months had been hectic. The Arab Spring and the Libyan campaign, Kosovo, the Horn of Africa, and more generally the EU’s more or less fulfilled ambition of becoming a military security policy operator meant, in practice, a myriad of meetings and decisions, informal contacts, and thousands of papers with proposals flitting between the capitals of Europe. All this went through the encrypted European communication system, Coreu. There was a database where all member states and the Council of Europe secretariat could post messages—a never-ending noticeboard where thousands of messages, agendas, and minutes were published every day. It was Carina’s responsibility to keep track of this flow of information and make sure that the department didn’t drop any balls. There were those who hated Coreu. When Sweden had joined the EU and connected to the information system, the volume of mail and messages had increased by fifty percent overnight. Carina liked the tempo. She enjoyed having direct contact with other European foreign ministries and the feeling of being a part of real politics. Fifty or sixty hours a week were a prerequisite to do the job, but that was generally okay. This morning, however, the sheer volume of new messages on Coreu made her draw breath. Dealing with the stream of Coreu data was sometimes like playing an unending tennis match against an inexhaustible Agassi.

  She stood up and stretched her arms. Her back creaked. Tiredness washed across her like an anesthetic and made her stagger. She needed coffee.

  Carina looked around. Her room was narrow, a little smaller than the others on the corridor. There had been a possibility that she might get the office next door to the Head of Department, at the top end of the corridor—a light room with a view toward Strömmen. It had been the last EU coordinator’s office. But, instead of Carina, the DPKO desk officer, responsible for contact with New York about Swedish contributions to UN troop activities, had gotten the room. He was of a higher rank. But he was going to Santiago soon, and then perhaps it would be her turn.

  She really ought to tidy up, she realized. It was one of the things she never prioritized. She had never been good at physical order. Deep down, she didn’t quite understand what the point was of constantly tidying up—always gathering things into neat piles, putting them in drawers and boxes—when the order was there in her head all along. She was in full control. She prioritized. She was completely fulfilled by her work—what did it matter if there were a few papers here or an apple core there? Everyone knew that she had a fully equipped intellect, but no one believed her when she said she had a system in her office. People visiting her office would often stop short in the doorway as if confronted by a natural phenomenon. Johan Eriksson called her room “the Batcave.” The deputy Head of Department had started to drop small hints, so sooner or later she would have to tidy up. Why on earth couldn’t she be left in peace in her room as it was? She was one of the best analysts in the department. She knew it, even if no one ever said so in as many words. Johan and others would constantly bombard her with various texts for her consideration, and she would usually take pity and quickly glance through their documents, dead calm and absorbed, before leaving a few comments. And the fact was that she was rarely wrong. Despite this, she knew that the office of a civil servant at the MFA shouldn’t look like this.

  The desk was a jumbled landscape of crusty coffee cups, fruit peelings, tubs of paper clips, reference works, handbooks, and an avalanche of papers that had slipped down toward the computer screen. Somewhere or other there ought to be a cactus, but she didn’t take care of it. The shelves along one wall were brimming with books, papers, and files. She contemplated the stacks of paper lying on the floor. The elegant, sheepskin-clad Lammhult armchair was beside the table. It actually belonged in the UNHCR desk officer’s room, but she had discreetly carried it to her office the day he left on paternity leave and nobody could remember whose it actually was. It was comfy, but couldn’t be sat in because towering of
f it was a stack of reports from all the past year’s summit meetings at the EU. That pile was a problem—from time to time it extended to the floor. Sometimes she would find classifieds in it—which was not good. The security guards patrolling the building at night were always checking if there was any classified material lying around in offices. If you forgot to lock up classified material, you received a warning in the form of an angry red note on your chair in the morning. Three warnings and you would be called in to the department head.

  The best way to keep a secret was never to divulge it, so they said. But in practice that was impossible. The greater part of the work at the MFA was done under cover of secrecy stamps. The House was bulging with secrets. They were collected, discussed; some built their entire careers on having access to the right classified material. The encrypted mail system delivered a flood of classified reports and analyses depicting reality in its true, complex and raw form. Everyone was careless with secrets. Classifieds were always lying around because no one could be bothered to adhere to the strict rules concerning the handling of secret material. But chucking classifieds on the floor was probably a little too nonchalant. She spotted a report from a NATO meeting in Kabul littering the floor, bent down, and picked it up. In all likelihood there were even more classified reports in the piles. She quickly shuffled through the armchair pile. She wouldn’t forgive herself if she made the beginner’s mistake of getting caught being careless about secrecy. She couldn’t become a problem to the department, not now.

  As EU coordinator, Carina had to work like a slave, but if she stuck it out for another year she would be within reach of a promotion. Her predecessor had been a deputy director. Every EU coordinator before her had been. But not her, she was still a desk officer. It wasn’t something that she dwelled on, but those were the facts, and a poisonous suspicion had begun to spread through her that she wasn’t quite as good as the others. The department head seemed to like her. But she knew how it was: she hadn’t taken the Ministry’s Diplomat Program—she wasn’t a “dipper”; she had come the long way around to become a diplomat, and that made all the difference.

  Carina had started as a temp in the Press, Information, and Communication Department, the least prestigious place to work in the entire building, but had quickly demonstrated an aptitude for analysis and had gone on to short temporary roles at the Department for Eastern Europe and Central Asia and then the Americas Department. Finally, after six years, she got a permanent job at the Security Policy Department. Thank goodness. “Dippers” were guaranteed a permanent position; they were guaranteed a career. She and they were not the same Homo sapiens. She had to fight every week to show her worth. She had considered applying to the Diplomat Program but the thought of rejection had held her back. There were twelve hundred applicants every year and just a handful were accepted after written examinations, stress tests, intelligence tests, and ten interviews. Everyone at the department would know if she didn’t make it and it would be proof that she was second-rate. So instead she had thrown herself into her work and now it was beginning to pay off. As of a few months ago, reports would appear in her pigeonhole every now and then with a Post-it saying, Swedish options? Or, Carina, your views appreciated. Nils. The department head had caught sight of her and begun to use her as a kind of informal sounding board. She would read through and quickly send her assessment. And now there was the rumor of her promotion. Small signs. You made your own luck. How she could be so sure, she didn’t know, but all the same . . .

  It had started as a rumor in the department. Johan Eriksson knew one of the unit heads at Human Resources and had heard that her name had been discussed at a meeting. After that it had quickly become the accepted truth that Carina Dymek was going to become a deputy director next year. But no one really knew whether it was true, not even the department heads, because no one understood the Byzantine procedures in place at the Human Resources Department. Sometimes one could sense a deeper meaning, a pattern in the way posts were filled and who was promoted. But then those patterns would be broken by unfathomable placements that once again meant the MFA’s personnel policies reverted to being the mystery that kept the entire diplomatic corps on tenterhooks and filled the House with rumor and speculation. Like when a deputy was recalled from Rome under suspicion of housing allowance abuse and suspended, only to turn up as the ambassador in Rabat a year later. Or when one of the country’s most prominent political figures was left to wither away on a pointless inquiry, only to be brought back into the fold and made ambassador to Hong Kong. Unpredictable turns like that sent shock waves throughout the building and generated endless speculation. It enchanted and frightened in equal measure. One thing, however, was clear—loyalty paid off. If you stayed in the House, you made your career. The former Marshal of the Court was a warning to all. He had worked at the royal court for over ten years when he returned to the MFA from his leave of absence. He was promptly dispatched to Islamabad in the midst of the worst terror bombings for years. Everyone got the message: opt out of the Ministry and you can go to hell when you come back.

  In reality, the career ladder was perfectly clear and straightforward. Administrative staff had zero career development; they remained assistants their whole lives and could only hope for postings to embassies in decent capital cities. Then there were the political appointments, those working around ministers: junior ministers, press secretaries, and senior advisers—the political experts. They came from the parties, had broken through the youth organizations and political meetings—they belonged to another world. There was deep mistrust between them and the civil servants. Carina felt it herself. As a civil servant she and her colleagues were loyal to the House: it was their House; the politicos were just temporary visitors. The day after changes in government, moving boxes would be sitting outside the offices of junior ministers and political appointees, and then they were gone. But the civil servants stayed. They knew their House and they knew their government—they knew how to get a minister to see the light and grant approval to their proposals.

  For the civil servants and diplomats, a career at the MFA was ostensibly simple. You started as a desk officer, then became a deputy director, then perhaps you became a director and, finally, maybe, an ambassador. The thing that had made her fight for a career at the Ministry was the chance of working in embassies, in the closed rooms of Brussels or Washington. This opportunity was available once a year in the autumn with the commencement of the so-called Grand Call. All vacant positions were published on an internal database, graded by rank, and anyone who wanted to could apply. The Grand Call was the cause of a storm of rumors and intrigue on an annual basis, with everyone trying to get on the good side of bosses and ambassadors in the hope of a good word, while horse-trading with the Human Resources Department. Diplomats had free reign to use the tactics they had been trained in to drive forward their own ambitions rather than to run Swedish politics. It was a time for hopes, dreams, alliances, and razor-sharp rivalries—but with a smile. The last day for applications was the beginning of a four-month game of negotiation in the arena of personnel administration that few saw, but, according to what Carina had heard, reached such a level of complexity that in the end no one was even able to guess who might get which job. Everything disappeared into the labyrinth that was the Human Resources Department. She had heard that the HR administrators would have huge, secret, marathon meetings to which no one else had access, and during which they would draw up lists that no one had ever seen but everyone had heard of, ranking personnel by means of an intricate system. Finally, applicants found out which position they were being offered, or not offered, whereupon an enormous logistical apparatus was set in motion. Hundreds of moves between capital cities and embassies, as well as between floors in the House back in Stockholm, would take place. Next year she was going to apply to an outside position—an embassy. Beijing, perhaps. Or maybe something completely different—Nairobi. She shivered with anticipation.

  Carina stepped ou
t into the corridor and put the classifieds into a burn trolley—a large, locked wastepaper basket on wheels into which civil servants dumped sensitive papers through a small flap after they had been read. The trolleys were taken regularly to a location outside of Stockholm where everything was burned in a secure manner. Often the trolley in her corridor was overflowing by the middle of the week, with secrets sticking out of the flap.

  She went into the bathroom and splashed water across her face, dried off, and looked critically at herself in the mirror. Four hours’ sleep wasn’t enough, but she didn’t look as hollow-eyed as she felt. Her face, with its prominent chin, always became furrowed and wolflike when she hadn’t slept well. But you could hide the dark rings under the eyes with a little makeup. Simply because she was so tired, she had dressed extra formally in a black suit, crimson top, and black shoes. She had glossy polished nails. It didn’t do to wander around the Ministry yawning—no one here wanted to know about your weaknesses. It was important to appear sharp. She always wore a suit to work. In her private life, she never wore a suit, but at the MFA she was in the service of the state. The suit provided her with a steadiness of character—like a piece of armor. Casual clothes were not accepted, something which she had learned quickly the hard way when she had started eight years ago. On her first day, she had come to work in a stylish denim jacket. A man, who she later discovered was the Head of the Press Department, had stopped her in the corridor and said, “Oh, nonuniform day, is it?”

  She hadn’t understood what he meant and had said that they were her normal clothes.

  “You won’t come back from lunch in those clothes,” she had been told.

  At lunch she had gone, with a lump in her throat, to the NK department store and returned with a navy blue suit, white blouse and black shoes. She had worn a suit ever since.