Alexander Haig was secretary of state, the first of ten secretaries under whom I would serve. President Reagan had launched a massive military modernization program, part of an effort to reassert American purpose and influence in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Iranian Revolution that same year. Conflicts in Central America transfixed official Washington, part of a wider contest with a Soviet Union that no one imagined was already in the last decade of its existence. Meanwhile, China’s economic transformation was quietly gathering momentum, with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms producing double-digit growth. It was a moment of turbulence and uncertainty across the globe—and a genuinely exciting time for a twenty-five-year-old just embarking on a diplomatic life.
The training course for new FSOs, known in bureaucratic jargon as “A-100,” was about seven weeks long, though at times it felt interminable. It featured a procession of enervating speakers describing their islands in the great American policymaking archipelago, and offering primers on how embassies functioned and the foreign policy process worked.
By the end of the training period, I had learned more about administrative rules and regulations than I had about the nuances of diplomatic tradecraft. I was struck, however, by the expansive mandate of the profession. On any given day in any given country, diplomats were keeping a watchful eye on American citizens living and working in the country, encouraging local citizens to come visit and study in the United States, and building a wide range of contacts inside and outside government to explain and inform American policy.
Our class of entering officers was a wonderful, eclectic mix. Lisa and I were among the youngest in the group. The average age was thirty-two, with a former Jesuit priest in his mid-fifties at the far end of the actuarial scale. There were former Peace Corps volunteers and military veterans, a couple of high school teachers, and at least one failed rock musician.
With a princely annual salary of $21,000, an intriguing professional future, and a budding romance, I couldn’t have been more content. In the last week of the A-100 course, we were given our first assignments. Mine was Amman, Jordan. I was delighted, given my exciting foray into the Arab world several years before, and the inevitable policy swirl of the region. Lisa had volunteered to go to Burkina Faso, which reflected her lifelong passion for development issues and made her very popular in the class, since no one else was too enthusiastic about the lifestyle awaiting them in Ouagadougou. In the perverse wisdom of the State Department, Lisa was assigned instead to Singapore. We dreaded our impending separation but knew it would be a fact of life in the Foreign Service. We got engaged before Lisa departed for Asia in late spring, leaving me to fend for myself for six months as an Arabic-language student in Washington.
Before I left for the Middle East, I wrote to Albert Hourani, the chief examiner for my Oxford doctorate and a brilliant scholar of the Arab world, to tell him where I had been posted. He replied warmly, noting that he had always found Jordan “a little quiet and unremarkable culturally, but interesting politically.” He added that he had just agreed to provide academic supervision to King Hussein’s oldest son, Prince Abdullah, who would be at Oxford in the coming year. While Hourani’s note didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, Jordan and Abdullah would play a large part in the career I was just beginning.
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AMMAN WAS DUSTY and nondescript in the early 1980s, a city of about a million people sprawled across a series of rocky hills and valleys on the central Jordanian plateau. When I arrived, King Hussein had been on the throne for thirty years, and had survived numerous assassination attempts. Jordan occupied a precarious perch in the region, surrounded by conflicts and sitting atop simmering tensions between the stubborn, clannish East Bank minority that dominated Jordanian politics and a Palestinian-origin majority harboring no shortage of resentments. Starved of natural resources, Jordan was heavily dependent on outside financial help and remittances from the Gulf.
As an introduction to Middle East politics and diplomacy, Jordan was especially well situated, at the crossroads of most of the major problems in the region—from the Lebanese civil war in the north, to the Iran-Iraq conflict in the east, and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the west. The American embassy itself was just the right size for a new FSO, big and central enough to provide exposure to a whole range of issues and professional challenges, but not so big that a junior officer would easily get lost in the machinery.
Dick Viets was the ambassador, a skilled and sophisticated diplomat, straight out of central casting with his white mane and ever-present pipe. Unlike most U.S. ambassadors in the Arab world, Viets had served in Israel, and had wide experience outside the Middle East, including in South Asia and as an aide to Henry Kissinger. He had a close and effective relationship with King Hussein, and a willingness to speak his mind to Washington. Viets’s deputy, Ed Djerejian, and political counselor, Jim Collins, became lifelong mentors.
I spent my first year in Amman in the consular section, as was customary for new officers, no matter what their later specialties might be. My first boss was Lincoln Benedicto, who had spent time before the Foreign Service as a youth counselor in some of Philadelphia’s toughest neighborhoods. He was a good manager with a razor-sharp sense for people who were trying to game the system, whether visa applicants or Americans down on their luck overseas. The Jordanian employees who staffed the consular section were a huge asset, an early demonstration for me of the critical role that foreign service nationals play at American diplomatic posts around the world. They were our trusted eyes and ears, patient guides, and the one thread of continuity of knowledge, expertise, and contacts as officers came and went.
I was not a stellar visa officer. I spent too much time practicing my Arabic in interviews with Bedouin sheikhs, and not enough time processing the endless stream of paperwork and visa applications that came with the job. I never particularly enjoyed my quarterly visits to the few young Americans imprisoned for drug offenses; Jordanian prisons were hard places, and there wasn’t much I could do other than talk and try to offer a little bit of hope. My consular responsibilities gave me chances to travel outside Amman, however, and I eagerly sought out tasks that would get me on the road.
I persuaded Lincoln to let me spend two weeks with the Howeitat tribe in southern Jordan, ostensibly to improve my Arabic. By the early 1980s, the Bedouin spent more time in small pickup trucks than on camelback, although camels were still the ornery heart of their daily existence. Smuggling everything from cigarettes to televisions back and forth across the Saudi border was a primary, if not publicly advertised, income stream. I was kept at a polite remove from those activities, and spent most of my time testing the patience of local tribesmen with my grammatically challenged Arabic. Nearly every member of the Howeitat I encountered claimed to have played a prominent role in the filming of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia two decades before. Set in the stark beauty of Wadi Rum and the Jordanian desert beyond the tiny port of Aqaba, the movie starred Peter O’Toole as Lawrence and Anthony Quinn as the great Howeitat tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi. The Howeitat were not quite as cinematic in person as the Anthony Quinn version, but my brief experience in their midst opened my eyes to the ways in which tradition and modernity were colliding across the Arab world, setting off disruptions that continue to reverberate.
In the summer of 1983, I moved to the political section, the part of the embassy charged with analyzing Jordan’s domestic situation and foreign policy, and building contacts with key officials and political players. We were busy but happy, dealing with a steady stream of Washington visitors, keeping up with an active ambassador, and grappling with lots of interesting regional and domestic issues. Donald Rumsfeld, briefly the Reagan administration’s Middle East envoy, swept through Amman a couple times that year, supremely confident but unfettered by much knowledge of the region. The wider regional landscape remained perilou
s, with the bombing of our embassy in Beirut in the spring of 1983 a terrible reminder of the increasing risks that American diplomats faced. The horrific attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that October, in which 241 Marines were killed, reinforced the challenge.
Amman was hardly immune from those threats. In addition to periodic assassinations and attacks against Jordanian targets, our embassy warehouse was bombed, and a small car bomb was set off one weekday afternoon in the parking lot of the InterContinental Hotel across the street from the embassy. When I walked over afterward with one of our security officers to talk to the Jordanian police and intelligence officials who were investigating, a second car bomb was discovered, and fortunately defused. It had been set to go off some time after the first one, precisely to hit the crowd of officials and onlookers who would naturally gather. It was the first, but not the last, time that I was luckier than I was smart.
That set of events produced understandable alarm. The embassy was an old, cramped stone building, on one of Amman’s main streets. With no obvious alternative locations in the short term, the decision was made to put up a sandbag wall in front of the building, two stories tall and six feet thick. The barrier was reassuring, if unphotogenic—until it collapsed after one of Jordan’s rare rainstorms, transforming the entrance into a man-made beach.
My responsibilities in the political section were mainly to cover domestic politics, and to try to expand the embassy’s relationships beyond our traditional palace and political elite sources. I worked methodically at that task, talking discreetly to Islamist politicians and Palestinian activists in Jordan’s refugee camps. I wrote profiles of next-generation leaders and explored the politics of some of the major towns and cities, including Zarqa, the sprawling urban area just east of Amman, in which disenfranchised Palestinians and disgruntled East Bankers mixed uneasily (and from which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, would later emerge). In the spring of 1984, I covered the first parliamentary elections in nearly two decades—a cautious effort by King Hussein to let off some of the political steam that was building as economic conditions stagnated.
Toward the end of my tenure in the political section, I wrote a cable in which I tried to distill what I had learned and what worried me about the future of Jordan and the wider Arab world. Entitled “The Changing Face of Jordanian Politics,” the cable began by noting that “the traditional system of power relationships which has underpinned the Hashemite regime for decades is beginning to buckle under increasing demographic, social, economic and political pressures.”1 By the end of the 1980s, 75 percent of Jordan’s population would be under the age of thirty. Well over half would be living in the urban stew of Amman and Zarqa, largely cut off from their social and political roots in Palestine and elsewhere on the East Bank. The educational system had its flaws, but remained one of the best in the Arab world; when combined with decreasing economic opportunities, the resultant expectations gap could prove combustible.
“As material gains become more difficult for a growing number of Jordanians to obtain,” I observed, “and as traditional social and political ties begin to fray, disaffected citizens are likely to turn increasingly to the political system for redress of their grievances. What they will probably find is a generally anachronistic and unresponsive structure, riddled with corruption, the preserve of a powerful but steadily diminishing proportion of the population intent upon shielding its power and wealth from interlopers. It is a system based on the fading realities of a bygone era, a time when East Bank tribal balance was the stuff of which political stability was made.”
King Hussein’s intuitive skill and personal grip on the imaginations of most Jordanians were significant brakes on serious instability. But the broad challenge, not just for Jordan but for the rest of the Arab world, was that meeting the demands for dignity and opportunity of the next generation, and the one beyond that, would eventually require greater agility and commitment to modernize creaky economic and political systems. Jordan under King Hussein and later King Abdullah would be better placed than most to cope, but it was not hard to anticipate many of the pressures that would eventually bubble over.
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LATE IN THE summer of 1984, I returned to Washington for my next assignment. Lisa and I had been married earlier that year, and it was far easier for us both to find jobs in Washington than at a single overseas post. In what is a rite of passage for new officers learning the byzantine ways of the State Department bureaucracy, I took on a position as a staff assistant in the Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs. Lisa took a similar position in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
The Near East Bureau, or NEA, was in that era a proud, intense, and slightly inbred place. As one senior colleague put it to me on my first day on the job, it was a place where “three simultaneous wars are considered average.” It was known as the “Mother Bureau” for its reputation for skillfully shepherding Arabists along their career paths, and for setting the standard among State’s other regional bureaus for professionalism under pressure. Led by Assistant Secretary of State Dick Murphy, the bureau worked at a frantic pace, coping with constant crises in the region and congressional scrutiny at home. Murphy was a consummate gentleman and a wise professional, steeped in the perils and personalities of the Arab world.
My partner in the staff assistants’ office during most of that year was David Satterfield. I always felt a little inadequate around David, who had immense facility in the arcane policy issues that bedeviled the bureau, bottomless energy, and a capacity to speak in crisp, precise talking points about any issue at any time. Our role in those low-tech days was basically to serve as the organizational hub for the bureau’s policy work. We conveyed taskings from the secretary’s office, reviewed and filtered the cables coming in from overseas posts, and made sure that Murphy was well prepared for his relentless schedule of meetings and trips. One of us would come in every morning at six to prepare a one- or two-page summary of overnight developments for Murphy’s use in Secretary of State George Shultz’s daily staff meeting. Given NEA’s pace, we’d rarely get out of the office before nine or ten at night.
One of us would also accompany Murphy on his frequent overseas trips—shuttling between capitals, cultivating relationships, managing crises, and pushing large policy rocks up steep hills. The Middle East had its share of Sisyphean tasks. The bitter aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon a couple years earlier still consumed much of NEA’s attention. Meanwhile, the grueling conflict between Iran and Iraq dragged on, with Washington quietly putting its thumb on the scale to support Saddam’s Iraq. The familiar struggle to revive Arab-Israeli peace talks remained a priority, although as was so often the case it was a function more of aspiration than on-the-ground realities.
George Shultz’s reliance on professionals like Dick Murphy, along with his own impressive integrity and intellect, won him many admirers in the department. Shultz was a firm believer in the importance of “tending the garden” in diplomacy, and expected Murphy to spend considerable time on the road, even when particular policy goals were so obviously elusive. One evening in the fall of 1984, I was walking with Murphy along the long wood-paneled corridor that runs down the middle of the seventh floor of the State Department, where the office of the secretary is located. Shultz appeared in the hallway outside his office as we walked past, and asked Murphy when he was heading back to the Middle East. Murphy replied that he had a number of commitments in Washington, including upcoming congressional testimony, and wasn’t sure when he’d travel next. Shultz smiled and said, “I hope you can get back out there soon. It’s important to keep stirring the pot.”
The result of that conversation was a marathon trip, which stretched from North Africa to South Asia, and kept us on the road for nearly five weeks. My role was a mix of logistician and policy aide. Much of the trip involved shuttling between Israel, Lebanon
, and Syria, as Murphy tried to broker a deal that would allow Israeli forces to withdraw from Lebanon, with Syrian forces not advancing southward beyond their positions in the Beqaa Valley. It was fascinating to watch him try to move the immovable Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, who loved to filibuster with long soliloquies on Syrian history since the Crusades. Lebanese politicians, with deep-rooted survival instincts and an endless capacity for backbiting, were maddeningly entertaining. Israel’s national unity government was frequently paralytic, with its two leaders and rotating prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, almost as suspicious of each other as they were of their Arab neighbors.
Nevertheless, Murphy somehow managed to maneuver the parties toward a slightly more stable disposition of forces, with the Israelis pulling back by the early summer of 1985 to a several-mile-wide “security zone” along Lebanon’s southern border. Murphy’s formula was equal parts persistence and ingenuity, steadily pressing for small practical steps, using American leverage carefully, and always conscious that this was another problem to be managed before it could ever be solved. As I was learning, diplomatic triumphs are almost always at the margins.
On that trip and several subsequent efforts over the next few months, Murphy worked hard to restart Arab-Israeli talks. Negotiations never materialized. Yasser Arafat was as hard to pin down as ever; King Hussein lost whatever patience he had for Palestinian machinations; and the Israeli side was immobile, with Shamir uninterested in negotiations over territory with anyone, and Peres interested only in negotiations with Hussein, without the headaches of Palestinian representatives and their desire for an independent state.
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