The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  Iraq, then five years into its horrific war with Iran, was a particularly memorable stop. Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s urbane and faintly menacing foreign minister, hosted Murphy for a long lunch of masgouf, the famous Iraqi fish dish. Aziz’s security detail cleared a well-known restaurant on the Tigris of its patrons for the afternoon. Seated at an outdoor table overlooking the river, we could see Iraqi guards fanning out around the building, pistols drawn. The restaurant staff affected an air of normalcy, exchanging whispers about who these evidently important foreigners were. Puffing on a big Cuban cigar, Aziz professed great optimism about Iraq’s prospects on the battlefield, and waxed poetic about the future of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Murphy was unimpressed. As down-to-earth as Aziz was full of mobster charm, Murphy smiled as we walked out of the restaurant and said, “He kind of reminds you of Al Capone, doesn’t he?” I learned a lot about diplomacy from Dick Murphy, although I had no idea then that fifteen years later I’d wind up sitting in his office, not just emptying his outbox.

  Near the end of my assignment, I was asked by Deputy Secretary John Whitehead’s chief of staff if I’d be interested in becoming one of Whitehead’s two special assistants. He thought my experience in NEA would serve me well in the stressful world of the seventh floor, where the department’s senior leadership wrestled with the problems that couldn’t be solved at lower levels. I spent the next year trying not to prove him wrong.

  Whitehead had just become George Shultz’s deputy, after a remarkable career that had taken him from the U.S. Navy and the D-Day invasion to the top of Goldman Sachs. Self-assured and thoroughly decent, Whitehead shared Shultz’s faith in the State Department, although he was always a bit bemused by the difficulty of getting things done quickly, or at least as quickly as he had become accustomed to at Goldman.

  My first day on Whitehead’s staff was very nearly my last. He was an avid art collector, and had placed an original Degas ballerina miniature on the edge of his large desk. On my first morning, I walked in quietly and put a folder in the inbox, only to accidentally knock the Degas off the desk and onto the floor. Fortunately, the oriental carpet was thick, the ballerina bounced undamaged, and the deputy secretary resumed his reading with only a mild grimace in my direction.

  The rest of my tour went more smoothly. My new position gave me a wide perspective on how the department worked, across the whole range of policy issues and bureaus. Whitehead took a special interest in economic issues, and played an important role in helping to open up East European economies as the Cold War was ending and the Soviet bloc was crumbling. I accompanied him on a variety of trips, from Europe to the Middle East and Africa. He helped manage the difficult aftermath of the Achille Lauro attack in the fall of 1985, when Palestinian terrorists murdered a wheelchair-bound American on a hijacked Italian cruise ship. He also took the lead in mobilizing European support for sanctions against Libya in the spring of 1986, after Muammar al-Qaddafi’s agents struck a disco in West Berlin and killed several U.S. servicemen. Although himself a skeptic about the efficacy of economic sanctions, Whitehead was a skillful advocate, and his efforts in the mid-1980s laid the groundwork for a sanctions regime that two decades later helped persuade Qaddafi to abandon terrorism.

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  MY RUN OF professional good fortune continued in the summer of 1986, when I was assigned to the National Security Council’s Near East and South Asia directorate, a four-person office covering Morocco to Bangladesh.

  My new office was in room 3611⁄2 in the Old Executive Office Building, the elaborate structure next to the White House, which until World War II had housed the entire staffs of the State, War, and Navy departments. Whenever I got a little too full of myself, walking with my White House badge along the long, high-ceilinged corridors of the building or across West Executive Avenue for meetings in the White House, my ego would come right down to earth when I returned to my office. Room 3611⁄2 was a converted women’s bathroom, the size of a walk-in closet, with exposed plumbing along the walls and a scent that served as a persistent reminder of the room’s previous function.

  My boss was Dennis Ross, a smart, even-tempered thirty-eight-year-old Californian with an academic background in Soviet and Middle East studies. The Reagan administration was still scarred by its grim experience in Lebanon a few years before, groping unsuccessfully with various formulas for restarting Arab-Israeli negotiations, and anxious about revolutionary Iran. We were all stretched thin in the summer and fall of 1986, on an NSC staff whose core dysfunction was quickly apparent even to a young and inexperienced diplomat like me.

  The modern NSC had grown out of the experience of the Kennedy administration, when McGeorge Bundy led twenty or so political appointees and career professionals from State, Defense, and the intelligence community, organized in small regional and functional offices. The main tasks of the NSC staff, then as now, involved staffing the president for his foreign policy engagements; coordinating the preparation of options for presidential decision with the key cabinet agencies and ensuring that their views were clear, timely, and unfiltered; and carefully monitoring implementation. The role of the national security advisor and the NSC staff grew substantially under Richard Nixon, who drew on the brilliance and ruthless bureaucratic agility of Henry Kissinger to remake relations with China and the Soviet Union, with the White House staff serving not only as coordinator but also chief policy operator.

  Ronald Reagan entered office in January 1981 committed to diminishing the role and reach of the NSC staff and reducing the tension between the NSC staff and cabinet principals that had continued during the Carter administration. Reagan went through national security advisors at a rapid clip. John Poindexter, a Navy admiral, became Reagan’s fourth NSC chief in four years at the end of 1985. A decent man with a nuclear engineer’s exacting intellect, Poindexter was badly miscast in the role. Uncomfortable dealing with Congress and the media, without personal or political connections to the president, not held in high regard by the leaderships of State, Defense, or the CIA, he inherited a staff with some bad habits and explosive secrets—which his own uncertain instincts and detached style proceeded to make worse.

  The most dangerous of those secrets was a bizarre scheme that had begun earlier in 1985 as a clandestine effort by the NSC staff, working through a motley collection of Iranian and Israeli middlemen, to trade U.S. arms to Iran in exchange for the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon. Poindexter’s predecessor, Bud McFarlane, had championed the initiative, despite the long-standing U.S. policy against making concessions to terrorists. Beyond his interest in the return of American hostages, McFarlane saw the potential for a strategic opening to Iran, and contacts with “moderates” in Tehran. In May 1986, still engaged in the enterprise despite having handed over his post as national security advisor to Poindexter, McFarlane made a secret trip to Tehran with a small NSC staff team, in an unmarked Boeing 707 full of arms. The whole episode was the stuff of dark comedy, with McFarlane and his colleagues bearing a cake in the shape of a key to highlight their interest in an opening to Iran. No senior Iranians, let alone “moderates,” emerged to meet McFarlane. Tehran did, however, buy the arms. It also eventually engineered the release of several American hostages by their Hezbollah captors in Lebanon.

  What turned this strange story into a full-blown scandal that nearly brought down the Reagan presidency was a further twist. Led by Oliver North, a Marine lieutenant colonel in the NSC staff’s political-military office, the White House had secretly diverted the proceeds of the arms sales to support the anti-Communist Contra forces in Nicaragua. Since Congress had formally forbidden the administration from funding the Contras, this was an illegal—and stunningly reckless—maneuver. Predictably, news of the arms-for-hostages effort leaked out in a Lebanese newspaper story in November 1986, and the Contra connection was soon exposed. Poindexter and North were gone by the end of the month.

  As the Ira
n-Contra scandal unfolded, the NSC staff and the entire White House were in deep disarray. The president seemed stunned and adrift. Seeking a way out, he tasked a commission headed by Senator John Tower of Texas to investigate the role the NSC staff had played in the scandal and recommend reforms. The Tower Commission Report, issued in February 1987, was sharply critical of the president’s hands-off leadership style and the failings of the NSC, and advocated a long list of remedies. Frank Carlucci, a former career diplomat who had served as deputy director of the CIA and deputy secretary of defense, returned to government as Poindexter’s successor. He brought as his deputy Colin Powell, a charismatic forty-nine-year-old Army general. Powell and Carlucci employed the Tower Commission Report as their “owner’s manual,” and quickly set about overhauling the staff and its structure.

  Two-thirds of my colleagues on the NSC staff were soon transferred or fired. An experienced senior diplomat, Bob Oakley, was appointed head of the Near East–South Asia office, with Dennis staying on as his deputy and me remaining at the bottom of the organizational chart. Carlucci and Powell streamlined the overall NSC staff, installed a general counsel to ensure rigorous legal and ethical compliance, and insisted on strict accountability. They worked hard to rebuild trust with Secretary Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, restored the NSC staff to its nonoperational, coordinating role, and set up a disciplined system of interagency meetings, built around a Senior Review Group of cabinet principals, which Carlucci chaired, and a Policy Review Group of their deputies, led by Powell. Together with White House chiefs of staff Howard Baker and Ken Duberstein, Carlucci and Powell helped save the Reagan presidency, rebuild public and congressional trust in the White House, and support a renewed diplomatic push by Shultz that produced some significant late Cold War gains.

  Powell made a particularly strong impression on me, as effective and natural a leader as I had ever encountered. Having grown up in the world of the military, I knew the significance of “command presence,” and Powell personified the concept. Straightforward, demanding, and well organized, he was also warm and good-humored, with a ready smile and easy charm. His Policy Review Group meetings were precise and collegial. The departmental deputies never lacked for opportunities to lay out their views, but Powell made sure each session had a clear beginning, middle, and end—with a crisp statement of objectives, orderly discussion of options, and a concise summation of conclusions or recommendations to principals. For many meetings on Middle East issues, I’d write the talking points that Powell could draw on to guide the conversation. He always made them much more compelling.

  Much of my work in 1987–88 revolved around the Persian Gulf, where the Iran-Iraq War ground on, and where our Gulf Arab allies remained deeply unsettled by the revelation of secret American overtures to a regime in Tehran that they despised and feared. The Gulf Arabs had still not recovered from the shock of the Iranian Revolution and all the uncertainties about American reliability that flowed from it. Every Iranian tactical advance in the war with Iraq sparked new worries.

  Desperate to ward off the Iranians, the Iraqis had begun to attack Iranian oil tankers in the Gulf, trying to chip away at the resources that fueled the war effort. Since most Iraqi oil was exported by pipeline, and since it was hardly in Iran’s interest to try to close the Strait of Hormuz on which its own oil exports depended, Tehran retaliated by striking the tankers of Saddam’s Gulf Arab allies, especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The resultant “tanker war” added a new theater to the conflict, and Iran’s acquisition of Chinese-origin Silkworm antiship missiles threatened a rapid escalation. Late in 1986, the Kuwaitis approached both the United States and the Soviets for help in protecting their tankers, explicitly requesting that the United States “reflag” Kuwaiti-owned tankers—putting them under U.S. flag so that they would fall under the protection of the American Navy.

  That touched off a series of complicated deliberations within the Reagan administration about how to respond. I joined Bob Oakley in weeks of Policy Review Group meetings, now chaired by John Negroponte. An accomplished diplomat, Negroponte succeeded Powell as deputy national security advisor in late 1987, when Powell took Carlucci’s place and Carlucci moved to the Pentagon to replace Weinberger as secretary of defense. There were obvious downsides to agreeing to reflagging, not least the danger of getting sucked into the tanker war. Neither State nor the Navy were wildly enthusiastic about the prospect. As Weinberger was departing, however, he had registered with Reagan his strong concern that ceding the opportunity to the Soviets would be a major setback for American interests. Moreover, the White House was anxious to rebuild credibility and trust with the Gulf Arabs, and to send a post-Iran-Contra signal of American resolve. The president formally announced U.S. willingness to reflag in May 1987, just after the Iraqis had “inadvertently” fired a missile at the USS Stark, killing thirty-seven Navy personnel. While the intelligence was murky, I’ve never been convinced that the attack on the Stark was entirely an accident, given Saddam’s interest in drawing the United States in and breaking the murderous stalemate with Iran.

  The reflagging operation was conceived as a relatively low-key exercise, but that quickly proved wishful thinking. The Navy had only a handful of ships in the Gulf at the time, and had to make some major adjustments. It was short on minesweepers, and we had to drum up support from a number of European allies. The reflagging itself required endless legal gymnastics and interagency coordination. By late July, however, the United States was able to begin protecting eleven Kuwaiti tankers, now under U.S. flag, in convoys moving in and out of the Gulf. It didn’t take long, however, for other crises to emerge. In September, a U.S. helicopter fired on an Iranian vessel caught laying mines. The following month, the Iranians fired missiles at a U.S.-flagged tanker in Kuwaiti waters, and U.S. Navy destroyers shelled an Iranian offshore platform in response.

  There was no letup in the first half of 1988, and I remember many late nights and early mornings in the White House Situation Room monitoring the latest collision. In April, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine, and ten sailors were injured. Two Iranian oil platforms and a number of Iranian naval vessels were destroyed in retaliation. Finally, in July, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian plane, killing 290 passengers and crew. It was a terrible tragedy, but reflected the mounting risks of conflict in the crowded waters and skies of the Gulf. In August, the Iranians finally agreed to a UN-brokered cease-fire with Iraq.

  As tensions in the Gulf began to ease, my own role at NSC shifted unexpectedly. Dennis Ross left to serve as Vice President Bush’s chief foreign policy advisor in his 1988 presidential election campaign. Bob Oakley became our ambassador to Pakistan after the tragic death of his predecessor, Arnie Raphel. I assumed that Colin Powell would bring in a senior official to run the Near East office for the last six months of the administration, and was genuinely surprised when he asked me to take on the role of senior director and chief of the office. At thirty-two, and barely into the middle ranks of the Foreign Service, I was very junior for such a promotion. I went over to see Powell in his West Wing office and explained that I was appreciative of his confidence but thought he should find someone more experienced. I had even brought a few names to suggest. “I wouldn’t have asked you to do this if I wasn’t convinced that you could,” Powell replied evenly. I understood immediately that there was only one right answer, swallowed my self-doubt, and replied that I’d do my best to honor his trust. I walked back to the Old Executive Office Building unsure of how I’d handle the responsibility, but buoyed by his vote of confidence.

  The remaining months of the Reagan administration were a blur. More crises inevitably erupted. In December 1988, a terrorist bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, along with 11 people in Lockerbie who were struck by debris. Initial suspicions focused on the Iranians, seeking revenge for the Vincennes shoot-dow
n, or a Syrian-based Palestinian terror group. But the investigation eventually pointed toward Libyan responsibility, setting off another tortured chapter in relations with Qaddafi, and eventually in my own professional life.

  A final episode in the Reagan administration’s efforts to promote Arab-Israeli peace occupied much of my last months at the NSC staff. Throughout the first half of 1988, against the unsettling backdrop of mounting violence in the West Bank, Secretary Shultz and Dick Murphy had labored doggedly to launch negotiations. The idea was that Jordan could represent Palestinian interests, and that there would be an “interlock” in the process whereby talks on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza would proceed even as discussions of transitional arrangements unfolded. The Shamir government in Israel was resistant—unwilling to concede much in the face of Palestinian violence. King Hussein was wary of exposing Jordan to more regional criticism and distrustful that Arafat would ever cede negotiating responsibility to Jordan. In July 1988, his frustration complete, the king publicly relinquished Jordanian legal and administrative ties to the West Bank, stating bluntly that the PLO now bore sole responsibility for negotiating Palestinian interests.

  Since the mid-1970s, the United States had insisted that it would deal directly with the PLO only if it met three conditions: acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the land-for-peace formula for resolution of the conflict; an end to violence; and recognition of Israel’s right to exist. As King Hussein cut his ties to the West Bank, and nervous that new leaders might emerge that he could not control, Arafat began to probe the possibility of opening a dialogue with the United States. One private diplomatic track was opened by a Palestinian American activist close to the PLO chairman, and another initiative was championed by the Swedish foreign minister. A complicated dance ensued, with Arafat taking a series of steps that came close to the three American conditions, but didn’t quite meet them. The White House largely deferred to Shultz, who was adamant that the criteria could not be compromised. I stayed in close touch with Dick Murphy and his deputy, Dan Kurtzer, as they tried to nudge the intermediaries toward the finish line, and kept Powell carefully informed.