The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  Not long after Vice President Bush’s sweeping victory in the presidential election in November, a significant complication developed. Arafat applied for a visa to come to the United Nations in New York at the end of the month. I thought there were powerful arguments to grant the visa, given U.S. obligations as host of the UN. But Secretary Shultz remained deeply concerned about PLO involvement in terrorism, and was determined to show Arafat that he would not bend until the three conditions for U.S. dialogue were met. The president and Powell deferred to Shultz, and Arafat was denied a visa. As Shultz anticipated, the denial did not slow PLO interest in opening a direct dialogue, and may have convinced Arafat that he couldn’t cut any corners.

  By early December, Arafat was edging close to the mark. I joined Powell and Shultz and a few other aides for a meeting with President Reagan in the Oval Office to discuss next steps. Shultz argued persuasively that it was important to take yes for an answer if Arafat met the terms. This would be a service to President Bush, who would inherit a dialogue with the Palestinians, and not have to sacrifice any early political capital to bring it about. President Reagan readily agreed. “Let’s just make sure they stick to their end of the bargain,” he said.

  On December 14, Arafat made a public statement in Geneva that matched the American criteria, and our ambassador in Tunis was authorized to begin a direct dialogue with PLO representatives. While we were still a long way from serious peace negotiations, it was a useful step forward. Both President Reagan’s foreign policy legacy and his place in history looked immeasurably better in December 1988 than they had two years before.

  As the inauguration of President Bush approached in January 1989 and I prepared to return to the State Department after two and a half intense years at the White House, I realized how fortunate I had been, and how much I had learned. I wrote in my last personnel evaluation at the NSC staff that I now understood “how the policy process should work, and how it shouldn’t.” I had also begun to learn that the profession of a diplomat was only partially that of diplomacy; you had to know how to navigate politics and policymaking as well. My apprenticeship as a diplomat had been unusually rich and varied over less than seven years, with experience in an exceptional embassy and tours with two strong public servants at senior levels of the department, followed by a roller-coaster ride at the NSC staff that took me from the bizarre lows of Iran-Contra to heady responsibilities under Colin Powell. Now I was about to launch into a new and even more fascinating chapter, returning to the State Department as the Cold War ended and the world was transformed.

  2

  The Baker Years: Shaping Order

  THE OLD CAUCASUS spa town of Kislovodsk was in terminal decline, much like the Soviet Union itself. It was late April 1991, and Secretary Baker and the rest of us in his bone-tired delegation had just arrived from Damascus. With Baker scheduled to meet with Soviet foreign minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh the next morning, we stumbled around in the evening gloom to find our rooms in the official guesthouse, long past its glory days as a haven for the party elite. My room was lit by a single overhead bulb. The handle on the toilet came off when I tried to flush it, and what trickled out of the faucet had the same sulfurous smell and reddish tint as the mineral waters for which the town was famous. It wasn’t a particularly alluring setting, but I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and longed to collapse in the bed, rusty springs and all.

  First I had to deliver a set of briefing points to the secretary. I walked down to his suite, which was bigger and better lit than the other rooms, although with similarly understated décor. The State Department security agent stationed outside the door knocked and let me in. Baker was sitting at a desk reading press clips, still in his crisp white dress shirt and characteristic green tie. He smiled wearily and motioned me to sit down. The secretary’s stamina and focus on preparation were legendary, but he was exhausted. A day before, he had spent nine hours in a diplomatic cage fight with Syrian president Assad. Nearly motionless as he sat in his overstuffed armchair, Assad had relished the endurance contest with Baker, spinning out long monologues about Syria’s history and regional intrigues, and ordering enough tea to overwhelm even the hardiest bladders. Unintimidated and undefeated in Damascus, Baker was nevertheless worn out.

  He glanced at the paper I handed him. The range of issues that he was going to discuss with Bessmertnykh would have been hard to imagine at the outset of Baker’s tenure two years before. There were points on Germany’s peaceful reunification in the fall of 1990, and background notes on the Soviet Union’s increasingly uncertain future, with hardliners battling reformers, Gorbachev beset by independence-minded republics, and the economy in free fall. Historic negotiations were under way to lock in conventional and nuclear arms reductions. And in the Middle East, Baker was seeking to capitalize on the military triumph over Saddam Hussein and produce an Arab-Israeli peace conference, ideally with Soviet co-sponsorship.

  Looking up from the memo and across the tattered furnishings of his suite, Baker asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I assured him I hadn’t, and started to tell him all about my new handleless toilet. “That’s not what I meant,” he said, unable to restrain his laughter. “I’m talking about the world. Have you ever seen so many things changing so damn fast?” Embarrassed, I acknowledged that I hadn’t. “This sure is quite a time,” he said. “I bet you won’t see anything like it for as long as you stay in the Foreign Service.”

  He was right. For all the exceptional people and complicated challenges I have since encountered, the intersection of skilled public servants and transformative events that I witnessed in the Baker years at the State Department remains special. The end of the Cold War, the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the successful reversal of Iraqi aggression marked a new era in international order.

  President George H. W. Bush was well suited for the unprecedented changes unfolding around him, drawing on his eight years in the White House as vice president, his tenure as CIA director, and his life in the diplomatic arena, first as ambassador to the United Nations and then as envoy to China. Jim Baker was his closest friend, a wily political player, a former White House chief of staff and secretary of the treasury. Brent Scowcroft became the model for future national security advisors, forging a close bond with President Bush, managing the policy process with fairness and efficiency, and displaying consistently sound judgment and personal integrity. Dick Cheney was a strong leader at the Pentagon, well versed in national security issues as well as the dark arts of Washington politics. Colin Powell had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bringing with him not only a stellar record of military service but also his successful tenure as Reagan’s national security advisor.

  Their combination of policy skill and political acumen served our country well when the tectonic plates of geopolitics began moving in dramatic and unexpected ways. This was a team that had its inevitable imperfections and blind spots, and its share of misjudgments and disagreements, but as a group they were as steady and sound as any I ever saw. At one of those rare hinge points in history, they were realistic about the potency as well as the limits of American influence. They realized that American dominance could lead to hubris and overreach, but they had a largely affirmative view of how American leadership could shape and manage international currents, if not control them. Theirs was an example that I never forgot, and that every successive administration tried to reach.

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  I OWED MY entry onto the fringes of Baker’s circle to my old boss, Dennis Ross. After the campaign, in which he served as Bush’s foreign policy advisor, Dennis chose to go with Baker to the State Department. He judged, correctly, that the secretary’s tight relationship with the president would make him the key player in American diplomacy. As director of the Policy Planning Staff, Dennis was given responsibility for two critical issues, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Sitt
ing on the steps of the Old Executive Office Building one sunny late November afternoon, he asked if I’d join him as his principal deputy. I accepted—uncertain about another professional leap for which I felt unprepared.

  Jim Baker ran the State Department through a tight, close-knit group, working out of a string of offices along the seventh floor’s “mahogany row.” At one end of the wood-paneled hallway sat Deputy Secretary Larry Eagleburger, a rumpled, blunt-spoken, chain-smoking Foreign Service veteran, sometimes bursting at the seams of his aspirationally sized pinstriped suits. Baker relied on Eagleburger to manage the building and help ensure harmonious coordination with Brent Scowcroft, Eagleburger’s longtime friend and colleague under Henry Kissinger. At the other end sat Bob Zoellick, who served as counselor, and later undersecretary for economic affairs. Still only in his mid-thirties, Bob was brilliant, creative, and incredibly disciplined. He was precisely the kind of talent Baker needed by his side at a moment when the shelf life of conventional wisdom often seemed to be measured in days, not years.

  Sitting in an office with a connecting door to the secretary’s suite was Margaret Tutwiler. Though she was nominally assistant secretary for public affairs and department spokesperson, Margaret’s actual role was far more expansive. She had served under Baker in the Reagan White House and at Treasury, and was fiercely protective of his image and political flanks. Beneath her Southern graciousness, Margaret was tough as nails, with exceptional instincts about people. Just beyond her office was Bob Kimmitt’s set of offices as undersecretary for political affairs, the number three job in the department. Kimmitt’s roots with Baker also went back to the Reagan White House. A West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, Kimmitt had a quick mind and immense organizational ability. He oversaw the department’s regional bureaus, and played a crucial role in managing the day-to-day policy process. Between Kimmitt and Zoellick sat Dennis and me, a few corridors removed from the rest of the Policy Planning Staff.

  Baker had mastered the politics of foreign policymaking. He knew how to maneuver people and bureaucracies, and his feel for the international landscape was intuitive and pragmatic. He was a superb problem-solver, and made no pretense of being a national security intellectual or grand strategist. He was cautious by nature, and always attuned to the risks of unforeseen second- and third-order consequences. He was unchained by ideology and open to alternative views and challenges to convention. He was as good a negotiator as I ever saw, always thoroughly prepared, conscious of his leverage, sensitive to the needs and limits of those on the other side of the table, and with a lethal sense of when to close the deal.

  Baker deftly used his closest advisors to run the institution and supply the innovation and imagination he sought, with just the right touch on the reins to draw on the strengths of each of them. He could rely on Zoellick and Ross for ideas and strategy; Eagleburger and Kimmitt to get things done and steer the bureaucracy; and Tutwiler to watch his back and avoid political landmines. While Baker’s early, closed style produced predictable grumbling at State, it evolved considerably over time. The accelerating pace of events and his own growing appreciation of the skills of career personnel encouraged him to rely on a wider circle. Career professionals were drawn in and exhilarated by Baker’s clout and success, which put State at the center of American diplomacy at a time of massive global change.

  I had always been intrigued by the Policy Planning Staff, which had been launched in 1947 by Secretary George Marshall, and whose first director was George Kennan, the Foreign Service legend and architect of the Cold War strategy of containment. Marshall’s charge to Kennan and the five staff members he assembled was to “develop long-term programs for the achievement of U.S. foreign policy objectives.” He added one laconic bit of advice: “Avoid trivia.”1 Kennan and his colleagues played a pivotal role in devising the Marshall Plan, and in laying the early foundations for American policy during the Cold War. After Marshall left State in 1949, Kennan grew disenchanted with both what he saw to be the militarization of his original concept of containment and Dean Acheson’s less sympathetic view of Policy Planning’s bureaucratic prerogatives. His influence waning, he soon left the department for a sabbatical at Princeton.

  The role of Policy Planning varied widely in significance after Kennan. Subsequent directors often struggled to sustain the attention of secretaries of state, and to find an effective balance between long-term strategy and the operational challenges that preoccupy the secretary and the rest of the department on any given day. Successful Planning Staffs, such as Kissinger’s, did both.

  Baker’s Policy Planning Staff was as consequential as Kissinger’s or Marshall’s. Baker treated it as his own mini–National Security Council staff, relying on us for ambitious initiatives as the Cold War was ending, speechwriting, tactical support on his travels, and the briefing papers and talking points and press statements that fueled the diplomatic machine. His relatively insular style, as well as the drama and scope of world events, gave Policy Planning a huge (and daunting) opportunity to shape strategies and decisions.

  We eventually grew to thirty-one staff members, drawn from career ranks at State, the Pentagon, and CIA, as well as an eclectic group from outside government. I served as Dennis’s principal deputy and alter ego, doing my best to help lead and manage the staff, and frequently traveling with Baker. The staff was full of stars—scholars like John Ikenberry and Frank Fukuyama, whose article on “The End of History” was about to catapult him to fame; FSOs like Russia hand Tom Graham, the always irreverent Bill Brownfield, and my good friend Dan Kurtzer; and civil servants like Aaron Miller, another close friend and Middle East specialist, and Bob Einhorn, one of the government’s premier arms control experts. We had gifted political appointees, like Andrew Carpendale, Walter Kansteiner, and John Hannah; talented if overworked speechwriters; and young interns like Derek Chollet, one of the most promising foreign policy minds of his generation.

  It was a remarkable group, and a heady time. Our connection to Baker and privileged status in the department did not endear us much to the rest of the institution, so I spent a fair amount of energy trying to build a collegial reputation for our team. Still, it was no surprise when Tom Friedman, then the New York Times correspondent at the State Department, wrote in the fall of 1989 that we were viewed by many in the department as “a group of still-wet-behind-the-ears whippersnappers with too much authority for their tender years.”2

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  WET BEHIND THE ears or not, nothing would have prepared us for the events of 1989.

  Having served as central players throughout the Reagan administration, President Bush and Secretary Baker were intimately familiar with their inheritance. They knew that Central America would remain a major source of partisan strife and a potential drain on the Bush administration’s foreign policy capital on the Hill. They were more optimistic about Asia, and at least initially encouraged by the trajectory of relations with China. Japan’s economic boom was real, but its threat to our own economy was grossly exaggerated. The vast expanse from Afghanistan to Morocco seemed more settled than it had been in some time: The last Soviet troops departed Afghanistan on the eve of President Bush’s inauguration in January 1989, the Iran-Iraq War was over, and threats to shipping and access to Gulf oil had receded. The beginning of dialogue with the PLO seemed to offer a modest new opening on the Arab-Israeli peace front, even as violence continued between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.

  The central drama, however, was unfolding in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev was still trying to reform Soviet rule, aiming to reverse a perilous economic decline while preserving Communist Party rule at home and Soviet influence abroad. He faced mounting problems: economic decay; food shortages; a hostile old guard in the party; growing ethnic unrest and separatist sentiment in non-Russian republics; restive allies in Eastern Europe; and an increasingly disillusioned public. And yet few e
xpected the imminent demise of the Soviet bloc, let alone the Soviet Union itself.

  Reagan, the old Cold Warrior, had seemed in his later years in office to understand the desperation in Gorbachev’s maneuvers and the terminal rot in the Soviet system. But Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and their colleagues remained skeptical. They entered office determined not to be hoodwinked by Gorbachev. If he failed, it was not apparent that the Soviet Union would fail; it seemed more likely that hardliners would supplant him and restore the hard edge of the Cold War.

  Bush and Baker took a careful approach to managing relations with Gorbachev during the first half of 1989. At the president’s direction, Brent Scowcroft and his deputy, Bob Gates, launched a long interagency review of our policy toward the Soviet Union. As the review proceeded, Gates called for a “conscious pause” in U.S.-Soviet diplomacy. “A lot has happened in the relationship in an ad hoc way,” Gates wrote. “We’ve been making policy—or trying to—in response to what the Soviets are doing, rather than with a sense of strategy about what we should be doing.”3 Baker was careful in his first meeting with his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, that March in Vienna, and in conversations with Shevardnadze and Gorbachev in Moscow in May. He made clear to both that the Bush administration appreciated the sweep and potential of the changes they were attempting, but also emphasized that neither he nor the president appreciated being cornered by bold public proposals or acts of “one-upmanship” designed to portray Washington as the recalcitrant party. For Scowcroft and Gates, as well as for Cheney, the jury was still out on Gorbachev. As Scowcroft later put it, “Were we once again mistaking a tactical shift in the Soviet Union for a fundamental transformation of the relationship?”4