The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  Other troubles were always bubbling up. In the latter part of the Bush administration, Yugoslavia began to splinter. Serbian forces laid siege to Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, in the spring of 1992, and concerns mounted in European capitals as well as in Washington. In June, based on a strategy memo that Dennis and Andrew Carpendale had helped put together, the secretary recommended to the White House a robust plan to build diplomatic and economic pressure on the Serbs, and potentially even to deploy a multilateral force to break the siege and ensure that relief supplies got through. Brent Scowcroft supported Baker. Cheney and Powell were less enthusiastic. The Serbs momentarily backed down before the U.S. initiative got off the ground, and humanitarian supplies flowed into Sarajevo. The worst, however, was yet to come. The Bush administration, with a presidential reelection campaign in full swing and poll numbers dropping from their post–Desert Storm peak, was not eager to take risks in the Balkans, and content to let the Europeans take the lead. Its failure to act more forcefully only made the choices of the next administration more complicated.

  In late summer, Baker moved to the White House to lead the president’s floundering campaign and serve as chief of staff. Dennis went with Baker. Larry Eagleburger became acting secretary of state, and asked me to serve as acting director of Policy Planning. Sitting in George Kennan’s old seat and still only thirty-six, I felt an uneasy pride.

  One of our main preoccupations over the next six months was trying to think through the contours of an American strategy for managing post–Cold War order. We had begun this effort with a paper for Baker in late April 1992, entitled a little too expectantly, “Foreign Policy in the Second Bush Administration: An Overview.”11 In it, we cited the accomplishments of Bush’s team, noting, “You and the President have much to be proud of in foreign policy. The end of the Cold War, a united Germany in NATO, peace in Central America, Desert Storm, and the first negotiations between Israel and all its Arab neighbors in forty-three years are singular achievements. But they amount to an unfinished agenda. Historians will ultimately judge you by how well you use the second term to translate those first-term successes into a coherent and enduring legacy. Above all, you will be judged by how well you have handled the two main consequences of the Cold War: the transformation of the former Soviet empire, and the victorious though fraying alliance of the U.S., Europe and Japan.”

  The memo emphasized that the starting point for a successful strategy had to include an updated set of assumptions about the international landscape beyond the Cold War. With no global security rival to counterbalance, we were left with an increasingly regional security agenda. “We have a long-term stake in stability in at least three key regions—Europe, East Asia and the Persian Gulf,” I argued. “The end of the Cold War and the defeat of Iraq remove the immediate threat of a hostile power dominating one of those regions. What we face instead is the challenge of providing reassurance in a period of uncertainty, marked particularly by geopolitical upheaval and ethnic rivalry in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, ambiguity about the post–Cold War military roles of Germany and Japan, and the unclear path of post-revolutionary Iran.” I stressed the crucial significance of strengthening our international economic competitiveness as the foundation of our foreign policy.

  Another assumption was that “the system of nation-states that developed during the Cold War, and the elites who governed those states, are caught in a swirl of both centralizing and decentralizing forces. The result is not the obsolescence of the nation-state, which still remains the central actor in international relations, but rather the transformation of the particular system of nation-states that we’ve grown accustomed to over the last half-century.” I continued that “from the disintegrated Soviet empire to the Balkans, to much of Africa and the Middle East, what is happening is that traditional elites who have either excluded significant national or ethnic groups from power or failed to deliver political or economic goods are under attack….The consequences of this political proliferation, and the crisis of legitimacy at its core, are uncertain ones for the U.S. On the one hand, there are enormous possibilities for nurturing democratic values and institutions, creating an international environment that could become more benign than ever for Americans. On the other hand, however, the search for legitimacy and national self-expression will often be a violent process—and it may lead to answers that meet local tests of legitimacy that aren’t very democratic, like conservative Islamic regimes or nationalist authoritarian ones.”

  Defining our new leadership role would not be easy. America’s powerful position, I wrote, did not “imply American dominance of a unipolar world. Power, especially economic power, is too diffuse for so simple a construct. We need to be mindful of the dangers of hubris and the deep suspicions of many governments…about American unilateralism.” At the same time, I pointed out that “the reality remains that the United States, at least for the transitional period in history following the Cold War, occupies a unique position at the intersection of a diverse international system, remaining both a critical balancer in security sub-systems from Europe to Asia, and the only major player with a foot in each of three key economic sub-systems (the Americas, Europe and Asia). In short, while multilateralism may be one of the hallmarks of a post–Cold War order, it will have to be shaped largely by American leadership.”

  In November, Bill Clinton defeated Bush, whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by mounting popular appetite for change and a thirst for post–Cold War domestic renewal. As part of the transition process, we crystallized our views in a paper Eagleburger shared with incoming secretary of state Warren Christopher in January 1993. It was entitled “Parting Thoughts: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Years Ahead.”12 We had refined our thinking quite a bit from the earlier drafts—and the notion of describing an agenda for a second Bush term was obviously long buried. Much of the analysis of the international environment was similar to what we had laid out before, but we highlighted both the advent of new transnational threats and the challenge of building domestic support for active American leadership. “A variety of new transnational threats has appeared,” I wrote, “particularly environmental degradation, drugs and the spread of deadly diseases like AIDS. Such dangers demand collective action rather than purely national responses. They also require an aggressive, new international scientific agenda, in which American leadership will be critical.”

  The thrust of our paper was careful and realistic. We tried to take into account likely domestic constraints. We were mindful of traditional security risks and the danger of regional hegemons emerging. We also saw a shifting global landscape, where security had to be defined in broader terms and new threats had to be considered. We stressed the importance of leading by example and building coalitions of countries around our central role. We were not persuaded that the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War meant that the United States could take a detached view of the world, but we were also careful in our recognition of the perils of overreach and failing to connect ends to means. Ours was a strategy that accepted limits, but also reflected confidence in the capacity of the United States to at least manage problems, if not solve them. It was very much the worldview of Jim Baker, and many of the lessons we tried to articulate haven’t lost their relevance today, more than a quarter century later.

  3

  Yeltsin’s Russia: The Limits of Agency

  IT WAS BARELY forty miles from Sleptsovskaya, a tiny Ingush border town overflowing with refugees, to the Chechen capital of Grozny. But in the late spring of 1995, it felt as if you were crossing from civilization, albeit in its tattered post-Soviet form, to a grim, darkened world in which civilization had lost its place. The main road ran alongside the Sunzha River east into Chechnya, full of ruts and potholes, with heavily mined fields on either side. I was riding with an embassy colleague in an old Soviet ambulance in search of a missing American humanitarian assistance expert named
Fred Cuny. This was our first foray into Grozny, soon after the Chechen rebel leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and his forces had retreated south into the hills.

  Our route was a kaleidoscope of reemerging normalcy and wartime brutality. Civilian traffic had returned, and roadside stands peddled everything from soft drinks and vodka to small arms and ammunition. Russian military vehicles rolled down the middle of the two-lane highway, scattering everything in their path, ridden by Russian troops who looked more like gang members than professional soldiers. Wearing bandannas, reflector sunglasses, and sleeveless T-shirts, and equipped with bandoliers and big knives in their belts, they tried hard to look intimidating. Some checkpoints along the way were manned by teenage conscripts notorious for shooting first and asking questions later, especially after darkness settled. Others were the preserve of kontraktniki, contract soldiers hardened by fighting in Afghanistan or more recent conflicts on Russia’s former Soviet periphery. And then there were the OMON, the Ministry of Interior troops, cold-eyed and clad in black.

  As we drove past the burned-out remains of houses and shops in Samashki, it was not hard to imagine the horrors of the night a few weeks before, when OMON soldiers swept into town and massacred more than two hundred Chechens, mostly women, children, and elderly men. Reportedly drunk and eager for revenge after their own losses in the Chechen campaign, OMON troops burned down homes with flamethrowers and threw grenades into crowded basements.

  When we drove into Grozny itself, the scale of the devastation only grew. Forty square blocks in the center of the city had been leveled by Russian bombing in January and February—a campaign that left thousands dead. It was a scene that resembled a smaller version of Dresden 1945, or Stalingrad 1943.

  Our brief trip gave us a glimpse of the terrible realities of that first Chechen war of the 1990s, which was in many ways a continuation of struggles between Russians and Chechens that went back nearly three centuries. It was also a glimpse of how far Russia had fallen since the collapse of the Soviet Union; here were the ill-fed and ill-trained remnants of the Red Army, once reputed to be capable of reaching the English Channel in forty-eight hours, now unable to suppress a local rebellion in an isolated part of Russia. And here was Boris Yeltsin, who had so courageously defied hardliners in August 1991 and buried the Communist system for good, exposed as an infirm and isolated leader unable to restore order and rebuild the Russian state. This was post-Soviet Russia at its low point, deeply humiliated and thrashing about, the promise of its post-Communist transition still not extinguished, but beginning to flicker.

  It was no coincidence that Vladimir Putin would ride a ruthlessly successful prosecution of the second Chechen war several years later to become Yeltsin’s unlikely successor. If you wanted to understand the grievances, mistrust, and smoldering aggressiveness of Putin’s Russia, you first had to appreciate the sense of humiliation, wounded pride, and disorder that was often inescapable in Yeltsin’s.

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  AS THE GEORGE H. W. BUSH administration wound down, I had been in Washington for eight years, and was well aware of how fortunate I had been. While it typically took at least two decades to rise to the ranks of the Senior Foreign Service, I had been promoted across that threshold in less than a decade. I was not interested in skipping more rungs on the career ladder. I wanted to refine my craft and get back overseas.

  What I really wanted to do was work in what seemed to me to be the most interesting place an American diplomat could serve in the early 1990s: Russia. When the job of minister-counselor for political affairs in Moscow opened up, I leapt at the chance. Lisa was less than enthusiastic; she loved adventures, but this one would involve more professional sacrifices for her, and cold and dark was not the atmosphere she had aspired to as an Asia specialist. Ultimately, she came around to the idea. Part of the allure for both of us was the opportunity to spend a year at the old U.S. Army Russian Institute in Garmisch, at the foot of the Alps in Bavaria, where I would complete advanced Russian-language training. Now with two wonderful young daughters, Lizzy and Sarah, we also wanted a chance to decompress as a family. We arrived in Germany in the summer of 1993, and proceeded to spend as close to an idyllic year as we had in the Foreign Service.

  I was the only diplomat among the group of U.S. Army officers studying Russian in Garmisch. Our instructors were all Russian émigrés. Some had been at the institute since the 1950s; others had come in the wave of Soviet Jewish emigration in the 1970s; a few younger teachers had arrived since the breakup of the Soviet Union. I loved the richness of the Russian language, and learned quickly. Lisa took introductory Russian with a class of special forces soldiers, and to this day has an alarmingly strong grasp of arcane military terminology in Russian. We took weekend trips around Europe, and went hiking and skiing whenever we could. In the late spring of 1994, I spent a couple weeks living with a working-class Russian family in St. Petersburg. It improved my vocabulary considerably—and opened up whole new vistas in Russian profanity, thanks to the family’s ne’er-do-well eighteen-year-old son, an aspiring but not overly talented rock musician.

  We arrived in Moscow in mid-July. I had read voraciously about the embassy’s colorful history, enthralled by the stories of George Kennan and Chip Bohlen reporting from a Moscow transfixed by fear of Stalin’s purges. A ramshackle mustard-colored building on the Garden Ring, the embassy was not far from the Moscow River and the Foreign Ministry. It had served as the U.S. chancery since the early 1950s, increasingly a firetrap and the target of massive bugging attempts. An electrical fire in 1991 had done considerable damage to the building. The spectacle of Russian intelligence agents rushing to the scene, thinly disguised as firefighters, had left an even more lasting impression.

  A new embassy building, later discovered to have been bugged by the Russian construction crew, lay vacant and partially completed down the block from the old chancery. Directly in front of the main entrance stood an Orthodox church, so jammed with listening and monitoring equipment that it was known in the embassy community as “Our Lady of Telemetry,” or alternatively, “Our Lady of Immaculate Reception.” Across a busy street to the west was the Russian White House, which still bore scars from the failed coup attempt against Yeltsin nine months before.

  The American embassy was led by Ambassador Tom Pickering, a veteran of six previous ambassadorial posts, and the most capable professional diplomat for whom I ever worked. He was insatiably curious about every aspect of diplomatic work. He knew more about the widgets in the embassy boiler room than most of our technicians, and was an adroit problem-solver across the whole range of issues, from the plight of American citizens who had run afoul of Russian law to the delicate high policy work of managing relations with Yeltsin. Pickering’s lack of Russian-language skills always frustrated him, but he was so quick (and his interpreter so good) that it never seemed too much of an impediment.

  Pickering never met an instruction from Washington that he didn’t want to first shape himself. He never wanted to be a diplomatic postman, simply waiting for orders from headquarters. His view was that he was the president’s representative on the ground, paid not just to report on events but also to offer his best policy ideas and solutions, and sometimes to act first and ask for forgiveness later. Pickering’s one weakness, as far as I could tell, was a need for speed on Russia’s often menacing roads. Riding in the backseat of his armored limousine, impatient to get places and do things, he would offer running advice to his long-suffering driver about how to race in the wrong direction down one-way streets or maneuver through the reckless world of Moscow traffic.

  There is no playbook or operating manual in the Foreign Service, and the absence of diplomatic doctrine, or even systematic case studies, has been a long-standing weakness of the State Department. Throughout my own formative years, good mentors mattered most of all—accomplished diplomats from whom I could draw essential lessons about negotiating and lea
dership. Experience was passed from generation to generation, and I never had a better role model than Tom Pickering.

  In Russia, Pickering ran what was then one of the biggest American diplomatic missions in the world, including the embassy in Moscow and consulates in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Vladivostok. Unlike almost all our other diplomatic posts, we had only a handful of locals working in our embassy and consulates in the summer of 1994, with roles from drivers and mechanics to consular clerks and assistants played by Americans. The Soviet government had refused to allow Russians to work for the U.S. mission after the spying and bugging crises of the mid-1980s, and Pickering was just beginning the process of rehiring them.

  Pickering led a “country team,” comprising the senior representatives of some twenty different U.S. agencies working at the embassy. State composed less than half of the total staff, with the remaining positions filled by Defense, Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, and the intelligence community, among many others. I’ve always thought that the country team is the most effective example of interagency coordination in the U.S. government, at least from the point of view of the State Department. A strong ambassador, like Pickering, could not only ensure efficient implementation of policy through careful coordination among agencies in the field, but also shape policy formulation in Washington by working with the senior agency representatives at post.

  As the president’s representative, he had authority over other agencies in Russia, and more interagency clout than more senior officials in the State Department. Pickering used this wisely. He never had to wave around his presidential appointment letter to command the respect of other agency officials on his country team. His experience and attentiveness to their agendas won their loyalty, and he repeatedly demonstrated that he could help them advance their departmental goals through his own energy and access to senior Russian officials. In return, they gave him transparency and followed his lead. It’s a credit to Pickering’s leadership, and a mark of the strength of his country team, that I don’t ever recall him being surprised by an action of intelligence or law enforcement representatives at the embassy, or anyone else. He didn’t micromanage their affairs, but he set a clear policy direction and exercised his broad authority skillfully.