“Friendly takeovers” in administrations of the same party, like the transition from Christopher to Albright, are supposed to be easy. Transitions from one party to another are assumed to be much more difficult. The reality is more complicated. New secretaries, no matter their party, want to put their own mark on personnel and policy. Much as Baker respected Shultz, he wanted to mold the department in his own way, and both he and President George H. W. Bush made clear that they were shaping the first Bush administration, not the third Reagan administration. Madeleine Albright was equally intent on putting her own stamp on the department, but I survived the reshuffle.
The administration was under heavy pressure to cut costs and streamline the foreign policy machinery from Senator Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a caricature of a neo-isolationist and a longtime critic of the Department of State and foreign assistance. With Helms leading the charge, Congress made clear its intention to cash in on the post–Cold War peace dividend, eventually shrinking the size of the foreign affairs budget by nearly half over the 1990s. Reading the tea leaves, the Clinton administration tried to get ahead of the cuts by laying out an affirmative vision for the most substantial restructuring of Washington national security institutions in a half century.
The secretary asked Pat and me to take the lead in managing one significant aspect of this effort—the complicated task of absorbing the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) into the State Department. ACDA, which my father led in the late 1980s, was much smaller than State, with about two hundred staff and a mission that remained essential but had shifted from its Cold War origins. Its consolidation into State was relatively straightforward. We created a new undersecretary position to absorb its key elements and transferred its professional cadre directly into the department.
USIA was a more difficult proposition. Its public diplomacy mission—to expose other societies to American culture, ideas, and perspectives and make the case for American policy—was in many ways even more valuable in the post–Cold War world. It took years to fully merge the two personnel systems and bureaucratic cultures, and we lost much of USIA’s public diplomacy expertise and program management skills along the way. That became painfully apparent in the aftermath of 9/11, especially in a roiling Islamic world. It became even more apparent when Putin’s Russia mounted substantial disinformation campaigns a decade later.
The costs of the Helms-generated cuts and consolidation were long-lasting. At State, intake of new foreign service officers was virtually suspended for four years. This created substantial gaps at mid-level ranks a decade down the road, significantly hindering post–9/11 diplomacy as we struggled to find enough seasoned officers to fill key positions. History didn’t end in the 1990s; we couldn’t afford to rest on our laurels and await the inexorable march of globalization and American influence, and we paid a price for our shortsightedness.2
I learned more than I ever wanted to know about budgets, personnel, regulations, and congressional affairs during my two years as executive secretary. I knew, at least conceptually, that it was an investment that would pay off. But I missed doing diplomacy and was eager to return overseas.
Secretary Albright and Strobe Talbott, by now deputy secretary of state, could sense my impatience, and offered to support my candidacy to become ambassador to Jordan—if I agreed to extend for another year through the summer of 1998. It was a hard offer to refuse, not only because it would fulfill every young diplomat’s dream to become an ambassador, but also because it would allow me to return to Jordan—and this time to experience it with Lisa and our daughters. I had a blessedly uneventful confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was sworn in by Madeleine Albright in late July. Sixteen years into the Foreign Service, I had come full circle.
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IN A CABLE to President Clinton on the eve of King Hussein’s funeral in Amman in February 1999, I reminded him of a comment attributed to John Foster Dulles in the early 1950s. “King Hussein is an impressive young fellow,” Dulles said. “It’s a shame that neither he nor his country will last very long.”3 Nearly five decades later, Jordan was still intact, and the king himself had become the region’s longest-serving head of state. He had survived a coup attempt in 1957, the disaster of the Six-Day War in 1967, the events of Black September a few years later, and a series of assassination attempts along the way. He had not only kept Jordan afloat amid the unending turbulence of the Middle East, but created a sense of national identity and an operable, if still fragile, economy.
The practical dilemmas facing Jordan in the summer of 1998 were nevertheless daunting. Water scarcity was an urgent problem; per capita consumption was one-fortieth that of Americans. Unemployment ran at more than 20 percent, with underemployment an equally flammable problem. The population of roughly five million was growing rapidly, GDP growth was flat, and external debt was rising. Jordan had few natural resources. It ran a growing trade deficit, importing most of its food and heavily dependent on outside assistance. Hussein periodically had to employ austerity measures and tighten budgets, but cuts in subsidies brought popular unrest, and the king was generally unable to sustain serious economic reform programs.
As he neared his forty-seventh year on the throne, Hussein was the embodiment of Jordan, the singular guarantor of national unity. Down below, society was still riven by fault lines, some old and some new. Over half the population was of Palestinian origin. East Bankers, the townspeople and descendants of the Bedouin tribes who had populated the hard hills and deserts east of the Jordan River before the waves of Palestinian arrivals after the 1948 and 1967 wars, were fiercely protective of their political control and prerogatives. Several hundred thousand Iraqis had fled to Jordan after Desert Storm. Meanwhile, another newer fault line was widening, between the struggling poor of east Amman and other Jordanian cities and the conspicuously consuming residents of Abdoun and other neighborhoods in west Amman.
Political opposition was closely monitored by the General Intelligence Department (GID). Hussein sometimes let off steam through carefully managed political liberalization; in 1989, for example, he had allowed fairly open elections and the formation of a government that included Islamists. His rule was absolute, but wrapped in a tolerance and relative generosity of spirit that set Jordan apart from other regimes in the region.
If Hussein had a tough hand to play at home, his neighborhood was even rougher. While the king’s longevity, shrewdness, and friends outside the region (in particular the United States) brought him some respect, it came mostly grudgingly. To the north, Hafez al-Assad’s Syria looked down its nose at Jordan—which was a part of Greater Syria during Ottoman times, and was now a country most Syrians thought of as an historical anomaly. To the east lay Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, isolated after Desert Storm but still menacing, a source of concessional oil and a market for Jordan’s goods. To the south, Saudi Arabia often took a dim view of Hashemite Jordan, always mindful that the House of Saud had expelled Hussein’s great-grandfather from the Hejaz in the 1920s. Across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba was Egypt, self-consciously the center of the Arab world and usually disinclined to pay much attention to an inconsequential smaller Arab power like Jordan. And to the west was Israel, which had a strategic interest in a stable, moderate Jordan. Since the 1950s, Hussein had kept up secret contacts with the Israelis. After the Oslo Accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Hussein seized the opportunity to negotiate a peace treaty with Israel, solidifying his regional position and repairing the damage with the United States that lingered after the Gulf War.
By 1998, U.S.-Jordanian relations were quite healthy. President Clinton and Secretary Albright reintroduced me to King Hussein as their nominee for ambassador when the king visited Washington in June. I had been a background fixture in Hussein’s meetings with senior Americans over the yea
rs, and his courtly mannerisms and deep, easy laugh were familiar. Clinton and the king had an excellent relationship. The president had obvious respect for Hussein’s judgment and experience, and the king had an equally obvious, almost avuncular affection for Clinton’s intellect and commitment to Arab-Israeli peace.
In that initial June conversation, Hussein was upbeat and looking ahead. “We’ll do a lot together,” he said. “You already know Jordan and our challenges. There is so much we can accomplish during this administration.” Sadly, the king would return to the Mayo Clinic in July, before I arrived in Amman, with a recurrence of an even more deadly form of cancer. He would spend only a couple more weeks of his life in Jordan.
The embassy that I took over at the beginning of August 1998 was a much different place from the one I left in 1984. It occupied a new and much larger complex west of the old center of Amman, built in the early 1990s to fit the new security specifications for American embassies around the world. It contained 130 American employees and 270 Jordanians, roughly twice the staff of the embassy I had left. The compound was about the size of six or seven football fields, and was surrounded by a nine-foot wall. Inside were a sizable circular chancery building, a service annex and motor pool, a social club and swimming pool, and the ambassador’s residence. Lisa and the girls and I enjoyed our new home; what it lacked in privacy it made up for in convenience, with my office a two-minute walk away.
Security was a persistent concern throughout our three years in Amman. On our third night in our new home, Lisa and I were awakened by a 2 A.M. phone call from the Operations Center, and a contingent of Marines in full combat gear barreling upstairs to help secure the residence. An urgent threat report warned that there would be an RPG attack on the embassy compound that night. Fortunately, the plotters were caught in time. A few days later, al-Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, with massive loss of life.
Threats reemerged throughout our tour, and were particularly worrisome at the end of 1999, when a major al-Qaeda attack on Jordanian hotel and tourist sites was thwarted. We had entered a new era in diplomatic insecurity, in which risks—for many years a painful feature of embassy life—were increasing, and Washington’s appetite for risk-taking was diminishing.
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SITTING IN HIS hospital room in Minnesota in July 1998, King Hussein gave a television interview that jarred his Jordanian audience. “The doctors’ diagnosis is lymphoma,” he said with a weary smile. “My cancer is a new fight which I hope to win.” There was reason for the king to be optimistic. He was only sixty-two, he’d already won a bout with bladder cancer earlier that decade, and he had one of the world’s best teams of doctors treating him at Mayo.4
Jordanians, however, were uneasy. They had become utterly dependent on one man, and were not used to having him out of the country for months at a time. Through force of personality and political dexterity, Hussein had camouflaged societal divisions in Jordan and created a role for his country on the regional stage out of all proportion to its strategic weight and resources. Most Jordanians had grown unaccustomed to taking political responsibility, let alone thinking about what might follow after Hussein. There was no escaping that now.
Hussein’s younger brother, Hassan, had served as crown prince since 1965, when the king had decided amid a particularly intense spate of assassination threats that it would be irresponsible to keep his oldest son, Abdullah, then only three years old, as his successor. Hussein and Hassan were eleven years apart in age, but the difference in their personalities seemed even wider. Intuitive and full of restless energy, the king had an easy rapport with Jordanians, at home with Bedouin sheikhs in the desert or military units in the field. Hassan was at heart an intellectual. It was hard to imagine him clambering atop a tank to speak to his troops, as Hussein had done so many times over the years. Oxford-educated and widely read, Hassan could come across as a bit detached from the world of most Jordanians—a disconnect reinforced by his official 1998 birthday portrait, in which he posed in full polo regalia, complete with helmet, mallet, and jodhpurs, seated on his favorite pony.
And yet beyond traits that were easy to caricature, Hassan was as devoted to Jordan as Hussein. He worked hard, was deeply knowledgeable about his country, and loyal to his brother. He also had more of a common touch than he was given credit for. When Secretary of Commerce Bill Daley visited Jordan in the fall of 1998, Hassan insisted on driving us back to Daley’s hotel after dinner at his lovely old stone house on a hill overlooking downtown Amman. He got behind the wheel of his Land Rover, with a bemused commerce secretary riding shotgun and me in the backseat, and another vehicle full of royal guards in the rear. Pulling out of the palace gate, Hassan asked if we wanted to stop for tea in the Wehdat refugee camp, which was more or less on the way. Daley was haggard after a long day of meetings, but he knew it would be impolite to say no. And so the three of us wound up sitting at a tiny shop on one of the camp’s densely packed streets at midnight, drinking tea surrounded by curious Palestinian teenagers and an increasingly nervous group of royal guards. Hassan was breezy and nonchalant, asking the shopkeeper about his family, engaging in small talk with other patrons, and basking in the moment.
King Hussein’s long hospitalization in the second half of 1998 became, in effect, Hassan’s dress rehearsal for the throne, after thirty-three years as crown prince. It didn’t end well. There were all the hallmarks of Shakespearean drama—a dying king coming to terms with his own mortality; a beleaguered crown prince trying to show he was ready for a job that was fast receding from him; a royal family struggling with loss and dysfunction; sons coming of age in the midst of so much scrutiny and uncertainty; and courtiers angling for advantage. There were no real villains, just a chain of difficult circumstances and complicated personalities. The king had been drifting for some time toward a change in the line of succession. His illness merely accelerated that decision. His unease about Hassan was not about loyalty or intellect or commitment, but about whether he was the best person to lead Jordan through what the king knew would be a tough transition. And his sense of confidence in his sons had grown as they matured. Prince Abdullah, now in his late thirties, had become an accomplished and well-respected military officer. Prince Hamzeh, now eighteen and Hussein’s eldest son by the last of his wives, Queen Noor, was a cadet at Sandhurst, with a manner and bearing much like his father’s.
As uncertainties about the king’s health and succession unfolded that fall and winter, my main task as ambassador was to place America’s hand on Jordan’s shoulder and do whatever I could to help steady a country on which the United States depended heavily. A stable Jordanian partner was essential to Israel’s security and hopes for Palestinian-Israeli peace, and Jordan’s geopolitical value as a moderate, reliable friend in a tough neighborhood was out of all proportion to its demographic and economic weight. This was a classic opportunity for American diplomacy, as the organizer and mobilizer of support from other countries and international institutions—and for an ambassador as conductor, orchestrating the varied instruments of the American bureaucratic symphony.
Crown Prince Hassan was gracious and welcoming from the start. Barely ten days into my new role, I had to call him a little after midnight to seek an urgent meeting and preview the cruise missile strikes that the United States was about to launch against al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in retaliation for the embassy attacks in East Africa. Without hesitation, he agreed to see me, and we spent an hour or two drinking his favorite single malt scotch and discussing a variety of challenges beyond those lighting up the sky over Afghanistan. Hassan seemed a bit lonely, with few confidants outside his immediate family. That was partly a function of personality, but also partly because the king moved people in and out of his brother’s inner circle and never allowed him to develop an independent political base. Hassan was understandably thin-skinned about stories drawing unflattering contrasts with his br
other. He was too proud to look for sympathy but anxious for signs that people respected him in his own right. I went out of my way to make clear that I did.
Prince Abdullah and I were only a few years apart in age. He spent a year at Oxford soon after I finished there, and we had shared an academic mentor in Albert Hourani. At the time, Hourani described Abdullah to me in a letter as “smart and personable” but someone who seemed “destined more for a life of action than of books.”5
In late August 1998, Prince Abdullah and his wife, Princess Rania, invited Lisa and me to an informal dinner at their home. A fan of Japanese cuisine, Abdullah was an accomplished cook, and prepared Kobe beef on the grill. The setting was relaxed and unpretentious, just like our hosts. The only other guests were from the royal family—Abdullah’s brothers and sisters; his mother, Princess Muna, a lovely, down-to-earth person and King Hussein’s second, British wife; and her father, Colonel Gardiner, a veteran of the Italian campaign in World War II. It was the first of a number of evenings that we would spend with Abdullah and Rania over the next few years, including each of the Thanksgivings we celebrated in Amman, when we supplied the turkey and they brought the pies. They were funny and unaffected, with Princess Rania a particularly good judge of people, and Prince Abdullah proud of his family and his growing responsibilities in the military.
With uncertainty about King Hussein’s health hanging over everything, I tried hard to build as broad a set of relationships as I could, inside the royal family and across Jordanian society. I worked easily with the prime minister, Fayez Tarawneh, an affable East Bank technocrat, instinctively cautious but increasingly concerned about Jordan’s economic predicament. The foreign minister, Abdul-Ilah al-Khatib, was a capable professional and good friend. Rima Khalaf, the minister of planning and one of the most senior women officials in the Arab world, was impressive and reform-minded. Samieh Battikhi was then the head of the General Intelligence Department, a shrewd and ambitious operator with a lifestyle obviously not purely a function of his government salary. The GID was already a crucial intelligence partner for the United States; it was also slowly becoming the power behind the throne.
The Back Channel Page 13