HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  But even within State, Hillary’s emerging faith in the power of technology to transform diplomacy was a controversial proposition. Ross had clashed with Jim Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, over the balance of traditional diplomacy and the use of modern tools, particularly when it came to Ross’s prediction that the world would see a leaderless revolution during Hillary’s term as secretary. And while Slaughter provided a lot of the intellectual firepower behind Hillary’s smart-power approach, she was marginalized by more savvy bureaucratic infighters as she took over the laborious process of compiling the QDDR. Even the set who appreciated Ross and Cohen viewed them as a lone-wolf unit. “They’re both very hard to work with,” said one longtime Hillarylander who worked at State. “They’re not team players, which is why they’re so good. They just go off and freelance and do creative stuff all the time. They’re brilliant.”

  Cohen’s mile-wide independent streak made him, the morning after his Twitter intervention, a hot topic of conversation among Hillary’s senior staff. Hillary, who normally led the daily meeting, didn’t attend that day, and neither did Cohen, who was far too junior to be included. But he did bring the episode to the attention of P. J. Crowley, the assistant secretary for public affairs, to make sure that the press team was aware of what had transpired. When Mark Landler of the New York Times asked about the incident, Crowley filled in the details, thinking Cohen’s move would look good for State.

  That was when Cohen’s behind-the-scenes intervention suddenly became a public relations problem. Between the morning staff meeting and Landler’s reporting for his article, the story was making its way around the building in double time. It was all anyone in the top offices could talk about.

  Mills summoned Ross and Sullivan to her office; en route, the two men ran into each other in the secured part of the seventh floor, where national secrets are discussed.

  “What Jared did is going on A1 of the New York Times,” an exasperated Sullivan told Ross.

  “What the fuck do you mean?” Ross replied. “P. J. just gave the New York Times Jared’s intervention?”

  “He gave it to him,” Sullivan said. “It’s going on A1.”

  Sullivan, Ross, and Crowley all gathered in Mills’s office, where they brought in Philippe Reines by phone. Sullivan was agitated. This was a consequential decision, he thought, one that should have been carefully contemplated and messaged, not something done on a lark and then fed to the world’s paper of record. Sullivan, who was becoming a powerful link between State and the White House, had a wider lens than Cohen on the administration’s strategy in Iran. The Green Movement’s leaders had been telling American officials to stay away from them publicly because U.S. intervention would only serve to discredit the revolutionaries with the rest of the Iranian people by fueling the regime’s claim that the movement was led by American puppets. Mostly Sullivan expressed concern about State pissing on the White House. Obama was getting hit hard by conservatives who believed he should be more actively engaged in helping the movement along and Cohen’s status as a Bush administration veteran sparked suspicion about his motives. The simple solution to save face for everyone would be to fire Cohen.

  As the normally reserved Sullivan grew increasingly vocal, Crowley smiled and tried to calm him down. “I think you’ll find that this is going to go well for us,” he said, pointing to a long-term win for the United States in showing support for the revolutionaries in Iran.

  “Why are we even discussing this?” Sullivan said. “He has to go.”

  Reines, who was much closer to Hillary than Crowley, began proposing ways to spin what Cohen had done. Motivation matters a lot to Reines, and he saw no malice in Cohen’s actions. Others in the room thought he was looking for a way to save Cohen’s skin by smoothing over the inherent conflict between the president’s policy and Cohen’s intervention. Reines’s intensity matched Sullivan’s.

  But Mills repeatedly cut him off to tell him to stop talking. There was no good way to finesse this one.

  They called Denis McDonough, the NSC’s head of strategic communications. His directive: no one at State was to say another word about it publicly. They would sit back, wait for the Times story, and not help fuel a media firestorm by talking to other reporters about it. The best-case scenario would be a relatively positive Times story that didn’t embarrass Obama for taking a passive stance toward the Iranian protest movement.

  Cohen was in a bind, his fate no longer in his own hands. The long knives were out not just for him but by extension for Ross, who was his patron in the department, and for Crowley, who had handed the Times a story about a midlevel State Department official conducting policy at odds with the president. Cohen hadn’t meant any harm, but he now understood that his action could cost him his job and, perhaps worse, present a major setback to the work that he and Ross had been doing.

  Operating largely outside the attention of the White House, Hillary had given the pair mostly free rein to explore the intersection of technology and diplomacy, not just in theory but in practice. In February she had sent Cohen to Afghanistan with Holbrooke and Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where they saw that the Taliban had been smuggling iPhones to inmates at a prison there. Holbrooke then wrote Hillary memos about the role of technology in the war in Afghanistan, which further sparked her interest in deploying Ross and Cohen. At the same time, with Ross and Slaughter as her guides, Hillary was becoming a student of how technology interacted with foreign policy. She had built a little lab for innovation at State, and Ross and Cohen had been the tinkerers working in the shadows.

  But now they were fast-blinking blips in the middle of the White House radar. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether what Cohen did was helpful or hurtful to the Green Movement, and the degree to which it amounted to insubordination to the president by either himself or Hillary, the imbroglio underscored a basic difference between Obama’s worldview and Hillary’s. At least as far back as her early days in the Senate, where she had represented New York’s staunchly pro-Israel Jewish community, Hillary had been bellicose on Iran. When Obama had said during the campaign that he would be willing to sit down one-on-one with Ahmadinejad in his first year as president, Hillary suggested Obama had a naïve approach. “I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes,” she had said.

  Now her department, or at least Cohen, had taken a more forceful tack with Ahmadinejad than Obama’s and had used social media to do it. For all of Obama’s mastery of technology during the 2008 campaign, his team was notably much slower to embrace the power of new media platforms to transform the globe. Similarly, the old guard at State had little use for Ross and Cohen’s new way of conducting diplomacy; the episode was a perfect example to them of the perils of 21st Century Statecraft, a term that seemed to come right out of the video-game generation and sounded a lot like World of Warcraft.

  However Hillary reacted, it would be a major inflection point for a New Age diplomatic worldview that was still in its infancy but to which she had given early support. She had said many times privately that she wanted her team’s errors to be those of commission rather than omission, but no one was quite sure that would be true when an error made Obama look bad, or potentially undermined U.S. efforts to get Iran to negotiate an end to its nuclear program. On the flip side, the White House refusal to explicitly back the Iranian protesters seemed at odds with American values. How could the world’s leading democracy and its greatest power stand idly by while Iran crushed dissent? All these questions were swirling when the Times story popped online late that Tuesday.

  By early Wednesday, with the story in indelible print in the newspaper that Obama trusted most, Hillary’s top advisers gathered for their small-circle daily 8:45 a.m. meeting. They nervously waited for her word. If she was angry, they would know it quickly. Hillary can be sarcastic, even caustic, when she feels her aides have failed her. Her tone takes on an unmasked disappointment or she asks rhetorical question
s that can’t be answered without leading to further trouble.

  The Cohen incident was a touchstone for so many points of tension. Was Hillary the kind of boss who would back her guy, or would she throw him under the bus? Was disrupting other governments just a clever theory or a real tool of modern diplomacy? Would she show backbone in a showdown with the White House?

  The incident was clearly on Hillary’s mind that morning when she walked into her conference room on the seventh floor, along the “Mahogany Hall” of wood-paneled executive offices, just across a narrow corridor from her own suite. It’s highly unusual for her to carry a newspaper because she gets clips printed out and delivered. But on this morning, she held the Times in her hand. The story actually ended up on A12, not A1. Her aides watched closely for any signal of what she thought.

  She put the paper down on the fourteen-seat rectangular wooden table in front of her and looked at her lieutenants. “This is great,” she said. “This is exactly what we should be doing.”

  Hillary’s commitment to innovation at State ran too deep to get sidetracked by the mishegoss over whether Jared Cohen had cleared his move with the right people or created momentary confusion over the administration’s dovish policy on the reelection of Ahmadinejad. During the transition, Williams, Mills, and Hillary had discussed the need not just to catch up on innovation but also to get ahead of the curve. They wanted to turn a deficiency into an asset, and that mission wasn’t something Hillary would give up on because of a little controversy.

  In her first five months at State, she had poured mental energy and resources into making sure that her operation was far more forward-leaning in its use of technology as a political tool than her 2008 campaign had been. If anything, Cohen’s Twitter-vention was a confirmation of the power of understanding and manipulating technology infrastructure. Not only was her innovation team a powerful tool at State, Hillary was keenly aware, according to associates, that technological superiority could become the force behind a second bid for the presidency. “The tools used to impact political movements abroad,” one Hillary adviser said, “can be leveraged just as easily domestically.”

  The innovation team eventually grew to number more than one hundred strong across the State Department’s various bureaus; many of the aides simply incorporated 21st Century Statecraft activities into their existing jobs. They were a special forces unit of sorts for Hillary, and their efforts were directed at projects as benign as setting up social media accounts for State in various countries and as insidious as providing tech tools and training for rebels in Middle Eastern countries. She was taken not just with the possibility of affecting the rise and fall of governments or political candidates but also with the potential for technology to protect and empower the world’s most vulnerable populations. Innovation, then, tied together her ambitions as a diplomat, her chances of running a successful campaign for the presidency, and her religion-inspired commitment to social justice.

  Hillary turned to her tech team again in August 2009, during one of the most emotionally difficult periods of her first year as secretary. At a town hall meeting with Congolese students in Kinshasa, Hillary was asked what her husband thought about World Bank interference in Chinese contracts in the Congo. The question was an insult on top of a series of injuries to her stature: in Washington, Obama’s team was still slow-walking her hiring decisions; journalists from Ben Smith to Tina Brown were writing about her perceived lack of influence; and Obama had even sent Bill to North Korea to negotiate the release of two American journalists who were being held there.

  Now, sixty-five hundred miles outside the Beltway, on a trip that she had taken to empower women and combat abuses against them, some college kid had the nerve to ask what her husband thought about a policy issue. It was hot. The venue stunk of urine. Hillary was halfway through a twelve-day, seven-country trip.

  She lost her temper. “My husband is not secretary of state. I am,” she fired back. “If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.”

  Hillary’s aides reached out to the White House, flagging what they knew would become the story of the day in the United States. One of Obama’s top communications aides, who worked on the 2008 campaign, expressed sympathy for Hillary’s reaction, which her aides had portrayed as the result of a bad translation or a poorly constructed question. “This is so infuriating,” the Obama aide wrote in an e-mail to Reines. “She’s flying to one of the most dangerous parts of one of the most dangerous countries on the continent to highlight the plight of women being put through unspeakable horrors and yet the press is still focused on psychobabble family bullshit from 1998.”

  The moment between two aides, former rivals and staunch loyalists, respectively, to Hillary and Obama, was a notable sign of the burgeoning solidarity between the two sides.

  “I feel like a PUMA member right now,” the aide wrote, referring to the “Party Unity My Ass” crowd that stuck with Hillary long after the end of the primary. “I’m calling Geraldine Ferraro immediately.”

  The video went viral. The Today show asked if she was jet-lagged or jealous of Bill. A little bit of both, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell answered. The New York Post ran a picture of her under the headline “I’m the Boss.” One of Hillary’s aides said the moment was a reminder that she’s a human being. “People think of her as some kind of automaton,” the aide said, when she feels emotion just like anyone else.

  The next day was even worse—and also much better, in a way that friends and advisers say defines Hillary. She traveled to the Mugunga refugee camp north of Goma, a godforsaken city on Lake Kivu filled with people who fled the Rwandan genocide, where she heard the detailed stories of two survivors of a rampant sexual assault epidemic. Through a series of seemingly never-ending conflicts in Congo and its neighboring countries, the sexual violence never stopped. Diplomatic security officials advised Hillary not to go to the war-torn region, but she insisted. The culture of rape, which had been perpetuated by Congolese soldiers and militias, “distills evil into its basest form,” she said.

  At a forum later that day, Hillary announced that the United States was pouring $17 million in aid into the country to prevent attacks and assist survivors. In meetings with top Congolese officials, she had raised the issue directly, telling them that the United States could not condone the government’s tolerance of systematic rape. But she couldn’t help feeling that she needed to do more. Shortly after her trip, Burns Strider, her 2008 faith adviser, e-mailed her to ask how she was doing. “I just came out of the Congo,” she wrote back. “I cannot begin to tell you. Terrible. The pain, the atrocity, what’s going on here.”

  The suffering gnawed at her, but she also drew strength from what she had seen and heard. “The thing that gives me hope,” she wrote, “is that there are women who have escaped who turned right around and went back to help those who haven’t escaped.” Hillary doesn’t cry much in front of other people, save for that famous moment in New Hampshire on the campaign trail, when she credited her supporters for helping her find her voice. In times of crisis during the campaign and at the State Department, friends and aides say, she kept her composure when others around her were losing theirs.

  The way Hillary mourns, friends say, is to pour her emotion into healing and fixing, an approach deeply rooted in the teachings of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. That’s what she did when she returned from the Congo, even though she was supposed to have some downtime. She reached out to a wide circle of friends, aides, and spiritual advisers to see what could be done for the women of the refugee camps. “She was so mortified by what she heard, she was e-mailing everybody while she was on vacation,” said one State Department source.

  “She has something more driving her than just power. She has a very strong moral compass that she leans into,” said one longtime friend. “So she doesn’t wear [religion] on her sleeve, but I think if you had any length of conversation with her as a Methodist, and talked to
her about her faith, she would be very insightful.”

  Hillary ordered Ross and Cohen to go to eastern Congo. They wanted to talk directly with soldiers and police to get a better sense of how corruption contributed to gender-based violence. But embassy officials refused to put them in contact with corrupt soldiers.

  Figuring he couldn’t come up with a solution unless he understood the root of the problem, Cohen seized on his first opportunity to circumvent the embassy staff. Riding in the midst of a long motorcade, he jumped out of his car, ran up to the front of the line of vehicles, and demanded to get in the front seat of the lead car, which was driven by a security officer. He didn’t need an embassy translator because he spoke Swahili. He and Ross ended up talking to enough soldiers to get a sense of why government troops were participating in the systematic sexual abuse of women by local militias.

  Soldiers took on extra work as muscle for the militias because the central government’s cash payment system invited large-scale embezzlement. The government would send bundles of banknotes to generals, who were supposed to distribute them to their troops. Instead, the generals, who operated more like warlords than high-ranking military officers, pocketed most of the money.

  If Ross and Cohen could figure out a way to ensure that soldiers were adequately paid, perhaps the troops would start protecting the women of eastern Congo instead of contracting with their assailants. They devised a plan for the government to pay soldiers through mobile technology, going around the generals. President Joseph Kabila threw his weight behind the idea, and the Congolese parliament passed a law allowing for mobile payments. But the law gave regulatory power to the central bank, which aligned with the generals and refused to set up the program.

  Cohen and Ross also tried to create a text warning system for refugee camps that were in danger of being overrun by militias. The idea was to declassify intelligence on the militias’ movements from a UN peacekeeping force and send it to the heads of the refugee camps, hospitals, and NGOs in real time. But it never got off the ground for two reasons: Ross and Cohen couldn’t guarantee that the information wouldn’t be intercepted by one militia or another, and alerting refugee camps about militia movements might create a “presumption of protection” that obligated the peacekeepers to intervene militarily.