HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  When Hillary’s plane landed, she went to the opening of the conference, and Sullivan went to the embassy to help coax Chen into leaving for the hospital. Eventually, with an escort from American officials, Chen agreed to go. On the way to the hospital, he asked to speak to Hillary by phone. “I want to kiss you,” he told her.

  Hillary put out a statement, confirming that Chen had been transported from the embassy.

  The Chinese, in an effort to save face, put out a harshly critical statement. The American intervention was an “interference in China’s internal affairs, which is completely unacceptable to China,” the statement said, and it called on the United States to “apologize for that” and “carry out a thorough investigation into the incident, deal with those responsible, and promise not to let similar incidents happen again.” The public scolding was a small price for the United States to pay for having secured Chen’s freedom.

  But then the situation grew complicated again. The next morning Chen told American officials he had had a change of heart. He wanted to leave China for the United States with his family in tow, and he was about to start applying serious political pressure to Hillary.

  As the Chinese and American officials watched their carefully orchestrated deal unravel, Chen used his connections to human rights activists to call in to a Washington hearing of the Congressional-Executive China Commission, an organization set up by Congress to monitor the American relationship with China. With Representative Chris Smith (R-N.J.), a leading conservative advocate for human rights and a critic of Hillary, chairing the hearing, Chen said he no longer felt comfortable with the deal.

  Romney, who was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, pounced on the unfolding debacle. He could slam the president for a major foreign policy snafu and try to drive a wedge between Obama and Hillary.

  It is “apparent, according to these reports, if they’re accurate, that our embassy failed to put in place the kind of verifiable measures that would assure the safety of Mr. Chen and his family,” Romney said while campaigning in Virginia. “If the reports are true, this is a dark day for freedom, and it’s a day of shame for the Obama administration. We are a place of freedom, here and around the world, and we should stand up and defend freedom wherever it is under attack.”

  It was just the kind of story that could breathe life into the Romney assertion that Obama was weak on democratic values. Romney had even used the word freedom three times in two sentences to hammer home the point. Some State Department officials were reading media reports from the United States that seemed to lay blame at their feet for being too trusting of the Chinese—even though it was Chen, not his government, that had reneged on the deal.

  Sullivan and Campbell sat down with Cui Tiankai, China’s vice foreign minister. Thank you for the hard work, Campbell told him, but we’ve got to change the deal.

  That’s not going to happen, Cui said.

  Campbell tried to sell Cui on the idea that Sullivan was particularly influential with Hillary and Obama and was there to deliver a message directly from them.

  Figuring they’d made it this far, Sullivan picked up the routine. The president and the secretary want these things for Chen, he said.

  Cui, a veteran diplomat, was unmoved.

  The Americans, who were starving after around-the-clock shuttle diplomacy, saw it as a particularly harsh rebuke when Cui had their food taken away.

  As this minicrisis unfolded, Hillary was getting updates from her aides during breaks in the S&ED talks. At one point, she pulled a few senior State officials into a side room on the margins of the conference and delivered a pep talk.

  “Our people did nothing wrong,” she said. The State Department and embassy staff had “acted in good faith” and worked their tails off in trying circumstances. She wouldn’t let Chen’s change of heart reflect poorly on the people who had been working so hard to secure his release. There was still time to save the day.

  “That struck me as being very protective of her staff,” said an American official who was in the room.

  Back in Washington, White House officials were paying close attention to the spiraling situation, which was now playing out in news reports and becoming a bigger issue on the campaign trail. Sullivan called Denis McDonough and reported that there were still some challenges to resolving the situation.

  “Yeah, I see that,” McDonough replied tartly.

  In consultation with White House aides back in Washington, State officials decided that only Hillary herself stood a chance of getting the Chinese to agree to a second deal—and risked losing face if she failed.

  “We knew we had one big play with her,” said one American official who was in China.

  The plan was to get Hillary into a room the next day with Dai Bingguo, the powerful state councilor, and let her make the case directly to him that it was best for both sides to right the situation. “We all agreed on a game plan, talking points, the whole nine yards,” said a second source.

  The next morning Hillary’s aides sent word to their Chinese counterparts that Hillary wanted to meet with Dai privately on the sidelines of an official breakfast. The Chinese pushed back, but the Americans held their ground. It is a personal request from Hillary, they said, knowing that Dai would be hard-pressed to refuse what was basically a demand veiled as polite insistence. When Hillary got in the room with Dai, she told him that the Chen situation was blowing up in the United States. Chen had called in to a congressional hearing the previous day, Hillary said.

  Dai’s jaw dropped. Surely she had been mistranslated, he said. Chen didn’t really call in to a congressional hearing, did he?

  Hillary’s power and prestige might have given her room to work, but she was also forced to put her personal credibility on the line. The United States had pulled off a caper of questionable legitimacy to give Chen asylum, negotiated his freedom with the Chinese government, and then turned back on a publicly announced deal. Chen might have been a little eccentric, but a lot was riding on this moment for her, for Obama, and of course, for the blind dissident who couldn’t make up his mind.

  Still, she boldly stepped farther out onto the limb. If China didn’t play ball, shes intimated, the trust that had been slowly built up between the two countries through the S&ED and other interactions might just evaporate. Chinese and American officials were in the process of wrapping up a conference that produced fifty outcomes on issues ranging from climate change to international maritime law; some of that progress could be jeopardized if there was no resolution to the Chen situation.

  “She just, through kind of a piercing gaze and a stiff but calm tone, got Dai to see we were not kidding around—that this was a big, big deal,” said one American official.

  “If we do not resolve this, we’re going to have a problem,” Hillary said.

  If it was a bluff, Dai didn’t call it.

  Hillary thought she had a solution that could work for all sides. If China declared Chen a free man and processed a passport request from him, he could travel to the United States. China could say they had dealt directly with their own citizen. The United States could be certain that its efforts to shield Chen had not been in vain. And Chen would be able to move his family to America. Dai liked the idea enough to task his aides to work with Hillary’s team to put together the details of a plan that could be brought to Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao.

  Hu huddled with Dai and Cui at the end of his meeting with the American delegation, which American officials took as a good sign that serious consideration was being given to the plan. In the middle of the day, after working with their American counterparts, Chinese officials put out a statement indicating that Chen was eligible to apply for a passport. It would take another couple of weeks for everything to fall in line. But Hillary’s face-to-face talk with Dai had turned a political disaster into a diplomatic success for the administration, and it had protected the Strategic & Economic Dialogue that she had worked so hard to build.
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  “She invests heavily in personal relationships,” said one of her senior aides. “She spends huge amounts of time in these meetings, not just kind of going through her talking points but getting to know the person, asking them about things they care about. So she establishes a baseline level of credibility that she’s not there just to transact but she’s actually building relationships. With Dai, she had built up a relationship over a long time.”

  Rather than the “dark day for freedom” and “day of shame” for Obama that Romney had declared, Hillary’s diplomacy had delivered a human rights coup. America liberated a Chinese political prisoner and did it with the assent of the Chinese. She had made the decision to go get Chen without asking for permission from the White House, and for at least a day, it had looked as if it would blow up in her face and cause some collateral damage to the Obama campaign. But ultimately the Romney attack was turned on its head. The Chen episode was a win for Obama.

  Around the same time, Hillary was lobbying the White House on another issue with serious potential repercussions on the campaign trail. She wanted to issue an apology to Pakistan for a November 2011 NATO air strike in Peshawar that had mistakenly killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers. In late 2010 and early 2011, as her effort to woo Pakistani leaders with diplomacy and development assistance had taken a backseat to drone strikes and other U.S. counterterrorism measures, the relationship between the two countries had suffered, leaving little reason for the United States to keep a spotlight on it. The relationship had all but disintegrated when SEAL Team 6 raided Bin Laden’s compound, and the NATO strike blew up what was left of it. Pakistan immediately ordered the CIA to stop conducting drone operations out of one air base, and—more important—it closed off supply routes from Karachi, the port city on the Arabian Sea, to Afghanistan, forcing the United States to rely on a northern route through Russia. That gave Russia more leverage in its politically delicate relationship with the United States.

  Hillary argued that the United States should comply with Pakistan’s demand for an apology—the mistake, after all, had cost Pakistani soldiers their lives; and at least as important as the question of whether it was the right thing to do, an apology was in the best interests of the United States preserving its tenuous relationship with a country that was both infested with terrorists and armed with nuclear warheads. Moreover, it was costing the United States money and time to use the Russian route. It didn’t make sense for America to stand on ceremony when the refusal to issue an apology came with a price, both in terms of dollars and in conducting the war in Afghanistan, she thought.

  But Hillary ran into resistance from the White House, the Pentagon, and the intelligence community. The Defense Department and the CIA felt that the Pakistanis owed the United States an apology for, at the very least, failing to prevent attacks on American soldiers. Some believed the Pakistanis were complicit.

  “There was a lot of concern that these guys’ behavior, the Pakistanis, they should be apologizing to us for some of the things they were doing to our soldiers in Afghanistan,” said Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, who had succeeded Jack Lew.

  With Romney accusing Obama of going on an “apology tour,” it hardly made good political sense for the president to issue an apology to Pakistan, where Americans knew Bin Laden had been hiding in plain view for years. That could play right into Romney’s unfounded attack that Obama liked apologizing for America. “When you go out and say that you’re sorry, people like the Republicans jump on you and say, ‘Oh, my God, why are you apologizing to the Pakistanis?’ ” Nides said of a major undercurrent of concern in internal debates.

  But Hillary thought it was vital to American interests to apologize, and she was willing to take it on the chin if there was a political backlash in the United States. “I have political capital. I’ll expend it,” she said. “If they attack me for saying that, I’m sorry, then so be it. I’m willing to do that.”

  She dispatched Nides, a veteran of Wall Street and domestic politics, to Pakistan, where he opened up a back channel with Pakistani finance minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh. The Pakistanis were losing revenue from the closure of the supply route, and Hillary believed it was in their interests, too, to resolve the dispute.

  Nides and Shaikh negotiated the language of a carefully worded deal in which Hillary issued a soft apology and Pakistan reopened the supply route. Hillary believed that “the ability to admit you’re wrong is a sign of strength, not weakness,” one of her senior aides said later.

  Hillary’s elevation of Pakistan, through her visits and direct engagement with both the country’s leaders and its people, had helped make her the American official with the most credibility in the country. “I’m still shocked that the Pakistanis love her and hate Obama for the same damn policy,” said one senior administration official focused on Pakistan. “That is a successful operation.”

  The pact was consummated in a July 3 telephone call between Hillary and Pakistani foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar. “We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military. We are committed to working closely with Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent this from ever happening again,” Hillary said in a statement. “Foreign Minister Khar has informed me that the ground supply lines into Afghanistan are opening.”

  Romney, who had titled his precampaign book No Apology, chose not to jump on Obama for acceding to Pakistan’s demands for an American mea culpa. When the subject came up in his debate prep, he told advisers he drew a distinction between blanket apologies for America and saying sorry in a specific instance. “As a country, you don’t apologize for the country and your national stance and your point of view,” Romney said. “Of course you make mistakes, but that’s different than apologizing for who you are.”

  “It’s one of those cases where he did not want to grandstand,” one of the Romney advisers recalled.

  Through Nides, Hillary had found a way to go around the fraught relationship between the two countries’ military and intelligence communities to find a solution that benefited both the United States and Pakistan. Hillary’s “artful apology,” as her senior aide termed it, had opened up the supply routes but not a window for Romney to take advantage.

  FOURTEEN

  The Bill Comes Due

  On April 29, 2012, more than five hundred donors packed into the backyard of Terry McAuliffe’s seven-thousand-square-foot mini-mansion on Old Dominion Drive in McLean, the tony Washington suburb where Robert F. Kennedy’s kids had grown up. Still bursting with the boyish enthusiasm that helped make him a great fund-raiser, McAuliffe was looking toward a second bid for governor in 2013. But he hadn’t opened up his yard on this sixty-degree evening to fill his own coffers. The contributors were there to see two presidents—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—at the first of several joint fund-raisers for Obama’s reelection campaign.

  Obama’s courtship of Bill Clinton was working. The ice had thawed, even if Bill’s response was a function of self-interest more than genuine affection. Raising money for Obama would unlock the door to the donors Hillary needed to pay off the last of her debt. But before that cash started flowing to her account, Bill had to prove himself a loyal field marshal in Obama’s campaign.

  He announced that night that he was lending support to Priorities USA, the flailing pro-Obama super PAC started by former White House aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney. The outfit had suffered a slow start in large part because Obama had spent so much time blasting super PACs publicly that many liberal donors didn’t want to be associated with them. It had only been a couple of months since Obama finally blessed Priorities USA, and raising money was still a problem. Bill, having been a pioneer fund-raiser in the era of unlimited “soft” money, didn’t have Obama’s reluctance to squeeze small pools of donors for vast sums of cash.

  The more important factor for Obama, who was still battling a sluggish economy and mounting debt, was winning a seal of approval for his policies from the last man to preside over budget surpluses. At this poi
nt, though, his praise for Obama was a little fainter than it would get later in the year.

  Obama “deserves to be reelected,” Bill said. “I think he’s done a good job. I think he is beating the historical standard for coming out of a financial collapse and a mortgage collapse. I think the last thing you want to do is turn around and embrace the policies that got us into trouble in the first place.”

  Clinton was really just warming up, though. During a follow-up question-and-answer session, held under a tent for about eighty VIPs, the presidential pair grew more comfortable. Sitting side by side on stools, Obama and Clinton played off of each other, with Clinton taking on the atypical role of best supporting actor. The singer will.i.am asked Obama a question about education policy. When he didn’t get a satisfactory answer, he pressed Obama a second time. Clinton jumped in to defend the president. And so it went for nearly an hour.

  When the two-man improv act was over, Clinton went to the foyer of the house to say goodbye to Obama. Without a camera or a reporter in sight, the two presidents shared a private moment.

  “Thanks for all your help,” Obama said to Clinton.

  “I’m here to do whatever I can,” Clinton replied.

  They didn’t shake hands. They hugged.

  “It was clear that night that, whatever issues they had had in the past, that event was a coming together,” said a Democratic official who witnessed the physical and political embrace.

  Shortly before Bill delivered on his end of the bargain to get behind the president, Obama fund-raising chief Matthew Barzun, who had attended the peace-pipe dinner for Obama ambassadors and Hillarylanders at the Cosmos Club in early 2009, put the word out to Obama’s leading donors that it was time to retire the last of Hillary Clinton’s debt. The joint fund-raiser at McAuliffe’s house was held on April 29; in May and June, dozens of Obama’s elite givers, including Vogue editor Anna Wintour, contributed to retiring Hillary’s debt, helping her shave it from $245,000 to $100,000 by the end of June. None of Obama’s big-time donors had given to her during the 2012 cycle before Bill’s turn at the April fund-raiser for Obama. It was the payoff for Bill buckraking for Obama.