by Ben Rhodes
“Well,” I said, “that makes our theory more necessary: Show the Israelis you love them but also challenge them.”
“That’s your theory,” he said. “The Ben Rhodes theory.” Obama—who was often accused of putting too much stock in speeches—was more cynical than I about the capacity for a speech to change entrenched attitudes, particularly a conflict as intractable as the Israeli-Palestinian one.
I watched the speech backstage on the teleprompter. Obama paused for a moment, and I saw the text freeze. “I’m going off script here for a second,” he said, “but before I came here I met with a group of young Palestinians from the age of fifteen to twenty-two. And talking to them, they weren’t that different from my daughters. They weren’t that different from your daughters or sons. I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those kids, they’d say, I want these kids to succeed; I want them to prosper. I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do. I believe that’s what Israeli parents would want for these kids if they had a chance to listen to them and talk to them. I believe that.” His comments were met with rolling applause, and when he dived back into the prepared text it occurred to me that this tribute—this imploring of Israelis to see Palestinians as human beings no different from themselves—might be the most he would be able to do to keep a promise to those Palestinian kids.
That night, at a dinner hosted by Shimon Peres, I sat next to his daughter—an older woman who spoke accented English and could have fit in at the seders I went to as a kid. She recounted the story of how her family had hid throughout the Holocaust, the pride they felt upon reaching Israel, the imperative of bringing the nearly dead language of Hebrew back to life. It evoked in me a sense of pride at what Israelis had accomplished over the last seventy years, but it was also hard to reconcile that sense of history, generosity, and justice with those Palestinian kids. Obama’s vision—so readily accepted by young people everywhere, including the young Israelis in the convention center—seemed to clash with the harder edges of politics, the world in which one side needs to win and another needs to lose.
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THE HOPEFUL CHAPTER THAT began with the spread of the Arab Spring to Egypt in 2011 came to an end during a trip that we took to Africa in June 2013. In Tanzania, Obama called Mohamed Morsi from a secure room in his hotel, as protests against the Egyptian government were again building in the streets. This time, we had indications that the Egyptian military—backed by the Saudi and Emirati governments—was stoking the unrest, preparing the overthrow of the deeply flawed yet democratically elected government. They were also sponsoring an information campaign against the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson, casting her as an accomplice of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was a way to apply pressure on us, to demonstrate that this time they weren’t going to yield in their intention to see the type of government they wanted in Cairo just because of America’s views. In one of the more brazen acts that I’d experienced in my job, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba—a man treated as a leading voice on the affairs of the region in the corridors of power in Washington—sent me a photo of a poster that cast Patterson in this light with no other message attached.
Morsi sounded tired but defiant as Obama spoke to him from the makeshift NSC office. Obama urged him to do something to reach out to his growing opposition, some gesture at a unity government that could hold the country together. “You know,” he said, “I just left South Africa, where Nelson Mandela is in the hospital and is very sick. You know when he came to power he could have gone to the white minority in South Africa and said, ‘We are now the majority and we’re going to do what we want. We’ll follow the rules but you are a small minority in this country.’ But he didn’t do this. He went out of his way to reach out to the minority. He even put his former prison guard, the man who had been the warden of the prison where he had been held, in charge of the security services. It was those gestures that showed he was about bringing the country together and sending the message that in fact everyone is part of this thing….You are not just the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, you are the president of Egypt. You need to listen to everyone, and your cabinet needs to be reflective of everyone, and the rules and the constitution include everyone.”
Morsi kept reiterating his democratic legitimacy, the fact that he’d won an election. But he also grew reflective, a man who knew his time might be running out. My background was in physics, he told Obama, but I also know Egypt very well. In contrast to the undemocratic steps he’d taken to try to alter Egypt’s constitution, Morsi said, I’m doing my best to write history for a new Egypt that is really democratic, and what I want to see in my life is that power is transferred in elections to another candidate.
A few days later, Morsi was toppled in a military takeover of the government and put into prison, where he remains to this day. A general, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, took power, casting himself as a savior of Egypt from Islamists with the full backing of Saudi Arabia and the UAE—two U.S. allies that had actively subverted democracy and worked against U.S. policy. In Washington, a tortured debate ensued about whether to label what had been clearly a coup, a coup—which would entail restrictions on the type of assistance that we provide to the Egyptian government. In meetings, once again, I was in a small minority of people arguing on behalf of democracy in Egypt, saying that we should label it a coup for the sake of our credibility; I lost the argument, and I didn’t press the point. As with intervention in Syria, my heart wasn’t entirely in it anymore. I could tell which way the argument was going to go, and which way events were going.
Obama was the most powerful man in the world, but that didn’t mean he could control the forces at play in the Middle East. There was no Nelson Mandela who could lead a country to absolution for its sins and ours. Extremist forces were exploiting the Arab Spring. Reactionary forces—with deep reservoirs of political support in the United States—were intent on clinging to power. Bashar al-Assad was going to fight to the death, backed by his Russian and Iranian sponsors. Factions were going to fight it out in the streets of Libya. The Saudis and Emiratis were going to stamp out political dissent in Egypt before it could come to their kingdoms. A Likud prime minister was going to mouth words about peace while building settlements that made peace impossible. Meanwhile, innocent people were going to suffer, some of them were going to be killed, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. Obama had reached that conclusion before I had. History had opened up a doorway in 2011 that, by the middle of 2013, had been slammed shut. There would be more war, more conflict, and more suffering, until—someday—old men would make peace.
CHAPTER 17
CLENCHED FISTS
After my conversation with Obama on Air Force One, I’d thought about the question he had posed: Why don’t you think about a couple of projects you’d like to take on? I began to keep a file in my head of what I called the “affirmative agenda,” issues where we could be doing more. Cuba. Colombia. Burma. Exchange programs. Development in Africa. Places where a little investment from the United States might make a positive difference. I told McDonough, who was poised to become chief of staff. Then we had a meeting with Obama before the inauguration where we went through a thick briefing that reviewed all of the things that we might do in a second term. Obama stopped on Cuba. “Let’s see what we can do here,” he said. “But we’ll have to get Alan Gross out of prison.”
Alan Gross was a sixty-three-year-old American USAID subcontractor who had already spent three years in a Cuban prison. He was arrested in December 2009 while delivering satellite and communications equipment to Cuba’s small Jewish community, and accused of spying. Before Gross’s arrest, we had made some incremental changes in our Cuba policy, such as expanding the capacity for Cuban Americans to travel and send remittances to the island. The Cuban government had also initiated some reforms, including allowing for the emergence of a small pr
ivate sector so that people could own their own shops, restaurants, and taxis. This created an opening for American travel and money to flow directly to Cubans, without getting caught in the net of the U.S. embargo. But Gross’s unjust arrest made it impossible to press forward with further changes.
As the State Department pursued Gross’s release, the Cubans insisted that he be exchanged for four Cubans imprisoned in the United States. These prisoners were part of the so-called Cuban Five—or Wasp Network—a ring of spies arrested after Cuba shot down two small airplanes that were dropping leaflets into Cuba in the 1990s, killing four people.
The only way to get Gross out of prison and set the stage for broader changes was through sustained diplomacy, but we had no formal diplomatic relations with Cuba. The U.S. Congress had a handful of well-placed hard-liners who were dead set against improving relations, including Cuban Americans Bob Menendez—the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and Republican Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, the Cubans did not trust the State Department, which had spent decades trying to isolate Cuba and channel assistance to opponents of the Cuban government. If we were going to talk, it was going to have to be done secretly.
I was largely a bystander on Cuba issues in the first term, but I had grown frustrated by the status quo. Every time we traveled to Latin America, our summits were dominated by complaints about our Cuba policy. There was zero evidence that our hard-line approach was doing anything to advance human rights. Obama himself told me repeatedly that he was unhappy with our Cuba policy and wanted to change it. U.S. interests, common sense, and honesty suggested this was something we should change. In Obama’s first inaugural address, he had said, “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” I wanted to test whether we could make that connection with Cuba.
The lead staffer on Latin America at the White House was Ricardo Zuniga, a forty-two-year-old Foreign Service officer who was a leading Cuba expert in the government. Born in Honduras to a politically prominent family, he moved to the United States amid the upheaval that plagued Central America. After his father was murdered in Honduras in 1985, Ricardo’s family stayed in the United States. He had served as the human rights officer in Havana from 2002 to 2004 and spent much of his time trying to meet with opponents of the Castro government. Later, he was on the Cuba Desk at State when Gross was arrested in 2009. Ricardo also found himself the consistent target of Cuban government propaganda, derided on state television and trailed by Cuban agents. Unbeknownst to me, he’d been developing a plan to pursue a secret channel with the Cuban government and shake up the status quo.
Shortly after the Situation Room meeting in which Obama signaled an interest in doing something on Cuba, McDonough asked me to go for a walk, which he often did when he wanted to have a conversation that touched upon something personal. His looming promotion to chief of staff felt as though it could open a bit of a chasm in our friendship. We’d known each other since 2002. He was my oldest friend in the White House. But soon he would be among the most powerful people in the country. In the future, when we’d go for walks, we’d be trailed by Secret Service agents.
The southwest gate of the White House clanged, and we started to walk around the ellipse that curves around the south side of the White House grounds, tourists snapping pictures of themselves with the long, sloping lawn in the background. He began to explain that he thought it would probably be too much for me to take on everything in my “affirmative agenda” file. Before I could say anything in response, he said, “Why don’t you do Cuba?”
“I want to do Cuba,” I said in response.
“No, I mean why don’t you actually do Cuba,” he said. “Someone is going to have to open up a channel with the Cubans and negotiate Alan Gross’s release. Ricardo’s been working up a plan, but we need someone senior to lead it.”
“You mean do the negotiation myself?” I asked. I had just thought about running some meetings on Cuba policy. “I haven’t done anything like that.”
“We’re going to need someone close to the president to do this,” he said.
I started to feel some nerves in my stomach. I couldn’t say no, but it wasn’t what I thought I’d be saying yes to, and I couldn’t even envision what this would be—diplomacy with whom, when, where? “Okay,” I said. “Yes.”
“Great,” he said. “You should mention it to POTUS next time you talk to him and then get with Ricardo.”
McDonough had a style like this, a way of rewarding you while challenging you. Obama was doing the same thing with him—he was about to become chief of staff, the man in charge of the president’s domestic policy agenda, and he’d held only national security jobs. Why don’t you do Cuba? I didn’t want to betray that I was nervous, that I might not know how to do this; the only thing I knew for sure about Cuba was that every effort to improve relations so far had failed.
My conversation with Obama was brief, and came in the context of his asking me if I’d figured out what my wish list for a second term was. “Denis talked to me about leading Cuba policy, and doing the negotiations,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “It’s a good idea. Our man in Havana.”
Over the next few weeks, I started to meet with Ricardo, who had a straightforward plan: We’d propose a dialogue with the Cubans on Alan Gross and counterterrorism. That way, if the effort leaked, no one could object. But our hope was that we’d get traction and gradually expand the dialogue to address deeper issues in the relationship. In May 2013, we sent a short message to the Cubans proposing a meeting. It was the first test of whether the Cubans wanted to pursue engagement, and we didn’t know what we’d get in response. “Who shows up for them is what really matters,” Ricardo said.
It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that they’d respond favorably. For decades, the Cuban government had built its legitimacy in part on opposition to the United States—it was a guiding principle of Cuba’s foreign policy, and a justification for cracking down on dissent at home. Improved relations with the United States would undercut that narrative. Advocates for engagement weren’t subtle in arguing that more travel, more commerce, and more connections between the United States and Cuba would help the Cuban people while also catalyzing reforms on the island. It would also dramatically improve the standing of the United States in Latin America.
A few days after we sent the message, Ricardo came to see me—he liked to do everything in person. “We got a message back and it’s serious,” he said. Alejandro Castro, Raúl Castro’s son, would lead the delegation, which agreed to meet with us in Canada. Up to that point, Alejandro had been a bit of a mystery in the United States. His titles were colonel and chair of something called the Cuban National Security and Defense Commission—a relatively new creation, modeled in part on the American NSC. By all accounts, he was playing a larger role in the Cuban system, but nobody knew exactly what that meant. Most analysts thought he was the most powerful man in Cuba after Raúl and Fidel. I could speak for Obama and there was no doubt that he would speak for his father.
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THE CANADIANS HAD GRACIOUSLY agreed to host us, and when Ricardo and I landed in Ottawa we were met at the gate by a pudgy man who made sure we got through immigration with no problem and escorted us to a waiting van. We asked no questions and were driven through a sun-splashed June day into the surrounding countryside, with empty roads rolling through dense forest—the Canadians had taken our request for discretion seriously. In a flat Canadian accent, the driver peppered us with trivia about Ottawa and the vacationing habits of people in this region, as if we were visiting tourists, before driving through a gate and up a winding driveway to a house with a large wraparound porch, which looked out over a lake dotted with the occasional kayak or fisherman.
Alejandro breezed into the room, trailed by three other Cubans, and took my hand with both of his, greeting me like an old friend. He was a big man who spoke and laughed loudly. Befitting the sense of mystery that comes with all things Cuban, he had apparently lost vision in one eye in a training accident while serving in Angola. With slightly thinning hair and black wire-rimmed glasses, he looked more like an academic than a colonel; in fact, he’d spent the previous years publishing works of history, including screeds against American imperialism and full-throated defenses of the Cuban Revolution.
He introduced the rest of his party, but the other two men barely spoke. One of them was older, with a permanent frown, the look of a man who had done many things on behalf of the Cuban security services over the years. The other was younger, spoke good English, and seemed to have a boundless curiosity about us. The interpreter was an elegant older woman named Juana who conveyed an air of having seen everything. And she had: She’d been Fidel’s translator for more than thirty years.
Alejandro began by saying that Cuba wanted this to be an open channel of communication. He gestured at the stoic older man sitting next to him who had participated in back-channel conversations with Americans in the 1990s, saying they’d learned from the past. He noted that Obama was respected in Cuba and in Latin America and emphasized that Raúl did not want to “damage Obama’s political capital”; instead, he wanted to offer him “political space” to improve the relationship. I responded in kind, saying that we wanted to maintain the channel as well, and we hoped we could make progress on securing the release of Alan Gross, deepening counterterrorism cooperation, and improving the U.S.-Cuba relationship.