by Ben Rhodes
“I’ll shake his hand, of course,” Obama replied. “The Cubans were on the right side of apartheid. We were on the wrong side.” In the 1980s, while Reagan was backing the apartheid government in South Africa, Cuba was fighting a war against its right-wing proxies in Angola. Their decisive 1988 victory in a battle against that racist government at Cuito Cuanavale was, in the words of Mandela, a “turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid.” With his short reply, Obama had casually recognized a history that no other president before would have dared to speak aloud. After trying on the bulletproof vest, Obama refused to wear it—its bulk would be obvious under his suit and the message would be disrespectful. No one in that stadium was going to harm Obama anyway.
I stayed behind at the hotel and watched on television as Obama approached the lectern and warmly shook Raúl Castro’s hand. Seeing Obama speaking about the antiapartheid struggle and the importance of Mandela, I felt I was watching him in a separate role from his status as president of the United States—here, in South Africa, he was more appreciated and more intuitively understood than he would have been saying these same things at home. When Obama got back to the hotel, he called me into his suite, where he was decompressing with Michelle. He was sitting in his bedroom, a muted television on in the background, looking energized. “That was one of my favorite speeches we’ve ever done,” he said.
“It looked like the crowd loved it,” I said.
“Yeah. It was kind of awkward, though,” he said. “Whenever they showed Zuma on the big screen, they booed.”
I asked him about his interaction with Castro. “It’s funny,” he said. “He seemed taken aback that I actually shook his hand.”
“It’s getting a ton of attention in our press,” I said. Already, there were vigorous debates about whether it was right to shake Raúl’s hand.
“What am I supposed to do? Snub the guy at a funeral?” His voice was rising a bit. I had taken him out of the moment he’d been in, honoring Mandela, and put him back into the reality of American politics.
Obama started talking about how he’d gone out of his way to talk to F. W. de Klerk, the white leader who had released Mandela from prison and handed power over to him after an election. I mentioned that Desmond Tutu had closed the event. Obama was surprised—Tutu, no longer in the best graces of the ANC, had been left off the official printed program. “I feel bad I didn’t see him,” he said.
“Let’s give him a call,” Michelle said. I stood off to the side as they both spoke to him, Michelle going on about how much she enjoyed their time together on her last visit to South Africa, and ending the conversation by telling Tutu that she loved him.
On the flight home, I scanned the American press. There was almost no coverage of the first African American president eulogizing the most iconic African of the last century. Instead, the lead story back home was a selfie that the Danish prime minister had taken with Obama. Everywhere, the picture was splashed across websites, on social media, on cable news: Obama grinning next to an attractive blond woman. The thought and care Obama had put into honoring Mandela, and his efforts to reveal himself in doing so, were subsumed by the opportunity to talk about this photograph. Before we landed, Obama told me he’d never been so annoyed by the U.S. media. He didn’t have to explain why.
* * *
—
THAT SUMMER AND FALL before the funeral, we had more secret meetings with the Cubans in Ottawa. I’d wake up at dawn, take a cab to Dulles Airport, and board a small regional jet for the short flight. Since almost no one at work knew what I was doing, it was easier to offer no explanation, acting as if it was perfectly normal to be gone for a day here or there. The Cubans always insisted that phones be left in an adjacent room, mindful that a good hacker could turn a phone into a listening device. I’d step out of several hours of discussions to find hundreds of emails backed up, from people who just assumed I was at my desk, within reach.
In our second meeting, the Cubans remained fixated on getting their four guys out of prison in exchange for Alan Gross, something we would never agree to. We did make some progress, however. When two adversaries are just beginning diplomacy, it’s necessary to build confidence, a process of showing that small steps can lead to bigger ones. With help from Senator Patrick Leahy, we allowed the wife of one of the prisoners to pursue artificial insemination. The Cubans allowed for improvements in Alan Gross’s confinement: moving him into a different room, allowing him to take Spanish lessons, giving him access to a printer.
There was one other, more important signal. Around the time of our second meeting, Edward Snowden was stuck in the Moscow airport, trying to find someone who would take him in. Reportedly, he wanted to go to Venezuela, transiting through Havana, but I knew that if the Cubans aided Snowden, any rapprochement between our countries would prove impossible. I pulled Alejandro Castro aside and said I had a message that came from President Obama. I reminded him that the Cubans had said they wanted to give Obama “political space” so that he could take steps to improve relations. “If you take in Snowden,” I said, “that political space will be gone.” I never spoke to the Cubans about this issue again. A few days later, back in Washington, I woke up to a news report: “Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden got stuck in the transit zone of a Moscow airport because Havana said it would not let him fly from Russia to Cuba, a Russian newspaper reported.” I took it as a message: The Cubans were serious about improving relations.
In October, before our third meeting, Ricardo Zuniga and I considered three options: a smaller swap of some of the four Cubans for Gross; proceeding without Gross’s release; or insisting on some kind of swap that went along with a broader transformation of the relationship between our two countries. We went to Susan for guidance, and she urged us to go for what she called “the big bang.” Obama agreed, saying, “If I’m going to do this, I want to do as much as we can all at once.”
When we sat down for our third meeting, I listened again to Alejandro’s insistence on getting their four prisoners back. When it was my turn to speak, I tried to move past the prisoner discussion and put the entire relationship on the table. “We have a channel where we can be candid,” I said. “Given our shared interest in prisoners, we’ll keep discussing that issue. But President Obama wants us to discuss bigger issues as well. He wants to change the relationship in fundamental ways while in office. We won’t resolve this all in one meeting, but we want to discuss this in this channel.” I then went through a long list of nearly every aspect in the U.S.-Cuba relationship that we wanted to change. The State Sponsor of Terrorism list; unwinding the U.S. embargo; restoring diplomatic relations; the reform of Cuba’s economy and political system, including Internet access, labor rights, and political freedoms. During the pauses for translation, I looked at Alejandro and thought about how he was processing this in a different language, informed by a different history, focused primarily on getting these Cubans out of prison. I ended by reiterating that Alan Gross’s release was essential for any of this to happen and noting that we would respect Cuban sovereignty—our policy was not to change the regime.
When I was done, Alejandro put aside his talking points. “Thus far,” he said, “we had the perception that the U.S. side had the political will to advance. Your intervention confirms my view. Talking candidly is the only way for us to advance on the road established by the two presidents.” He paused for a moment. “President Obama wants to advance these, correct?”
He was still uncertain that I was really speaking on Obama’s behalf. “Yes,” I answered.
“You discussed these options with him?”
“Yes.”
We spent the rest of the meeting going through the list of everything that each side wanted the other to do. Whereas we wanted Cuba to reform its economy and political system, Cuba wanted the embargo lifted, the naval base at
Guantanamo Bay returned, and our funding for democracy programs and Radio and TV Martí to end. We wouldn’t be able to get all of this done; there were things that neither side was ready to do, and we were going to have our ideological differences. But our task was becoming clearer. We needed to find some solution on prisoners, and we needed to figure out what each side could do to transform the relationship and whether that added up to a deal.
Our fourth meeting was a few weeks after Obama shook Castro’s hand at the Mandela memorial. We were concerned about overstaying our welcome in Canada, so we agreed to meet in an alternative location: the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Their first comment was about the Mandela funeral. They noted, with pride, that the Obama-Castro handshake was the biggest news to come out of the event. “Our assessment is the reaction was favorable.”
In response, I tried to mute things a bit, noting that congressíonal criticism of Obama had been severe. “There are still many people who would oppose changes in our Cuba policy, and not all the reaction was favorable,” I said. “But it was an indication that we are open to change. Also, Obama mentioned to me that Cuba had earned the right to be there.”
“He said that?” Alejandro asked.
“Yes,” I said. I had mentioned it as an aside, but could tell that what I said registered. “He understands the history.”
We had a new proposal to put on the table: The intelligence community had come to us and said they had an agent in Cuba whom they wanted to get out of prison, someone who had been valuable to them in the past, who had helped provide information that led to the arrest of the Cuban Five. If the Cubans would release this agent, we could swap three of the remaining Cubans for him, but not Gerardo Hernández—the ringleader of the group, and the only one convicted of murder. They’d also have to release Alan Gross.
Alejandro balked. He went on a lengthy diatribe about how Gross was an intelligence agent and they had information to prove it, and then reiterated what he had been saying since the first meeting: Gerardo Hernández needed to be released. “A solution that does not include Gerardo is not a solution for us.” On the other hand, he guaranteed that there would be a solution for Gross if there was a solution for Gerardo. Finally, he said Cuba was open to a spy swap, but they didn’t want to release the person that the intelligence community wanted. “He is a traitor,” Alejandro said.
We had to insist they weren’t going to get Gerardo, and they had to insist we weren’t going to get this U.S. asset. We would both have to decide whether to compromise. Neither of us wanted to go first, and neither of us was empowered to make that offer right now. More important, though, was the fact that we both agreed that we were now talking about a transformation in the U.S.-Cuba relationship, not just a prisoner swap. Toward the end of the discussion, after hours of arguing about prisoners, I reiterated that we wanted to keep our eye on the bigger picture, this potential to transform U.S.-Cuba relations.
“We understand that in Obama’s circle you are the ones looking for a new relationship,” Alejandro said. His language was carefully chosen. The U.S. government, and the U.S. Congress, had plenty of people who were not looking for a new relationship. The Cubans had been burned in the past by people who met with them without being fully empowered by the president. The difference this time, he said, was the fact that “we have the political will of our leaders, Raúl Castro and Obama.”
CHAPTER 21
RUSSIANS AND INTERVENTION
One morning in early February 2014, Laura Lucas—a spokeswoman who worked for me on the National Security Council—sat in my morning staff meeting and asked how we should respond to an intercepted phone call that had been released on YouTube.
“What phone call?” I asked.
“You haven’t seen?” she said. “It’s Toria.”
I Googled it on my computer. At that point, a crisis was boiling over in Ukraine. In November 2013, the corrupt, pro-Russian leader, Viktor Yanukovych, had announced that he was suspending preparations to enter into an “association agreement” with the European Union, a step that would have helped cement Ukraine’s ties with the West. Over the next several weeks, hundreds of thousands of people held demonstrations in Kiev’s central square, the Maidan. Calls for Yanukovych’s resignation began as he pursued talks with Vladimir Putin on a “strategic partnership,” an obvious ploy to pull Ukraine away from Europe. There were clashes in the streets, a new law banning antigovernment protests, and mounting violence. The Arab Spring pattern was playing out in a European capital, on Russia’s border: Putin’s worst nightmare.
The intercepted call was between Toria Nuland, our assistant secretary of state for Europe, and Geoff Pyatt, our ambassador in Kiev. Nuland was a hawkish Foreign Service officer, anti-Russian, a savvy veteran of Dick Cheney’s staff who served as Hillary Clinton’s spokeswoman at State. In the recording, she and Pyatt sounded as if they were picking a new government as they evaluated different Ukrainian leaders. “I don’t think Klitsch should go into government,” she said about one Ukrainian politician. “I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience,” she said about another Ukrainian, who soon became prime minister. At the end of the call, complaining about a lack of European pressure to resolve the crisis, Nuland said, “Fuck the EU.”
I was stunned. The Russians had almost certainly intercepted the phone call. That was hardly surprising—in these jobs, you have to assume that any number of governments could be listening in if you’re on a nonsecure phone. What was new was the act of releasing the intercepted call and doing it so brazenly, on social media—the Russian government had even tweeted out a link to the YouTube account. Doing so violated the unspoken understanding among major powers—we collect intelligence on one another, but we use it privately, for our own purposes. A Rubicon had been crossed—the Russians no longer stopped at hacking information; now, triggered by the threat of Ukraine sliding out of their sphere of influence, they were willing to hack information and put it into the public domain.
“I don’t know what we can say about this,” I said. “What have we said so far?”
“State hasn’t commented.”
We ended up noting that the Russians were the ones who had published the video and calling it “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”
* * *
—
OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH RUSSIA had steadily deteriorated since the reemergence of Vladimir Putin as president. We had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that Putin had supported all of the progress made through the “reset” of the first term—the New START treaty, Iran sanctions, Russia joining the World Trade Organization. Medvedev had gone out of his way to signal a better relationship with the United States. When he visited in 2010, he gave a speech in Silicon Valley, wearing jeans and reading the text off an iPad, trying to strike a picture of a future-oriented, forward-looking Russia. When he came to Washington, we arranged for Obama and him to eat lunch together at Ray’s Hell Burger, a casual place where Medvedev oddly ate his burger without the top part of the bun, gripping the bare patty with his fingers.
I think of Medvedev now as a tragic figure—the guy who seemed to know better, who wanted Russia to step more firmly into the Western world. If life took a different turn, he’d be the kind of Russian who’d end up living in London and going back to Moscow on occasion to look after business interests. Instead, he was put in his place by Putin, a man who runs Russia as a personal fiefdom, a source of his own wealth and prestige. In retrospect, Putin must have been watching with growing concern as protests driven by corruption toppled long-standing dictators, and oil prices began to drop. His own election in 2012 was marked by large street demonstrations and a healthy opposition. Once he was restored to power, the momentum in the U.S.-Russia relationship ground to a halt. The first time Obama met with Putin after he became president again, Putin showed up forty-five minutes late. Putin rebuffed further discussions on a
rms control and missile defense. Russia continued its blank check of support for Assad. In August of 2013, Russia granted Edward Snowden asylum in Moscow.
As a former spy, Putin surely understood the gravity of someone making off with the blueprints for how a nation conducts surveillance. In response, Obama canceled a planned state visit to Moscow. He didn’t want to navigate the sideshow of Snowden being in the same city, but he also saw no point in attending a summit where nothing was going to be accomplished. I also noticed an unusual coziness among the Russians, Snowden, and Wikileaks—the way in which Wikileaks connected with Snowden, who was clearly being monitored by the Russians; the way in which the disclosures coincided largely with Russian interests, including the leaks from Snowden’s stolen cache that seemed focused on sabotaging America’s relationships abroad—particularly our alliance with Germany. Whoever was behind the disclosures was intent on driving a wedge between the United States and Europe, which also happened to be a key goal of Putin’s, who deeply resented the expansion of NATO and the European Union into former Soviet states like the Baltic countries.
While tensions had been building, Ukraine was a tipping point. To Putin, it was an existential threat to his rule and a part of Russia. It was the kind of crisis that creeps up on you in the rearview mirror when you work in the White House, a distant activity that comes further into focus until suddenly it is right on top of you. This happened in February, when more protesters started getting killed in the streets. Obama was wary. He didn’t see the protests as a chance to transform Ukraine because he was skeptical that such a transformation could take place. He had inherited the Bush administration’s policy that offered the prospect of NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine. Russia had already invaded Georgia in 2008. The last time there was a protest-driven revolution in Ukraine, the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004, the leader ended up poisoned by the kinds of toxins that Russia uses against enemies abroad.