The Secretary

by Kim Ghattas

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  For Lebanon and for my family,

  they made me who I am.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART I

  1. Who Do You Call?

  2. Hillary Reconquers the World

  3. From Washington to Beirut

  4. No Natural Growth

  5. The Shrink Will See You Now

  6. Halloween in Jerusalem

  PART II

  7. Camels Are Ugly

  8. Whirling Dervishes and Brazilian Samba

  9. Meet Me at the Fair

  10. Meet Me in the Sea

  11. Making the Cut

  PART III

  12. I Want to Break Through

  13. This Is Not About Us

  14. Sarko’s War

  15. Summer of Disparate Discontents

  16. Help Us Help You

  17. Chairman of the Board

  Conclusion

  Photos

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  War is a force that gives us meaning.

  —Chris Hedges, 2002

  I grew up in Beirut, on the front lines of a civil war. My father always said, “If America wanted the fighting to end, the war would be over tomorrow.” He waited fifteen years for the guns to fall silent. From 1975 to 1990, everybody waited while 150,000 people died. Did America not care that people were being killed? Did it not have the power to stop the bloodshed? Were we just a pawn in the hands of the neocolonial imperial power? And why were we all blaming this distant land for our war, anyway?

  As a child, I never imagined I would one day live in that distant land and would be able to put some of those questions to the American secretary of state Hillary Clinton. As a reporter, in the State Department press corps, I would even fly from Washington to Beirut with her, on an aging American government plane, which contrasted somewhat with my image of an omnipotent superpower.

  During the war in Lebanon, America received the most calls for help and the biggest share of blame in a conflict so complicated that even the Lebanese sometimes lost the plot. The United States was one of many countries playing a role, though there were those who believed only the United States could save Lebanon from its descent into a seemingly bottomless hell. Others were convinced America was the reason for our suffering. People who disagreed about everything, who either loved or resented the United States, shared one conviction: America was omnipotent; its power knew no bounds.

  My own family was liberal and secular, and with a Dutch mother, we felt attached to Lebanon yet also connected to the West. Although we often felt ambivalent about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Europe and America symbolized hope, a chance for a better life if we decided to leave Lebanon. We did not identify with the Soviet Union, Iran, or Syria, though many of our compatriots did. Ours is a country with multiple political identities and a multitude of religious communities.

  War is a maturing experience; at the age of thirteen, I decided I would be a journalist. I was tired of explaining to friends and relatives abroad that Lebanon was not flattened by bombs, that I still went to school—though there were long periods where the shelling was too intense—that we still went out for family lunch on Sundays when the snipers took some time off. I was tired of the raised eyebrows when we presented our passports at airports during the days when Lebanon and Beirut were associated with plane hijackings and bloodthirsty gunmen. I just wanted the world to understand what was really going on in my country.

  One day, we woke up and peace had arrived. Or at least a semblance of peace—postwar societies are rarely stable. We were in fact under the military occupation of Syria, our neighbor to the east. I was just a teenager, but war was all I had known and I had trouble adjusting to life without adrenaline. Bombardments had been replaced with a deafening silence, and fireworks made me jump. I still hoped for an outburst of fighting that would shut down the road to school as an excuse not to do my homework. The army was still on the move often, its tanks rumbling on city streets, checkpoints manned by trigger-happy Syrian soldiers terrified us at all hours of the day, and scores were still being settled with gruesome political assassinations. After high school, many of my friends left Lebanon and enrolled in universities in Europe and the United States, hoping to build a better, more sane future. I followed my childhood dream and stayed in Beirut.

  I reported on my country for American and European newspapers and then became a radio and television journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation. After covering political unrest, assassinations, uprisings, and more wars in Lebanon, as well as the invasion of Iraq and repression across the Middle East, I finally left the city that had made me a journalist and moved from Beirut to Washington in 2008, at the age of thirty-two, to be the BBC’s State Department correspondent. I had overdosed on instability and uncertainty and felt only relief as I arrived in the United States. I did sometimes wake up in Washington wondering about the meaning of life now that it didn’t involve a daily struggle. Could it really be just a steady stream of days in the office, dinner with friends, and weekends puttering at home? I got my adrenaline fix from a new, much healthier source. I had become part of the small group of journalists, known as the traveling press corps, covering the secretary of state in Washington and on international diplomatic missions—last-minute plans for frenzied jaunts around the globe on a U.S. government plane, motorcades racing through world capitals at breakneck speed, and high-wire diplomatic talks about war and peace.

  My BBC predecessors had all been British; I was also the only non-Western journalist in the group. My background informed and enriched my reporting—I had lived on the receiving end of American foreign policy my whole life; I knew the very real-life consequences of decisions made at the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon. Now I had a front-row seat to watch that policy unfold, succeed, and often fail.

  On my travels, from London to Kabul and Beijing, I heard countless echoes of my own frustrations and hopes about the United States. Even today, while America is deeply in debt again, exhausted by two wars, its influence challenged by rivals big and small, millions of people around the world still believe that the United States can snap its fingers to make things happen, for good or bad, just as I had believed as a child. But in Washington, I found American officials frustrated and exhausted by the heavy lifting required to advance their country’s interests or to get anything done around the globe. America really did seem to be in decline. Or was this just the reality of a complex and fast-changing world?

  As I prodded for answers and dug deeper, I began to feel that news reports for television and radio were no longer enough to share everything I was learning—it was time to write a book. I didn’t want to simply record observations from my travels and reflect on my feelings along the way; I wanted to enrich my perspective on the events I saw unfolding in public with the points of view of those at the heart of action, working behind closed doors. Those untold moments rarely make it into short news stories or big headlines but they provide valuable context that tells a fuller story. Over the course of a year, I interviewed several dozen senior American officials, junior officials, foreign ministers of other countries and their advisors, in Washington and abroad, some
times immediately after a diplomatic crisis, other times with hindsight. Many of them spoke to me more than once, often for several hours, in person or by phone. I conducted the interviews on a “deep background” basis, a journalistic term that means I would use the anecdotes, observations, or analyses shared with me during the interviews, but I would not identify the source. The promise of anonymity often allows people to be more open in their descriptions, in their retelling of events, and in sharing their emotions and thoughts. Dialogue in quotation marks has been retold to me by the speaker or someone in the room; I have paraphrased occasionally to condense long conversations or because my sources were uncertain about the precise wording used, but the context or content was never in doubt.

  The result is a rich canvas of different points of view, American and foreign: a multidimensional look at some of the issues and crises that have marked the Obama administration over the last four years, from the Arab Spring to the Asian pivot. It’s a journey across hundreds of thousands of miles, from the Elysée Palace in Paris to the Saudi king’s desert retreat. It’s a journey in the company of the real people behind American power, the fallible human beings who devise American foreign policy in an increasingly complicated world and the foreign officials with whom they cooperate, jostle, and clash on a daily basis.

  It’s also my own journey from Beirut to Washington, as I try to come to terms with my personal misgivings about American power and look for answers to the questions that haunted my childhood: Did America not care that the Lebanese were dying? Does America still matter in today’s world where China, Turkey, Brazil, India, and others are all competing for a bigger say in how the world is run?

  I look at the bigger picture of American power on the world stage through the eyes of the woman who came to symbolize America, almost as much if not more than President Barack Obama. For four years I traveled on a plane with Hillary Clinton, scrutinizing her every word and move to determine what the essence of American power and influence may be. And I watched her make her own journey during that time, from defeated presidential candidate and polarizing politician to a rock star diplomat, admired and respected around the world, at an all-time high in the polls in her own country. I’ve observed Clinton, the secretary of state, grow into her role and establish her own brand of diplomacy. But I also saw Hillary, the woman, in action, close-up, with and without makeup. In the spotlight for decades, Hillary Rodham Clinton is often referred to simply as Hillary and I have chosen to refer to her as Hillary occasionally in the book, not out of any familiarity but to highlight more private moments as the public rediscovers a woman it has known for years.

  When she took on the challenge of restoring America’s reputation, the United States was at a crossroads, its influence shunned by others after eight years of the Bush administration. As President Barack Obama’s envoy to the world, Clinton set out to make her country a wanted partner once more, finding new spheres of influence and exploring the new frontiers of twenty-first-century diplomacy from her very first day at the State Department.

  PART I

  You are the agents of innocence. That is why you make so much mischief. You come into a place like Lebanon as if you were missionaries. You convince people to put aside their old customs and allegiances and to break the bonds that hold the country together. With your money and your schools and your cigarettes and music, you convince us that we can be like you. But we can’t. And when the real trouble begins, you are gone. And you leave your friends, the ones who trusted you the most, to die. I will tell you what it is. You urge us to open up the windows of heaven. But you do not realize that the downpour will come rushing and drown us all.

  —Fuad, Palestinian CIA informant, in David Ignatius, Agents of Innocence

  1

  WHO DO YOU CALL?

  The armored black Cadillac stood waiting in the horseshoe driveway outside 3067 Whitehaven Street, in northwest Washington. Inside the three-story Georgian house, last-minute preparations were under way ahead of a first day at work. Two women talked through their schedule, checked that their BlackBerries were in their handbags, applied a last dab of lipstick. For the umpteenth time, Fred Ketchem went over the route for his package in his head. In his left ear, he could hear the chatter of his team along the way: the road was still clear. He checked alternative routes again, just in case. Until just a few weeks ago, he had been responsible for the safety of three thousand people implementing American foreign policy in one of the world’s most dangerous diplomatic missions—Baghdad. Now, he was charged with the security of America’s top diplomat. He had to remind himself that this wasn’t Iraq. There would be no hair-trigger checkpoints, no bearded gunmen, no roadside bombs planted along the way; the only hazards here were fire trucks and car accidents. Even so, he wanted the first day, the first drive, to be as smooth as possible. Standing in the crisp January cold, Fred kept his eyes on the portico. A few miles away, in a building that looked like a remnant of Soviet architecture, the crowd was gathering.

  It was just a few minutes past nine in the morning on January 22, 2009, when the dark door between the two white columns swung open and a middle-aged woman with short ash-blond hair, wearing a coffee-brown woven wool pantsuit and kitten heels, emerged. She walked down the steps to the car, a young statuesque woman with flowing jet-black hair following closely behind her.

  “Good morning, Fred!” said Hillary Clinton.

  “Good morning, Madame Secretary.”

  “Thank you for being here on our first day. We’re going to be very busy in the coming few years.”

  Fred opened the rear right door for his new boss before getting into the front passenger seat. Huma Abedin, Hillary’s longtime aide, got in on the other side. Otis, the trusted government driver who had ferried Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell around the city, was at the wheel. The package, the now-full Cadillac sandwiched between a black SUV leading in front and two following, headed down the hill to Foggy Bottom. When the Department of State chose the area as its home in 1947, the swampy fog had long since dissipated from the banks of the Potomac. As the government redeveloped the area, the industrial slum, smoke stacks, and tenement dwellings at the southwestern edge of the nation’s capital gradually gave way to more government offices, luxury residential buildings such as the curved Watergate complex, and the boxlike white marble Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But the area’s name had stuck, an inadvertent reminder of the fog of information that American diplomats often had to swim through to make their decisions.

  That morning, the skies were a bright blue, and Hillary’s mind was clear. She felt excited about her new job, expectant about the contribution she could make to her country, and determined to tackle the daunting challenges facing America around the world. The chatter of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition news program provided a background hum as she went over the day’s schedule with Huma one more time.

  Clinton had spent the past few weeks preparing for her Senate confirmation hearing as secretary of state in Barack Obama’s cabinet. She had to lay out her vision for American diplomacy and leadership around the world while demonstrating her loyalty to the new president, her former rival. But she also had to absorb vast amounts of information to prove she knew all the issues. It was like preparing for the bar exam again. On the campaign trail, Obama had reduced her foreign policy experience to sipping tea with foreign leaders as a First Lady. She was not exactly a neophyte but neither was she a seasoned diplomat, so the learning curve was steep. But Hillary had always known how to be a star pupil. She nailed questions about the more obscure, dry pet subjects of her former Senate colleagues and brought them to life as though she’d spent years thinking about Arctic policy and mineral-rich countries. She talked about cruise ships sailing past Point Barrow because of melting ice and Botswana’s great stewardship of its diamond riches. She outwonked all the wonks in the Senate room by mastering all the details. Clinton also explained how she envisaged the exercise of American power: it had to be “
smart.” Not just soft diplomacy, with a focus on development or just hard military power, but a combination—an updated, global version of the Marshall Plan. “Smart power” was a concept coined by political scientists like Joseph Nye but had never been implemented methodically before.

  Hillary couldn’t remember the last time she’d had some real time off. She had gone from being First Lady to running for senator, then jumped from the daily business of the Senate to the campaign trail to her new, unexpected job. The race for the Democratic nomination had been bruising, hurtful, and ugly. She had been defeated and discredited by her loss despite the millions of loyal voters who had backed her. Campaigning for Barack Obama on the shoulders of such loss had just added to her exhaustion. Obama had urged her to accept the job with unusual candor, telling Clinton he needed her, but serving her former nemesis involved a bracing lesson in humility. Clinton didn’t know how the relationship with Obama would work out, but she knew what a president needed—team players. Her Girl Scout instincts kicked in. She was on the team and she wanted the whole team to look good. She wanted America to look good again. Hillary was ready to play, but she was also ready for some red-carpet treatment, some respect, and some camera attention to soothe her campaign wounds. New challenges invigorated her. The adrenaline had kicked in, and she felt and looked energized, ready for her grand entrance.