by Kim Ghattas
On March 3, Obama gave a press conference; this time, he named Gaddafi and called on him to leave power. A few days later, the Gulf Cooperation Council called on the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The Arab League, long a hollow and impotent body, was plagued with the same ills as the region: it didn’t represent the people and was beset by rivalry and disagreements between its twenty-two member states. The league never took decisions of any consequence, and its secretary-general Amr Moussa was a former foreign minister of Egypt who had served under Mubarak. But on March 12, Arab foreign ministers attending a special meeting at the league’s headquarters in Cairo voted unanimously in support of a no-fly zone. Syria and Iraq abstained.
I was flabbergasted: Arabs calling for military action against one of their own? Not even in 1990, when George H. W. Bush put together an international coalition to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s army, did Arab countries unanimously participate: those who did were in it ostensibly to help Kuwait, not to rein in one of their own as they would be doing in Libya. The old myth of Arab solidarity had been truly punctured. Of course, Gaddafi’s antics, his bizarre wardrobe, his rambling, interminable speeches at the UN General Assembly every year, and his delusions about being the king of Africa drove the Arabs crazy. At an Arab League summit, he had once called the Saudi ruler a liar. No one would be sorry to see him go. The Turks still insisted that military action was a ridiculous idea. But the clamor for action was growing, as was criticism of Obama for standing idly by while civilians were being killed.
Sarkozy had come out ahead of everyone and recognized the Libyan opposition group, the Transitional National Council, as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people. The Libyan opposition was pushing the United States to follow suit. But Washington was still only saying “a” legitimate representative. I sometimes rolled my eyes at how much time U.S. officials spent on nuances and semantics. It was lost on people who were being shot. But I could see that in this case the definite article made all the difference because it had legal and financial implications. And I knew the weight that America’s words carried. Cameron and Sarkozy, even Erdoğan, were scrutinized mostly at home, their words or missteps the subject of some opinion pieces here or there. There would be a ruckus in the House of Commons in London if the British prime minister met with the wrong political representative. But once Washington embraced the new Libyan opposition, it would be hard to undo. The United States first wanted to know more about the rebels.
With the world debating what to do about Libya, Clinton planned to check in on the state of postrevolution Egypt and Tunisia, Libya’s neighbors. Huma, Philippe, and Jake were putting the final touches on the planning, weighing every event, every location, and every meeting on the schedule for Cairo and Tunis. Here again, if Hillary met with the wrong activist or visited a specific location, it could send an inadvertent signal of a change in U.S. policy. But the secretary would first stop in Paris, deal with a nuclear crisis, and get an American out of the claws of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.
* * *
The Book was in chaos, a reflection of the state of the world. The Building was struggling to keep up. Every day brought new changes in Egypt and Tunisia, and the briefing notes that the Near Eastern Affairs section was contributing to the Book were already outdated by the time they were printed. While Libya’s revolution had been gaining momentum, a devastating earthquake and tsunami had hit Japan on March 11, and the country’s nuclear energy reactors were failing. Washington worried the Japanese were not moving fast enough to contain the crisis and was concerned about the health and safety of thousands of American troops in Japan, who were also being drafted into the relief efforts. The U.S. Navy was also on its way to help. The crackdown in Bahrain was continuing. Egypt was navigating its transition. Tunisia was learning to live without Ben Ali. Protests had erupted in Syria. In Pakistan, Raymond Davis, an American contractor suspected of being a CIA agent, had been arrested after allegedly shooting two men on the streets of Lahore in January. And then, of course, there was Libya.
* * *
On Sunday evening, March 15, Molly Montgomery and Andrew Johnson, the line plane team, settled down to work through the nighttime flight to Paris. They needed a definitive version of the secretary’s daily briefing book in seven hours. When SAM landed at nine the next morning, Clinton would head into a long day of meetings. Molly snacked on beef jerky that her husband had made for her. They asked Washington for extra briefing materials, for more information. Every official Clinton would be speaking with in Paris wanted to discuss the Japanese nuclear crisis, what the United States would do to help. Molly and Andrew also had to think about Tunisia and Egypt. The American embassy in Egypt was overwhelmed and barely finding its footing—it didn’t know all the new players on the scene. Huma wanted to know whether the secretary could meet with this activist or that minister. No one had any firm answers. All the usual talking points that Molly and Andrew were getting from the relevant country desks in the Building were now irrelevant and outdated; with Jake, they rewrote and refined policy on the plane from scratch and then rewrote it again. Hillary was reading the Book as usual and somehow stapling papers. She kept walking out of her cabin and borrowing Molly and Andrew’s stapler.
Jake had fleetingly thought about how exciting it was to be going to Egypt, but now all he could think of was Libya, that the clock was ticking, how Gaddafi was threatening to flatten the rebel city of Benghazi. He checked in regularly with the White House, relaying the latest to his boss.
The back of the plane was packed with a record twenty-one journalists. SAM hadn’t seen such a large press contingent since Madeleine Albright had traveled to Pyongyang in November 2000. DS agents and officials had been sent ahead to the different stops on commercial flights to make room for the journalists who would record the historic visit of the American secretary of state to post-Mubarak Egypt.
When we landed in Paris, our in-boxes contained an updated list of events. There was now a meeting with the representative of the Libyan Transitional National Council sometime on Monday, to be determined (TBD). A note said it could end up being Tuesday. There was a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister. Though she would see Takeaki Matsumoto at the G8 meeting, they would meet à deux to discuss the response to the earthquake in Japan in detail. Clinton wasn’t just meeting with the new French foreign minister Alain Juppé. Now she would also be received by President Sarkozy himself.
Sarko was a fan of the United States and was often referred to as Sarko l’américain. He loved Hillary, and she enjoyed his charming French je ne sais quoi. Sarko saw her not just as the American chief diplomat but as Hillary the woman. A year ago, she’d come to the Elysée Palace to meet him. As she walked up the steps on her way in, her black kitten heel shoe had slipped off her right foot, and Sarko caught her hand in time and supported her while she found her footing. The moment was immortalized in a picture, a copy of which Hillary sent to Sarkozy with a note: “I may not be Cinderella but you’ll always be my Prince Charming.” After the hour-long meeting, he didn’t just wave good-bye to her from the steps of the Elysée, he walked her to the door of her car. The warm ties and trust would come in handy to keep the impetuous Sarkozy from dragging America into an uncontrolled spiral in Libya. He was becoming increasingly vocal about military action, but the contours of what he was proposing were very vague. Exasperated American officials at the UN were accusing the French of grandstanding and dragging America into “their shitty little war.”32
* * *
Hillary had arrived in Paris with a reasonably clear vision about what needed to be done in Libya but uncertain about whether all the factors were aligned. So she came with her legendary checklist. Her critics mocked her for being a good Methodist girl who simply checked things off a to-do list, to which she would retort that at the end of the day what mattered was that she got the job done.
She got to work. She sat down with Sarkozy and explained to him what a no-f
ly zone entailed and what it did not deliver. It wouldn’t be enough to protect civilians. The rebels would need more. But before implementing a no-fly zone, it was necessary to take out Gaddafi’s air defenses. Was France ready and able to do that?
Next she sat down with the Emirati foreign minister Abdullah bin Zayed to talk about Libya but also Bahrain. Bob Gates had been in Bahrain over the weekend, urging America’s ally to implement quick reforms to respond to the demands of the protestors. Baby steps were simply not enough with Iran looking to exploit the unrest.
“Time is not our friend,” he had said. The Sunni Gulf monarchies were always ready to crush their Shiite minorities out of religious hatred for their sect and historic discrimination. The United States sympathized with the Bahraini protestors, though it worried more about Iran. Blinded by its own history with Tehran, the United States feared Shiite radicalism more than Sunni orthodoxy.
The Bahrainis agreed that time was key and watched Iran’s extending hand with horror. But they had a better idea about how to push back against Tehran, and democracy had nothing to do with it. Just as we were landing in Paris, two thousand Saudi and Emirati troops were driving across the causeway and onto the island of Bahrain to restore their vision of order. They gave no notice to the United States of their plans. Officials who got wind that something was under way were told to stay out of it. Saudi Arabia had its own restless, alienated Shiite population in the Eastern Province, and the military move was a message to them as well.
Clinton admonished bin Zayed for the deployment of troops. This looked nothing like reform. But almost in the same breath she also asked exactly what the Gulf countries and the Arab League had in mind when they called for a no-fly zone over Libya. Hillary wanted to get a sense of people’s real intentions, not just their public statements. She was ready to go as far as the Arabs were ready to go, and now that they had made those statements, she wanted to assess their sincerity—theirs and that of everyone else so desperate to dispatch fighter jets over Libyan skies.
In Libya, Gaddafi’s troops were advancing quickly east, beating back the opposition. Soon they could be in Benghazi, the rebel stronghold. The pressure for action was mounting by the hour. In Washington, no decision had been taken yet about the course of action. Hillary continued working on her checklist.
Over dinner with all the G8 ministers, she spoke to William Hague. The British were pushing for a no-fly zone as well. She spoke with Lavrov, who opposed it less vehemently than when she’d seen him in Geneva in February. It was no longer “no, no, no” but simply “no.” The Germans were not keen at all.
Clinton still needed to get a feel for what the Libyan opposition was made of, or at least its American-educated leader, Mahmoud Jibril. The advance line officer for this trip, Antoinette Hurtado, was doing everything possible to make that happen. While Clinton went from meeting to meeting, Antoinette had been on the phone all afternoon with the representative of the Libyan Transitional National Council, trying to get a sense of when she might be able to get him into the same room with Clinton and change that TBD event on our schedule into a confirmed meeting. Antoinette had arrived in Paris herself only a couple of days ago, for one of the shortest advances she had been on. Before leaving, she had been given an Emirates cell phone number with instructions to get the man on the other end of the line to Paris safely.
Being on European soil was not protection enough against Gaddafi’s wrath and long arm, so Jibril’s arrival and the location of his meeting with the secretary were kept secret. He was flying into Paris from the Gulf on a private jet lent by a benefactor, his exact arrival time uncertain. The meeting was first slated for the early afternoon, but then he called to say the plane wouldn’t be able to take off in time. Antoinette found it nerve-racking but inspirational to speak to the man who was risking his life by standing up to a dictator. She conferred with Huma. Clinton was going into a series of meetings. Perhaps they could slot him in before the G8 dinner. Too tight. It would have to be after the G8 dinner, at Clinton’s hotel. All evening, as she guided Clinton from meeting to meeting to the dinner, Antoinette nervously checked her BlackBerry to make sure Jibril had arrived and was in place. As an additional security precaution, Jibril had asked to avoid the front entrance of the hotel, so Antoinette arranged for him to be taken in through a back entrance. He was waiting in a hold room on the secure floor, just down the hall from Clinton’s suite, chatting to Gene Cretz, the spiky-haired ambassador to Libya who had feared for his own life after WikiLeaks released his diplomatic cables about Gaddafi. Chris Stevens, a tall, lanky career diplomat with hunched shoulders who had also recently served in Libya and knew Jibril, was in the room as well. Chris, who spoke good Arabic, had just been appointed Washington’s liaison with the rebels and would soon be making his way to Benghazi. Just after ten in the evening, they got word that Clinton was on her way up.
* * *
The Libyan rebel leader looked nothing like a revolutionary. No beard, no camouflage, no bandana on his forehead. Short with glasses and wearing a suit, the fifty-nine-year-old business management consultant had come to Paris to find out what America had to offer. The gulf between perception and expectations—he knew all about that. It was at the heart of his PhD thesis on the U.S.-Libyan relationship at the University of Pittsburgh years ago. He had written about the influence of images and perception in the very rocky U.S.-Libyan relationship from 1969, the year Gaddafi took power, when Libya was still an American friend, until 1982, when Libya had moved from being an agitator against the United States to being firmly in the camp of the enemy.
“We tend to see that countries we like do things we like, and to see our enemies pursuing policies that would harm our interests,” Jibril had written in 1985.
Now again, America’s perception of Libya changed depending on what its own objectives and interests were in the region. Jibril needed to get Clinton to like him and convince her that a no-fly zone was in America’s interest, but in real life, perceptions and expectations could not be neatly charted the way they had been in his thesis.
On the top floor of the Westin Hotel, Clinton welcomed Jibril into the living room of her presidential suite. The Eiffel Tower was lit up, shining through the corner window. The tasteful purple and gray couches and settees and the checkered armchairs had been rearranged into a more formal meeting setting. Clinton asked a few questions, but she mostly listened. In his perfect but heavily accented English, Jibril eloquently explained that without a no-fly zone, without U.S. intervention, there would be a massacre in Benghazi. His plea was passionate but delivered calmly, his bushy eyebrows only barely moving up and down under his dark rimmed eyeglasses. Clinton said America’s vital interests were not at stake. America, he replied, had to be coherent in its foreign policy; it could not speak of the defense of democracy and abandon the Libyan people. Clinton asked very detailed questions about the Transitional National Council, its composition, how representative it was of all of Libya, his vision for the future of the country. She also asked him for an update about the military situation on the ground as well as the humanitarian aid needed.
After forty-five minutes, the meeting came to an end. Clinton walked Jibril into the hallway. They shook hands, and he thanked her for the meeting. She smiled, he bowed slightly, looking relieved it was over. Clinton conferred very quickly with Cretz and Stevens. She added what she had heard to the information she’d gathered all day. She had checked all her boxes, and she could make her case to President Obama about what she believed should be America’s next move.
Jibril left the hotel through the back door again. He had been pleasantly surprised by how attentive Clinton had been and how much time she had given him to make his case. But she had made no commitment to him either way. He had given it his best shot, but he didn’t know whether he had convinced the American secretary of state to help his country. Was the cavalry coming? Perhaps the Arabs and the French, but he wasn’t sure about the United States. Libya could be on its own,
but he was hopeful.
* * *
The day wasn’t over. At half past midnight, we were called to a background briefing with three senior officials from the delegation. There was no filing center, where we usually held those briefings, so we agreed to meet up in the hotel bar. It was a Monday night, but the Tuileries Bar was crowded. The hotel was in the heart of Paris, in the first arrondissement, between the place de la Concorde and the place Vendôme, lined with the world’s finest jewelry shops.
We tried to huddle away from indiscreet ears in a nook in the back of the bar. The large, plush black chairs kept us well apart from each other, two tables separating us from the officials sitting together on the red velvet banquette. Why weren’t they ready to take more definitive steps? Were they simply in the dark about what was going on in Libya? Were the divisions about what to do next simply too big? The first official tried to answer our question, walking a fine line as he described the discussions at the G8 dinner.