Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  When Mike McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford and a Russia expert at the National Security Council, was preparing to move to Moscow as our new Ambassador, I told him that he’d have to find creative ways to get around government obstacles and communicate directly with the Russian people. “Mike, remember these three things,” I said, “be strong, engage beyond the elites, and don’t be afraid to use every technology you can to reach more people.” Mike soon found himself harassed and vilified by the Kremlin-controlled media. I made a point of calling him on an open line one night and, speaking very clearly so all the eavesdropping Russian spies could hear, I told him what a good job he was doing.

  Mike became an avid user of social media, eventually attracting more than seventy thousand followers on Twitter and becoming one of Russia’s ten most influential online voices, based on numbers of mentions by other users and readership. Many Russians knew him primarily as @McFaul, and they were intrigued by his surprising candor and willingness to mix it up with all comers. In between explaining U.S. policies and shining a spotlight on some of the Kremlin’s abuses, Mike posted a steady diet of personal thoughts and photos. Russians got to see the U.S. Ambassador as a human being, enjoying the Bolshoi Ballet, showing visiting relatives around Red Square, and recovering from a broken finger injured in a basketball game. In one official meeting not long after that incident, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev asked about Mike’s hand. When he began to tell the story behind the injury, Medvedev just waved him off. “I know all about it,” he said. “I read about it on the internet.”

  Early in his tenure Mike got into a heated back-and-forth on Twitter with the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who has more than 250,000 followers, chimed in with a tweet of his own: “I see that Russia MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] has launched a twitter-war against US Ambassador @McFaul,” he wrote. “That’s the new world—followers instead of nukes. Better.” I think Mike would be the first to agree.

  * * *

  * * *

  If the hyperconnectivity of the networked world played to America’s strengths and offered opportunities to exercise smart power to advance our interests, it also presented significant new challenges to our security and our values.

  This became painfully apparent in November 2010, when the online organization WikiLeaks and several media outlets around the world began publishing the first of more than 250,000 stolen State Department cables, many of which contained sensitive observations and intelligence from our diplomats in the field.

  A junior military intelligence officer stationed in Iraq, Private Bradley Manning, downloaded the secret cables from a Department of Defense computer and gave them to WikiLeaks and its Australian leader, Julian Assange. Some celebrated Manning and Assange as champions of transparency who were carrying on a noble tradition of exposing government wrongdoing, comparing them to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. I didn’t see it that way. As I said at the time, people of good faith understand the need for sensitive diplomatic communications, to protect both the national interest and the global common interest. Every country, including the United States, must be able to have candid conversations about the people and nations with whom they deal. And the thousands of stolen cables generally showed America’s diplomats doing their jobs well, often in difficult circumstances.

  The cables also provided intriguing color. For instance, one discussed a diplomat’s meeting with a Central Asian Minister who showed up drunk to a meeting, “slouching back in his chair and slurring all kinds of Russian participles,” while another described the scene at a wedding in Dagestan, Russia, where guests threw $100 bills at child dancers as a “microcosm of the social and political relations of the North Caucasus.” Diplomats often provided insight into world leaders, such as one cable on the Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe that noted “his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics).”

  The publication of these reports had the unintended consequence of showing how hard our Foreign Service officers were working, and what keen observers and talented writers many of them were. But some of the unvarnished comments also damaged relationships our diplomats had carefully built over many years. Our diplomats routinely reported on conversations with human rights activists and dissidents, business leaders, even officials of foreign governments who could face persecution and retribution if their names became public.

  In the immediate aftermath of the leaks I condemned the illegal disclosure of classified information. “It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems,” I said. Then I turned to face the diplomatic fallout from aggrieved allies and outraged partners.

  I asked Under Secretary of State for Management Pat Kennedy to set up a task force to analyze the leaks cable by cable and determine exactly what information was compromised and the consequences of those disclosures to our interests, our personnel, and our partners. We rushed to develop a process to identify at-risk sources and, if needed, help them get to safety.

  On the night before Thanksgiving 2010, I started making what would be dozens of calls from my house in Chappaqua. First up was my friend Kevin Rudd, the Australian Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister. We began with a discussion of our usual topics of interest, led by North Korea. “The other point I want to raise is WikiLeaks,” I told him. Our Ambassador to Australia had already briefed Rudd that some of our confidential discussions about the region, including China’s activities, might have been compromised. In response the Australian government had established their own task force to deal with the situation. “It could be a real problem,” he said. “It’s a dreadful fallout,” I agreed. “We deeply regret it and feel blind-sided.” I promised to do all we could to help with the damage control.

  It would be a long Thanksgiving holiday, working the phones and offering apologies. Over the coming days I spoke with many Foreign Ministers, one Prime Minister, and one President. These calls covered other issues as well, but in every conversation I explained the impending release of the secret cables and asked for their understanding. Some were angry and hurt; others saw an opportunity to gain leverage with the United States and tried to exploit it. But most were gracious. “I appreciate that you called yourself,” said German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang was consolatory, saying, “I can’t predict the reaction of the public, but it’s important for both sides to deepen mutual trust. That’s the magic word for the China-U.S. bilateral relationship.” One leader even joked, “You should see what we say about you.”

  The in-person conversations were harder. In the first week of December I attended a summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Astana, Kazakhstan, along with many other world leaders. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister whose antics described in a number of leaked cables were now being ridiculed on the front pages of Italian newspapers, was especially upset. “Why are you saying these things about me?” he asked when we sat down together. “America has no better friend,” he insisted. “You know me, I know your family.” He launched into an impassioned story about how his father used to take him to the graveyards of American soldiers who had sacrificed on behalf of Italy. “I’ve never forgotten it,” he said. Berlusconi was no stranger to bad publicity, as bulging files of scandalous press clippings could attest. But the way he was regarded by his peers, and by the United States in particular, mattered a great deal to him. And this was embarrassing.

  I apologized, yet again. No one wished these words had stayed secret more than I did. Understandably that wasn’t enough to assuage him. He asked me to stand with him in front of the cameras and offer a strong statement about the importance of the U.S.-Italian relationship, which I did. For all of Berlusconi’s foibles, he genuinely loved America. Italy was also a k
ey NATO ally whose support we needed around the world, including in the upcoming military campaign in Libya. So I did everything I could to reestablish a measure of trust and respect.

  Eventually my team and I reached nearly every leader mentioned prominently in a secret cable. Our full-court press seemed to minimize the lasting harm. And in some cases the honesty of our apology may even have added new depth to some relationships. Others were beyond repair.

  In Libya, Ambassador Gene Cretz’s searing reports on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi made him persona non grata in Tripoli. He was even threatened by some of Qaddafi’s thugs, prompting me to recall him to the United States for his own safety. In neighboring Tunisia it was the dictator who had to flee. The publication of secret U.S. reports about the corruption of the regime helped fuel growing popular frustration that eventually blossomed into a revolution that chased Ben Ali from office.

  In the end the diplomatic fallout from WikiLeaks was bad, but not crippling; however, it did foreshadow another, much more serious breach of a far different nature, which occurred after I left office. Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), which is chiefly responsible for monitoring foreign communications, stole a massive batch of highly secret files and passed them to journalists. Snowden fled first to Hong Kong and then to Russia, which granted him asylum. His leaks revealed some of America’s most sensitive classified intelligence programs. There was outrage around the world that the United States allegedly was monitoring the personal cell phone calls of partners such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. There was also concern that terrorists and criminals would change their own communications practices now that they knew more about the sources and methods used by the U.S. intelligence community.

  Most of the attention back home, however, focused on how various NSA data collection programs might affect American citizens. In particular, scrutiny focused on the bulk collection of telephone records, not the content of the conversations or the identities of callers but a database of phone numbers, and the time and duration of calls, that could be examined if there was a reasonable suspicion that a particular number was associated with terrorism. President Obama has since called on Congress to implement a number of reforms so the government will no longer keep such data.

  While continuing to defend the need for foreign surveillance and intelligence operations, the President welcomed a public debate about how to balance security, liberty, and privacy a dozen years after 9/11. It’s hard to imagine similar conversations taking place in Russia or China. Ironically, just a few weeks before the Snowden story hit, the President had given a major speech about national security policy in which he said, “With a decade of experience now to draw from, this is the moment to ask ourselves hard questions—about the nature of today’s threats and how we should confront them. . . . The choices we make about war can impact—in sometimes unintended ways—the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends.”

  Living in the public eye for so many years has given me a deep appreciation of privacy and the need to protect it. And although the technologies at issue are new, the challenge of balancing liberty and security is not. Way back in 1755 Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” With liberty and security, it’s not that the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. In fact I believe they make each other possible. Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to safeguard our freedoms, but not so much (or so little) as to endanger them.

  As Secretary of State I focused on protecting privacy, security, and liberty on the internet. In January 2010 Google announced that it had discovered Chinese authorities trying to break into the Gmail accounts of dissidents. The company said it would respond by rerouting Chinese traffic to its Hong Kong servers outside the “Great Firewall.” The government in Beijing reacted with anger. Suddenly we were in the middle of a whole new kind of international incident.

  For some time I had been working on a speech staking out America’s commitment to internet freedom; now it seemed more important than ever to sound the alarm about online repression. On January 21, 2010, I went to the Newseum, a high-tech Washington museum on the history and future of journalism, and made the case for the “freedom to connect.” I argued that the same rights we cherished in our homes and public squares—to assemble, to speak, to innovate, to advocate—existed online. For Americans, this idea was rooted in the First Amendment, whose words were carved in fifty tons of Tennessee marble on the front of the Newseum. But the freedom to connect was not just an American value. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights confirms that all people everywhere have the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

  I wanted to put nations like China, Russia, and Iran on notice that the United States would promote and defend an internet where people’s rights are protected and that is open to innovation, interoperable all over the world, secure enough to hold people’s trust, and reliable enough to support their work. We would oppose attempts to restrict access or to rewrite the international rules governing the structure of the internet, and would support activists and innovators trying to subvert repressive firewalls. Some of these countries wanted to replace the multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance established in the 1990s, which brings together governments, the private sector, foundations, and citizens, and supports the free flow of information within a single global network, and instead centralize control in the hands of governments alone. They wanted each government to be able to make its own rules, creating national barriers in cyberspace. This approach would be disastrous for internet freedom and commerce. I directed our diplomats to push back against these attempts in every forum, no matter how small.

  The speech caused a stir, especially online. Human Rights Watch called it “groundbreaking.” I certainly hoped that we had begun a conversation that would change how people thought about freedom on the internet. Most of all, I wanted to make sure that the United States was leading the way on the frontiers of human rights in the 21st century, just as we had in the 20th.

  25

  * * *

  * * *

  Human Rights: Unfinished Business

  When I was growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois, I attended Sunday school at our Methodist church every week. My parents were both people of faith, but they expressed it in different ways, and I sometimes struggled to reconcile my father’s insistence on self-reliance and my mother’s concerns about social justice. In 1961 a dynamic new youth minister named Don Jones arrived at our church, and he helped me better understand the role I wanted faith to play in my own life. He taught me to embrace “faith in action” and to open my eyes to injustice in the wider world beyond my sheltered middle-class community. He gave me lots of books to read, and took our youth group to visit black and Hispanic churches in Chicago’s inner city. We found a lot in common with the girls and boys in those church basements, despite our very different life experiences. It was in those discussions that I first became interested in learning more about the Civil Rights Movement. For me and my classmates, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King were names we occasionally saw in a newspaper headline or overheard while our parents watched the nightly news. For many of the kids I met through those church trips, however, they were sources of hope and inspiration.

  One day Don announced that he wanted to take us to hear Dr. King speak in Chicago. It wasn’t hard to persuade my parents to give me permission to go, but some of my friends’ parents thought Dr. King was a “rabble-rouser” and wouldn’t let their kids attend. I was excited but unsure of what to expect. When we got to Orchestra Hall and Dr. King began to speak, I was transfixed. The speech was entitled “Remaining Awake through a Revolution,” and he challenged all of us that evening to stay en
gaged in the cause of justice and not to slumber while the world changed around us.

  Afterward I stood in a long line to shake Dr. King’s hand. His grace and piercing moral clarity left a lasting impression on me. I was raised with a deep reverence for the virtues of American democracy. In the view of my rock-ribbed anti-Communist, Republican father, the fact that we had the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Soviets didn’t was a defining feature of the ideological struggle of the Cold War. The promises that our founding documents made about freedom and equality were supposed to be sacrosanct. Now I was realizing that many Americans were still denied the rights I took for granted. This lesson and the power of Dr. King’s words lit a fire in my heart, fueled by the social justice teachings of my church. I understood as I never had before the mission to express God’s love through good works and social action.

  I was equally inspired by my early encounters with Marian Wright Edelman. A 1963 graduate of Yale Law School, she was the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar and worked as a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP in Jackson. When I heard Marian speak during my first semester at Yale, she opened a door for me to a life dedicated to legal, social, and political advocacy for human rights, especially for women and children.