by Glen Johnson
President Putin stepped in a vacuum left by the Americans. In September 2014, Russian forces started an air campaign in Syria that effectively propped up President Assad just as opposition forces were making gains on the battlefield.
Similar to his actions in Crimea, President Putin denied he was involving himself in the country’s political debate but said instead he was helping to create the proper climate amid terrorist incursions.
There was legitimate concern in Russia, the United States, and other countries around the world about the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group in eastern Syria, especially as it aired videos of grisly beheadings and destroyed cultural artifacts during its rampage across the Middle East.
But Syria was a longtime client state of Russia, and much like it felt in regards to Sevastopol, the Russian military didn’t want to lose access to an eavesdropping base in Latakia, Syria—its largest outside the homeland—or a small Navy base at Tartus, Syria.381
Russia, Syria, Iran, and Iraq proposed setting up a joint information center in Baghdad to coordinate their anti-ISIS campaign. Russia invited the United States to join, and Lavrov met with Kerry several times as the two sides sought to work out the parameters for cooperating, but the Pentagon repeatedly balked.
Not only did Defense Secretary Ash Carter oppose getting tactical coordination with the Russians, but the intelligence community didn’t trust Russia with information about the location of moderate opposition troops fighting ISIS and the Assad regime.
“I didn’t want the United States to be associated, either politically or morally, with what the Russians were doing,” Carter said in February 2018 during an interview with Politico’s Susan Glasser. “They were intent upon trapping us, or beguiling us into what they called cooperating with them, and I was against cooperation.”382
The two sides continued with their respective air campaigns, the United States eventually eliminating ISIS strongholds and Russia helping Assad effectively beat his opposition.
On December 11, 2017, President Putin made a surprise visit to Syria’s Khmeimim Air Base and ordered a “significant part” of Russia’s military force to begin withdrawing the following week.
“In just over two years, Russia’s armed forces and the Syrian army have defeated the most battle-hardened group of international terrorists,” the president told his troops. “The conditions for a political solution under the auspices of the United Nations have been created.”383
He added: “The Motherland awaits you.”384
Despite that flourish, most of the forces remained, apparently for years to come.
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SECRETARY KERRY WAS ADDRESSING the State Department’s annual Chiefs of Mission Conference on March 15, 2016, when he touched on the dynamic he faced in dealing with Foreign Minister Lavrov.
He noted his counterpart had graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, an elite school where, he said, aspiring Russian diplomats are taught to argue “that red wine is white.”385
He also pointed out the foreign minister lived in the United States from 1994 to 2004 while serving as Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations. That allowed him to not only become fluent in English but skilled in the mechanics of drafting—and defeating—UN resolutions.
The secretary highlighted their work on the Syria chemical weapons agreement as well as the Iran nuclear deal, despite their concurrent disagreement on other topics, such as Ukraine and the Syrian civil war.
Kerry said part of good diplomacy “is seeing the aspirations of the country you are dealing with not through your lens, but theirs.”386
He said in the case of Russians in particular, the facts of a situation may not matter as much as their perception of it.
“Perceptions are what leaders react to when they are making policy,” the secretary told the assembly of ambassadors and chiefs of mission.387
I couldn’t help but remember Secretary Clinton complaining in 2011 about the parliamentary elections being “neither fair nor free,” and President Obama—in the aftermath of the Crimea annexation—labeling Russia a “regional power” that doesn’t “pose the No. 1 national security threat to the United States.”388
By any electoral or economic index, both statements were 100 percent true. But President Putin and his government didn’t take kindly to either perception, especially in light of their perceived disrespect following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Russians had the reputation for responding disproportionately.
All of this fueled their predicate for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election, pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump—however shaky the logic. President Putin may not have thought Trump could win, but there’s no doubt he would relish a Clinton loss.
We arrived on our final trip to Russia and Moscow about four months before the general election, on July 14, 2016.
Secretary Kerry’s first meeting was with President Putin and ended up being delayed two hours. Originally set to begin at 8 p.m., it didn’t start until 10 p.m. and then stretched until 1 a.m. as the two talked about ways to boost military and intelligence cooperation against the Islamic State.389
By 10 a.m. that same day, we were back across town at the Osobnyak Guesthouse, a villa used by the Foreign Ministry. The secretary participated in a bilateral meeting, working lunch, and joint news conference.
State Department Chief of Staff Jon Finer, who attended numerous sessions with the Russians, described the dynamic of these bilateral meetings during an April 2017 interview with National Public Radio:
The challenge with these conversations is always how much time you will spend on your own agenda, on the ideas and plans that you come in to the meeting with to try to get the Russians to buy into, versus how much time you will spend more on your back foot, responding to Russian classical counter-accusations. They have a way of trying to start these meetings with a long litany of grievances, going back sometimes decades in their view of kind of American transgressions in foreign policy. . . . There’s a greatest hits tape that they can run just from memory that includes the Iraq War, the Libya intervention, you know, episodes from the Cold War and many others. . . .
The advice that we tended to give to Secretary Kerry was to not take the bait and rebut every single one of these charges because they often are all rebuttable. But to focus, absorb, and then try to pivot and focus on your own agenda so you can actually try to get something out of these meetings.390
During the lunch that followed, Foreign Minister Lavrov picked at sunflower seeds that were a stand-in for the Parliament cigarettes he usually smoked on the sidelines of his meetings. Our servers poured not one, not two, but three shots of Tzarskaya Gold vodka between courses that included a green pepper stuffed with elk meat and a dessert of strawberry biscuit.
During the conversation, Lavrov welcomed the appointment of the colorful Boris Johnson as the new foreign secretary in the United Kingdom.
“We need some fun in foreign policy,” he said.391
Kerry threw out the idea of Lavrov visiting Cape Cod and Nantucket for an installment of his Hometown Diplomacy series. The foreign minister said he had a scheduling conflict and had already been to the Cape, as well as Kennebunkport, Maine.
The secretary turned serious for a moment, saying the world was looking to the two countries for leadership, especially amid the raging civil war in Syria.
“The local impact of Russia and the United States coming to terms on this could open up new things” he said.392
Kerry noted he’d recently been to Silicon Valley and talked with tech industry representatives about impending changes in commerce.
When the foreign minister noted many of the key players in the Valley were Russians, the secretary said, “Yes, but the world is changing and that is where we should be directing our energy.”
Lavrov replied: “I agree.”393
Alas, it was not to be.
The stalemate over Syria continued thr
ough the remainder of the year—the final of President Obama and Secretary Kerry’s terms—and soon the US government was convulsing with evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The Democratic National Committee was hacked sometime before May 2016, and emails from its top officials were published by DCLeaks and Wikileaks in June 2016 and July 2016. Some included embarrassing evidence the party was working against the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an insurgent who threatened Hillary Clinton, the eventual nominee and President Putin’s onetime foil.
In mid-August 2016, federal officials began hearing about “scanning and probing” of voter databases in some states.394
Wary of being perceived as interfering in an election that Donald Trump was also suggesting would be rigged, the Obama administration withheld public disclosure until October 7, 2016.
On that date, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a joint statement.
“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process,” it read. “Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”395
That same day, however, Wikileaks began publishing another trove of emails, this time from John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The emails included criticism of the former first lady for using a private email server while secretary of State, as well as a twelve-page memo from an aide to her husband, President Clinton. It described how he could use his consulting company to aid the Clinton Global Initiative and direct personal income to the former president.396
It’s unclear what effect the disclosures had on the presidential vote the following month, but the Democrats were stunned when a veteran politician like Clinton lost to a political upstart like Trump.
One could only imagine the reaction in Moscow.
A little over a month later, President Obama responded to the interference by announcing he was ejecting thirty-five suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and sanctioning two of Russia’s leading intelligence services, the GRU and the FSB.
Separately, Secretary Kerry and the State Department said they were closing two waterfront estates—one on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the other on Long Island in New York—the Russians claimed were diplomatic retreats.
The United States contended they were intelligence outposts.397
“These actions follow repeated private and public warnings that we have issued to the Russian government, and are a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm US interests in violation of established international norms of behavior,” President Obama said in a statement.398
President Putin withheld any immediate reaction to the sanctions, a development that came amid allegations that President-elect Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had urged the Russians to defer to the new administration.
Putin unleashed a disproportionate response on July 30, 2017, though.
Three days earlier, Congress had voted near unanimously to pass new sanctions against Russia for the election interference, and a day later, now president Trump said he would sign them into law.399
President Putin replied by announcing the US embassy in Moscow would have to cut its staff by 755 employees, far more than the 35 expelled by President Obama. President Putin said the cut would leave 455 American diplomats in Russia, the same as his country had at its missions in the United States, despite the United States issuing more than twice as many nonimmigrant visas to Russians than the other way around.400
He also said he was seizing two diplomatic compounds used by US embassy employees, a veritable eye-for-an-eye retaliation.
“We waited for quite a long time that, perhaps, something will change for the better, we held out hope that the situation would somehow change,” President Putin told state-run Rossiya 1 television. “But, judging by everything, if it changes, it will not be soon.”401
It was a moment typifying the hair-pulling challenges we’d confronted during our dealings with Russia under Vladimir Putin.
Its leader blamed the United States for punishing a Russian act against the United States.
8
PARIS
AS ELECTION DAY DAWNED over the United States in November 2016, Secretary Kerry was at the outskirts of the country and heading about as far away as possible.
We took off from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu about 8:30 a.m. and set off for Christchurch, New Zealand. Our visit to Hawaii had been a refueling stop before we were to board a military transport Down Under and fly to our final destination: Antarctica.
The secretary of State wasn’t fleeing the country out of political exasperation. Instead, he was heading to the South Pole to see the effects of climate change and global warming.
Antarctica would end up being the seventh and final continent we visited during our four years at the State Department.
That’s not to say there wasn’t an interest in the election outcome as we set off from Andrews Air Force Base while the campaigning finished a day earlier. We also moved up our departure from Hawaii by six hours so we’d cross through a communications dead zone in the South Pacific before the polls closed, which would also get us to our hotel before the winner was announced.
As a longtime US senator and former presidential candidate himself, Kerry was able to get a line on the early exit-poll results shortly after leaving Hawaii. They showed Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump.
But then, as predicted, we flew into an electronic black hole over the South Pacific and were cut off from the outside world for several hours.
I remember the instant our satellite link came back up and the first bits of Internet service began pulsing through our airplane. There wasn’t enough bandwidth to let us load web pages or stream video, but there was enough data to make everyone’s Twitter feed chirp.
As the polls began to close across the country and the vote-counting started, tweet after tweet began telling us Trump was picking off the first of the states Clinton was supposed to win. By the time we got to our hotel in New Zealand, the dominoes were falling more decisively through the must-wins.
Florida. Pennsylvania. Michigan. Wisconsin.
The firewall had crumbled.
One staffer was glued to a New York Times web graphic showing the statistical likelihood of either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump winning the race.
Like a gas gauge heading toward empty, the loss of each state shifted the needle from solidly Clinton to assuredly Trump.
While American television commentators were still wary of calling the race for Trump, Kerry offered his own verdict: “It’s over. I’ve seen this before.”402
Moments later, I read aloud an all-but-official verdict from the Associated Press. The wire service moved a Flash, its highest level of bulletin, declaring Donald Trump had won and was president-elect of the United States of America.
The news hit President Obama’s political appointees on the staff—many of them active Democrats before taking their State Department Hatch Act vows of political celibacy—like a bowling ball leveling a set of pins.
Senior Aide Matt Summers sat on a couch in the secretary’s room, holding his head in his hands. Kerry himself couldn’t believe the outcome and tried to get a handle by calling old political hands back in Washington and Boston.
Yet as stunned and disillusioned as he was, the secretary almost immediately realized the potential impact of the election results on everything he’d worked for—not only in his current job but also as a senator and political activist before that.
One of his biggest concerns was the environment, something he’d made a focus during the culmination of hi
s career in public service. Donald Trump was on the record saying, “I don’t believe in climate change.” He also had labeled it a “hoax.”403
During his victory speech, President-elect Trump tried to gloss over his differences with his rivals, saying, “To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.”404
The secretary scoffed at the remark, responding to the television in his room, “Come together? Why should we? And do away with climate change?”405
His spine stiffened, and before heading to bed, he vowed to create a political movement to support what he believed.
“I’m ready to continue to fight,” Kerry would later tell a New York Times science reporter who accompanied us on the trip. “We’ve made too much progress.”406
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EVEN BEFORE PRESIDENT OBAMA tapped John Kerry to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of State, two of the Massachusetts Democrat’s most loyal and trusted aides drafted an outline of the possible pillars for a tenure at the State Department.
Senate chief of staff David Wade and Heather Higginbottom, a former congressional staffer then working for the Obama administration at the Office of Management and Budget, scribbled a list of major themes. Wade would go on to be State Department chief of staff for the first two years of the secretary’s term, while Higginbottom would have the No. 3 job as deputy secretary of State for management and resources.
They envisioned a focus on traditional diplomacy through both bilateral and multilateral engagement and some management reforms at Foggy Bottom. They also suggested a riskier willingness to tackle “frozen conflicts,” such as the Middle East peace process and lingering territorial disputes in Cyprus and Nagorno-Karabakh.
In addition, a would-be Secretary Kerry would focus on economic development, using the State Department staff and the instruments of diplomacy to advance US business development both domestically and abroad.
But also making the short list was the environment, particularly the perils of global warming and the climate change it had triggered. They felt the secretary of State, with his global portfolio and focus on issues transcending national borders, was uniquely positioned to take up the cause around the world.