Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Ronan Farrow, 2018

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Ronan Farrow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007575626

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780007575640

Version: 2018-04-18

Dedication

For Mom.

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE: MAHOGANY ROW MASSACRE

PART I: THE LAST DIPLOMATS

1 AMERICAN MYTHS

2 LADY TALIBAN

3 DICK

4 THE MANGO CASE

5 THE OTHER HAQQANI NETWORK

6 DUPLICITY

7 THE FRAT HOUSE

8 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

9 WALKING ON GLASS

10 FARMER HOLBROOKE

11 A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION

12 A-ROD

13 PROMISE ME YOU’LL END THE WAR

14 THE WHEELS COME OFF THE BUS

15 THE MEMO

16 THE REAL THING

PART II: SHOOT FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS NEVER

17 GENERAL RULE

18 DOSTUM: HE IS TELLING THE TRUTH AND DISCOURAGING ALL LIES

19 WHITE BEAST

20 THE SHORTEST SPRING

21 MIDNIGHT AT THE RANCH

PART III: PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION

22 THE STATE OF THE SECRETARY

23 THE MOSQUITO AND THE SWORD

24 MELTDOWN

EPILOGUE: THE TOOL OF FIRST RESORT

PICTURE SECTION

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE
MAHOGANY ROW MASSACRE

AMMAN, JORDAN, 2017

[A]ppoint an ambassador who is versed in all sciences, who understands hints, expressions of the face and gestures … The army depends on the official placed in charge of it … peace and its opposite, war, on the ambassador. For the ambassador alone makes and separates allies; the ambassador transacts that business by which kings are disunited or not.

—THE MANUSMRITI, HINDU SCRIPTURE, CA. 1000 BCE

THE DIPLOMAT HAD NO CLUE that his career was over. Before stepping into the secure section of the American embassy, he’d slipped his phone into one of the cubbies on the wall outside, according to protocol. The diplomat had been following protocol for thirty-five years, as walls crumbled and empires fell, as the world grew smaller and cables became teleconferences and the expansive language of diplomacy reduced to the gnomic and officious patter of email. He had missed a few calls and the first email that came in was terse. The director general of the Foreign Service had been trying to reach him. They needed to speak immediately.

The diplomat’s name was Thomas Countryman, which seems like it must be made up, but is not. He was sitting at a borrowed desk in the political section at the heart of the low, sprawling embassy complex in Jordan’s posh Abdoun neighborhood. The embassy was an American contractor’s studied homage to the Middle East: sand-colored stone, with a red diamond-shaped motif on the shatterproof windows that said, “local, but not too local.” Like most American embassies in this part of the world, there was no avoiding the sense that it was a fortress. “We’d build a moat if we could,” a Foreign Service officer stationed there once muttered to me as our armored SUV made its way through the facility’s concrete and steel barriers, past armored personnel carriers full of uniformed soldiers.

It was January 25, 2017. Countryman was America’s senior official on arms control, a mission that was, quite literally, a matter of life and death. He oversaw the State Department’s work on the fragile nuclear deal with Iran, and its response to apocalyptic threats from the regime in North Korea. His trip that January was a moonshot: the latest in decades of negotiations over nuclear disarmament in the Middle East. Nuclear-free zones had been established around the world, from Latin America to parts of Africa and Europe. No one thought Israel was going to suddenly surrender its nukes. But incremental steps—like getting states in the region to ratify treaties they had already signed banning nuclear tests, if not the weapons themselves—might someday be achievable. Even that was “a fairly quixotic quest, because the Arabs and the Israelis have radically different views.” Tom Countryman had a flair for understatement.

The work this mission entailed was classic, old-school diplomacy, which is to say it was frustrating and involved a lot of jet lag. Years of careful cajoling and mediating had brought the Middle Eastern states closer than ever to at least assenting to a conference. There was dialogue in the hopes of future dialogue, which is easier to mock than to achieve. That evening, Countryman and his British and Russian counterparts would meet officials from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to press the importance of nonproliferation diplomacy. The next day, he’d go on to Rome for a meeting with his counterparts from around the world. “It was an important meeting,” he told me later, “if not a decisive one.” He punctuated this with a hollow little laugh, which is not so much an indictment of the comedic qualities of Tom Countryman as it is an indictment of the comedic qualities of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

Countryman had landed in Amman the previous day and checked into the InterContinental. Then he went straight to a meeting with his Arab League counterpart over coffee and cigarettes. Countryman took the coffee mazboot, or black with sugar, in the local fashion. For the cigarettes, he favored Marlboro Lights, as often as possible. (A life of travel and negotiation hadn’t been conducive to quitting. “I’m trying,” he said later, before vaping unhappily.)

The next day, it was over to dinner with British and Russian officials. Not all of Countryman’s counterparts had his years of experience and relationships. The British point person had changed several times in the preceding years. His Russian counterpart had sent a deputy. That would make it harder. In high-wire acts of persuasion, every ounce of diplomatic experience in the room counted.

Diplomats perform many essential functions—spiriting Americans out of crises, holding together developing economies, hammering out deals between governments. This last mandate can sometimes give the job the feel of Thanksgiving dinner with your most difficult relatives, only lasting a lifetime and taking place in the most dangerous locations on earth. A diplomat’s weapon is persuasion, deployed on conversational fronts at the margins of international summits, in dimly lit hotel bars, or as bombs fall in war zones.

Tom Countryman had, since joining the Foreign Service in 1982, weathered all of these vagaries of diplomacy. He had served in the former Yugoslavia and in Cairo during Desert Storm. He had emerged unscathed from travels through Afghanistan and the bureaucracy of the United Nations. He’d picked up Serbian and Croatian, as well as Arabic, Italian, and Greek along the way. Even his English carried a puzzling accent from all of those places, or maybe none of them at all. Tom Countryman had a flat, uninflected voice and an odd way with vowels that made him sound like a text-to-speech application or a Bond villain. An internet troll excoriating him as “one of those faceless bureaucrats in the State Department” called it “a strange bureaucratic accent I guess you obtain by not being around real people your whole working career,” which encapsulates another facet of being a diplomat: they work in the places the military works, but they’re not exactly welcomed home with ticker-tape parades.

But this particular troll was wrong: Tom Countryman was not faceless. He had a face, and not one you’d lose in a crowd. A slight man with a flinty, searching gaze, he often wore his salt-and-pepper hair clipped short in the front and long behind, tumbling gloriously over his neat suits. It was a diplomat’s mullet: peace in the front, war in the back. (“Sick mane,” one conservative outlet crowed. “King of the party.”) He had a reputation for frank, unbureaucratic answers in public statements and Senate hearings. But he never strayed from his devotion to the State Department and his belief that its work protected the United States. In a work of fiction, naming him Countryman would have been annoying as hell.

SITTING UNDER THE FLUORESCENT LIGHTS of the political section that day in Jordan, Countryman looked at the email for a moment and then sent back the number of his desk. The director general of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Arnold Chacon, called back quickly. “This is not happy news,” Chacon began, as Countryman recalled the conversation. The White House, Chacon said, had just accepted Countryman’s resignation, effective as of the end of the week. Chacon was sorry. “I wasn’t expecting that it was about me,” Countryman remembered between puffs at his e-cigarette. “I didn’t have any idea.” But there he was, a few hours before a critical confrontation with foreign governments, getting shit-canned.

When there’s a changing of the guard in Washington, Senate-confirmed officials submit brief, one- or two-sentence notes tendering their resignations. It’s a formality, a tradition. It is almost universally assumed that nonpartisan career officers like Tom Countryman will remain in place. This is a practical matter. Career Foreign Service officers are the foundation of the American government abroad, an imperfect structure that came to replace the incompetence and corruption of the spoils system. Only career officials have the decades of institutional knowledge required to keep the nation’s agencies running, and while every administration takes issue with the intransigence and unaccountability of these “lifers,” no one could remember any administration dismissing them in significant numbers.

The president doesn’t technically have the power to fire career Foreign Service officers, just to remove them from their jobs. But there’s an “up or out” rule: if you’re not in a presidentially appointed job after a certain number of years at a senior level—Countryman’s level—you have to retire. Being relieved of this job was the end of his career; it was just a question of how long he wanted to draw it out. He opted for a quick end. It was Wednesday. When the resignation took effect on Friday, he’d leave.

They decided he’d attend the meeting with the Arabs that night. “What about the Rome meeting?” Countryman asked. It was one of the rare opportunities for the United States to press its nonproliferation agenda with world powers. “It’s important.” Chacon agreed, but the forty-eight hours Countryman had been given wouldn’t be enough for that. A less-senior officer would have to suffice in his place. “Okay, thanks for informing me,” Countryman said simply. “I’ll be coming back home.” For a man with a mullet, Tom Countryman was resistant to spectacle.

Others were less sanguine. His wife Dubravka had met him during his first tour in the former Yugoslavia and they’d had a thirty-year Foreign Service romance. She had a degree in education and talent as a painter, but she’d set aside her ambitions to move around the world every few years with him, helping to make ends meet as an interpreter while raising their two sons. Her father had been a diplomat, so she knew the sacrifices of the job—but she also understood the general expectation of respect for senior diplomats, in her native Yugoslavia and in the United States. This was something else. “It’s not fair,” she said when Countryman called her, minutes after he got the news, “and it’s not fair to me.”

She was shocked. The less-senior officer replacing him in Rome—being sent to navigate one of the world’s most treacherous multilateral issues from a position of scant authority—was shocked. The Italians were shocked. The Arabs, that night, were shocked. Countryman waited until the end of the session, after the Arabs had related the grievances (and the Arabs had a lot of grievances) they wanted addressed before they’d sit down with the Israelis. Then he told them he’d relate the results of their conversation to a successor, because this was his final meeting as an American diplomat. One by one, they took his hands in theirs and exchanged words of respect—for him, and for a shared tradition that seemed, suddenly, to face an uncertain future.

IT WAS JUST FIVE DAYS into the new Trump administration, and rumor and paranoia gripped America’s diplomats. On the campaign trail, Trump had offered little by way of specifics about diplomacy. “America First,” went the campaign mantra. He wanted to “stop sending foreign aid to countries that hate us,” though it was, at the time, unclear whether this meant development aid or military assistance or both. (“Nobody can do that better than me,” he added helpfully.)

Tom Countryman was one of many senior officials who emerged from their first meetings with the Trump transition team alarmed. “The transition was a joke,” he remembered. “Any other administration changeover, there were people who were knowledgeable about foreign affairs, there were people who had experience in government, and they had a systematic effort to collect information and feed it to a new team. In this case, none of those things were true.” He presented the transition team with detailed briefing papers on nonproliferation issues, marked “sensitive but unclassified,” since few members of the team had security clearances. But they showed little interest in nuclear weapons. What they did show was a “deep distrust for professional public servants,” Countryman said. They hadn’t come to learn, he realized with a sinking feeling. They’d come to cut.

Then the firings began. Typically, even politically appointed ambassadors in important places, especially ones without overly partisan reputations, stay on until a replacement is confirmed, sometimes for months. The Trump administration broke from that tradition: shortly after taking office, the new administration ordered all politically appointed ambassadors to depart immediately, faster than usual. Pack your bags, hit the road.

After that, the transition team asked State Department management to draw up a list of all noncareer officers across the Department. Countryman began to fear that the next target would be the contractors hired under an authority specifically designed to bring subject matter experts into American diplomacy. The Department was full of these. They played pivotal roles in offices overseeing the most sensitive areas of American foreign policy, including in Tom Countryman’s. “These were the best possible experts on issues like Korea and Pakistan,” he remembered. “And in the arms-control bureau there were a number of them that were not easily replaceable.” They were “necessary.” The United States couldn’t afford to lose them. But “the concern that they were going to dump everyone they could dump was palpable.” And so he’d spent the weeks leading up to that day in Jordan quietly lobbying State Department management, helping them devise arguments against what he feared might be a wave of firings of the Department’s experts.

In fact, that’s what he’d assumed the call was about. What was unthinkable, ahistorical, seemingly senseless, was that it would in fact be about career officials like him. Countryman insisted it was no great sob story for him personally. He had been around a long time. He had his pension. But it was a troubling affront to institutional culture. Tom Countryman had an unimpeachable record of service across Republican and Democratic administrations. He’d had a few contentious moments in Senate hearings, but they’d earned him more respect than ire. Senators “would come up to me after and say, ‘I really like the way you shoot straight,’” he recalled. Perhaps, he speculated, the administration was trying to send a message that the United States was no longer interested in arms control. Or maybe they’d gotten into his private Facebook account where, during the campaign, he’d posted criticism of Trump to a small circle of friends. “To this day, I don’t know why I was singled out.”

IN FACT, TOM COUNTRYMAN had not been singled out. The White House, Chacon told him, was relieving six career diplomats of their jobs that day. Some were more explicable than Countryman. Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, who served around the world for more than forty years, had been involved with both the secretary of state’s email accounts and diplomatic security, and had spent the preceding year swept up in the torrent of campaign coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email server and the controversy surrounding Benghazi. David Malcolm Robinson had been assistant secretary of state for conflict and stabilization operations, a bureau with an amorphous portfolio that conservative critics said amounted to that deadliest of terms in Washington: “nation building.” But three others—assistant secretaries who worked under Kennedy and had nothing, as far as anyone could tell, to do with Benghazi, had also gotten the axe. “That was just petty,” said Countryman. “Vindictive.”

It was just the beginning. A few weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Erin Clancy’s phone rang—the personal one she kept in a beat-up blue wooden case. She had just landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County and was standing in the February California sunlight, in her jeans and T-shirt, waiting for a rental car. “Hold on the line,” said the scheduler. “We’re having an emergency team meeting.” The team was the deputy secretary of state’s, where Clancy, a career Foreign Service officer, was posted. She sat within spitting distance of the secretary of state on the seventh floor: through the secure crash door, past where the sagging drop ceilings and linoleum floors end and the opulent wood-paneled receiving rooms begin, in the legendary corridor of power known as Mahogany Row. Jobs on Mahogany Row were elite postings, held by the best of the Foreign Service; the Ferraris of State Department personnel, but more reliable.

Clancy held on the line. Her partner, a State Department alum, gave her a searching look. Erin shrugged: beats me. The fired officials so far had at least been in Senate-confirmed roles. Her team consisted entirely of working-level officers, and the most elite and protected of them at that. They’d assumed they were safe.

In the weeks since Tom Countryman and the other senior officials cleared out their desks, the Department had been dead quiet. By this time in most administrations, the deputy secretary’s office would be humming with activity, helping a new secretary of state jumpstart his or her agenda. In this case, the new administration had yet to even nominate a deputy secretary of state and wouldn’t for months to come. When the last deputy, Tony Blinken, was in the job, Clancy and the rest of her team had arrived at 7 a.m. and worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days. Now they sat with little to do, taking long coffee breaks at 9 a.m. each day, waiting for orders that never came. “No one’s asking us for anything, we’re totally cut off, we’re not invited to meetings, we had to fight for every White House meeting,” she remembered. “Our morning meetings were, ‘well, have you heard this rumor?’ That was no way to formulate US foreign policy.” Eventually, the acting deputy, Tom Shannon, told them they might as well take a break. So Clancy had caught a flight out of DC that morning, to see her mother.

When Yuri Kim, the deputy secretary’s chief of staff and a fellow Foreign Service officer, came on the line, her voice was solemn. “Great,” she began, in a tone that suggested this would not, in fact, be great. “Thanks everyone for your time. We just found out that we’re all being asked to move on.” The entire deputy secretary’s staff was assembled: five in the room back on Mahogany Row, two on the phone. Everyone spoke at once. “How?” they asked. “Why?” They should go to their union, one suggested. They should go to the press, offered another. “Your assignments are broken,” Clancy remembered being told. “Who knows if you have your next job, maybe you don’t. It’s utter chaos. And it’s out of the blue. No reason.”

Kim, usually a fierce advocate for her team, became mechanical. They had forty-eight hours. There would be a meeting with the office of human resources the next day to walk them through next steps. They should use the little time they had left to start making preparations.

When the call was over, Clancy hung up and turned to her partner, dumbfounded. “We’re all being fired.”

Like a lot of young diplomats, Erin Clancy had joined the Foreign Service after 9/11. She wanted to make the world safer. She moved to the Middle East for six years. She’d been in Damascus when the American embassy there was overrun by protesters. She’d narrowly avoided kidnapping. She’d worked long hours with low pay. As with Countryman, the Foreign Service officers on her team couldn’t be fired altogether. But they could be removed from their jobs. This wasn’t just a career setback. For many, it was the difference between making ends meet and not. Foreign Service officers don’t earn overtime. Instead, assignments with backbreaking hours get a pay differential, a bonus of 18 percent for the deputy secretary’s team. No one goes into this career expecting riches. Including the differential, Clancy was making $91,000 a year. But they bid on these jobs knowing they were guaranteed for a year. Many had planned their family’s lives around that income. The dismissals felt wanton and without regard for their service.

Offices across the seventh floor of the State Department were having identical emergency meetings that day. The deputy for management’s staff learned their recently departed boss would not be replaced. They too, would be let go. The same went for the office of the State Department counselor, a role some secretaries of state have maintained, and others not. According to several people present that day, Margaret Peterlin, chief of staff to incoming secretary of state Rex Tillerson, sat down in counselor Kristie Kenney’s office for their first one-on-one meeting that Valentine’s Day. Peterlin’s first question to Kenney, a veteran ambassador and one of the most senior women in the Foreign Service: How soon could she leave?

By some back-of-the-napkin calculations from insiders, the jobs of more than half of the career staff on Mahogany Row were threatened that day. At the eleventh hour, Erin Clancy and the deputy’s team got a reprieve: Acting Deputy Secretary Tom Shannon had put his foot down. They’d live to see another day. But the other teams moved on.

When I met up with Clancy, she was in her T-shirt and jeans again, sitting in the sun outside a Los Angeles café. She still had her job, but she was back home, regrouping, thinking about next steps. Maybe she should run for office, she mused—it might be a better way to make a difference at this point. Eventually, she decided to stay, going on to a posting at the United States Mission to the United Nations. She, like many still working at the State Department, wasn’t giving up. But her confidence in her profession had been shaken. “The culture of the State Department is so eroded,” she remarked. It was an institution more than a dozen career diplomats told me they barely recognized, one in which their expertise had been profoundly devalued. Squinting into the afternoon sun, Erin Clancy paused. “We are truly seen as outsiders,” she said.

Members of Rex Tillerson’s team were adamant that they hadn’t been aware of the firings, which, in some cases, took place after the Trump transition team had begun to interface with the Department, but before Tillerson was confirmed. (Other dismissals or attempted dismissals, like Clancy’s, took place after Tillerson’s confirmation.) In the first days of 2018, when I asked Tillerson about Countryman and the wave of forced retirements, the secretary of state stared at me, unblinking, then said: “I’m not familiar with that one.” A little over a month later, Tillerson was gone too: another casualty of a fickle president and a State Department in disarray.

IN SOME WAYS, the world had changed and left professional diplomats like Countryman and Clancy behind. A strain of populism that, from America’s earliest days, opposed and denigrated internationalism, was on the rise across the Western world. The foreign policy establishment that underpinned diplomatic acts of creation from NATO to the World Bank after World War II had long since disintegrated into vicious partisanship. Technology had made the work of the diplomat less meaningful and special. For the basic function of delivering messages in foreign lands, email was more efficient than any ambassador. The prestige and power of the Foreign Service were in decline.

Some of the skepticism of American diplomacy was earned. The State Department was often slow, ponderous, and turfy. Its structures and training were outdated in the face of modern tests of American influence from cyberterrorism to radical Islam. Eyes in many a White House have rolled when the subject of “State’s objections” has been raised. But for a complex set of new challenges—penetrating cultural barriers in a fraught relationship with China; pulling North Korea back from threats of nuclear war; containing a modern Iran pursuing regional hegemony—specialized experts trained in the art of hard-nosed negotiation remain indispensable. Evolving technology and a rising military offer no substitute. In these crises, sidelining diplomacy is not an inevitability of global change: it is a choice, made again and again by administrations Democratic and Republican.

“Unprecedented,” blared Foreign Policy and a host of other publications on what was being described as the Trump administration’s “assault” or “war” on the State Department. But for all the ways in which the developments were shocking, to describe them as unprecedented was simply not true. The Trump administration brought to a new extreme a trend that had, in fact, been gathering force since September 11, 2001. From Mogadishu to Damascus to Islamabad, the United States cast civilian dialogue to the side, replacing the tools of diplomacy with direct, tactical deals between our military and foreign forces. At home, White Houses filled with generals. The last of the diplomats, keepers of a fading discipline that has saved American lives and created structures that stabilized the world, often never made it into the room. Around the world, uniformed officers increasingly handled the negotiation, economic reconstruction, and infrastructure development for which we once had a devoted body of trained specialists. As a result, a different set of relationships has come to form the bedrock of American foreign policy. Where civilians are not empowered to negotiate, military-to-military dealings still flourish. America has changed whom it brings to the table, and, by extension, it has changed who sits at the other side. Foreign ministries are still there. But foreign militaries and militias often have the better seats.

These relationships are not new, nor are they inherently a negative. “America’s military might, used judiciously and with strategic precision, is a critical tool of diplomacy,” James Baker, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, said, embodying a more hawkish strain of foreign policy. “I’ve always said ‘diplomacy works best when it comes in a mailed fist.’” The question is of balance. In many of America’s engagements around the world, those military alliances have now eclipsed the kind of civilian diplomacy that once counterbalanced them, with disastrous results.

These trends have been apparent since 2001, but their roots stretch even further back. By the time terrorists toppled the Twin Towers, the stage had been set for this crisis of modern diplomacy for at least a decade. Bill Clinton ran on the promise of domestic reinvestment—it was, as Clinton’s strategist James Carville noted in a statement that became the indelible brand of their campaign, “the economy, stupid,”—and quickly set about slashing America’s civilian presence around the world. When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 and Jesse Helms—he of the jowls and the racism and the fevered isolationism—became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nosedive accelerated. Clinton’s first secretary of state, the late Warren Christopher, championed what he called a “tough budget for tough times.” Christopher’s successor, Madeleine Albright, defended Clinton’s personal commitment to international engagement, but conceded that, in the wake of the Cold War, “there really was a sense that we needed to pay attention to domestic issues.”

Over the course of the 1990s, the United States’ international affairs budget tumbled by 30 percent, on a par with the cuts requested years later by the Trump administration. Here’s what happened then: the State Department pulled the plug on twenty-six consulates and fifty missions of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The timing could hardly have been worse. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the United States needed a slew of new outposts to stabilize the region and gain footholds of American influence in spaces vacated by the Soviets. While some were indeed created, by the mid-1990s, the United States had fewer embassies and consulates than it did at the height of the Cold War. Even remaining outposts felt the shift—Christopher sheepishly told a congressional committee that the embassy in Beijing reeked of sewer gas, while in Sarajevo, diplomats desperate to receive news had to jerry-rig a satellite dish to the roof using a barbecue grill.

In 1999, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United States Information Agency were both shuttered and their respective mandates folded into a shrinking and overstretched State Department. The Cold War was over, the logic went. When would the United States possibly need to worry about rising nuclear powers, or information warfare against an ideological enemy’s insidious propaganda machine? Two decades later, Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear aspirations and the Islamic State’s global recruitment are among the United States’ most pressing international challenges. But by then, the specialized, trained workforces devoted to those challenges had been wiped out. Thomas Friedman raced to the scene with a visual metaphor, lamenting that the United States was “turning its back on the past and the future of U.S. foreign policy for the sake of the present.” (The point was certainly valid, though one wondered where the nation’s back was now facing. Maybe we were spinning? Let’s say we were spinning.)

So it was that on September 11, 2001, the State Department was 20 percent short of staff, and those who remained were undertrained and under-resourced. The United States needed diplomacy more than ever, and it was nowhere to be found.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SCRAMBLED to reinvest. “We resourced the Department like never before,” then–secretary of state Colin Powell recalled. But it was growth born of a new, militarized form of foreign policy. Funding that made it to State was increasingly drawn from “Overseas Contingency Operations”—earmarked specifically for advancing the Global War on Terrorism. Promoting democracy, supporting economic development, helping migrants—all of these missions were repackaged under a new counterterrorism mantle. “Soft” categories of the State Department’s budget—that is, anything not directly related to the immediate goals of combatting terrorism—flatlined, in many cases permanently. Defense spending, on the other hand, skyrocketed to historic extremes, far outpacing the modest growth at State. “The State Department has ceded a lot of authority to the Defense Department since 2001,” Albright reflected.

Diplomats slipped to the periphery of the policy process. Especially during the early days of the Iraq War, Bush concentrated power at the White House; specifically, under Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney built a close rapport with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but had little time for Powell. “The VP had very, very strong views and he communicated them directly to the president,” recalled Powell. The Bush White House had “two NSCs during that period. One led by Condi [Rice, then the national security advisor] and one led by the VP. Anything going to the president after it left the NSC went to the VP’s NSC and the problem I’d have from time to time is that … access is everything in politics and he was over there all the time.” It was a challenge former secretaries of state invariably recalled facing, to one extent or another. “There is the interesting psychological fact that the secretary of state’s office is ten minutes’ car ride from the White House and the security advisor is right down the hall,” said Henry Kissinger, recalling his time in both roles under presidents Nixon and Ford. “The temptations of propinquity are very great.”

During the Bush administration, those dynamics cut the State Department out of even explicitly diplomatic decisions. Powell learned of Bush’s plan to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change only after it had been decided, and pleaded with Rice for more time to warn America’s allies of the radical move. He raced to the White House to press the case. Rice informed him that it was too late.

But State’s exclusion was most profound in the Global War on Terrorism, which an ascendant Pentagon seized as its exclusive domain. That the invasion of Iraq and the period immediately after were dominated by the Pentagon was inevitable. But, later, Bush handed over reconstruction and democracy-building activities, which had historically been the domain of the State Department and USAID, to uniformed officers with the Coalition Provisional Authority, reporting to the secretary of defense. Powell and his officials at State counseled caution, but were unable to penetrate the policymaking process, which had become entirely preoccupied with tactics—in Powell’s view, at the expense of strategy. “Mr. Rumsfeld felt that he had a strategy that did not reflect Powell thinking,” he recalled. “And he could do it on the low end and on small. My concern was probably, yeah, he beat the crap out of this army ten years ago, I have no doubt about them getting to Baghdad, but we didn’t take over the country to run a country.” Powell never used the phrase “the Pottery Barn rule,” as a journalist later dubbed his thinking, but he did tell the president, “If you break it, you own it.” It was, he later told me with a heavy sigh, “a massive strategic failure both politically and militarily.”

More specifically, it was a string of successive strategic failures. The Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi security forces, turning loose hundreds of thousands of armed and unemployed Iraqi young men and laying the foundations for a deadly insurgency. Taxpayer dollars from the massive $4-billion Commander’s Emergency Response Program, which essentially gave military brass the authority to undertake USAID-style development projects, was later found to be flowing directly to those insurgents. The State Department’s legal adviser is typically consulted on questions of law regarding the treatment of enemy combatants, but Powell’s Department was not involved in conversations about the administration’s expanding use of military commissions—aspects of which were later found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

As the disasters of Iraq deepened, a bruised Bush administration did attempt to shift additional resources into diplomacy and development. The White House pledged to double the size of USAID’s Foreign Service, and began to speak of rebalancing civilian and military roles and empowering the US ambassador in Iraq. The supposed rebalancing was more pantomime than meaningful policy—there was no redressing the yawning chasm of resources and influence between military and civilian leadership in the war—but there was, at least, an understanding that military policymaking had proved toxic.

THE LESSON DIDN’T STICK. In a haze of nostalgia, liberal commentators sometimes frame Barack Obama as a champion of diplomacy, worlds apart from the pugnacious Trump era. They remember him in a packed auditorium at Cairo University offering dialogue and calm to the Muslim world. “Events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible,” he said in that speech. And the Obama administration would, especially in its second term, yield several examples of the effectiveness of empowering diplomats, with the Iran deal, the Paris climate change accord, and a thaw in relations with Cuba. But it also, especially in its first term, accelerated several of the same trends that have conspired to ravage America’s diplomatic capacity during the Trump administration.

Obama, to a lesser extent than Trump but a greater extent than many before him, surrounded himself with retired generals or other military officers in senior positions. That included National Security Advisor General Jim Jones, General Douglas Lute as Jones’s deputy for Afghanistan, General David Petraeus as head of the CIA, and Admiral Dennis Blair and General James Clapper as successive directors of national intelligence. Growth in the State Department budget continued to flow from Overseas Contingency Operation funds, directed explicitly toward military goals. Defense spending continued its rise. The trend was not linear: sequestration—the automatic spending cuts of 2013—ravaged both the Pentagon and the State Department. But the imbalance between defense and diplomatic spending continued to grow. “The Defense Department budget is always very much larger, and for good reason, I mean I agree with that, but the ratio between the two keeps getting worse and worse,” Madeleine Albright said.

Over the course of his presidency, Barack Obama approved more than double the dollar value of arms deals with foreign regimes than George W. Bush had before him. In fact, the Obama administration sold more arms than any other since World War II. When I pressed Hillary Clinton on those facts, she seemed taken aback. “I’m not saying it was perfect,” she told me. “As you made out, there were decisions that had increased military commitments associated with them.” In the end, however, she felt the Obama administration had gotten “more right than wrong,” when it came to the militarization of foreign policy. She cited, as an example, the emphasis on diplomacy that accompanied the Afghanistan review in which she participated. But that review was held up, by both State Department and White House officials, as a deep source of regret and an acute example of the exclusion of civilians from meaningful foreign policymaking. In secret memoranda sent directly to Clinton as that process unfolded and made public in these pages, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, ostensibly the president’s representative on Afghanistan, decried a process overtaken by, in his words, “pure mil-think.”

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION also doubled down on the kind of White House power grabs that had frustrated Powell during the Bush administration. From Obama’s first days in office, Jones, the national security advisor, pledged to expand the National Security Council’s reach. What was disparagingly referred to as “back-channel” communication between the president and cabinet members like the secretary of state would be constrained. Jones’s successors, Tom Donilon and Susan Rice, each ratcheted up the level of control, according to senior officials.

Samantha Power, who served as director for multilateral affairs and, later, in Obama’s cabinet as US ambassador to the United Nations, conceded that there were “some fair critiques” of the administration’s tendency to micromanage. “It was often the case,” she recalled, that policies made at anything but the highest tiers of the White House’s hierarchy, “didn’t have the force of law, or a force of direction. People weren’t confident it wouldn’t get changed once it went up the White House chain.” We were holed up in a shadowy, exposed-brick corner of Grendel’s Den, a bar near Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she was a professor. Power, the one-time bleeding-heart war reporter and professor of human rights law, had won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on America’s failure to confront genocide around the world. She had long been a favorite subject of awed, inadvertently sexist journalistic paeans, which often began in the same way. Power “strode across the packed room and took a seat, her long sweep of red hair settling around her like a protective shawl,” the New York Times offered. She was “ivory-toned, abundantly freckled and wears her thick red hair long,” added the Washington Post. “Her long red hair,” Vogue agreed, was “striking against the UN’s hopeful sky-blue backdrop.” Samantha Power’s hair, through little fault of her own, shimmered its way across a decade of profiles until, finally, the feminist blog Jezebel pleaded, “Enough With Samantha Power’s Flowing Red Hair.” Power had a winning earnestness and a tendency toward authentic rambling that had, on occasion, made her a PR liability. She memorably called Hillary Clinton a “monster” during the 2008 presidential campaign. She said “fuck” a lot.

“The bottleneck is too great,” she continued, “if even very small aspects of US foreign policy have to get decided at the deputies’ and principals’ level in order for it to count as policy.” Denis McDonough, Donilon’s deputy and, later, White House chief of staff, would chastise senior officials who attempted to, as he put it, “color outside the lines,” according to two who received such rebukes. Susan Rice, according to one senior official, exerted even tighter control over policy related to virtually every part of the globe except Latin America. Rice pointed out that every administration struggles with questions of White House micromanagement. “That is ever the charge from the agencies,” she said, “and I have served more time in the State Department than I have in the White House in my career. I’m very familiar with both ends of the street. Find me an agency that feels like the White House isn’t up in their knickers and I’ll be amazed and impressed.”

But some career State Department officials said the Obama administration had gotten the balancing act wrong more often than previous administrations. Examples abounded. Policymaking on South Sudan, which was elevated to a “principals” level under Obama, often stalled when Secretary of State John Kerry or Secretary of Defense Ash Carter were unavailable to join meetings due to their numerous competing obligations. Lower-level officials were disempowered to fill the void. Meetings would be canceled and rescheduled, and weeks would be lost, with lives hanging in the balance. That, Power conceded, “should have been at best a deputies process, because, given inevitable bandwidth constraints, it was very unlikely to be sustained as a principals’ process.”

The centralization of power had a withering effect on capacity outside of the White House. “The agencies got habituated to always be coming back and asking for direction or clearance,” she reflected, as a waitress slid a plate of curry in front of her. She doused it with a shocking amount of sriracha sauce, which makes sense if you’re ordering curry at a bar. “The problem,” she continued, “is that central control, over time, generates something like learned helplessness.” The defiant, world-striding scholar-stateswoman sounded, for a moment, almost wistful. “I think people in other agencies felt that they couldn’t move.”

THE KINDS OF WHITE HOUSE CONTROL exerted by Presidents Trump and Obama were, in some ways, worlds apart. Where one administration closely micromanaged agencies, the other simply cut them loose. “In previous administrations,” Susan Rice argued, the State Department “struggled in the rough and tumble of the bureaucracy. Now, they’re trying to kill it.” But the end result was similar: diplomats sitting on the sidelines, with policy being made elsewhere.

The freefall of the Foreign Service has continued through both the Obama and Trump eras. By 2012, 28 percent of overseas Foreign Service officer slots were either vacant or filled by low-level employees working above their level of experience. In 2014, most officers had less than ten years of experience, a decline from even the 1990s. Fewer of them ascended to leadership than before: in 1975, more than half of all officers reached senior positions; by 2013, just a quarter did. A profession which, decades earlier, had drawn the greatest minds from America’s universities and the private sector was ailing, if not dying.

Every living former secretary of state went on the record for this book. Many expressed concern about the future of the Foreign Service. “The United States must conduct a global diplomacy,” said George P. Shultz, who was ninety-seven by the time we spoke during the Trump administration. The State Department, he argued, was stretched too thin and vulnerable to the changing whims of passing administrations. “It was ironic, as soon as we had the pivot to Asia, the Middle East blew up and Russia went into Ukraine … So you have to conduct a global diplomacy. That means you have to have a strong Foreign Service and people who are there permanently.”

Henry Kissinger suggested that the arc of history had emaciated the Foreign Service, skewing the balance further toward military leadership. “The problem is whether the selection of key advisers is too much loaded in one direction,” Kissinger mused. “Well, there are many reasons for that. For one thing, there are fewer experienced Foreign Service officers. And secondly, one could argue that if you give an order to the Defense Department there’s an 80 percent chance it’ll be executed, if you give an order to the State Department there’s an 80 percent chance of a discussion.” Those imbalances in usefulness are deepened, inevitably, during times of war. “When the country is at war, it shifts to the White House and the Pentagon,” Condoleezza Rice told me. “And that, I think, is also natural.” Rice reflected a common thinking across multiple administrations: “It’s a fast-moving set of circumstances,” she argued. “There isn’t really time for the bureaucratic processes … it doesn’t have the same character of the steady process development you see in more normal times.”

But, by the time the Trump administration began hacking away at the State Department, it had been nearly twenty years since “normal times” in American foreign policy. This was the new reality with which the United States had to contend. Rice’s point—that the aging bureaucracies shaped during the post–World War II era moved too slowly for times of emergency—was often true. But ruthlessly centralizing power to avoid broken bureaucracies, rather than reforming them to do their jobs as intended, conjures up a vicious cycle. With State ever less useful in a world of perpetual emergency; with the money, power and prestige of the Pentagon dwarfing those of any other agency; and with the White House itself filled with former generals, the United States is leaving behind the capacity for diplomatic solutions to even make it into the room.

“I remember Colin Powell once said that there was a reason the occupation of Japan was not carried out by a Foreign Service officer but by a general,” Rice remembered. “In those circumstances, you have to tilt more to the Pentagon.” But just as the occupation of Japan being carried out by a Foreign Service officer registered as an absurdity, the negotiation of treaties and reconstruction of economies being carried out by uniformed officers was a contradiction, and one with a dubious track record.

THE POINT IS NOT that the old institutions of traditional diplomacy can solve today’s crises. The point is that we are witnessing the destruction of those institutions, with little thought to engineering modern replacements. Past secretaries of state diverged on how to solve the problem of America’s crumbling diplomatic enterprise. Kissinger, ever the hawk, acknowledged the decline of the State Department but greeted it with a shrug. “I’m certainly uncomfortable with the fact that one can walk through the State Department now and find so many offices empty,” he said. Kissinger was ninety-four when we spoke. He slouched on a royal blue couch in his New York office, staring at me from under a brow creased with worry lines. He appeared to regard the problems of the present from immense distance. Even his voice, that deep Bavarian rasp, seemed to echo across the decades, as if recorded in Nixon’s Oval Office. “It is true that the State Department is inadequately staffed. It is true that the State Department has not been given what it thought was its due. But that is partly due to the fact that new institutions have arisen.” But by the time I interviewed Kissinger, during the Trump administration, there were no new institutions emerging to take the place of the kind of thoughtful, holistic foreign policy analysis, unshackled from military exigencies, that diplomacy had once provided America.

Hillary Clinton, sounding weary about a year after she lost her 2016 presidential campaign, told me she’d seen that shift coming for years. When she took office as secretary of state at the beginning of the Obama administration, “I began calling leaders around the world who I had known in my previous lives as a senator and a first lady, and so many of them were distressed by what they saw as the militarization of foreign policy in the Bush administration and the very narrow focus on the important issues of terrorism and of course the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think now the balance has tipped even further toward militarization across the board on every kind of issue,” she said. “Diplomacy,” she added, expressing a common sentiment among former secretaries of state, both Republican and Democrat, “is under the gun.”

These are not problems of principle. The changes described here are, in real time, producing results that make the world less safe and prosperous. Already, they have plunged the United States deeper into military engagements that might have been avoided. Already, they have exacted a heavy cost in American lives and influence around the world. What follows is an account of a crisis. It tells the story of a life-saving discipline torn apart by political cowardice. It describes my own years as a State Department official in Afghanistan and elsewhere, watching the decline play out, with disastrous results for America, and in the lives of the last, great defenders of the profession. And it looks to modern alliances in every corner of the earth, forged by soldiers and spies, and to the costs of those relationships for the United States.

In short, this is the story of a transformation in the role of the United States among the nations of our world—and of the outmatched public servants inside creaking institutions desperately striving to keep an alternative alive.

PART I

THE LAST DIPLOMATS

PAKISTAN, 2010

If you ain’t speakin’ money language I can’t hang

You know your conversation is weak, so it’s senseless to speak

—DR. DRE, EVERYDAY THING (WITH NAS AND NATURE)

1
AMERICAN MYTHS

THE DIPLOMAT WAS NOT always an endangered species. Those who hold the profession in reverence point out that it once flourished, upheld by larger-than-life, world-striding figures whose accomplishments still form the bedrock of the modern international order. Stories of diplomacy are a part of the American creation myth. Without Benjamin Franklin’s negotiations with the French, there would have been no Treaty of Alliance and no naval support to secure American independence. Without Franklin, John Adams and John Jay brokering the Treaty of Paris, there would have been no formal end to war with the British. Had Adams, a Massachusetts Yankee of modest upbringing, not traveled to England and presented his credentials as our first diplomat in the Court of King George III, the new United States might have never stabilized relations with the British after the war. Even in the nineteenth century, when diplomats barely made living wages and Congress saddled the State Department with a slew of domestic responsibilities from maintaining the mint to notarizing official documents, the Department defined the modern map of the United States, brokering the Louisiana Purchase and settling disputes with Britain over the border with Canada. Even after the First World War, as the nation turned inward and grappled with the Great Depression, American secretaries of state orchestrated the Washington Naval Conference on disarmament and the Pact of Paris, renouncing war—forging bonds that were later integral in rallying the allies against the Axis powers.

American politicians have forever exploited a vein of nationalism and isolationism against the work of foreign policy. One late nineteenth-century congressman accused diplomats of “working our ruin by creating a desire for foreign customs and foreign follies. The disease is imported by our returning diplomats and by the foreign ambassadors sent here by monarchs and despots to corrupt and destroy our American ideals.” He suggested confining diplomats on their return from assignments, “as we quarantine foreign rags through fear of cholera.” But great diplomatic accomplishments always cut through that hostility.

This was never more true than during World War II, when the Department adapted to the challenges of the day and gave rise to the most fruitful period of diplomatic accomplishment in American history. The State Department faced an existential crisis then not unlike the one that unraveled in 2017. “The American nation desperately needs and desperately lacks an adequate State Department at this hour of the shaping of its future,” screamed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1943 copy that would splice neatly into coverage of Trump’s secretaries of state generations later. But the response was a world apart: Between 1940 and 1945, the Department modernized and reformed. It tripled its workforce and doubled its budget. It restructured, creating offices to address long-term planning, postwar reconstruction and public information in an age of fast-changing mass media.

That modernized State Department, led by a new generation of hard-charging diplomats, shaped a new international order. Those years saw the forging of a great wartime alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom, brokered by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The same era brought about the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, negotiated between the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan. It produced the “containment” doctrine that came to define US engagement with the Soviets for decades to come. Among the prominent architects of this era were six friends, later celebrated as “the Wise Men.” Two, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, were members of the Foreign Service, the, at the time, newly formed professional organization for diplomats. In the postwar years, the Wise Men guided President Truman to what would become the Truman Doctrine, committing the United States to support other nations against the Soviets and to the massive Marshall Plan for international assistance to those nations. The same timeframe yielded the creation of NATO, championed by another member of a rejuvenated State Department, Under Secretary Robert Lovett.

The era of the Wise Men was far from perfect. Some of their most celebrated ideas were also fonts of blunder and misery. Despite Kennan’s warnings, for example, containment was appropriated as a rationale for the military escalation and conflict that came to define the Cold War. “As much as I love reading Present at the Creation,” John Kerry said of Dean Acheson’s densely detailed 800-page memoir of his time at the State Department, “Maybe history and some distance tells us that Acheson and Dulles made some mistakes out of a certainty and a view of the world that we paid for a long time, certainly in some places? In my generation, Richard Holbrooke and I both knew that the supposed best and the brightest got plenty of our friends killed in Vietnam.”

But the Wise Men had undeniable success and staying power in stabilizing the world. And diplomats of their stature, and the kind of old-school diplomacy they practiced, seem harder to find today than seventy years ago, or fifty, or twenty. “Is it the person or the role or the times?” Kerry wondered. “I see some really first-rate diplomats who have done great work … Maybe we just don’t celebrate people in government and at State the way we once did?”

Henry Kissinger argued that a broader shift had taken place: that something had changed not simply in the State Department and its relative bureaucratic influence, but in the philosophy of the American people. It was not lost on me that I was sitting across from someone with a more complicated legacy than even the Wise Men: regarded in some circles as an exemplar of the ferocious diplomat, and in others as a war criminal for his bombing of Cambodia. (It wasn’t lost on him either: he attempted to end our interview when I approached subjects of controversy.) This may have been why Kissinger tended towards the general and the philosophical. Tactics, he felt, had triumphed over strategy, and fast reaction over historicized decision-making. “The United States is eternally preoccupied with solving whatever problems emerge at the moment,” Kissinger said. “We have an inadequate number of experienced people in the conduct of foreign policy but even more importantly, an inadequate number of people who can think of foreign policy as a historical process.”

That was how the last standard bearers of the diplomatic profession found themselves, increasingly, at odds with administrations seeking political expedience and military efficiency. Kissinger pointed to the confrontation between the Obama administration and its representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke: a struggle to be heard in a policy process overtaken by generals, and to apply the lessons of Vietnam in an administration fixated on innovation. “They wanted to start something new, and he wanted to apply lessons from the past,” Kissinger said of Holbrooke. Similar battles were lost by other diplomats before, and more have been lost since. But the story of Richard Holbrooke, and the disintegration of his last mission, and the devastating effect that had on the lives of the diplomats around him, provide a window into what was lost when we turned away from a profession that once saved us. “It’s one great American myth,” Kissinger added, speaking slowly, “that you can always try something new.”

2
LADY TALIBAN

THE POWER WENT OUT, as it often did in Islamabad, and the room went dark. But the laptop had juice, so the human rights activist I had come to see swung the screen around and told me to watch. A video flickered on screen. It was shaky, surreptitiously captured from a distance. Six young men stumbled through a wooded area, blindfolded, hands bound behind their backs. In typical civilian kurtas, they did not look like fighters. Soldiers in Pakistani Army uniforms led the young men to a clearing and lined them up against a stonework wall.

An older, bearded officer, a commander perhaps, approached the young men, one by one. “Do you know the Kalimas?” he asked, referring to the Islamic religious phrases sometimes uttered before death. He rejoined more than half a dozen soldiers at the other end of the clearing. They were lining up in the style of an execution squad. “One by one, or together?” asked one. “Together,” said the commander. The soldiers raised their rifles—G3s, standard issue equipment in the Pakistani military—took aim, and fired.

The men crumpled to the ground. Several survived, wailing and writhing on the ground. A soldier approached and fired into each body, silencing the men one by one.

For a moment after the video ended, no one said anything. Street traffic rattled through a nearby window. Finally, the human rights activist asked: “What will you do now?”

THE VIDEO WAS SHOCKING, but its existence was no surprise. It was 2010 in Pakistan, home to America’s most important counterterrorism partnership. Al-Qaeda’s leadership had fled American military operations in Afghanistan, evaporating into the thin mountain air of Pakistan’s untamed border country. This was the heart of the war on terror and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. As a rookie recruit to the State Department’s Afghanistan and Pakistan team, charged with talking to development and human rights groups, I found that diplomacy in the region had a quality of pantomime. Every conversation, whether about building dams or reforming education, was in fact about counterterrorism: keeping Pakistan happy enough to join the fight and allow our supplies to pass through its borders to American troops in Afghanistan. But often, the Pakistanis were unwilling (according to the Americans) or unable (by their own account) to move against their country’s terrorist strongholds.

The previous fall, there had been a rare success—Pakistani forces had staged an offensive in the rural Swat valley, seizing control and capturing Taliban militants. But it wasn’t long before rumors began to circulate about what exactly that success had entailed. Public reports were emerging of a new wave of executions in the wake of military operations in Swat. By that summer, Human Rights Watch had investigated 238 alleged executions and found at least 50 were heavily corroborated. As with everything in government, the executions even had an acronym: EJK, for “extrajudicial killings.” The issue was complex. In rural Pakistan, courtrooms and prisons were more the stuff of aspiration than reality. Some Pakistani military units viewed summary executions as the only practical way of dealing with extremists they apprehended. But the tactic was also proving useful in disposing of a growing number of dissidents, lawyers, and journalists. Pakistani military personnel, when they could be enticed to acknowledge the issue at all, bitterly pointed out that the United States pressed them to target some bad guys, then complained when they took out others.

The killings were a point of extraordinary sensitivity in the relationship between Pakistan and the United States. For the Pakistanis, they were an embarrassment. For the Americans, they were a fly in the ointment. American taxpayers had bankrolled Pakistan to the tune of $19.7 billion in military and civilian assistance since September 11, 2001. Revelations about the murders raised the specter of unwanted scrutiny.

Inside the State Department, I circulated news of the video, and of mounting calls for a response from human rights watchdogs. The results were Kafkaesque. Officials set to work quashing meetings with the groups behind the reporting. When they acquiesced to a single briefing, in Washington, with Human Rights Watch, it was with the understanding that we would allow no questions of the US government, and that our comments be limited to “very general press guidance.” A career bureaucrat with a prim demeanor and a vacant smile responded to my emails on the subject with a cheerful suggestion:

Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 4:43 PM

Subject: RE: Extrajudicial Executions/HRW Meeting Request

One suggestion: rather than specifically referencing the term EJK, we’ve been trying to work these issues under the umbrella of “gross violations of human rights” (statutory language lifted from Leahy provisions). One advantage of using the Leahy phrasing is that it covers the broad swath of abuses (including EJK) of concern to the USG; another is that it encompasses abuses committed by insurgents as well as those attributed to government forces and agencies. The bonus is that it helps to insulate “open source” meetings from the sensitive policy discussions on the high side.

Just a semantic twist in service of diplomacy.

The statute she was referring to—named after its sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont—banned giving American assistance to foreign military units committing atrocities. I forwarded the exchange to a colleague. “Oh boy, how Rwanda-press-conferences-circa-1994 is this!?”, I wrote, referring to the “semantic twists” US officials undertook to avoid using the word “genocide” in the midst of that crisis.

Several months later, I pushed a dossier across a conference table toward Melanne Verveer, Hillary Clinton’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. We were both visiting Islamabad and she’d asked what human rights groups were saying. I printed up some of the reporting—nothing classified, just open-source documents. All the same, I stuck to euphemisms.

“There’s a spike in … gross violations of human rights.”

“And when you say, ‘gross violations’? …” she said, flipping through the file.

“Executions.”

It was June, Islamabad’s hottest month of the year, and the air felt close in the cramped room at the American embassy in Pakistan. Across the table from the two of us, a diplomat stationed at the embassy glared at me. She’d shot me a warning look when the topic came up. Now her lips were pursed, her eyes boring into me. On the table in front of her, her knuckles were marble-white. Ambassador Robin Raphel, the career Foreign Service officer who was overseeing a spike in American assistance to Pakistan that year, was furious.

LATER THAT WEEK, embassy staff and locals gathered outside the American ambassador’s residence in Islamabad’s secure “red zone.” Nestled at the foot of the densely forested Margalla Hills, the city’s wide avenues are lined with eucalyptus and pine trees. By that June in 2010, its parks and lawns were an explosion of white gladiolus and purple amaranthus. At night, the posh districts hummed with intellectual energy. As the war raged nearby, an international set of diplomats, reporters, and aid workers met for golden-haloed cocktail parties, exchanging whispers of palace intrigue.

Robin Raphel had been a fixture at such parties for years, since she began working in Pakistan decades earlier. To many locals, she was simply “Robin.”

That night at the ambassador’s residence, she was in her element, holding forth for a clutch of party-goers. With high cheekbones and ramrod-straight posture, she had an aristocratic quality, her blond hair pulled into a tight French twist. She spoke with a locked jaw and the clipped, mid-Atlantic cadence of a 1940s movie star. Tossed over one shoulder, she wore, as she so often did, an embroidered pashmina shawl that made her dress suit resemble the flowing salwar kameez of the local women.

Since that day in the conference room, Raphel had done her utmost to kneecap the junior diplomat who had responded to the question about human rights. When she couldn’t keep me out of meetings, she would cut me off in them, with relish. That night at the party she made little secret of her disapproval. “How dare you bring up—” here she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “—EJK in a meeting at this embassy.” Her lip quivered. “You are not of value on that issue.”

I wondered how much she was frustrated by my criticism of America’s role in Pakistan and how much she just found me personally annoying. I explained, trying to stay deferential, that the State Department had adopted a policy of acknowledging the human rights reporting, even if we didn’t confirm it. “Well, that may be the case in DC,” she sniffed. She fingered the loop of pearls at her neck. “This isn’t DC. And we do not discuss that issue here.”

It would be three years before the gutting of Mahogany Row, but in national security hot spots like this, you could see the power slipping away from diplomats in real time. Pakistan was the perfect illustration of the trend: for decades, the Pentagon and the CIA had bypassed the United States’ civilian foreign policy systems to do business directly with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders. In the years since September 11, 2001, they’d gained more freedom than ever to do so. Standing in the warm Islamabad summer, I wondered at Robin Raphel, so keen to avoid tough questions about a foreign military and its entanglements with our own. What did she understand her role to be, at a time in which so much of that role was being carved away and carted off? When nineteenth-century pundits suggested quarantining diplomats, lest they bring back mixed allegiances, was this what they meant? Was this something old or something new?

FOR DECADES, ROBIN RAPHEL embodied a tradition of old-school diplomacy. Born Robin Lynn Johnson, she grew up in a sleepy lumber town in Washington State, tearing through the National Geographic magazines her father collected and dreaming of the wider world. At Mark Morris High, she was voted “most likely to succeed.” “She seemed to have a worldly sense about her,” remembered one classmate. In college, she’d leapt at opportunities to travel, spending a summer in Tehran with a church group, before heading to a junior year abroad at the University of London.

“Are you still religious?” I once asked her. She snorted derisively. This seemed an absurd question to her. “What do you mean, ‘am I still religious’?” she snapped. When pressed, she waved a hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t say one way or another.” If Robin Raphel had time for spirituality, she didn’t have time to share it with me. She was all flinty pragmatism. She prided herself on it.

After college, she spent a year studying at Cambridge and found a dazzling set of fellow Americans with their own international dreams and yearbook superlatives. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and the dorms of Oxford and Cambridge filled with debate about an American proxy war gone wrong. There were eerie parallels to another war that would, decades later, have a cataclysmic impact on Robin Raphel’s life: another new administration faced with a fatigued public, an uncooperative partner force, and an elusive insurgency with safe havens across a tactically challenging border.

Raphel, then still Johnson, started dating a young Rhodes Scholar and fellow University of Washington graduate, Frank Aller, and befriended his roommates: Strobe Talbott, who would go on to become a journalist and deputy secretary of state, and an aspiring politician named Bill Clinton. In their modest house at 46 Leckford Road in North Oxford, the friends spent hours agonizing over the threat of the draft. Clinton and Aller were both classified as “1-A”—available to be drafted—and both opposed the war. Clinton considered various strategies for avoiding the draft but ultimately decided against them, as he put it, “to maintain my political viability within the system.” Aller, on the other hand, stayed in England, on the run from the draft and agonized by the resulting stigma. A year later, he went home to Spokane, put a .22-caliber Smith & Wesson in his mouth, and blew his brains out.

I asked Raphel how Aller’s death, so soon after they dated, affected her. “Oh,” she said, as if I’d asked her about a fender bender. “I was very upset, needless to say!” She paused, realizing how she’d sounded. “As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’m passionate about being dispassionate.” Robin Raphel wasn’t about to let emotion be an obstacle to the life on the world stage she was, even then, beginning to craft. In the following years, her path would wind from Tehran to Islamabad to Tunisia.

OVER THE COURSE of that journey, Raphel’s critics would not share her dispassion. By the end of her career, she would be called a traitor, a turncoat, and a terrorist sympathizer. In the Indian press, she was called, with delight, “Lady Taliban.” The astonishing nadir would come during the Obama administration. Four years after our run-in in Islamabad, Raphel arrived at her desk on the first floor of the State Department, in a sea of cubicles not far from the cafeteria. She checked her email and took a few routine meetings. It was early afternoon when she saw the missed calls. The first was from Slomin’s Home Security; someone had been trying to get into Raphel’s house. The next call was from her daughter Alexandra, who was panicked. Raphel had to get home immediately, Alexandra said. Raphel got into her Ford Focus and drove the twenty-minute route to her home in Northwest Washington, DC.

What she arrived, she saw a dozen FBI agents crawling over her modest two-story Cape Cod–style house. Two earnest-looking agents in plainclothes approached her and showed her their badges. Next they handed her a warrant.

It specified that Robin Raphel was being investigated under 18 U.S.C. Section 793(e), a criminal statute that covers the illegal gathering or transmission of national security information:

Espionage.

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