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War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence
Ronan Farrow
A book for anyone interested to know more about how the world really works by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow.‘This is one of the most important books of our time.’ Walter Isaacson‘A masterpiece’ Dan Simpson, Post-Gazette THE NEW YORK TIMES #3 BESTSELLERUS foreign policy is undergoing a dire transformation, forever changing America’s place in the world. Institutions of diplomacy and development are bleeding out after deep budget cuts; the diplomats who make America’s deals and protect democratic interests around the world are walking out in droves. Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. Increasingly, America is a nation that shoots first and asks questions later.In an astonishing journey from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to some of the most remote and dangerous places on earth – Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea among them acclaimed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history. His first-hand experience as a former State Department official affords a personal look at some of the last standard bearers of traditional statecraft, including Richard Holbrooke, who made peace in Bosnia and died while trying to do so in Afghanistan.Drawing on newly unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with warlords, whistle-blowers, and policymakers – including every living secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson – War on Peace makes a powerful case for an endangered profession. Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, short-sightedness, and outright malice – but it may just offer a way out of a world at war.
Copyright (#ub930abdd-f9f7-50e3-b06e-669480286438)
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 (#ub930abdd-f9f7-50e3-b06e-669480286438)
For Mom.
Contents
COVER (#u9ddc47a2-506a-5475-b34c-9ae67d70903f)
TITLE PAGE (#u600736a9-b5e2-5f13-851a-0e62bf9e35cf)
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 (#ue82594fa-f04d-5842-aa9e-273afdb563d1)
PROLOGUE (#ub930abdd-f9f7-50e3-b06e-669480286438)
MAHOGANY ROW MASSACRE (#ub930abdd-f9f7-50e3-b06e-669480286438)
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.
