The Endgame strategy called for a peace conference to end hostilities in the Balkans, and the role of the principal negotiator would be vital. No one yet knew what form the negotiations would take, where they would be conducted, and who would conduct them. But a special American negotiator would be needed for a job of rare importance and visibility. Technically Lake had the first shot, but he had held back, perhaps because he was overloaded with other work, or perhaps because he sensed that his talents were not especially well suited to the job. That of itself said something about Lake. No one, noted one colleague in the administration, who had ever known Henry Kissinger in his time could imagine him pulling away from such a course in midstream, getting everyone to the peace table and then not putting himself squarely in the spotlight as the principal American negotiator.
Dick Holbrooke, who had been the assistant secretary for European affairs for almost a year, badly wanted the job and had been actively campaigning for it. “I’ve been preparing for almost thirty years to conduct peace talks like this,” he told colleagues. And why not Holbrooke? Who could deal better with Milosevic, Tudjman, and Izetbegovic, none of them, as John Deutch had once said, a candidate for the Thomas Jefferson award. Given the people he was going to have to negotiate with, Holbrooke would be perfect for the job. The only person who might have been better, one friend noted, was Jimmy Hoffa, the former Teamsters leader who had not been seen in years and was believed to be buried under the New York Giants football stadium near Hackensack, New Jersey.
Warren Christopher was another possibility. But he was not familiar with the intricacies of the many different Balkan parties involved, and having conducted the brutal and exhausting Iran hostage negotiations some fifteen years earlier, he had little desire to take on a comparably murderous and exhausting peace conference. Whatever doubts he had had about Holbrooke, Christopher had largely put to rest. Holbrooke had proved to be an admirable deputy, he had made no end runs around Christopher, and the secretary of state knew that the two of them in some unintended way complemented each other. Christopher was always careful and cautious, ever sensitive to what might go wrong, wary of the limelight, the tidiest of men. Holbrooke was the least tidy of men, inevitably pulled to the limelight like a moth to a flame and guilty on occasion of shameless self-promotion. “The ego has landed,” some of his deputies, who admired him and worked with him on location in the Balkans, would say whenever he arrived in their city during his Balkan shuttle. Yet he was also decisive and audacious, willing to do some things wrong in order to do other things right, willing above all to take risks for policies he believed in.
Moreover, Holbrooke’s modus operandi was in sharp contrast to that of diplomats of another era, who valued privacy and secrecy above all else. The coming of Holbrooke—and his closeness to the media—represented one more change wrought by modern communications in the media world it had created. Even in the field of diplomacy, traditionally occupied by gentlemen who kept everything important secret, the torch had been passed to operators who were more rough-hewn and who understood that the diplomat who leaked most artfully and used his press corps as a kind of Greek chorus tended to win out. Holbrooke was hardly Lake’s choice for the assignment as peace negotiator. In the previous summer when details of the Endgame strategy were being worked out, Holbrooke had been excluded from the small working team, and cries of anguish were regularly heard from him by almost all his old friends. Lake’s doubts about Holbrooke’s abilities were obvious. Lake told his peers that Holbrooke would be difficult to control, his ego would be in the way, and he might grandstand. But there was one more critical vote on this one. Bill Perry did not have strong feelings about Holbrooke one way or another, but he did acknowledge that it was the secretary of state’s call. As for Clinton, he had come to appreciate Holbrooke and knew that he needed his energy and his ability with the media. So Holbrooke it would be. On August 12, he flew to London, where he met privately with Lake, who gave him the job. “This is what we always dreamed about when we started out in Saigon more than thirty years ago,” Lake told him. I’ll be with you all the way, he added, “and if it fails, it’s my ass more than yours.”1
That made Holbrooke the bureaucratic comeback kid of 1995. He had started far outside the play in January 1993, taking a post he thought was well beneath him. The Clinton transition period had been the worst of times for him. The Democrats were back in power, and he was fifty-one, at his absolute professional prime, ready to take over one of the top jobs in the new administration. But he had been cut out by the big boys, many of whom were supposed to be old friends, and he was sure that some of the people who were getting top jobs were less talented than he was. Even during the transition period, however, he had enjoyed the backing of one critically important sponsor, Strobe Talbott, who had used his influence with Clinton to get Holbrooke the assignment to Germany, and who continued to be his sponsor for an even more important role when he did well in Europe.
The Bonn assignment had caught Holbrooke completely by surprise because he was almost everything but a Europeanist. His doubts about the job were immediate; he feared that he might have fallen too far. Seeking advice, he called Les Gelb, the Times foreign affairs columnist who was something of a career consultant in those days to both Lake and Holbrooke. Gelb, a shrewd student of the State Department bureaucracy as well as a knowledgeable expert on Richard C. Holbrooke, was enthusiastic and told him that it was a much better offer than Tokyo, the assignment he had wanted. He had always been typed as an Asian hand, and the Bonn assignment would give him experience in Europe as well, which he would badly need for any additional ascent. Gelb could easily imagine Holbrooke with his talent and energy in action in Germany, the perfect man for an environment where things were no longer static. “It’s the best thing that could happen,” Gelb said. “It’s going to be an exciting time in Germany—it’s in flux, and Europe is in flux and you’ll be at the center of it, and you’ll get a chance to retool yourself in an entirely different region.”
Holbrooke’s next call was to Frank Wisner, another old friend from the early Vietnam days, and now undersecretary of defense, who took the news without breaking stride and said, “Well, of course you’ll take it. It’s a very good job and the thing we want from the Germans is . . .” Thereupon Wisner went into an immediate briefing. Then Holbrooke called his mother, who had been born in Germany, had left there before the war at the age of thirteen, and had never been back. She was dismayed by the news. Germany? she said, and it was all question mark. Holbrooke’s final call, because he was already operational, already making moves, was to Henry Kissinger. He knew Kissinger was the American closest to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and the call was a way of stroking him. Because they had often been on different sides of the fence, Holbrooke hoped to position Kissinger as much as he could on his side and, above all, did not want Kissinger bad-mouthing him to Kohl.
Holbrooke took the job because a number of his friends thought that Bonn would merely be the first step, that given his abilities and drive, and the weakness in the State Department at the top, he would sooner or later be needed. But he took it as well because he loved government, the byplay and the excitement of the game. Wall Street, though he had made millions there, never excited him as much. He hit the ground running in Germany. It was typical of him that even in a job that was a consolation prize, knowing that some of his peers in Washington were giggling because he had been dispatched to Bonn, he nevertheless seized the day. He quickly retooled himself, and instead of being Asia-centric, he became the very model of a modern Europeanist.
Whatever else could be said about Holbrooke, he was the most intellectually open of men. Even more rare for anyone who operated at his level and whose ego was so large, he knew what he did not know and therefore what he had to learn. He immediately convinced Fritz Stern, an old friend he had met twenty years earlier at Princeton and one of the leading academics in America on German history, to join his embassy for a limited tour as a kind of historian-in-residence and give him a daily two- or three-hour tutorial. Stern had been born in Breslau, had come to America as a boy, and was an academic who knew the contemporary uses of history. He quickly brought Holbrooke up to speed intellectually in his new role. In addition, Holbrooke soon discovered and rehabilitated an ancestor, a grandfather who had fought for the kaiser in World War I. A framed photo of Grandfather, never seen before by any of Holbrooke’s old friends in his previous homes, with a suitably Germanic mustache and wearing one of those ludicrous Teutonic helmets, was soon on prominent display.
Holbrooke got on well with Helmut Kohl and was quite influential in convincing Kohl, who had ties by experience and ideology to the Bush administration, to take the new administration seriously. The Clinton people, Holbrooke suggested, were not merely brash, unfinished children, which was the general old-world view; rather, Holbrooke suggested, Clinton would soon emerge as a talented, skillful leader whose exceptional political success so far had not been an accident. Softening Kohl’s view of Clinton was no small coup for Holbrooke, and he would help stage-manage Clinton’s successful visit to Berlin in 1994. There, Clinton and Kohl, the leaders of the nations that had fought two bitter wars against each other in this century and had then been paired in an uneasy anticommunist alliance, had walked to the Brandenburg Gate together, holding hands, accompanied by their wives. It was such a powerful—and obvious—symbolic moment of the best part of the new world order that Holbrooke always wondered why George Bush had never done it. Unlike Bush, Holbrooke understood, Clinton had an almost perfect anticipatory sense of the right image at the right time.
With Mitterrand’s health failing, Kohl had become the most important political figure on the Continent, and Holbrooke dealt ably with him, knowing that with Kohl, as he once said, the principal job for an American ambassador was simply to listen. He understood Kohl’s elemental desire to expand NATO so that Germany would no longer be the West’s border with Russia as it had been since the end of the war. Kohl wanted Poland to serve that purpose, and therefore as he sought the expansion of NATO, so did Holbrooke within the administration. He sensed a general softness and lack of focus in Clinton’s foreign policy, except on trade, where Mickey Kantor was a considerable influence. Holbrooke moved into that vacuum eagerly. Slightly underemployed in Germany, he became something of a force beyond his hierarchical position, what his friend Talbott called “a one-man idea factory on the future of NATO and the security of Europe.”
Talbott, who traveled to Moscow regularly, believed that the energy Holbrooke produced was special and would arrange his own trips to stop off in Bonn to talk with him, thinking him the ablest strategic thinker of the group that was dealing with greater European security. The more time he spent with Holbrooke, the more convinced Talbott became that they needed him back in Washington at a higher level in the department. Some of the stumbles that had marked the first two years of the Clinton administration might have been avoided, Talbott decided, if Holbrooke had come in at a senior level in the beginning. It might have been more chaotic and contentious, but well worth it. Holbrooke, Talbott believed, was well ahead of the administration in his thinking about the Balkans and the dilemma we faced there. Always an activist on the Balkans, Holbrooke thought that we could not deal with any issue of NATO or European security until we dealt with Milosevic because he was such a divisive factor. He exploited and magnified all the existing tensions in the West. It was that simple.
Holbrooke’s success in Germany exactly paralleled the failure of the administration’s Balkans policy, which he had predicted from day one would be the deciding foreign policy issue of the Clinton presidency. Inevitably, he was called back to Washington to become the assistant secretary for European affairs, returning in the middle of September 1994, not necessarily because Warren Christopher wanted him, but because the department badly needed him. He would be able to fill the conspicuous hole at the top of the department. By then Holbrooke had two sponsors. One was Talbott, who was very much aware of both Holbrooke’s strengths and his weaknesses and had once noted of his friend, “Dick is like a great pitcher going into the World Series who is going to strike out more batters than anyone else, but he’s also going to hit more guys with beanballs, too—maybe lead the league with hit batsmen.” Holbrooke’s other sponsor was Tom Donilon, the bright young assistant to Christopher who played a crucial role in his boss’s personnel choices and thought the department at the highest level desperately needed Holbrooke’s energies and talents, especially since Christopher tended to be only as good as his deputies in any given area. Donilon knew that almost everything critics said about Holbrooke was probably true, but that a great deal of it didn’t matter, and much of it was said in jealousy. Donilon understood the one great truth about Dick Holbrooke beyond the peripheral qualities: his career was his life. Succeeding seemed to mean more to Holbrooke than almost anyone else, and failure seemed to mock him far more than most others. Donilon also believed that one criticism of Holbrooke was a great canard, that he operated on his own and never checked in. Never checked in? Donilon told friends—he’s always checking in. He calls every twenty minutes to let you know what he’s just done.
Both Talbott and Donilon were influential with Christopher, and both were Holbrooke fans. Christopher was most assuredly not. He had not been eager to have Holbrooke anywhere near his elbow when he first took over. Holbrooke’s general modus operandi bothered Christopher. Moreover, they had some history together over human rights issues when Holbrooke had struggled with Pat Derian over Marcos and the Philippines. When Talbott and Donilon pressed Holbrooke’s case, Christopher would protest. “But Holbrooke is disruptive,” he would say. “We could use a little disruption around here,” Donilon would reply. Finally Christopher said he would take Holbrooke, but when he made the decision, he turned to Talbott and said, almost pleading, “Now, Strobe, you’ll deal with Dick, won’t you?”
In a State Department that had become notoriously tentative and unfocused, Holbrooke was an asset from the start. He had a clear idea of what the administration needed, and because he was always aware of the intersection of foreign policy and domestic politics, he knew the danger that events in Bosnia posed to the future of the Clinton presidency. The good thing about the Christopher State Department was the freedom to operate for those who wanted to operate. There were not, in this State Department, tight territorial limitations. If Christopher was not a formidable figure with a clear vision of his own, then he readily deferred to his deputies, and that would be an advantage for Holbrooke. So he came in fully activated, more than two years behind schedule, trying to make up for lost time by taking charge of the Balkans policy.
He was also something of a blowtorch, relentlessly driving the people around him, always demanding excellence and, of course, loyalty. He quickly connected himself to Peter Galbraith, the department’s otherwise lonely man in Zagreb, and let him know that Galbraith was back in the loop, but only if he went through Holbrooke. There would be many phone calls to Galbraith, demanding some kind of action, and then at the end a fairly typical Holbrooke reminder: “Just remember, I’m your only friend around here. Everyone else hates your ass. I spend more than half my time defending you. So you better come through for me.” Galbraith would try to come back at Holbrooke: “Dick, how come you’re my only friend, but all your friends trash you, and I think my friends like me?” So they raged at each other, but Galbraith was aware that Holbrooke was probably right. He was the one man at that level who was on Galbraith’s side.
When the handoff from Lake took place in London on August 12, Holbrooke immediately became exactly what he wanted, the point man on Bosnia, and his first job, often working with Peter Galbraith, was to coordinate the Croat-Muslim offensive. Here, Washington and the people in the field differed. Washington wanted greater limits put on the advancing Croats than Holbrooke and his team did. Part of their job was to tell the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims to slow down, instructions that Tudjman and Izetbegovic were hardly eager to hear. Nor did Holbrooke agree. In his mind, every bit of territory regained during the offensive would enormously benefit the eventual peace talks. Simply stated, the more the Croats took, the easier a time Washington’s negotiators would have in drawing up a new map. When Holbrooke and his support team met with Tudjman on August 17, one member of the team, responding to Washington’s directives, kept pressuring the Croatian president to stop the offensive. Holbrooke felt differently, as did his deputy Bob Frasure, who had already spent a great deal of time negotiating with Milosevic. In the middle of lunch that day, to encourage his boss, Frasure scribbled a note for Holbrooke on his place card and slipped it to him: “Dick: We ‘hired’ these guys as our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to ‘control’ them. But this is no time to get squeamish about things. This is the first time the Serb wave has been reversed. That is essential for us to get stability so we can get out.”2 That carried the day. The Croat offense would continue.
By mid-September the rout of the Serbs continued. Again Washington was nervous. Tudjman wanted to drive forward, so did the principal Americans he was dealing with, Holbrooke and Galbraith, and so most of all did Izetbegovic. But Washington told both Holbrooke and Galbraith to get the Croats and Bosnian Muslims to stop the offensive. On September 15, Galbraith was ordered to present to Tudjman a démarche, a formal message, telling him to stop. Galbraith, appalled by the message, asked for a revision but was quickly overruled. He had, of course, delivered it, but it went against everything he believed in. Both Holbrooke and Galbraith dissented. Holbrooke believed in Milosevic’s essential selfishness; he had written off the Krajina Serbs and was willing to write off, at least partly, the Bosnian Serbs. Holbrooke knew there was no love lost between him and Mladic, and that Mladic was a convenience at best, and quite possibly someone who needed to be brought down a notch.
Holbrooke was by then dealing directly with Milosevic and could see the impact of the changed battlefield in his attitude. Holbrooke believed he had an accurate sense of how far Milosevic was willing to go in response to the Croat-Muslim offensive. Holbrooke was irritated that Washington, which he felt had played this wrong from the start, now wanted to halt the offensive. Tudjman, meeting with Holbrooke and Galbraith in mid-September, shrewdly asked Holbrooke for his personal view on the issue. As carefully as he could, without openly defying his superiors, Holbrooke signaled his support for the offensive. By then the Serb hold on parts of Croatia and western Bosnia had shrunk rather considerably. Milosevic now faced a real political crisis. Thousands and thousands of Bosnian Serbs, just like the Croatian Serbs a few weeks before them, were fleeing their towns and villages, heading back to Serbia, where the city they intended to settle in was Belgrade. Serbia proper had already absorbed more than one hundred thousand Serb refugees, mostly from Croatia, and now with the catastrophic events in Bosnia, the figure that loomed was far greater, perhaps six hundred thousand more, all of them likely to be angry. For Milosevic, that could be a political killer, and he wanted to stop the rout. He was, for the first time, looking at peace negotiations from a different point of view—the end of someone else’s guns.
Holbrooke, aware of Washington’s apprehensions but operating under a flexible commission from Christopher, wanted a battlefield that essentially matched the settlement envisioned in Lake’s Endgame plan, a 51–49 division of the Bosnian terrain, Croat and Muslim versus the Serbs, and he was prepared to wait just a little while longer. Day by day the Croat-Muslim forces surged ahead, and soon Holbrooke had staff people drawing up maps twice a day showing who controlled how much land. Essentially he was straddling two governments, signaling Tudjman, whose forces were doing most of the fighting, to continue, while trying to hold Washington at bay. In the past the greatest drawback in dealing with the Serbs had been the map they had supplied—with 70 percent of Bosnia in Serb hands. Now that was changing on the battlefield.
If the pressure from the Croat-Bosnian offensive was not enough to convince Milosevic that the tide was turning, late August brought an additional incentive, the first major use of NATO airpower against the Bosnian Serbs, not the pinprick bombings that had failed in the past, but the heavy stuff, delivered with sustained violence and NATO’s very considerable technological muscle. That which had distinguished the use of airpower in the Gulf War four years earlier, and which had prompted General Tony McPeak, the air force chief of staff, to tell Colin Powell that airpower alone could make a difference in the Balkans, began to rain down on the Serbs. It had been triggered by a brutal and senseless attack on Sarajevo by Mladic and the Bosnian Serbs on August 28, 1995. Thirty-eight people were killed and another eighty-five wounded in a shelling of the city’s marketplace. It was one of the worst incidents of its kind, and coming as it did, when Serb forces were already in flight in the Krajina, it underlined the differences between Milosevic and Mladic. Milosevic was a cold, manipulative figure who could, when it suited him, be a didactic communist, a new-era banker, or a reborn post-Tito nationalist. The only given was his desire to hold power. But Mladic’s nationalism was more genuine, approaching, some thought, true madness. Now he had managed to provoke the West just when it wanted to be provoked.
This time the West was ready. “An unexpected last chance to do something we should have done three years earlier,” Holbrooke said. The president was on board and the Americans were ready to drive the alliance. On August 30, NATO began the heaviest bombing in its history, using its most modern weapons, including (apparently without clearance from the White House) its Tomahawk cruise missiles. More than sixty aircraft operating from bases in Italy and the carrier Theodore Roosevelt participated. One Tomahawk landed with stunning accuracy and took out Mladic’s entire communications center. That was an extremely important hit because one of the advantages the Serbs had enjoyed thus far was their vast superiority in communications and the ability, if necessary, to move forces quickly from one venue to another. Now they were, overnight, blind and deaf on the battlefield. The sense of what NATO could do in the future was palpable. Then on September 1, a bombing halt was called. Not all of the Americans were pleased about it, aware that it was always hard to resume bombing after a halt, but it was supposed to give Mladic a chance to negotiate and withdraw. But not much came out of the early talks, and the Americans were eager to resume the bombing, even if all of their allies were not.
What surprised some of the senior American civilians was that the commander of the air attack, Admiral Leighton (Snuffy) Smith, did not want to resume bombing. Smith wore two hats: he was commander of all U.S. forces in southern Europe as well as commander of all American naval forces in Europe. Some of his peers considered him a wonderful ship commander, an old-fashioned, rough, tough figure who regrettably had little feel or interest in the complicated political-military dilemmas of the post–Cold War world. But now, for whatever reason, he did not want to send his young men and women back into combat. He seemed to have no enthusiasm for the Balkan struggle, and he once used the same phrase to Holbrooke that James Baker had uttered a few years earlier: “We don’t have a dog in this fight.” Clinton would later tell his closest aides that he thought Smith had been insubordinate during this period as well as later when he was in charge of policing the Dayton accords.
Now the dilemma for the civilians was to push Smith to resume the bombing. Lieutenant General Wes Clark, Holbrooke’s military liaison, was told to call him and get him to reopen the air war. He reached Smith on a golf course and was reamed out for his trouble. Listening on a cell phone, Holbrooke could hear the roar of Smith’s voice and Clark’s apologetic yes-sirs and no-sirs. Eventually the issue went to the top and the bombing was resumed, but clearly the fissures between the military and the civilians, which had cast a great shadow over the Balkans from the start, still existed. Moreover, Clark, whom the civilians had begun to think of as helpful, a rare senior military figure who saw the Balkans much as they did, might now be in trouble; a three-star who crossed a four-star was part of an endangered species. Clark was clearly in danger of suffering fatal career wounds, and Holbrooke, Sandy Berger, and Strobe Talbott all immediately lobbied with Shalikashvili on his behalf. But in the complicated, overheated world they lived in, these calls did not go unnoticed, and if they helped protect Clark in the short run, they created even more doubts about him in the Pentagon in the long run.
It was not the first sign that Clark was in some kind of trouble with his own military. During the early days of the Balkan shuttle when he was constantly traveling with Holbrooke, he was given instructions from senior people in the Pentagon that from then on he was to be in as many photo opportunities as possible, as close to Holbrooke as possible. That would show this was not just a civilian operation, but the military was running it as well. In addition, he was no longer to be photographed carrying his briefcase. Generals should not carry their briefcase; that was wimpy. They should look like warriors. Equally troubling were calls from Shalikashvili to Holbrooke to ask whether Clark was working out all right: “Are you okay with Wes?” he would ask. Why? Holbrooke wanted to know. “Well, we’re getting a lot of complaints back here,” Shalikashvili said. It was an early warning that Clark would be at the center of continued military-civilian tensions, soon to escalate over Kosovo.
But the bombing went on and it was formidable. Nothing had shaken Milosevic quite like the use of the Tomahawk missile. He was aware of the dual nature of his dilemma. Croat forces were advancing across the Krajina, and now NATO’s airpower was destroying his troops. He accused the Americans of providing close air support for the Croat troops, which was not true, but the effect was much the same. Finally, one part of the Bosnian campaign was coming to an end. By late September, the Croat-Muslim forces had an open road to Banja Luka, the largest city in Serb-occupied Bosnia. Instead of holding some 70 percent of Bosnian territory, the Serbs in the north were reduced to an ever shrinking island, which with the fall of Banja Luka might disappear completely. Holbrooke was worried about Banja Luka and the refugee catastrophe that awaited the people there if the Croats took it. Three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand Serb refugees were said to be there, all of them having fled the advancing Croat and Bosnian forces. There had already been too much killing, Holbrooke and Galbraith believed, too many helpless people murdered to allow one more city to become infamous, even if the people who were now in danger were the kinfolk of those who had started all this bloody business in the first place.
On September 17, Holbrooke urged Tudjman to hold back on Banja Luka, even as Susak, his defense minister, was meeting with others on Tudjman’s team to tell them they were only twenty-four hours from controlling a key mountain outside the city. If they took the mountain, they could have Banja Luka in two more days. Milosevic was clearly eager to talk now. In a note to Christopher on September 20, Holbrooke said, “In only a few weeks, the famous 70 percent division of the country has gone to around 50–50, obviously making our task easier.”3
On September 17 with Croat-Muslim tanks an estimated seventy-two hours from Banja Luka, Holbrooke told a most unhappy Tudjman to halt his forces short of the city. Izetbegovic was even more unhappy. The rationale Holbrooke used with Izetbegovic had been used against him in the past by Washington: the Serb lines were finally coming together and there was a danger of a counterattack. The offensive that had surprised every Western capital had changed the balance of power on the ground and would set the conditions for the upcoming peace conference. In fact, the Croat-Bosnian offensive made the conference possible. When the peace process began, the Serbs held only 45 percent of Bosnia, and the real negotiating had already been done on the battlefield. The myth of Serb invincibility had been shattered.