MY FIRST DIPLOMATIC mission was an utter failure. The most junior officer in our embassy in Jordan in 1983, I eagerly volunteered for what at the time seemed like a straightforward assignment: to drive a supply truck from Amman to Baghdad. It all seemed to me like an excellent adventure, a chance to see the thinly populated, rock-strewn desert of eastern Jordan, and visit Iraq, then in the midst of a brutal war with Iran.
The senior administrative officer at Embassy Amman was a grizzled veteran renowned for his ability to get things done, if not for his willingness to explain exactly how he accomplished them. He assured me the skids had been greased at the Iraqi border: Getting across would be no problem. The seven-hour drive to the border went uneventfully. Then, at the little Iraqi town of Rutba, adventure met Saddam Hussein–era reality. The skids, it turned out, had not been greased. An unamused security official rejected my paperwork and ordered me to remain in the truck while he consulted with his superiors in Baghdad.
I spent a cold, sleepless night in the cab of the truck, incapable (in that pre-cellphone age) of communicating my predicament to my colleagues in Amman or Baghdad, and increasingly worried that my diplomatic career would not survive its first year. At first light, an Iraqi officer informed me that I’d be proceeding to Baghdad under police escort. He allowed me one brief phone call from the local post office to the on-duty Marine security guard at Embassy Amman. I explained what had happened, and he was able to convey to my colleagues in Baghdad the circumstances of my delay.
With a dour policeman who introduced himself as Abu Ahmed beside me, I began the long drive through many of the dusty towns of Anbar Province that America’s Iraq wars would make all too well known—Ramadi, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib. My travel partner had an unnerving habit of idly spinning the chamber on his revolver as we drove along the rutted highway. At one point he pulled out a popular regional tabloid with the cast of Charlie’s Angels on the cover. “Do all American women look like this?” he asked.
As the late afternoon sun was beginning to fade, we stopped for gas and tea at a ramshackle rest stop run by two of his brothers, just outside Fallujah, his hometown. As we sipped our tea, sitting on wobbly plastic chairs, Abu Ahmed’s nieces and nephews appeared to see the exotic American. I’ve always wondered what happened to them over the tumultuous decades that followed.
Abu Ahmed and I, weary and running out of things to talk about, finally arrived at a large police compound on the northwestern outskirts of Baghdad in early evening. I was relieved to see an American colleague waiting for me; I was less relieved to learn that the Iraqis refused to accept our customs documents and insisted on confiscating the truck and its cargo. There was nothing particularly sensitive in the truck, but losing a dozen computers, portable phones, and other office and communication equipment was an expensive proposition for a State Department always strapped for resources. We protested, but got nowhere.
My colleague made clear that he’d take this up with the Foreign Ministry, which elicited barely a shrug from the police. Now separated from the truck and released by the police, I went back to our modest diplomatic facility and told my story over a few beers. The next day, I flew back to Amman. As far as I know, neither our truck nor our equipment was ever returned.
A LIFE IN diplomacy seems more natural in retrospect than it did when I was stumbling along from Amman to Baghdad all those years ago, learning my first lesson in professional humility. But public service was already in my blood. I grew up as an Army brat, the product of an itinerant military childhood that took my family from one end of the United States to the other, with a dozen moves and three high schools by the time I was seventeen.
My father and namesake, William F. Burns, fought in Vietnam in the 1960s and eventually became a two-star general and the director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was an exemplary leader, thoughtful and exacting, someone whose high standards and model of public service I always wanted to approach. “Nothing can make you prouder,” he once wrote to me, “than serving your country with honor.” His was a generation accustomed to taking American leadership in the world seriously; he knew firsthand the dangers of ill-considered military conflicts, and what diplomacy could achieve in high-stakes negotiations. My mother, Peggy, was the devoted heart of our family. Her love and selflessness made all those cross-country moves manageable, and held us all together. Like my dad, she grew up in Philadelphia. They met in the chaste confines of a Catholic high school dance—with nuns wielding rulers to enforce “six inches for the Holy Spirit” between them—and built a happy life shaped by faith, family, and hard work.
Making our close-knit Irish Catholic family whole were my three brothers: Jack, Bob, and Mark. As in many Army families, constantly bouncing from post to post, we became one another’s best friends. We shared a love of sports across seasons and places, and looked out for one another on all those first days in new schools.
My upbringing bore little resemblance to the caricature of the cosmopolitan, blue-blooded foreign service officer. Through the years, however, a few useful diplomatic qualities began to emerge in faint outline. Because we moved so often, I became adaptable, constantly (and sometimes painfully) adjusting to new environments. I grew curious about new places and people, increasingly accustomed to trying to put myself in their shoes and understand their perspectives and predispositions. I developed a detachment about people and events, an ability to stand back and observe and empathize, but also a reluctance—born of many departures—to get too close or too invested. I also came to know my own country well, with a feel for its physical expanse and beauty, as well as its diversity and bustling possibility. I grew up with not only an abiding respect for the American military and the rhythms of Army life, but a vaguely formed interest of my own in public service.
In 1973, I went to La Salle College on an academic scholarship, my dreams of a basketball scholarship long since surrendered to the hard realities of limited talent. A small liberal arts school run by the Christian Brothers in a rough neighborhood in North Philadelphia, La Salle offered a valuable education inside and outside the classroom. It was then a school with lots of first-generation college students, mostly commuters, who worked hard to earn their tuition, took nothing for granted, and prided themselves on puncturing pretension. La Salle, like Philadelphia in the 1970s, was not for the faint of heart.
The summer after my freshman year, I spent three months in Egypt with one of my best high school friends, Conrad Eilts, and his family. Conrad’s father, Hermann F. Eilts, had become the American ambassador to Egypt when the United States restored diplomatic relations after the October 1973 war. An astute diplomat of the old school, Eilts was full of initiative and had a sure grasp of the region.
For a raw and untutored eighteen-year-old, that summer in Egypt was a revelation. It was my first time outside the United States since I was a preschooler at an Army post in Germany. It was also my first time in the Arab world, and I was entranced by the scents and sounds, the commotion of the souk, and the rich intonations of Arabic. Conrad and I roamed across Cairo, then mostly barren of tourists and bursting with street life and the endless cacophony of its traffic. One night after midnight, we eluded narcoleptic Ministry of Antiquities security guards and a pack of wild dogs and scrambled in pitch darkness partway up the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza, looking out across Cairo’s skyline until dawn began to break. We traveled to Luxor and Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt, and to the Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert, not far from the great World War II battlefield at El Alamein. It was the kind of adventure I could only dream about during previous summers bagging groceries in the Army commissary.
Later that summer, we went with Ambassador Eilts to visit President Anwar Sadat at his retreat in Mersa Matruh, on the Mediterranean coast west of Alexandria. While the ambassador met in private with Sadat, we swam in the warm blue sea, surrounded by the president’s massive bodyguards. We then had a casual lunch on the veranda of Sadat’s modest seaside home, with the president and his family all still in their swimsuits. Sadat was the picture of relaxation, puffing on his pipe and describing in his deep baritone his hopes for further steps toward peace with Israel. It was my first taste of the Middle East, and of American diplomacy, and I was already getting hooked.
During my senior year at La Salle, I won a Marshall Scholarship to study for three years at Oxford University. No one from La Salle had ever won a Marshall before, and I had applied with no expectations and minimal effort. Established by the British government in the early 1950s to commemorate the generosity of the Marshall Plan, the program gave thirty Americans each year a chance to study in the United Kingdom. The Marshall opened my eyes to a new, and initially intimidating, world of possibility. I felt out of my depth, surrounded by what seemed to me to be more worldly Ivy Leaguers, and out of place on Oxford’s storied quadrangles.
From my base at St. John’s College, I pursued a master’s degree, and eventually a doctorate, in international relations. My supervisor in the master’s program was an Australian academic named Hedley Bull. With a dry, self-deprecating wit and considerable patience for unformed young minds like mine, Bull was a superb intellectual guide. History was the key to understanding international relations, he insisted, and leaders most often erred when they thought they were immune to its lessons. His book The Anarchical Society remains as clear and compelling a framework for thinking about international order as I have ever read. Bull’s thesis was straightforward: Even in a Hobbesian world, sovereign states have a self-interest in developing rules and institutions to help shape their interactions and enhance their chances for security and prosperity.
“You Americans,” Bull told me at one of our weekly tutorials, “tend to be impatient about the world’s imperfections, and convinced that every problem has a solution.”
I asked what was so wrong with that.
“Nothing, really,” he said. “I admire American ingenuity. But diplomacy is more often about managing problems than solving them.”
I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the use of economic aid as an instrument of American policy toward Egypt in the Nasser era. The core argument was that economic assistance could reinforce areas of shared purpose, but it rarely had much effectiveness as a “stick” to alter fundamentally policies where no such common ground existed. Withdrawing aid for the Aswan Dam project, or American food aid, would not compel Egypt to abandon ties with the Soviets; it would more likely harden Egyptian defiance. Hardly a groundbreaking insight, but one that successive U.S. administrations would have to learn and relearn.
Beyond academics, Oxford was rarely dull. Grittier than its dreaming college spires might suggest, it was caught up in all the early turmoil of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, with angry labor unrest at the Cowley motor works on the eastern edge of town, and protests in support of Provisional Irish Republican Army hunger strikers on a square across from St. John’s. I played on the university basketball team, and traveled widely around Europe and the Middle East during long vacation periods. Those years were a chance to see my own country through the eyes of others, and I soon discovered a genuine sense of pride and satisfaction in trying to explain America to them. That was not easy in the late 1970s, with Vietnam and Watergate still weighing heavily on American society and our image abroad.
Shortly after Iranian militants took American diplomats hostage in Tehran in November 1979, I took the train down to London to sit for the written portion of the Foreign Service exam at the old U.S. embassy on Grosvenor Square. A fellow American graduate student at Oxford had mentioned casually that fall that he planned to take the test, and encouraged me to come along. I wasn’t yet convinced that diplomacy was the profession for me, nor was I sure that the State Department would think I had much to offer as a diplomat. But my experience in Cairo several years before, my admiration for my father’s public service, and my curiosity about other societies and life abroad all made me want to give it a try. To my relief, the exam was straightforward—a combination of general knowledge questions, American civics, and geography 101.
I was thrilled to pass and later to navigate successfully the more nerve-racking oral exam with a trio of grim-faced officials. “What’s the biggest challenge in American foreign policy today?” one asked. “I think it’s us,” I replied. Then, channeling my inner Hedley Bull, I explained, “After Vietnam, we have to do a better job of understanding which problems we can solve, and which we can manage.” I cited Jimmy Carter’s success in the Panama Canal Treaty and in the Camp David negotiations with Egypt and Israel as examples of the former, and grinding Cold War competition with the Soviets as an illustration of the latter. The examiners looked a little bored, and more than a little skeptical, but a few weeks later I got a formal letter of acceptance.
IN EARLY JANUARY 1982, I showed up to Foreign Service orientation in a dreary office building across the Potomac River from the State Department. I was seated alphabetically next to Lisa Carty—a tall, lovely New Yorker whose easygoing charm, kindness, and good humor soon captivated me. Lisa and I fell in love at a pace wholly out of character with our two relatively careful personalities, and would be married two years later.
The Foreign Service of the early 1980s was still a relatively small, somewhat insular institution, with about 5,500 officers staffing some 230 embassies and consulates overseas and a variety of Washington positions. Its “pale, male, Yale” reputation was well earned. At the time, nine out of ten foreign service officers were white, and fewer than one in four were women. It had only been a decade since married women and women with children were allowed into the service and since annual performance reviews stopped evaluating the “hostess skills” of wives. Homosexuality was no longer a basis for denial of employment, but it wasn’t until 1995 that President Clinton banned the government from denying security clearances on grounds of sexual orientation.
Alexander Haig was secretary of state, the first of ten secretaries under whom I would serve. President Reagan had launched a massive military modernization program, part of an effort to reassert American purpose and influence in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Iranian Revolution that same year. Conflicts in Central America transfixed official Washington, part of a wider contest with a Soviet Union that no one imagined was already in the last decade of its existence. Meanwhile, China’s economic transformation was quietly gathering momentum, with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms producing double-digit growth. It was a moment of turbulence and uncertainty across the globe—and a genuinely exciting time for a twenty-five-year-old just embarking on a diplomatic life.
The training course for new FSOs, known in bureaucratic jargon as “A-100,” was about seven weeks long, though at times it felt interminable. It featured a procession of enervating speakers describing their islands in the great American policymaking archipelago, and offering primers on how embassies functioned and the foreign policy process worked.
By the end of the training period, I had learned more about administrative rules and regulations than I had about the nuances of diplomatic tradecraft. I was struck, however, by the expansive mandate of the profession. On any given day in any given country, diplomats were keeping a watchful eye on American citizens living and working in the country, encouraging local citizens to come visit and study in the United States, and building a wide range of contacts inside and outside government to explain and inform American policy.
Our class of entering officers was a wonderful, eclectic mix. Lisa and I were among the youngest in the group. The average age was thirty-two, with a former Jesuit priest in his mid-fifties at the far end of the actuarial scale. There were former Peace Corps volunteers and military veterans, a couple of high school teachers, and at least one failed rock musician.
With a princely annual salary of $21,000, an intriguing professional future, and a budding romance, I couldn’t have been more content. In the last week of the A-100 course, we were given our first assignments. Mine was Amman, Jordan. I was delighted, given my exciting foray into the Arab world several years before, and the inevitable policy swirl of the region. Lisa had volunteered to go to Burkina Faso, which reflected her lifelong passion for development issues and made her very popular in the class, since no one else was too enthusiastic about the lifestyle awaiting them in Ouagadougou. In the perverse wisdom of the State Department, Lisa was assigned instead to Singapore. We dreaded our impending separation but knew it would be a fact of life in the Foreign Service. We got engaged before Lisa departed for Asia in late spring, leaving me to fend for myself for six months as an Arabic-language student in Washington.
Before I left for the Middle East, I wrote to Albert Hourani, the chief examiner for my Oxford doctorate and a brilliant scholar of the Arab world, to tell him where I had been posted. He replied warmly, noting that he had always found Jordan “a little quiet and unremarkable culturally, but interesting politically.” He added that he had just agreed to provide academic supervision to King Hussein’s oldest son, Prince Abdullah, who would be at Oxford in the coming year. While Hourani’s note didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, Jordan and Abdullah would play a large part in the career I was just beginning.
AMMAN WAS DUSTY and nondescript in the early 1980s, a city of about a million people sprawled across a series of rocky hills and valleys on the central Jordanian plateau. When I arrived, King Hussein had been on the throne for thirty years, and had survived numerous assassination attempts. Jordan occupied a precarious perch in the region, surrounded by conflicts and sitting atop simmering tensions between the stubborn, clannish East Bank minority that dominated Jordanian politics and a Palestinian-origin majority harboring no shortage of resentments. Starved of natural resources, Jordan was heavily dependent on outside financial help and remittances from the Gulf.
As an introduction to Middle East politics and diplomacy, Jordan was especially well situated, at the crossroads of most of the major problems in the region—from the Lebanese civil war in the north, to the Iran-Iraq conflict in the east, and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the west. The American embassy itself was just the right size for a new FSO, big and central enough to provide exposure to a whole range of issues and professional challenges, but not so big that a junior officer would easily get lost in the machinery.
Dick Viets was the ambassador, a skilled and sophisticated diplomat, straight out of central casting with his white mane and ever-present pipe. Unlike most U.S. ambassadors in the Arab world, Viets had served in Israel, and had wide experience outside the Middle East, including in South Asia and as an aide to Henry Kissinger. He had a close and effective relationship with King Hussein, and a willingness to speak his mind to Washington. Viets’s deputy, Ed Djerejian, and political counselor, Jim Collins, became lifelong mentors.
I spent my first year in Amman in the consular section, as was customary for new officers, no matter what their later specialties might be. My first boss was Lincoln Benedicto, who had spent time before the Foreign Service as a youth counselor in some of Philadelphia’s toughest neighborhoods. He was a good manager with a razor-sharp sense for people who were trying to game the system, whether visa applicants or Americans down on their luck overseas. The Jordanian employees who staffed the consular section were a huge asset, an early demonstration for me of the critical role that foreign service nationals play at American diplomatic posts around the world. They were our trusted eyes and ears, patient guides, and the one thread of continuity of knowledge, expertise, and contacts as officers came and went.
I was not a stellar visa officer. I spent too much time practicing my Arabic in interviews with Bedouin sheikhs, and not enough time processing the endless stream of paperwork and visa applications that came with the job. I never particularly enjoyed my quarterly visits to the few young Americans imprisoned for drug offenses; Jordanian prisons were hard places, and there wasn’t much I could do other than talk and try to offer a little bit of hope. My consular responsibilities gave me chances to travel outside Amman, however, and I eagerly sought out tasks that would get me on the road.
I persuaded Lincoln to let me spend two weeks with the Howeitat tribe in southern Jordan, ostensibly to improve my Arabic. By the early 1980s, the Bedouin spent more time in small pickup trucks than on camelback, although camels were still the ornery heart of their daily existence. Smuggling everything from cigarettes to televisions back and forth across the Saudi border was a primary, if not publicly advertised, income stream. I was kept at a polite remove from those activities, and spent most of my time testing the patience of local tribesmen with my grammatically challenged Arabic. Nearly every member of the Howeitat I encountered claimed to have played a prominent role in the filming of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia two decades before. Set in the stark beauty of Wadi Rum and the Jordanian desert beyond the tiny port of Aqaba, the movie starred Peter O’Toole as Lawrence and Anthony Quinn as the great Howeitat tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi. The Howeitat were not quite as cinematic in person as the Anthony Quinn version, but my brief experience in their midst opened my eyes to the ways in which tradition and modernity were colliding across the Arab world, setting off disruptions that continue to reverberate.
In the summer of 1983, I moved to the political section, the part of the embassy charged with analyzing Jordan’s domestic situation and foreign policy, and building contacts with key officials and political players. We were busy but happy, dealing with a steady stream of Washington visitors, keeping up with an active ambassador, and grappling with lots of interesting regional and domestic issues. Donald Rumsfeld, briefly the Reagan administration’s Middle East envoy, swept through Amman a couple times that year, supremely confident but unfettered by much knowledge of the region. The wider regional landscape remained perilous, with the bombing of our embassy in Beirut in the spring of 1983 a terrible reminder of the increasing risks that American diplomats faced. The horrific attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that October, in which 241 Marines were killed, reinforced the challenge.
Amman was hardly immune from those threats. In addition to periodic assassinations and attacks against Jordanian targets, our embassy warehouse was bombed, and a small car bomb was set off one weekday afternoon in the parking lot of the InterContinental Hotel across the street from the embassy. When I walked over afterward with one of our security officers to talk to the Jordanian police and intelligence officials who were investigating, a second car bomb was discovered, and fortunately defused. It had been set to go off some time after the first one, precisely to hit the crowd of officials and onlookers who would naturally gather. It was the first, but not the last, time that I was luckier than I was smart.
That set of events produced understandable alarm. The embassy was an old, cramped stone building, on one of Amman’s main streets. With no obvious alternative locations in the short term, the decision was made to put up a sandbag wall in front of the building, two stories tall and six feet thick. The barrier was reassuring, if unphotogenic—until it collapsed after one of Jordan’s rare rainstorms, transforming the entrance into a man-made beach.
My responsibilities in the political section were mainly to cover domestic politics, and to try to expand the embassy’s relationships beyond our traditional palace and political elite sources. I worked methodically at that task, talking discreetly to Islamist politicians and Palestinian activists in Jordan’s refugee camps. I wrote profiles of next-generation leaders and explored the politics of some of the major towns and cities, including Zarqa, the sprawling urban area just east of Amman, in which disenfranchised Palestinians and disgruntled East Bankers mixed uneasily (and from which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, would later emerge). In the spring of 1984, I covered the first parliamentary elections in nearly two decades—a cautious effort by King Hussein to let off some of the political steam that was building as economic conditions stagnated.
Toward the end of my tenure in the political section, I wrote a cable in which I tried to distill what I had learned and what worried me about the future of Jordan and the wider Arab world. Entitled “The Changing Face of Jordanian Politics,” the cable began by noting that “the traditional system of power relationships which has underpinned the Hashemite regime for decades is beginning to buckle under increasing demographic, social, economic and political pressures.”1 By the end of the 1980s, 75 percent of Jordan’s population would be under the age of thirty. Well over half would be living in the urban stew of Amman and Zarqa, largely cut off from their social and political roots in Palestine and elsewhere on the East Bank. The educational system had its flaws, but remained one of the best in the Arab world; when combined with decreasing economic opportunities, the resultant expectations gap could prove combustible.
“As material gains become more difficult for a growing number of Jordanians to obtain,” I observed, “and as traditional social and political ties begin to fray, disaffected citizens are likely to turn increasingly to the political system for redress of their grievances. What they will probably find is a generally anachronistic and unresponsive structure, riddled with corruption, the preserve of a powerful but steadily diminishing proportion of the population intent upon shielding its power and wealth from interlopers. It is a system based on the fading realities of a bygone era, a time when East Bank tribal balance was the stuff of which political stability was made.”
King Hussein’s intuitive skill and personal grip on the imaginations of most Jordanians were significant brakes on serious instability. But the broad challenge, not just for Jordan but for the rest of the Arab world, was that meeting the demands for dignity and opportunity of the next generation, and the one beyond that, would eventually require greater agility and commitment to modernize creaky economic and political systems. Jordan under King Hussein and later King Abdullah would be better placed than most to cope, but it was not hard to anticipate many of the pressures that would eventually bubble over.
LATE IN THE summer of 1984, I returned to Washington for my next assignment. Lisa and I had been married earlier that year, and it was far easier for us both to find jobs in Washington than at a single overseas post. In what is a rite of passage for new officers learning the byzantine ways of the State Department bureaucracy, I took on a position as a staff assistant in the Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs. Lisa took a similar position in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
The Near East Bureau, or NEA, was in that era a proud, intense, and slightly inbred place. As one senior colleague put it to me on my first day on the job, it was a place where “three simultaneous wars are considered average.” It was known as the “Mother Bureau” for its reputation for skillfully shepherding Arabists along their career paths, and for setting the standard among State’s other regional bureaus for professionalism under pressure. Led by Assistant Secretary of State Dick Murphy, the bureau worked at a frantic pace, coping with constant crises in the region and congressional scrutiny at home. Murphy was a consummate gentleman and a wise professional, steeped in the perils and personalities of the Arab world.
My partner in the staff assistants’ office during most of that year was David Satterfield. I always felt a little inadequate around David, who had immense facility in the arcane policy issues that bedeviled the bureau, bottomless energy, and a capacity to speak in crisp, precise talking points about any issue at any time. Our role in those low-tech days was basically to serve as the organizational hub for the bureau’s policy work. We conveyed taskings from the secretary’s office, reviewed and filtered the cables coming in from overseas posts, and made sure that Murphy was well prepared for his relentless schedule of meetings and trips. One of us would come in every morning at six to prepare a one- or two-page summary of overnight developments for Murphy’s use in Secretary of State George Shultz’s daily staff meeting. Given NEA’s pace, we’d rarely get out of the office before nine or ten at night.
One of us would also accompany Murphy on his frequent overseas trips—shuttling between capitals, cultivating relationships, managing crises, and pushing large policy rocks up steep hills. The Middle East had its share of Sisyphean tasks. The bitter aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon a couple years earlier still consumed much of NEA’s attention. Meanwhile, the grueling conflict between Iran and Iraq dragged on, with Washington quietly putting its thumb on the scale to support Saddam’s Iraq. The familiar struggle to revive Arab-Israeli peace talks remained a priority, although as was so often the case it was a function more of aspiration than on-the-ground realities.
George Shultz’s reliance on professionals like Dick Murphy, along with his own impressive integrity and intellect, won him many admirers in the department. Shultz was a firm believer in the importance of “tending the garden” in diplomacy, and expected Murphy to spend considerable time on the road, even when particular policy goals were so obviously elusive. One evening in the fall of 1984, I was walking with Murphy along the long wood-paneled corridor that runs down the middle of the seventh floor of the State Department, where the office of the secretary is located. Shultz appeared in the hallway outside his office as we walked past, and asked Murphy when he was heading back to the Middle East. Murphy replied that he had a number of commitments in Washington, including upcoming congressional testimony, and wasn’t sure when he’d travel next. Shultz smiled and said, “I hope you can get back out there soon. It’s important to keep stirring the pot.”
The result of that conversation was a marathon trip, which stretched from North Africa to South Asia, and kept us on the road for nearly five weeks. My role was a mix of logistician and policy aide. Much of the trip involved shuttling between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, as Murphy tried to broker a deal that would allow Israeli forces to withdraw from Lebanon, with Syrian forces not advancing southward beyond their positions in the Beqaa Valley. It was fascinating to watch him try to move the immovable Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, who loved to filibuster with long soliloquies on Syrian history since the Crusades. Lebanese politicians, with deep-rooted survival instincts and an endless capacity for backbiting, were maddeningly entertaining. Israel’s national unity government was frequently paralytic, with its two leaders and rotating prime ministers, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, almost as suspicious of each other as they were of their Arab neighbors.
Nevertheless, Murphy somehow managed to maneuver the parties toward a slightly more stable disposition of forces, with the Israelis pulling back by the early summer of 1985 to a several-mile-wide “security zone” along Lebanon’s southern border. Murphy’s formula was equal parts persistence and ingenuity, steadily pressing for small practical steps, using American leverage carefully, and always conscious that this was another problem to be managed before it could ever be solved. As I was learning, diplomatic triumphs are almost always at the margins.
On that trip and several subsequent efforts over the next few months, Murphy worked hard to restart Arab-Israeli talks. Negotiations never materialized. Yasser Arafat was as hard to pin down as ever; King Hussein lost whatever patience he had for Palestinian machinations; and the Israeli side was immobile, with Shamir uninterested in negotiations over territory with anyone, and Peres interested only in negotiations with Hussein, without the headaches of Palestinian representatives and their desire for an independent state.
Iraq, then five years into its horrific war with Iran, was a particularly memorable stop. Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s urbane and faintly menacing foreign minister, hosted Murphy for a long lunch of masgouf, the famous Iraqi fish dish. Aziz’s security detail cleared a well-known restaurant on the Tigris of its patrons for the afternoon. Seated at an outdoor table overlooking the river, we could see Iraqi guards fanning out around the building, pistols drawn. The restaurant staff affected an air of normalcy, exchanging whispers about who these evidently important foreigners were. Puffing on a big Cuban cigar, Aziz professed great optimism about Iraq’s prospects on the battlefield, and waxed poetic about the future of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Murphy was unimpressed. As down-to-earth as Aziz was full of mobster charm, Murphy smiled as we walked out of the restaurant and said, “He kind of reminds you of Al Capone, doesn’t he?” I learned a lot about diplomacy from Dick Murphy, although I had no idea then that fifteen years later I’d wind up sitting in his office, not just emptying his outbox.
Near the end of my assignment, I was asked by Deputy Secretary John Whitehead’s chief of staff if I’d be interested in becoming one of Whitehead’s two special assistants. He thought my experience in NEA would serve me well in the stressful world of the seventh floor, where the department’s senior leadership wrestled with the problems that couldn’t be solved at lower levels. I spent the next year trying not to prove him wrong.
Whitehead had just become George Shultz’s deputy, after a remarkable career that had taken him from the U.S. Navy and the D-Day invasion to the top of Goldman Sachs. Self-assured and thoroughly decent, Whitehead shared Shultz’s faith in the State Department, although he was always a bit bemused by the difficulty of getting things done quickly, or at least as quickly as he had become accustomed to at Goldman.
My first day on Whitehead’s staff was very nearly my last. He was an avid art collector, and had placed an original Degas ballerina miniature on the edge of his large desk. On my first morning, I walked in quietly and put a folder in the inbox, only to accidentally knock the Degas off the desk and onto the floor. Fortunately, the oriental carpet was thick, the ballerina bounced undamaged, and the deputy secretary resumed his reading with only a mild grimace in my direction.
The rest of my tour went more smoothly. My new position gave me a wide perspective on how the department worked, across the whole range of policy issues and bureaus. Whitehead took a special interest in economic issues, and played an important role in helping to open up East European economies as the Cold War was ending and the Soviet bloc was crumbling. I accompanied him on a variety of trips, from Europe to the Middle East and Africa. He helped manage the difficult aftermath of the Achille Lauro attack in the fall of 1985, when Palestinian terrorists murdered a wheelchair-bound American on a hijacked Italian cruise ship. He also took the lead in mobilizing European support for sanctions against Libya in the spring of 1986, after Muammar al-Qaddafi’s agents struck a disco in West Berlin and killed several U.S. servicemen. Although himself a skeptic about the efficacy of economic sanctions, Whitehead was a skillful advocate, and his efforts in the mid-1980s laid the groundwork for a sanctions regime that two decades later helped persuade Qaddafi to abandon terrorism.
MY RUN OF professional good fortune continued in the summer of 1986, when I was assigned to the National Security Council’s Near East and South Asia directorate, a four-person office covering Morocco to Bangladesh.
My new office was in room 3611⁄2 in the Old Executive Office Building, the elaborate structure next to the White House, which until World War II had housed the entire staffs of the State, War, and Navy departments. Whenever I got a little too full of myself, walking with my White House badge along the long, high-ceilinged corridors of the building or across West Executive Avenue for meetings in the White House, my ego would come right down to earth when I returned to my office. Room 3611⁄2 was a converted women’s bathroom, the size of a walk-in closet, with exposed plumbing along the walls and a scent that served as a persistent reminder of the room’s previous function.
My boss was Dennis Ross, a smart, even-tempered thirty-eight-year-old Californian with an academic background in Soviet and Middle East studies. The Reagan administration was still scarred by its grim experience in Lebanon a few years before, groping unsuccessfully with various formulas for restarting Arab-Israeli negotiations, and anxious about revolutionary Iran. We were all stretched thin in the summer and fall of 1986, on an NSC staff whose core dysfunction was quickly apparent even to a young and inexperienced diplomat like me.
The modern NSC had grown out of the experience of the Kennedy administration, when McGeorge Bundy led twenty or so political appointees and career professionals from State, Defense, and the intelligence community, organized in small regional and functional offices. The main tasks of the NSC staff, then as now, involved staffing the president for his foreign policy engagements; coordinating the preparation of options for presidential decision with the key cabinet agencies and ensuring that their views were clear, timely, and unfiltered; and carefully monitoring implementation. The role of the national security advisor and the NSC staff grew substantially under Richard Nixon, who drew on the brilliance and ruthless bureaucratic agility of Henry Kissinger to remake relations with China and the Soviet Union, with the White House staff serving not only as coordinator but also chief policy operator.
Ronald Reagan entered office in January 1981 committed to diminishing the role and reach of the NSC staff and reducing the tension between the NSC staff and cabinet principals that had continued during the Carter administration. Reagan went through national security advisors at a rapid clip. John Poindexter, a Navy admiral, became Reagan’s fourth NSC chief in four years at the end of 1985. A decent man with a nuclear engineer’s exacting intellect, Poindexter was badly miscast in the role. Uncomfortable dealing with Congress and the media, without personal or political connections to the president, not held in high regard by the leaderships of State, Defense, or the CIA, he inherited a staff with some bad habits and explosive secrets—which his own uncertain instincts and detached style proceeded to make worse.
The most dangerous of those secrets was a bizarre scheme that had begun earlier in 1985 as a clandestine effort by the NSC staff, working through a motley collection of Iranian and Israeli middlemen, to trade U.S. arms to Iran in exchange for the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon. Poindexter’s predecessor, Bud McFarlane, had championed the initiative, despite the long-standing U.S. policy against making concessions to terrorists. Beyond his interest in the return of American hostages, McFarlane saw the potential for a strategic opening to Iran, and contacts with “moderates” in Tehran. In May 1986, still engaged in the enterprise despite having handed over his post as national security advisor to Poindexter, McFarlane made a secret trip to Tehran with a small NSC staff team, in an unmarked Boeing 707 full of arms. The whole episode was the stuff of dark comedy, with McFarlane and his colleagues bearing a cake in the shape of a key to highlight their interest in an opening to Iran. No senior Iranians, let alone “moderates,” emerged to meet McFarlane. Tehran did, however, buy the arms. It also eventually engineered the release of several American hostages by their Hezbollah captors in Lebanon.
What turned this strange story into a full-blown scandal that nearly brought down the Reagan presidency was a further twist. Led by Oliver North, a Marine lieutenant colonel in the NSC staff’s political-military office, the White House had secretly diverted the proceeds of the arms sales to support the anti-Communist Contra forces in Nicaragua. Since Congress had formally forbidden the administration from funding the Contras, this was an illegal—and stunningly reckless—maneuver. Predictably, news of the arms-for-hostages effort leaked out in a Lebanese newspaper story in November 1986, and the Contra connection was soon exposed. Poindexter and North were gone by the end of the month.
As the Iran-Contra scandal unfolded, the NSC staff and the entire White House were in deep disarray. The president seemed stunned and adrift. Seeking a way out, he tasked a commission headed by Senator John Tower of Texas to investigate the role the NSC staff had played in the scandal and recommend reforms. The Tower Commission Report, issued in February 1987, was sharply critical of the president’s hands-off leadership style and the failings of the NSC, and advocated a long list of remedies. Frank Carlucci, a former career diplomat who had served as deputy director of the CIA and deputy secretary of defense, returned to government as Poindexter’s successor. He brought as his deputy Colin Powell, a charismatic forty-nine-year-old Army general. Powell and Carlucci employed the Tower Commission Report as their “owner’s manual,” and quickly set about overhauling the staff and its structure.
Two-thirds of my colleagues on the NSC staff were soon transferred or fired. An experienced senior diplomat, Bob Oakley, was appointed head of the Near East–South Asia office, with Dennis staying on as his deputy and me remaining at the bottom of the organizational chart. Carlucci and Powell streamlined the overall NSC staff, installed a general counsel to ensure rigorous legal and ethical compliance, and insisted on strict accountability. They worked hard to rebuild trust with Secretary Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, restored the NSC staff to its nonoperational, coordinating role, and set up a disciplined system of interagency meetings, built around a Senior Review Group of cabinet principals, which Carlucci chaired, and a Policy Review Group of their deputies, led by Powell. Together with White House chiefs of staff Howard Baker and Ken Duberstein, Carlucci and Powell helped save the Reagan presidency, rebuild public and congressional trust in the White House, and support a renewed diplomatic push by Shultz that produced some significant late Cold War gains.
Powell made a particularly strong impression on me, as effective and natural a leader as I had ever encountered. Having grown up in the world of the military, I knew the significance of “command presence,” and Powell personified the concept. Straightforward, demanding, and well organized, he was also warm and good-humored, with a ready smile and easy charm. His Policy Review Group meetings were precise and collegial. The departmental deputies never lacked for opportunities to lay out their views, but Powell made sure each session had a clear beginning, middle, and end—with a crisp statement of objectives, orderly discussion of options, and a concise summation of conclusions or recommendations to principals. For many meetings on Middle East issues, I’d write the talking points that Powell could draw on to guide the conversation. He always made them much more compelling.
Much of my work in 1987–88 revolved around the Persian Gulf, where the Iran-Iraq War ground on, and where our Gulf Arab allies remained deeply unsettled by the revelation of secret American overtures to a regime in Tehran that they despised and feared. The Gulf Arabs had still not recovered from the shock of the Iranian Revolution and all the uncertainties about American reliability that flowed from it. Every Iranian tactical advance in the war with Iraq sparked new worries.
Desperate to ward off the Iranians, the Iraqis had begun to attack Iranian oil tankers in the Gulf, trying to chip away at the resources that fueled the war effort. Since most Iraqi oil was exported by pipeline, and since it was hardly in Iran’s interest to try to close the Strait of Hormuz on which its own oil exports depended, Tehran retaliated by striking the tankers of Saddam’s Gulf Arab allies, especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The resultant “tanker war” added a new theater to the conflict, and Iran’s acquisition of Chinese-origin Silkworm antiship missiles threatened a rapid escalation. Late in 1986, the Kuwaitis approached both the United States and the Soviets for help in protecting their tankers, explicitly requesting that the United States “reflag” Kuwaiti-owned tankers—putting them under U.S. flag so that they would fall under the protection of the American Navy.
That touched off a series of complicated deliberations within the Reagan administration about how to respond. I joined Bob Oakley in weeks of Policy Review Group meetings, now chaired by John Negroponte. An accomplished diplomat, Negroponte succeeded Powell as deputy national security advisor in late 1987, when Powell took Carlucci’s place and Carlucci moved to the Pentagon to replace Weinberger as secretary of defense. There were obvious downsides to agreeing to reflagging, not least the danger of getting sucked into the tanker war. Neither State nor the Navy were wildly enthusiastic about the prospect. As Weinberger was departing, however, he had registered with Reagan his strong concern that ceding the opportunity to the Soviets would be a major setback for American interests. Moreover, the White House was anxious to rebuild credibility and trust with the Gulf Arabs, and to send a post-Iran-Contra signal of American resolve. The president formally announced U.S. willingness to reflag in May 1987, just after the Iraqis had “inadvertently” fired a missile at the USS Stark, killing thirty-seven Navy personnel. While the intelligence was murky, I’ve never been convinced that the attack on the Stark was entirely an accident, given Saddam’s interest in drawing the United States in and breaking the murderous stalemate with Iran.
The reflagging operation was conceived as a relatively low-key exercise, but that quickly proved wishful thinking. The Navy had only a handful of ships in the Gulf at the time, and had to make some major adjustments. It was short on minesweepers, and we had to drum up support from a number of European allies. The reflagging itself required endless legal gymnastics and interagency coordination. By late July, however, the United States was able to begin protecting eleven Kuwaiti tankers, now under U.S. flag, in convoys moving in and out of the Gulf. It didn’t take long, however, for other crises to emerge. In September, a U.S. helicopter fired on an Iranian vessel caught laying mines. The following month, the Iranians fired missiles at a U.S.-flagged tanker in Kuwaiti waters, and U.S. Navy destroyers shelled an Iranian offshore platform in response.
There was no letup in the first half of 1988, and I remember many late nights and early mornings in the White House Situation Room monitoring the latest collision. In April, the USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine, and ten sailors were injured. Two Iranian oil platforms and a number of Iranian naval vessels were destroyed in retaliation. Finally, in July, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian plane, killing 290 passengers and crew. It was a terrible tragedy, but reflected the mounting risks of conflict in the crowded waters and skies of the Gulf. In August, the Iranians finally agreed to a UN-brokered cease-fire with Iraq.
As tensions in the Gulf began to ease, my own role at NSC shifted unexpectedly. Dennis Ross left to serve as Vice President Bush’s chief foreign policy advisor in his 1988 presidential election campaign. Bob Oakley became our ambassador to Pakistan after the tragic death of his predecessor, Arnie Raphel. I assumed that Colin Powell would bring in a senior official to run the Near East office for the last six months of the administration, and was genuinely surprised when he asked me to take on the role of senior director and chief of the office. At thirty-two, and barely into the middle ranks of the Foreign Service, I was very junior for such a promotion. I went over to see Powell in his West Wing office and explained that I was appreciative of his confidence but thought he should find someone more experienced. I had even brought a few names to suggest. “I wouldn’t have asked you to do this if I wasn’t convinced that you could,” Powell replied evenly. I understood immediately that there was only one right answer, swallowed my self-doubt, and replied that I’d do my best to honor his trust. I walked back to the Old Executive Office Building unsure of how I’d handle the responsibility, but buoyed by his vote of confidence.
The remaining months of the Reagan administration were a blur. More crises inevitably erupted. In December 1988, a terrorist bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, along with 11 people in Lockerbie who were struck by debris. Initial suspicions focused on the Iranians, seeking revenge for the Vincennes shoot-down, or a Syrian-based Palestinian terror group. But the investigation eventually pointed toward Libyan responsibility, setting off another tortured chapter in relations with Qaddafi, and eventually in my own professional life.
A final episode in the Reagan administration’s efforts to promote Arab-Israeli peace occupied much of my last months at the NSC staff. Throughout the first half of 1988, against the unsettling backdrop of mounting violence in the West Bank, Secretary Shultz and Dick Murphy had labored doggedly to launch negotiations. The idea was that Jordan could represent Palestinian interests, and that there would be an “interlock” in the process whereby talks on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza would proceed even as discussions of transitional arrangements unfolded. The Shamir government in Israel was resistant—unwilling to concede much in the face of Palestinian violence. King Hussein was wary of exposing Jordan to more regional criticism and distrustful that Arafat would ever cede negotiating responsibility to Jordan. In July 1988, his frustration complete, the king publicly relinquished Jordanian legal and administrative ties to the West Bank, stating bluntly that the PLO now bore sole responsibility for negotiating Palestinian interests.
Since the mid-1970s, the United States had insisted that it would deal directly with the PLO only if it met three conditions: acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the land-for-peace formula for resolution of the conflict; an end to violence; and recognition of Israel’s right to exist. As King Hussein cut his ties to the West Bank, and nervous that new leaders might emerge that he could not control, Arafat began to probe the possibility of opening a dialogue with the United States. One private diplomatic track was opened by a Palestinian American activist close to the PLO chairman, and another initiative was championed by the Swedish foreign minister. A complicated dance ensued, with Arafat taking a series of steps that came close to the three American conditions, but didn’t quite meet them. The White House largely deferred to Shultz, who was adamant that the criteria could not be compromised. I stayed in close touch with Dick Murphy and his deputy, Dan Kurtzer, as they tried to nudge the intermediaries toward the finish line, and kept Powell carefully informed.
Not long after Vice President Bush’s sweeping victory in the presidential election in November, a significant complication developed. Arafat applied for a visa to come to the United Nations in New York at the end of the month. I thought there were powerful arguments to grant the visa, given U.S. obligations as host of the UN. But Secretary Shultz remained deeply concerned about PLO involvement in terrorism, and was determined to show Arafat that he would not bend until the three conditions for U.S. dialogue were met. The president and Powell deferred to Shultz, and Arafat was denied a visa. As Shultz anticipated, the denial did not slow PLO interest in opening a direct dialogue, and may have convinced Arafat that he couldn’t cut any corners.
By early December, Arafat was edging close to the mark. I joined Powell and Shultz and a few other aides for a meeting with President Reagan in the Oval Office to discuss next steps. Shultz argued persuasively that it was important to take yes for an answer if Arafat met the terms. This would be a service to President Bush, who would inherit a dialogue with the Palestinians, and not have to sacrifice any early political capital to bring it about. President Reagan readily agreed. “Let’s just make sure they stick to their end of the bargain,” he said.
On December 14, Arafat made a public statement in Geneva that matched the American criteria, and our ambassador in Tunis was authorized to begin a direct dialogue with PLO representatives. While we were still a long way from serious peace negotiations, it was a useful step forward. Both President Reagan’s foreign policy legacy and his place in history looked immeasurably better in December 1988 than they had two years before.
As the inauguration of President Bush approached in January 1989 and I prepared to return to the State Department after two and a half intense years at the White House, I realized how fortunate I had been, and how much I had learned. I wrote in my last personnel evaluation at the NSC staff that I now understood “how the policy process should work, and how it shouldn’t.” I had also begun to learn that the profession of a diplomat was only partially that of diplomacy; you had to know how to navigate politics and policymaking as well. My apprenticeship as a diplomat had been unusually rich and varied over less than seven years, with experience in an exceptional embassy and tours with two strong public servants at senior levels of the department, followed by a roller-coaster ride at the NSC staff that took me from the bizarre lows of Iran-Contra to heady responsibilities under Colin Powell. Now I was about to launch into a new and even more fascinating chapter, returning to the State Department as the Cold War ended and the world was transformed.