AT WORK I LANDED in an office full of introverts, so I felt right at home. There’s a joke at the State Department that you can always tell who the extroverts are when you meet them because they’ll stare at your shoes while they talk to you. I was happy to be in an office full of people who wanted to sit quietly in their offices and be an expert on some aspect of African politics and economics. My principal job was to follow the war in Darfur and Chad, and prepare in-depth analyses for the Secretary and other senior leaders.
I settled in to the job a little, but had made plans for a vacation trip to New Zealand; so in September I headed west. Just before I shut down my phone ahead of take-off from Dulles Airport, I got a text from my boss telling me that I had been selected for promotion in the Foreign Service.
I’m sure my promotion packet looked different than anyone else’s in the stack. It would have been filled with letters explaining what I was doing while I was away from the Foreign Service in Afghanistan and Darfur, my two Bronze Star Medal certificates from Afghanistan, and copies of Army Officer Efficiency Reports with big blocks of text blacked out because they were classified. I was number 53 of 53 officers selected that year, but in is in. I asked the flight attendant for a glass of champagne once we reached altitude.
Once I was back from vacation, one of my jobs was to support the President’s Special Envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios. He worked directly for the President, but sat in an office at the Department.
Natsios’s job was to design, coordinate, and implement U.S. policy towards Sudan. It can only be described as a shitty job. The U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus has four big horses: the Departments of State and Defense; the intelligence community, led by the Central Intelligence Agency; and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In theory, policy is coordinated by the White House—foreign policy in particular through the office of the National Security Advisor. But in fact, U.S. policy on Darfur at that time was a train wreck. Each of the foreign policy agencies had its own agenda and none of the leaders were willing to compromise very much or able to force another to do so.
The State Department was re-building its operational capacity in Sudan. In the years immediately prior to this, State had not staffed the embassy in Khartoum with American officials. The local staff worked in the building, the Americans—including the chief of mission—operated either from Nairobi or Cairo. Once they came back it took a while to get the operation up and running, to build relationships, and get back to normal. Although Secretary of State Powell stepped up and properly denounced what the Sudanese were doing in Darfur as genocide, that still didn’t force the hand of the White House or of the other agencies.
Across the river, Secretary Rumsfeld and his staff at the Pentagon were none too keen to get involved in a third ground war in a Muslim nation, especially one in Africa. I was told that the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs had set a strict limit on the number of military officers in Sudan—at five—and was briefed weekly on the situation there. Regardless of what State wanted, Rumsfeld and his team were determined to limit the requirements levied on the Department of Defense. At a public forum held at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum in August 2013, Michael Gerson, one of President George W. Bush’s senior advisors and speechwriters, called the Defense Department’s inaction on Darfur “near insubordination.”
Job One at the CIA was to capture and kill terrorists. The leadership at Langley took this seriously, of course, and since Osama Bin Laden had lived in Sudan for years, it made sense to talk to the Sudanese. But, this was where things got complicated. The Agency’s primary interest in Sudan lay in counter-terrorism operations—it’s important to note here that I knew nothing about that side of the mission because I wasn’t involved in them, and they were completely stove-piped. To those of us outside that lane, it felt like anything that wasn’t directly involved in forwarding the counter-terrorism mission wasn’t really important; therefore, Darfur wasn’t really important. Cooperation between the U.S. intelligence community and the Sudanese must have been pretty good because The New York Times reported that the CIA had flown Salah Gosh, the chief of Sudanese intel, back to the U.S. not long after Colin Powell had stated that the government of Sudan was committing genocide in Darfur. So much for continuity of policy across agencies.
The folks in the U.S. government who had the best relationships with the Sudanese in general were the development and relief experts at USAID. Their individual and organizational experience was based primarily on years of working Operation Lifeline Sudan, a relief operation run out of Uganda that supported the people of South Sudan during the generation-long, brutal and deadly civil war with the north. The good relations USAID officials had with the Sudanese were strictly with the southerners, though. As a matter of fact, once the embassy had been established in Khartoum the chief of mission wanted to consolidate all the staff in that city. But a few USAID officers refused to move from Nairobi. They claimed they wouldn’t move to Sudan unless they could live in Juba, the capital of the south.
The White House was supposed to be coordinating all of this, but never seemed able to do so. So Natsios—and his successor, Ambassador Richard Williamson—had to navigate this bureaucratic nightmare. I was their intelligence briefer and liaison to the intelligence community.
Part of Natsios’s strategy was to convince the Sudanese that he actually had a plan that could allow them to move forward with the already-agreed Comprehensive Peace Agreement between Khartoum and Juba, continue cooperating with the CIA on counter-terrorism, and yet would force them to stop killing their own citizens in Darfur. He called this “Plan B.” In a press briefing in November of 2006, Natsios laid out some deadlines for Sudan to meet, the goal being to allow a larger and more capable peacekeeping force into Darfur. He said that if the Sudanese didn’t comply, the U.S. would resort to Plan B. But he didn’t explain what Plan B was.
In fact, I was part of Plan B. Andrew asked DoD to send a few U.S. military officers to the Darfur border in Chad. The Defense Intelligence Agency complied, mobilized me for a few months, and sent me and four other officers to Chad. We were to look around, make assessments of the infrastructure—airfields, military bases, road networks, availability of fuel and water, etc.—with an eye to potentially launching a peacekeeping operation, a no-fly zone, or maybe even some sort of combat operation across the border into Darfur. So five U.S. colonels, all Africa specialists, traipsed around eastern Chad for a couple of weeks. One by one, the other colonels all left. I stayed for four months. This was when I was traveling around with the French lieutenant, and John Denver dropped in.
Chad was one of, if not the most, difficult operating environments I’d ever experienced. This was partly because, for most of my time there, I was operating singleton: out by myself, garnering what support I could from the UN or NGO aid workers, or the Chadian Army.
I had a Toyota pick-up truck provided for me by the embassy’s defense attaché, and I was using my personal laptop, because the ones from the embassy were all inoperative. I had a mobile and a satellite phone, and a diplomatic passport. It was great in some ways: I could go wherever I needed to whenever I could get there. But it was also pretty depressing being out there alone. I made some friends, including the NGO doctor I started dating. I traveled around the east following up on leads, meeting with Darfurian rebels who came across the border, tracking down reports of fighting along the border, incursions by Sudanese Janjaweit, skirmishes between Chadian Army and rebels, and ethnic violence. I wrote notes on my laptop and sent them to the defense attaché in Ndjamena via my personal Yahoo! account on a UN satellite email system that I waited in line with aid workers to use. This part of the work was a security officer’s nightmare. But we got the job done. Eventually, DIA sent me a modified commercial satellite uplink system so I was at least able to stay off the UN’s satellite system.
The work and the place were both fascinating. Chad has never really known a peaceful transition of power from one government to another. There is always some conflict brewing across the border in Darfur or the Central African Republic, and everyone in power seems to be related to everyone else in power. To top it off, now there is oil money.
I did about four months there reporting on the war, learning what I could about the Janjaweit, and keeping an eye on the Darfurian rebels who sought to consolidate their forces in and around the refugee camps. I was perhaps the most effective I had ever been at reporting. But in the end, that mission would bring about the end of my career.