Ellen Sauerbrey was not a very gifted politician. After a stint in Maryland’s state legislature, she ran twice for the governor’s seat and lost twice. After that, she stopped running and started raising funds for George W. Bush. The sixty-eight-year-old’s reward from the president was not a sinecure ambassadorship in some obscure Caribbean nation but the reins of the Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration as assistant secretary of state.
She was nominated to replace Arthur Dewey, a decorated Vietnam War veteran with decades of experience in refugee and humanitarian affairs. As the head of the Refugees Bureau, she would oversee a $700-million-a-year operation to work with various organizations and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to establish and sustain refugee camps. She would also be entrusted with overseeing the US Refugee Admissions Program, which was still recovering from a total shutdown following the attacks of 9/11.
Not everyone was convinced of her qualifications.
On October 25, 2005, she went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a grilling by Democratic senators who considered her too inexperienced in humanitarian affairs to run the bureau. Senator Barbara Boxer led off: “I don’t think we see the requisite experience that we’ve seen in other nominees.”
Sauerbrey responded feebly, “I do have experience managing resources. I do have experience in managing people. I think these are highly transferable skills.”
Boxer: “I’m talking about a résumé for this job, not about the census or other things.”
Senator Barack Obama weighed in: “I think the concern here is just that the issues of refugee relief are a very specific and extraordinarily difficult task, and it doesn’t appear that this is an area where you have specific experience.”
The New York Times ran an editorial blasting the nomination: “Ms. Sauerbrey has no experience responding to major crises calling for international relief. . . . This is a post for an established expert in the field.”
The editorial board of the conservative Washington Times was among the few outposts urging her appointment, implying that the principal factor driving Democratic opposition was the mishandled Hurricane Katrina relief efforts under another inexperienced Bush appointee. “[I]n the wake of the Michael Brown debacle at FEMA, her critics want the Senate to think she’s an unqualified crony. In this case, the facts simply don’t bear it out.” The paper suggested that Sauerbrey was opposed for two reasons: that she was pro-life, and that she was an outsider who might disrupt the status quo: “The other possibility is that the career types might see in Mrs. Sauerbrey another John Bolton. Mrs. Sauerbrey is not a career diplomat or humanitarian-aid specialist; she lacks an establishment pedigree. Worst of all for them, she appears to have strong convictions—which, by the way, are shared by the president. If confirmed, she might upset business as usual in the way Mr. Bolton has at the United Nations.”
The White House, anticipating the Democrats’ objection, bypassed the confirmation process and installed her as a recess appointee in January 2006, a month before the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra and the start of a several-year miasma of ethnic cleansing and human displacement.
On the morning of February 11, 2007, I woke up with a sore neck and a restless mind, having slept poorly on a buddy’s couch in DC. Seven weeks after writing the op-ed about Yaghdan, I was now hours away from my first meeting with the Refugee Bureau at the State Department. I flicked on the TV and saw a crowd gathered by the old state capitol building in Springfield. “Illinois Senator Barack Obama to announce candidacy momentarily” pulsed at the bottom of the screen.
I printed out the list, watching page after page spool out with the names, phone numbers, photographs, and scans of badges that I had spent the past two months gathering. I was nervous. I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. Until now, I had kept myself busy with a strategy of gathering details. It was a simple-enough system, allowing me to put some emotional distance between stories of tortured and raped bodies and myself: find a phone number, enter it into column D.
But now I had to do something with these names, and I had no idea what to expect from the State Department. I stuffed the list into a manila envelope on which I wrote “DOS.” I walked through a biting chill toward Foggy Bottom and listened to my HELO playlist of clichéd Vietnam War songs, created partly in jest to listen to while I flew in Blackhawks and Chinooks. “The End,” “Paint It Black,” “Fortunate Son,” “All Along the Watchtower” all helped to drown out the thoughts racing through my mind.
At the entrance to the State Department, I was met by a woman who’d spent too many years in the dull light of federal buildings, her skin grayed and her voice hoarsened by what I assumed to be a lifetime of cigarette smoke. She forced a smile and escorted me through security and into a conference room in which four other officials from the Population, Refugees, and Migration Bureau were waiting.
I sized up the room. The black suits and gray dresses sitting across from me created a dynamic that seemed slightly adversarial. I felt uncomfortably young, not unlike during meetings with the command staff of the marines in Fallujah, which only made me more intent on being taken seriously.
The gray-skinned woman started out with a pro forma welcome to the State Department. I thanked them and started out earnestly:
“I have these names of our former colleagues, and have been gathering them so that we can help get them out of harm’s way. I know it’s difficult to track Iraqi employees of the US government, so I’ve spent the last two months contacting all of my former AID colleagues, and—”
“And how have you been doing that, Kirk?” the woman interjected. The others stared at me.
“How have I been communicating with them?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have the email addresses for a few of my former colleagues. But to figure out the complete list of colleagues, I used a former warden’s list to start identifying those I hadn’t accounted for—”
“But it’s my understanding that you’re no longer working for the US government?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So how do you have access to a warden’s list? Those are classified, aren’t they?”
A little missile of anger spiraled from one side of my brain to the other. I sat silently for a moment, gathered my thoughts, and then locked my eyes onto hers.
“Look, if this is going to be the tenor of our conversation here today, we’re not going to get very far. Warden’s lists are not classified, anyhow. I didn’t come to explain the mechanics of how I’m connecting with the Iraqis, but to see what you’re going to do to help them.”
“And we understand and appreciate your help with that, Kirk.” Patronizing drips splashed and puddled on their side of the table.
I pulled the envelope from my backpack and thunked it onto the table. The woman unsealed it and began to flip through the pages, pausing here and there, passing sections to other staffers. I watched in silence. I was wearing the only suit I owned, and noticed that I had tracked slush up the back of my pant legs. Time seemed to stretch into hours as I waited for someone to look up from my list and say something.
“Kirk, we are going to have to study this more closely. But we can tell you that we are looking into this issue and appreciate your help in bringing these names to us. If we can, we’d like to be in touch with you after we’ve had a chance to review things more thoroughly?”
“Yeah, fine.” I was itching to get out of there, tense and unsettled in their company. Was I just some kid that they were humoring on a slow day, or would they actually do something? Hoping to add a little pressure, I mentioned the meetings I’d scheduled with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and with staffers on Capitol Hill, who would all be eager to know what the State Department would do with my list.
After the meeting, I hurried to a café to write down my notes. As I transcribed their comments, it became clear that every answer had been a classic yes/no, a staple of USGspeak, which sounds good enough in the moment but never settles well. In the end, they had only taken the list and committed to “looking into it.” I had zero concrete information to report back to Iraqis on the list.
One point of our discussion was particularly irksome: due to confidentiality requirements, they explained, they wouldn’t be able to speak with me directly about the particulars of any cases. Was I really not to be trusted? After all, I was the one giving them the list, which was filled with information that the Iraqis had entrusted to me. Hadn’t I crossed some threshold of common sense whereby the State Department could tell me what, specifically, Yaghdan would need to do before he could find a safe haven?
The more I considered it, the more I realized what a brilliant policy it was, from a bureaucratic perspective: it allowed them to suggest that they were so concerned with protecting the vulnerable that they were unwilling to communicate with the person who brought them names of the vulnerable, so pure was their commitment to the integrity of the process. It also carried a not-so-subtle message to buzz off. Don’t poke around in our process, and let us do this our own way, at our own pace.
A few weeks before my trip to DC, the Washington Post Magazine ran a piece I wrote about coming to terms with my accident and failures in Fallujah. I had written it long before Yaghdan and the refugee crisis took over my life, in an attempt to make sense of the accident and the PTSD I’d struggled with back in West Chicago. After the story ran, I received a number of emails from veterans—private first class to general officer—who shared stories of their own freak accidents suffered upon their departure from Iraq or Afghanistan. More than a few tied themselves to their beds each night.
Even though it was not the primary subject of the essay, USAID did not come off particularly well, and no government agency wanted any Iraq-related press by that point. On the heels of my op-ed about the agency’s abandonment of Yaghdan, I guessed that some folks in the public affairs office were probably upset. When I was scheduling meetings for my trip down to Washington, I’d sent an email to an old boss of mine, a Bush political appointee, and proposed a lunch when I came down with the list. He called me shortly after receiving the note.
“Kirk, I gotta tell ya, your articles are not being very well received here at the agency.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not coming after the agency. You guys can’t do anything about the list anyway. This is a State and Homeland Security issue.”
“You know what you’re pushing here, Kirk; you’re dragging the nation back to the rooftop of Saigon! Have you considered that?”
The photograph from the final moments of the fall of Saigon in April 1975, where South Vietnamese employees clambered outside our embassy with the hope of boarding one of the departing helicopters, became the iconic image of the end of the war, printed in every high schooler’s history textbook for a generation. I laughed. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I wasn’t dragging any nation anywhere. I barely had my own life together. My aunt had needed to rent out my room in Brighton to help pay the bills, so I was now sleeping on a mattress by the water heater in the unfinished basement, where I’d dumped my box of LSAT prep books and law school admissions paperwork.
A couple hours after my meeting at State, I headed over to my old employer. I stared at the smiling pictures of Bush, Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and USAID Administrator Randall Tobias hanging in the lobby of the Ronald Reagan Building, and wondered how they were affixed to the marble wall. Velcro would make them easier to peel off after an election, I figured.
The Bush appointee called out my name from the other side of the security screeners and metal detectors. I traded my driver’s license for a “Visitor—Escort Required” name tag and gave him a half smile as I shook his hand.
“Welcome back to the agency, Kirk.”
He poked at my silence as we rode up the elevator. “Good trip so far?”
“Going okay. Interesting feeling being back here at AID.”
The doors opened, and he escorted me into the Legislative and Public Affairs Bureau. As we walked past the government-blue cubicles that I had last seen in the compound in Baghdad, I noticed my magazine piece resting on nearly every desk. On one desk, I spotted a heavily highlighted printout of my op-ed about Yaghdan. I felt the aggressive unease of an encircled animal as I followed him into his office.
He sat down opposite me and asked if I wanted any coffee. When I declined, he started off in an irritated tone: “So, Kirk, I saw in your bio in your magazine piece that you were working on a collection of stories about your time in Iraq, is that right?”
“Well, yeah, that’s one of the things I’m working on.”
“And do you plan on publishing any more of these?”
“Yeah, I’m hoping to.”
He furrowed his brow as though deep in reflection.
“See, here’s the thing, Kirk: I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to be publishing anything about your time there with USAID. I’m saying this as a friend, because I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble for violating any terms of your contract.”
His words dissolved like a pill into my bloodstream, the impact immediate.
“I worked for USAID, not the CIA. I never signed any gag order.”
He leaned over to a nearby chair, upon which sat a green binder. On its binding, I read “Kirk Johnson.” He flipped through what I recognized as my articles, past other pages that I couldn’t make out, and pulled out a few stapled pages of paper. He slid them across his desk to me.
“See, take a look at this contract language. It says right there, the section that talks about not speaking to the media or publishing anything without clearance from the agency.”
I looked at the contract and knew immediately that it was not mine. I pushed it back and forced a smile.
“This isn’t my contract. I never signed a gag order. Besides, I’m not even working for the agency anymore. I was never fired and never resigned; you guys just forgot about me after I walked out the window . . .”
He showed me his palms defensively and leaned back, away from the alpha stirring in me. I continued.
“I’m a little confused here. I told you I was coming in as a courtesy call to explain what I was doing with my list. And the first thing you do is bring up this contract?”
He recomposed and locked eyes with me.
“I’m telling you this as a friend. We’d hate to see your objectives torpedoed. What I thought would make sense is that you submit your future publications to us, just so we can have a look at it and maybe even help, before you actually publish them.”
I put my hands on my knees. “That’s not going to happen.”
He tried to change the tone of the conversation and asked, “Hey, can I see the list? Fill me in on what’s going on.”
I stared over his shoulder at a framed picture of the entire USAID Iraq staff in 2005, in the piazza of the compound. I had taken the picture during my first week in Baghdad. I pointed to it and said, perhaps melodramatically, “The list is right there, in that picture. I’m not showing it to anyone other than the principal actors in the resettlement bureaucracy.”
He looked over his shoulder at the picture. Half Iraqis, half Americans. There was Yaghdan, his modest smile concealed partly by a bushy mustache. Tona and Amina were off to his right. Of the Iraqis pictured, only a few remained with USAID.
“I’m not going to submit anything to you guys. If that’s a problem, then let’s see how it plays out. Subtract my medical bills, and I have about a thousand bucks left, and every other person in my family is a lawyer.”
He stared back at me, masking any reaction. I was getting too upset. I thought back to a trick I’d used during insufferable meetings at the palace in the Green Zone and imagined that I was arguing with a parrot perched atop a chair. I grinned and stood up. “I’m sorry we had this meeting. I’ve got somewhere else to be now.”
I shook his hand and motored out of the bureau, past my magazine pieces, past stacks of briefing books containing archives of my Iraq Daily Updates, past row after row of bureaucrats struggling to spit-shine USAID’s projects for an uninterested media and a yawning public.
The awareness of just how little I had to lose had fully dawned on me only when I had mentioned my bank account balance. It was strangely empowering. After all, what was the worst that could happen? That I fail again? That I move out of the basement and back home to West Chicago? It wouldn’t be great, but it still seemed trivial compared to what was filling my in-box each day.
I was waiting at the bank of elevators outside the Legislative and Public Affairs Bureau when the Bush appointee caught up with me.
“Let’s be in touch, okay?” he said in a hushed tone as he handed me his USAID business card. I didn’t understand why, since I already had his contact information.
“And look, if she gets in touch with you, make sure she gets on your list, okay?”
I glanced down at the card and saw the handwritten name of an Iraqi woman.
“Don’t worry, it’s not like I slept with her or anything. But try to get her help if she gets in touch with you.”
That evening, a friend in USAID forwarded me a press release in which Condoleezza Rice announced the creation of the Iraq Refugee and Internally Displaced Persons Task Force. Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky would lead the task force, “building on support already provided, to coordinate refugee and IDP assistance to the region and refugee resettlement. The task force will also draw on the Department of State’s multidisciplinary expertise to devise strategies for Iraqis at risk because of their work with the US government.”
I grasped for meaning in the sentences, but they evaded my best efforts as they fishtailed along: “The task force will focus the State Department’s coordination with other USG agencies, the UN, and other stakeholders. The work of the task force will also support the department’s participation in existing interagency processes run by the National Security Council.”
“Will focus . . . coordination . . . Will also support . . . participation.” Whoever drafted it had a mastery of the numbing potential of USGspeak.
Despite the vagueness, the task force was launched with one hard promise: in fiscal year 2007, already four months under way by that point, the United States government would admit seven thousand Iraqi refugees.
I ran the math in my head. In the first four months of the fiscal year, eight, nine, seventeen, and fifteen visas, respectively, had been granted to refugees from Iraq, for a total of forty-nine. I needed a calculator to get at the nut of the promise: for the next eight months, the State Department would have to issue an average of 870 visas each month—a 7,000 percent increase. This suggested an efficiency I had long since come to doubt.
Slouched in the back row of the Chinatown bus back to Boston, I tried to make sense of a stew of conflicting emotions. I was exhilarated by the brush with my old life—the life that I thought had ended when I fell out the window. I wasn’t navigating according to any master plan but by echolocation: after shouting about a problem, Iraqis shouted back, and now the government was talking.
But the promises were meaningless USGspeak. I had hoped to dump off the list at the State Department and move on, but I now worried that if I didn’t keep the pressure on them, it’d be forgotten, misplaced, used for scrap paper.
I thought about who might be able to help me. The Americans with whom I’d worked in Iraq cheered me on privately, but nobody else stepped forward in any public way because they were still working for the government. One State Department foreign service officer had created a separate Gmail account for the sole purpose of referring the name of an Iraqi colleague to my list. “I am weeping into my keyboard as I write this, with the hope that you can help him,” she wrote. When I wrote her back and asked why she felt the need to create a secret account, her response came in one line: “I can’t be seen writing you.”
But there was one person with whom I was emailing almost hourly, who seemed to be my only ally in turning the screws on the US government. I had devoured George Packer’s reporting for the New Yorker while in Iraq, reading his book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq over two sleepless nights on a sagging cot at the CMOC in Fallujah. I’d first emailed him years earlier, in 2004, seeking his advice on how to find a job in the reconstruction efforts, but we started talking regularly after he wrote an op-ed in the New Republic about the need to protect US-affiliated Iraqis. We traded each rumor or theory we uncovered about the Bush administration’s policy, and when he went to Iraq and Syria to investigate the crisis for the magazine, I introduced him to Yaghdan, Ziad, and several others. If Packer wrote about the list, there was no way the State Department could ignore it.