The Secretary (33 page)

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On Wednesday morning in Astana, the Apology Tour, as we had dubbed the trip, was about
to enter full swing. The day started with a family photo of all the leaders attending
the summit. Hillary looked relaxed and chatted comfortably with those around her.
Almost none of them had escaped unscathed from the acerbic or humorous descriptions
by America’s diplomats. In the massive hall, the tall, lanky advance line officer
took one step forward to stand out of the crowd of photographers and cameramen. He
stood next to the exit and made eye contact with Clinton. She started walking toward
him. Her aides and Fred followed. Line officers always made sure something about them
stood out—a tie, a colorful handbag, something Clinton could spot so she could find
her way to her next appointment with no awkward wild hand waves and without ever looking
lost.

Every day, Huma briefed Clinton about the schedule. Hillary’s cordovan leather-bound
daily briefing book also contained the “truncated briefing checklists” with the detailed
scenarios of every event she was to attend, but the secretary didn’t devote much energy
trying to retain or worry about the details of the logistics, as long as she got the
big picture. Over the years, since her days as First Lady in Arkansas, she had learned
to turn off the part of her brain that asked, “Where do I go now?” or “Have we sorted
out lunch?” and “Where will I sit?” This was the only way she could devote her full
attention to the content and substance of an eighteen-hour day like this conference
in Astana, with eleven different events and a handful of one-on-ones.

Hillary trusted those around her and relied on them to help her glide through her
heavy schedule, and her easygoing social nature allowed her to manage herself on the
rare occasions when the system failed her for a few minutes. She rearranged people’s
positions for pictures, laughed at her own missteps, and filled in awkward silences
with shy activists or, in this case, world leaders with bruised egos.

International summits were an intense intellectual effort, juggling all the different
issues at the heart of the gathering and then the multitude of bilateral meetings
that counterparts always requested. At the yearly General Assembly at the UN, Clinton
participated on average in sixty meetings and events, multilateral or bilateral, alone
or with the president, over the course of about five days. It required an exceptional
level of mental multitasking to keep all the countries and their issues straight.
The OSCE was much smaller, but the list of bilateral meetings was growing, and no
matter what other pressing issues had to be resolved, every meeting would start with
the WikiLeaks talk. There was some guesswork involved as well: WikiLeaks was releasing
cables by dribs and drabs, and the State Department was not entirely certain of every
missive in Assange’s possession. Clinton kept some of her conversations very general,
careful not to draw attention to content that may never become public.

The secretary didn’t try to ignore the issue, pretend it didn’t matter, or reject
responsibility because the cable had been written by someone else during another administration.
This was a failure of America, and she was angry too. She tried as best she could
to explain the context of each cable, why it had been written, what was the background.
But mostly she tried to empathize with her interlocutors as a politician. I get it,
she would say. I know how you feel. I too have suffered slings and arrows. Russia’s
Sergei Lavrov waved WikiLeaks away; he just wanted to get down to business. In Moscow,
even ultranationalist Russians who loved to badmouth the United States were surprisingly
dismissive of the leak. The foreign minister of Kazakhstan was delighted to find out
he was important enough to be the subject of an American cable detailing his nightlife
and restaurant habits; he said it was great publicity. From Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili
to Britain’s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, Clinton diligently calmed upset egos
and gave reassurance about steady alliances.

After their private talks with Clinton, the ministers went away, somewhat appeased.
But one man wanted a public apology. Italy’s flamboyant prime minister Silvio Berlusconi
gave Hillary an impassioned presentation about how much he loved America and why it
was so painful for him to read the cables. He had brought her a gift: silk scarves
from Naples’s famous E. Marinella artisans. He told her about his father, who used
to take him to the cemetery to see the graves of American soldiers who had fought
and died to liberate Italy in World War II and how it had cemented his love for America.
Clinton was not exactly an admirer of the Italian leader as a person, with his reputation
for raunchy parties and allegations of sex with underage girls. But she felt bad for
Berlusconi the politician, who had been such an ally for the United States. I will
stand here with you, she told him. We will bring the cameras, and I will convey our
gratitude to Italy and to you personally for what you have done for our relationship.
An e-mail was sent around to the traveling press corps alerting us that Clinton was
about to make a statement. The camera crew, photographers, and a couple of reporters
hurried into the room.

“The United States highly values the relationship that we have with the prime minister
and with Italy,” said Clinton. “We have no better friend, we have no one who supports
the American policies as consistently as Prime Minister Berlusconi has, starting in
the Clinton administration, through the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration.”

We have no better friend—how many times did American officials say that about a country?
Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, India, the Philippines,
South Korea. A montage of statements by Obama and Clinton, and by all their predecessors,
praising different countries as America’s best friend, would be an entertaining comedy
sketch. And yet it was a sought-after mention that revealed each country’s neuroses
and insecurities. The publication of the cables seemed to have sent the world into
a tizzy, as people everywhere pored over them, eager to find out whether they had
made the cut and what America really thought of them in private. Were they in fact
America’s best friend?

Washingtonians are often mocked for what is called the “index read,” a quick scan
through the index to find one’s name. Find the relevant paragraphs, read them to determine
how you’re portrayed, maybe check the index for names of friends and see how they
come across, derive pleasure if you come out looking better. Don’t bother buying the
book if you’re not in the index.

WikiLeaks was the State Department’s “Unabridged Guide to the World: Our Relationship
with Every Country and Quirks of World Leaders.” The globe did a quick “index scan.”
Which country got the most mentions? Which came out most favorably? Which close ally
was actually being disparaged in diplomatic cables? What did American diplomats think
of this world leader? Countries kept a score board: they complained that their information
was being revealed and took comfort from the fact that their country was cited most
often.

Zauresh Batalova, the head of a local NGO in Astana, was waiting excitedly for a meeting
with Clinton when I asked her what she thought about the leak.

“The cables are a confirmation that America is still a global leader in geopolitical
affairs,” she told me. A simple but astute observation that made me wonder whether
any other country had diplomats sending cables from every single world capital. China?
Possibly. But America, whether in decline or not, clearly still had a finger in every
imaginable pie.

The reaction to the “dump” in different countries was also very telling of their national
personality. China blocked Internet access to anything WikiLeaks. The cables could
not be read by average Chinese citizens in a country where the media were tightly
controlled. The content would reveal too much about their government’s workings and
corrupt the minds of the people. In Pakistan, members of the cabinet angrily dismissed
the leaks as a conspiracy against the country and an attempt to undermine the political
and military leadership. A few days later, someone in Pakistan planted fake cables
in which American diplomats heaped praise over Pakistan’s military while attacking
India, describing its military as vain, egotistical, and genocidal. When the hoax
was revealed, some newspapers apologized quickly to their readers but others, like
the
Nation
, which had so shocked me during our visit to Pakistan with its rabid coverage, continued
for days to print articles about “India’s True Face.”

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On Thursday, we left our hotel in Astana at seven in the morning, driving through
deserted streets, white with snow. SAM was having trouble getting deiced, and our
departure was slightly delayed. We flew south to Kyrgyzstan. Clinton met the president,
gave a press conference, spent an hour with students in a town hall, greeted the U.S.
embassy staff, and then we went to Manas Air Base, where she shook hands with American
troops. We got back on the plane and flew another hour west to the warmer temperatures
and repression of Uzbekistan. We spent a few hours being stared at by menacing government
goons in black leather jackets who looked more Soviet than the Russians. Clinton sat
down with the local dictator Islam Karimov for one of those meetings where values
had lost out to national interest. The United States worried about relying too much
on Pakistan as a route in and out of Afghanistan. Uzbekistan bordered Afghanistan
too and provided an alternative—Hillary would have to pinch her nose. She would make
up for it by meeting with civil society representatives in the embassy. Four hours
after landing in Tashkent, SAM took us on a five-hour ride southwest to Bahrain. We
landed in Manama just before midnight local time. In Astana, where we had started
that morning under the snow in twenty degrees Fahrenheit, it was already three in
the morning. We shed our coats, gloves, and hats and walked down the steps onto the
tarmac and into Bahrain’s balmy sixty-degree weather.

The flight had given me some more time to delve into the WikiLeaks cables, which were
turning into the foreign policy equivalent of a gossip column. As I skimmed through
the batch that had been published so far, a theme emerged: everybody still relied
on the United States to sort out their problems. Countries and world leaders didn’t
just want America’s attention or another photo opportunity; they somehow expected
action. While the United States was struggling to advance its own agenda, other countries
were waiting for it to help them with theirs. The cables showed the extent to which
the Arabs feared Iran’s rise as a nuclear power but refused to say so in public—because
what scared them even more than Iran was the reaction of their own people if they
were exposed trying to bring America’s wrath onto another Muslim country. Instead,
they privately called on the United States to “cut off the head of the snake,” in
the words of the Saudi official ambassador to the United States Adel el-Jubeir, who
was quoting the king himself. If America did attack Iran, the same Arab leaders would
publicly curse the imperialistic American warmongers. Pakistan’s leaders called for
more American drone strikes in private and then protested against it in the National
Assembly. Yemen’s president Ali Abdullah Saleh did the opposite: he wanted more American
drone strikes against militants from al-Qaeda who were challenging his grip on power.
In public, he pretended the Yemeni army was carrying out the attacks so he could look
like a strong leader and avoid anti-American protests that would strengthen the militants.
In Bahrain, Hillary had also for the first time said she would not serve a second
term as secretary of state. She wanted to step out of the limelight and said she was
done with the high wire of politics. Her statement dominated the headlines at home,
even if no one believed her.

On the endless journey back to Washington, at the end of a weeklong trip, I battled
jetlag by reading more cables. They were a treasure trove for historians. I couldn’t
believe it when I read that even China seemed to want the United States to do its
bidding. The Chinese appeared increasingly worried about North Korea’s reckless behavior
but refused to criticize it openly, hoping instead that the United States would continue
to flex its muscle with military exercises in the region, enough to scare Pyongyang
into submission and cool tempers on the Korean peninsula. I suddenly realized that
on that flight out of Seoul in the summer, while my colleagues and I had been dismissive
of the administration’s official line that China was being helpful on a few issues,
there was actually some truth in what American diplomats were telling us. China wasn’t
about to ditch North Korea, but it appreciated a bit of American help keeping the
crazy Dear Leader in check.

There were a lot of juicy details about the habits of foreign leaders but no real
surprises—there was no sign of coups being fomented or secret supplies of weapons
no one had ever heard of before. The gap between what America said it did these days
and what its diplomats were actually doing seemed rather narrow. The cables showed
a superpower at work, cajoling, pleading, reassuring, and bullying. American diplomats
came across as sharp-eyed and earnest, detailing the corruption of the Tunisian regime,
the frustrating pace of almost nonexistent reforms in Egypt, or the lavish lifestyles
of various dictators around the world. They were also hard at work advancing their
country’s interests, detailing China’s growing influence in Africa and access to resources
there or reporting on the ties between Beijing and Islamabad. The biggest gap was
between what foreign leaders said in public to their own people and what they said
in private to American diplomats.

Obviously, the American cables were of the lowest classification category. They were
not top secret, they were not CIA missives; even senior officials in the Building
admitted they didn’t know everything their government was involved in. People suspected
there were covert operations to sow unrest in Iran. American officials would soon
openly acknowledge the use of drones, but it was already an open secret. American
newspapers had long uncovered CIA rendition flights and black holes where suspects
were being interrogated. This was not the age of the Pentagon Papers of the 1960s,
which, once revealed, showed that the U.S. government had consistently and systematically
lied to Congress and to the public about decision making during the Vietnam War.