HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (22 page)

Like a seasoned political pro, Hillary took the request in stride and promised to look into the matter. No one thought much of the pledge, which sounded like a polite dismissal.

But the next week, at a daily eight-forty-five morning meeting with about a dozen top advisers, Hillary asked Pat Kennedy, the undersecretary for management, for an update. “Pat, what’s the story on the shower?” she asked. She badgered Kennedy until the problem was resolved.

“I went to more morning staff meetings in these opening months,” said a political appointee who was new to Hillary’s world, “where we talked about, Were there enough showers in the locker room? Were there enough parking spaces in the garage? Were the computers and BlackBerrys working the way they should for staff? The kind of things that are not the big geopolitical thoughts. She was as focused on the stuff that matters to people who are kind of busting their tail every day for fifteen and twenty years. That stuff really mattered to her, and she got really mad when it didn’t get fixed. Those were the days when I saw her lose her temper.”

Jared Cohen was sweating. The twenty-seven-year-old prodigy of the State Department’s policy planning shop had a propensity to text as fast as he could think when he saw a solution within his grasp, and he seldom questioned his own instincts. Most high-end politicians follow the credo that it’s better to seek forgiveness than permission. Bill and Hillary Clinton use a slight adaptation of the same idea: “Better to get caught trying.” In that spirit, Cohen had just pulled off a behind-the-scenes coup using the American government to link Iranian revolutionaries with Twitter executives who could aid their cause. But in doing so, he had inadvertently set the State Department at odds with the president and put his own career at risk.

On June 13, 2009, in what would become known as the Green Movement, Iranian protesters took to the streets and the Internet to challenge the validity of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection. Two days later Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leader of the Iranian opposition, found out that Twitter was planning to shut down for scheduled maintenance for about ninety minutes shortly before one a.m. on the U.S. East Coast. That meant the Iranians wouldn’t be able to use the social media platform, which had become a crucial organizing tool, to communicate with one another from about 8:45 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. in Tehran. Concerned that the movement could lose momentum as a result, Moussavi tweeted about it.

Cohen saw the Tweet and, without giving any thought to the
consequences, shot an e-mail to his buddy Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. “Any chance you can do this at a time that’s convenient for Iranians rather than Americans?” Cohen wrote. If not, the Iranian protesters could lose their ability to communicate with one another and the outside world.

“Let me look into this,” Dorsey replied, promising to ask the Twitter team whether it could be done.

Thin, with curly black hair and blue eyes that come alive when he talks about a new idea, Cohen is a native of Weston, Connecticut, a wealthy New York suburb where the median income reaches nearly $200,000 a year. He graduated from Stanford and went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. A Condi Rice protégé at the tail end of the Bush administration, he showed such promise as a tech thinker that he caught the attention of two of Hillary’s most influential aides, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Alec Ross, who were trying to implement for Hillary a vision of “21st Century Statecraft” in which the State Department would use tools of innovation in conjunction with, and sometimes instead of, traditional diplomacy. Cohen was certainly innovating on his own when he reached out to Dorsey. He had to wait a couple of hours, or two eons in tech time, for a response.

“It’s not going to be as easy as they thought,” Dorsey finally replied.

“Anything you can do would be very helpful,” Cohen wrote back, emphasizing that the U.S. government was getting a lot of its information about what was happening on the ground from Twitter. “This is really important.”

Long-standing unilateral sanctions on Iran meant there was virtually no American presence there and no embassy in Tehran. The United States has a small team of Iran watchers in nearby nations who gather intelligence by interviewing people when they leave the country. The Iranian protesters needed the Twitter network up and running, and so did the American Iran-watchers. A little while later Dorsey forwarded to Cohen a long internal e-mail chain from Twitter’s tech team. The most important word was the one Dorsey had added at the top: “Done.”

For Cohen, it represented a hard-earned victory and a step forward in the quest for innovative diplomacy. He had been quietly working with tech companies in advance of the Iranian election in hopes of finding ways to give support to the opposition. Dorsey, in particular, was something of a great white whale for Cohen and Ross, Hillary’s senior adviser for innovation. They had been cultivating him for months. They had hosted him at the State Department. They had held a private dinner for him in Washington.
They had even invited him to Iraq as part of a State-run business delegation that included Obama campaign consultant Blue State Digital. He was a blossoming ally, someone they thought could grasp the importance of the relationship between the business community’s high-tech innovation and Hillary’s goals for modernizing the set of diplomatic tools at America’s disposal.

Tech tools can influence behavior and conditions at a lightning pace compared to the traditional levers of diplomacy. Sanctions and the promise of removing them offer the possibility of changing a foreign government’s calculus over a time frame of weeks, months, even years, but tech tools work in real time. They can be used to organize or disrupt whole social and political orders overnight.

For a less-developed country, American tech assistance offers the possibility of building infrastructure, combating crime, improving communications, and defending against cyberwarfare. But it also carries risks: the people can use it as a weapon against the government, and as the Arab Spring would show, it can be a pivotal factor in toppling a regime. That means the United States can leverage a big tech company like Twitter, Google, or Facebook as either an incentive or a threat to a foreign government. Help us, and we’ll help you. Hurt us, and we’ll sit back and watch as revolutionaries use our tech tools to oust you from power.

In the wake of Hillary’s primary defeat, she had become obsessed with the power of Internet-era innovation. Obama had used modern technology to organize, communicate, raise money, and market himself in ways that had left her campaign looking
outmoded. She was intent on figuring out how she could apply the lessons from her failure to the new job—and perhaps beyond. “She asked in some cases, ‘What could I have done better with technology’ in this state or that state?” said a senior State official. “I know there was this curiosity from the campaign that existed. I think it’s interesting that it then filtered over into an interest into how this could be leveraged for foreign policy.”

Her desire to turn a weakness into a strength, as she moved from candidate to cabinet official, was exemplified by her successful pursuit of Ross, who had coordinated Obama’s tech advisory group during the campaign. In the early days of Hillary’s term, Ross and Cohen, bound by their enthusiasm for a new brand of diplomacy, had struck up a friendship, and together they assiduously courted executives at the nation’s top tech companies, to enlist them in advancing America’s foreign policy goals.

Because the tech companies operate in countries all over the world, they work hard to counter any perception that they might be pawns of the American government. But Cohen was about to give the world a peek behind the curtain and, in doing so, jeopardize his own job by putting State publicly at odds with White House policy. From his perspective, the ask that he was making of Twitter was so benign that he didn’t bother to give a heads-up to his bosses in the Policy Planning Office. But that night he forwarded the e-mail chain to Ross, who dialed him back immediately.

“Jared, you realize you may have just contradicted the president of the United States’ stated policy of noninterference in the election?” Ross asked.

“Oh, shit,” Cohen replied.

On the very same day, June 15, Obama had said, “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be” and “We respect Iranian sovereignty.” That is, the United States would not meddle in the Iranian election. Cohen hadn’t been trying to undermine the president, and his stratagem might have been roundly well received if it had remained private. But when the story became
public, it was suddenly just the kind of snafu that fueled White House suspicions about whether Hillary’s empire at State could be trusted to execute the president’s policy.

Cohen’s chief advocate was one of the few Obama campaign advisers who had landed a job at State. Ross bears a resemblance to the actor Michael J. Fox in his
Spin City
days. A native of Charleston, West Virginia, and the grandson of an American diplomat, Ross had cofounded an international nonprofit aimed at closing the digital divide and had raised money for it by cold-calling top tech executives. He joined up with the Obama campaign before it was officially launched and took on a role as a conduit between the campaign and its advisers and supporters in the tech sector. By the end, he was coordinating a 509-person advisory committee of academics, executives, hackers, and techies who supported Obama. If the nerds in the Obama campaign’s operations center wanted a new app, Ross would connect them to a tech company employee who backed the campaign and could help deliver it.

When Obama won, Ross, then thirty-six, was eager to find a job combining his two loves, innovation and foreign policy. There are other parts of government from which an aide can affect foreign policy, most notably the NSC and the Pentagon. But Ross, who had a lot of options after the election, found State appealing. When Obama appointed Hillary to take over, his friends told him he was out of luck, as it would be a hard place for any Obama campaign veteran to find work. But Ross had something Hillary wanted: he understood how the innovative tools that Obama had used to kick her butt on the campaign trail could be applied and expanded upon in service of American interests. Longtime Hillary adviser Maggie Williams had heard about Ross during the campaign, and during the transition in 2008, she and Cheryl Mills reached out to him. He sat down with the two of them and Hillary, and they discussed his view of the foreign policy challenges presented by the proliferation of information networks, essentially the diffusion of power away from traditional states and toward a variety of nonstate actors.

Hillaryland had been ignorant of the tools of modern campaign
warfare and, compared with Obama, unaware of the ethos of the Internet generation. The concept of connectivity, however, wasn’t at all foreign to Hillary. Long before Obama came along, she and her husband had been the masters of networking. By emulating what Obama did on the campaign trail—and using his adviser to do it—Hillary could quickly move from being a PC to a smartphone without stopping at Mac. Her desire to replicate Obama’s domestic success in the global arena dovetailed well with Anne-Marie Slaughter’s academic writings on the emergence of nongovernmental world networks. The Internet, more than any other single factor, facilitated the growing power of nonstate actors. That meant more influence over time for transnational quasi-governmental groups—like the United Nations and the G8—multinational corporations, and international social organizations. More imminently, political movements within countries could much more quickly be turned into revolutions. But it also meant the empowerment of terrorist organizations and crime syndicates. Power could increasingly be measured in terms of the ability to build your own network and disrupt someone else’s, and that was an idea that Hillary could easily grasp.

Taken together, Hillary’s investments in Slaughter, Ross, and Cohen could be seen as one of the clearest signs that she had learned from her loss in the 2008 campaign. For a woman whose operation was famously insular, she put a lot of faith in three outsiders—Slaughter from Princeton, Ross from the Obama campaign, and Cohen from the Bush administration—to develop and execute in an area where, just months earlier, she had been far behind the curve. Leaning in on innovation could serve her well not only in conducting foreign policy but if she ran for president again, and it showed that she had developed a deep understanding of the real power of technology as a political tool. “She never fell into that trap of ‘let’s just use technology for public diplomacy,’ ” one of her tech-savvy aides said. “She associated technology with grassroots organizing because of the campaign frame of reference.”

But even within State, Hillary’s emerging faith in the power of technology to transform diplomacy was a controversial proposition.
Ross had clashed with Jim Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, over the balance of traditional diplomacy and the use of modern tools, particularly when it came to Ross’s prediction that the world would see a leaderless revolution during Hillary’s term as secretary. And while Slaughter provided a lot of the intellectual firepower behind Hillary’s smart-power approach, she was marginalized by more savvy bureaucratic infighters as she took over the laborious process of compiling the QDDR. Even the set who appreciated Ross and Cohen viewed them as a lone-wolf unit. “They’re both very hard to work with,” said one longtime Hillarylander who worked at State. “They’re not team players, which is why they’re so good. They just go off and freelance and do creative stuff all the time. They’re brilliant.”

Cohen’s mile-wide independent streak made him, the morning after his Twitter intervention, a hot topic of conversation among Hillary’s senior staff. Hillary, who normally led the daily meeting, didn’t attend that day, and neither did Cohen, who was far too junior to be included. But he did bring the episode to the attention of P. J. Crowley, the assistant secretary for public affairs, to make sure that the press team was aware of what had transpired. When Mark Landler of the
New York Times
asked about the incident, Crowley filled in the details, thinking Cohen’s move would look good for State.