Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (11 page)

People got annoyed and then got even, and as the spring turned to
summer, Holbrooke became increasingly frozen out of internal council meetings. Even his friends tired of defending him, especially in interagency meetings that no one wanted to attend in the first place, where Holbrooke often took the stage to offer his lengthy, professorial sweep of nineteenth-century European history. Twentieth-century Europe was fast becoming history, while nineteenth-century Europe, with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, was fast becoming current events. Holbrooke understood that before anyone else.

I was constantly in the middle of Holbrooke’s disputes with other parts of the bureaucracy, and even with other Contact Group delegations, as when the British representative, Pauline Neville-Jones, blew up at him when he opened up a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
while she was speaking. (Thankfully, she didn’t notice that he was reading the sports page.) Frequently he would ask me to go “fix a problem,” usually one set in motion by his expressed impatience with the person in question. Often it was a no-win situation for me, because if I sided with his adversary, I would inevitably hear it from Holbrooke and that would undercut my influence with him.

• • •

In summer 1994 the national security staff tried to coordinate policy by convening a morning teleconference for representatives of different agencies to touch base and assess what had gone on in the Balkans the previous twenty-four hours, and what needed to be done about it. Dick saw this basic National Security Council function, governmental coordination, as an insidious effort not only to coordinate but also to direct the policy, and he would have none of it. Whenever he detected NSC fingerprints on an instruction to one of our embassies, he would pounce:

“Why are we doing this, Chris? Why are we asking Embassy Sarajevo to approach the Bosnians about this situation in Bihac?”

“It was something that came out of this morning’s teleconference.”

“ ‘Came out of the teleconference’! What does that mean? Did you suggest this at the teleconference?”

“Well, no. But everyone thought it was a good idea.”

“Who do you mean, ‘everyone’?”

To make a point about the NSC-chaired morning meeting, Holbrooke refused to allow me to attend any more of them. I started sending my deputy, Jack Zetkulic. When Holbrooke heard that Jack was going, he forbade him from being there as well. Trying to salvage our relationship with the NSC staff, I then sent our Bosnian desk officer, Phil Goldberg. Desk officer is a fairly junior level, but since Phil had gravitas that made him a real player and he was acceptable to the NSC staff. But when Holbrooke heard that Phil, one of his favorites in my office (Holbrooke knew all fifteen officers in my office by name), was going, he outlawed it. (“You sent Phil Goldberg?” he asked, as if I had dispatched Henry Kissinger.) Finally, on a summer day when many people were out, I sent the summer intern with the instruction just to take notes and not speak. At that point, the NSC staff complained up the line to the national security deputy advisor, Sandy Berger, who called over to Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott, who took up the issue with us. Holbrooke allowed me to go once, and then it started all over again. As Talbott took the irate phone calls from Berger, I became the go-to Holbrooke handler for this kind of problem.

Dick was on thin ice with National Security Advisor Tony Lake, his deputy, Sandy Berger, and others around Washington, including even Secretary Christopher and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright. Strobe had fought hard to keep Dick (“our thermonuclear device”) from being fired, or worse, sidelined, but his support was increasingly becoming a lonely struggle. In early summer of 1995, Dick had heard about a meeting in the White House Situation Room, only to learn on arrival at the Southwest Gate that he was not on the list of attendees. Dick had quite worn out his welcome with old friends and colleagues from the 1960s and Vietnam days.

My approach to Holbrooke was to protect him from himself. I’d often try to convince him it wasn’t worth the fight, a comment that always earned me the favorite Holbrooke put-down. “What a typical Foreign
Service officer reaction. I thought you were better than that.” He brightened up when I assured him we never did what the national security staff wanted us to do. The staff was often out of touch with the situation on the ground, and I would regale Holbrooke and Bob Frasure with stories of the gap between the staff’s constant confusion of memos and talking points, and the situation on the ground. Frasure, no fan of senseless talking points, would mimic a Balkan warlord receiving a memo and hit the side of his head with the palm of his hand, saying, “Oh, now I understand. Now I get it, thank you, thank you.”

Sending talking points to be delivered by our embassies to various warlords reflected the limited Washington bureaucratic understanding of what motivated ruthless factional leaders. Frasure, whose laconic and ironic style had a way of defusing a problem, including an outburst of Holbrooke temper, added, “A wheelbarrow full of those talking points wouldn’t work with Milosevic unless you hit him over the head with it.”

• • •

Accomplishing something on the ground in a war zone and managing Washington anxieties were often two very distinct skill sets. Some people were good at neither, while many had one and not the other. Bob Frasure was a master at both. Being effective at the Washington end involved first of all never panicking. But it also required a keen understanding of exactly when others in the vast interagency world of Washington bureaucracy might be inclined to push the panic button. “Tell the embassy to come in with something on this ASAP” (meaning send a cable about it), he would often say, having just seen an intelligence report suggesting that an initiative of ours was about to be rejected. “This might be a problem today.”

While the Balkans were a distant part of the world, far removed from the centers of power and authority, their explosion, to say something of the human rights calamity graphically detailed by CNN’s coverage, meant that this tiny, obscure region of the world became the locus of all our fears. If Washington’s senior foreign policy leadership had learned
anything in school it was how to prepare for big problems (for example, the behavior of the Soviet Union). It was ill-prepared for the issues coming out of the scruffy edges like the Balkans. Even the proxy wars of the 1970s and ’80s, which took place in odd, faraway places such as Angola, had organizing principles attached to them, such as Soviet aggressive behavior. The Balkans was a constant stream of bad news that seemed impervious to any efforts—certainly not those cooked up in Washington interagency meetings—to make it better. The resultant frustration was a tendency to blame our diplomats in the field, or more immediately, those not in the room.

After one of those meetings where nothing was decided and the administration seemed content to allow the situation to continue forever, Frasure walked back in his office and, as he often did after a frustrating encounter, headed over to the window and looked out on the Lincoln Memorial.

“What happened, Bob?” I asked him as I entered his office anxious for a report of the meeting. I knew that it was another desultory, unproductive discussion, but I still wanted to hear the details. He had his hands in his pockets and barely turned to see me in as he gazed out the window. I could tell he was very unhappy with what had just transpired. He answered still looking at the Lincoln Memorial.

“In the Civil War, troops in the field assembling for battle would always want to know the identity of the units in the battle formation on their sides to give a better sense of whether they could be expected to be flanked or not. So you can imagine you are out there, battle drums sounding, and you yell to your sergeant: ‘Sarge, who’s that yonder to our right?’ And imagine the fear that must have swept through the lines when the answer came back, ‘Don’t worry, boys. That’s the Interagency Brigade.’  ”

• • •

Bob had become very special to all of us, both in the State Department and out at Embassy Sarajevo, where John Menzies was now calling me that Saturday in August at 5:30
A.M.
I sped down to the department
through Rock Creek Park, listening to the radio news in my car for anything about our team in Bosnia. Earlier in August, the president and secretary of state had overruled the objections of many and decided to name Holbrooke as the negotiator, sending him to the region at the head of an interagency team. Bob Frasure had accompanied Holbrooke primarily to introduce him to Milosevic, whom Dick had never met, and then to accompany him to Zagreb and to Sarajevo, the other two stops on the circuit, both places that Holbrooke had visited within the last year.

Frasure had been on the road constantly in the past year, often with me in tow, but always with one of the officers from my office, including Phil Goldberg. This was to be Frasure’s last trip. In the future, I would travel with Holbrooke, and Frasure would cover our back in the interagency process, where the real combat was. Given that Holbrooke would be the one in the field, Bob’s job would be a tough one. I was excited at the prospect of serving on Holbrooke’s team. It was everything I ever wanted to be as a U.S. diplomat, and having served in the Balkans, once in Belgrade and another in Albania, I felt prepared.

I drove into the State Department garage at breakneck speed, barely stopping to show my ID to the security guard. I parked as close to the elevator as possible and didn’t stop pressing the elevator button, as if it operated pneumatically, until the doors slowly opened. I entered the Operations Center on the seventh floor.

There were now press reports that there had been an accident on the dirt road that came up from the south and over Mount Igman into Sarajevo. Bosnian Serb soldiers manning checkpoints and taking bribes controlled all the other roads into the city, and “tolls” (bribes again) were often levied, raising the price of the goods. UNPROFOR commander Rupert Smith had once remarked to me that “every boy in this country grows up wanting to run his own checkpoint.”

I took the telephone from the watch officer and got back on the phone with John Menzies.

Before he could say anything I asked: “What about Bob?”

“He’s dead.”

I paused.

“Who else?”

“Kruzel and Drew,” referring to Joe Kruzel, the representative of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Nelson Drew, the representative from the National Security Council staff’s European Directorate.

I was horrified about Bob, a daily companion whose company I missed whenever he was out of town. But the report about Nelson Drew was also terrifying in its randomness. Nelson had hardly been involved with Bosnia, a last-minute add-on to the trip when the senior director of the Europe Directorate had decided not to go.

I wanted details. “Anyone else?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” There were some injuries. Some bad.

“Holbrooke and Clark [three-star general Wes Clark, director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J-5, for Plans and Policy] were in a Humvee in the front. The French armored personnel carrier was behind and couldn’t keep up. It went over the edge of the road. That’s all we know now.”

“Are you sure about Bob and the other two?”

He paused. “Yes, I’m sure.”

I called John Kornblum, who was the acting assistant secretary in Holbrooke’s absence, to alert him, but he was already heading to the department. It was now after 7
A.M.
and other members of the Bosnian team were arriving at the Operations Center. We set up shop in a small room with a table and telephones and began to plan our day, such as it was. We kept an open line to the embassy in Sarajevo and fed what information we had to the watch team.

The watch team that morning was extremely busy putting together conference calls involving National Security Advisor Berger, Deputy Secretary Talbott, and many others. There was a good deal of frustration at not getting more details about what had actually happened. I mentally replayed my calls with John Menzies and within seconds he was pulled into the conference call himself to repeat what he had told me earlier.
After making his way down Mount Igman, Holbrooke was patched into calls with the president and the secretary of state. Later in the morning, press reports started coming in with short quotes from Holbrooke that appeared to provide additional information, inflaming people in Washington.

• • •

Soon thereafter, John Kornblum and I drove out to Falls Church, Virginia, to tell Katharina Frasure that her husband was missing and feared dead. It was a typically sultry, humid August day in Washington, with no sign at all of any early fall. We drove in John’s car through leafy Northern Virginia and arrived at the Frasures’ home. Katharina answered the door, already looking stricken, and led us into the living room. One of Bob’s teenage daughters walked into the kitchen, staying away from the brief discussion in the living room. John took the lead, explaining what we knew, not wanting to pass on unconfirmed reports but also avoiding speculation that Bob was okay. His body had not been recovered, or at least the recovery had not been confirmed. At the same time, John had been very clear that Bob had not survived.

Back in the Operations Center, details were now flowing in, and all of the Balkan team had arrived. We were staffed up, manning the phones, writing memos, and beginning some of the technical tasks of getting the delegation home. Holbrooke insisted that the surviving team members accompany the fallen. I took a walk out of the Operations Center down the corridor to be alone for a second. I stopped for a moment and Deputy Secretary Talbott walked up to me. Strobe, whom I had never really talked with, said some kind words about our team’s efforts on this tragic day. He had just gone out to Katharina Frasure’s house to confirm to her the recovery of the body.

A few days later the delegation returned together to Andrews Air Force Base with the bodies of Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel, and Nelson Drew. President Clinton came to the memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery a few days later and afterward huddled with the reconstituted
negotiating team that I was part of, along with Jim Pardew from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Don Kerrick from the European Directorate at the National Security Council staff.