Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir (8 page)

But breaking up is hard to do, and with the internal political maps of Yugoslavia not corresponding to the internal ethnic map, war, a phenomenon well-known in the Balkans, was a present danger. When the European Union countries gave diplomatic recognition to Bosnia, having encouraged the Bosnians to hold a referendum, they hoped that diplomatic recognition would end the matter. Instead, the Serbs sharpened their pitchforks.

Many Serbs had lived in Croatia and Bosnia for centuries. When these republics seceded, Serbia claimed parts of each of them.

Amid all this history, the supply of which certainly exceeded the demand for it, the State Department’s European bureau was far better set up to deal with the need for thoughtful, well-drafted, and typo-free memos to prepare senior officials for polite discussions with European senior officials than it was for the direct diplomacy required to deal with those responsible for murder and mayhem in distant Balkan villages.

Bureaucratically, the Balkans was still handled as a kind of backwater, the issues tucked away in the so-called southern tier of the Office of Eastern Europe and Yugoslav Affairs, located on a floor below that of the assistant secretary. Meanwhile, offices that dealt with Europe’s “architecture,” including NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the European Union, were all located within shouting distance of the assistant secretary.

Holbrooke’s first step was to make EUR more like the East Asian and Pacific Affairs (EAP) bureau, which he had run during the Carter administration—make the offices smaller and eliminate middle management, that is, the deputy directors, and thus remove the “layered look” and turn it into a bureau with an operational mandate capable of dealing with the real crises of the day.

A week before I had been enjoying my new role as the deputy director in the Office of Eastern European Affairs. I was responsible for the
northern tier of countries, which included all the Baltic states and the upper tier of east-central European states, including Poland, where I had served just three years before. But as much as I was interested in working on these countries, I realized that by the summer of 1994 they had lost a lot of their luster. There were no crises to manage. Soviet troops were fast withdrawing from bases in the now-independent Baltic States, and some of the relationships were burgeoning—namely, with Poland—with the expectation that NATO membership might be extended to some of them. The lack of urgency, however, meant that these countries had become very much secondary in the minds of senior policy makers. In fact, a week before my summons to Holbrooke’s office, I had learned that my position was slated to be abolished as part of his reforms.

The European Bureau is the proudest, one of the busiest, and, viewed from the rest of the State Department, the least-liked of the bureaus. Every Foreign Service officer wants to have a foothold there because that is where the good jobs are. The Latin American bureau can offer a position in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires, but that is about it in terms of family-friendly assignments. The list of cushy assignments in Europe goes on and on. Of course, such a state of affairs does not necessarily attract the most agreeable staff, and the stories of Foreign Service officers trying to get into EUR are replete with examples of arrogance from their EUR counterparts. When I was preparing to leave Seoul, I had applied in 1988 to be the desk officer for Bulgaria, a modest perch if ever there was one. The deputy director of the office of Eastern Europe told me cheerfully about my chances: “You haven’t done badly: you are fifth on our list.”

I stood at Holbrooke’s doorway and looked into the oddly darkened wood-paneled office, the ceiling fluorescents all turned off, with the only lighting coming from a couple of table lamps nearby that illuminated the couch and upholstered chairs for visitors. He motioned me in and I walked across the room. He rose from behind the desk to introduce himself and shake my hand, still keeping his eye on the
NBC Nightly News
on the small television sitting on the windowsill, the view of the Lincoln Memorial beyond. He offered me a seat on one of the two hard-backed chairs positioned in front of his large desk while correspondent Andrea Mitchell talked onscreen. The walls were covered with pictures of Holbrooke with famous people, often from his days of managing our country’s relationships in Asia. I thought about the extraordinary career he was having, truly one of the giants of U.S. foreign policy, even though as a political appointee of the Democrats he had sat out the Reagan and Bush administrations in the private sector. What a country, I thought, that can afford to take a talent like this and sit him on the bench for twelve years. I continued to survey the scene of this larger-than-life figure who was in effect keeping me on hold as Mitchell concluded her story. There was a small door in the back wall that was left open, the toilet visible and the seat up.

Holbrooke finally asked me, one of his eyes still fixed on the television, now showing an antacid commercial, “What do you think of the changes I have made to EUR?” These reforms had, of course, included abolishing the deputy director job I had just started two months before, but before I could answer he held up his right hand as if directing traffic and went back to full-time listening to the news. He turned to me again, this time asking, “What should we do with Yugoslavia?” As I was about to answer, he raised his hand again, though this time he absentmindedly pointed the remote control at me. I didn’t mute immediately, but I understood that he wanted to focus on the
Nightly News
.

At that moment Holbrooke, still watching television with his body turned to me as if we were in the midst of a conversation, managed to triple-task by motioning into his office Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary John Kornblum, who had appeared in the doorway. John walked into the room and sat down in the other hard-backed chair to join in the competition for Holbrooke’s attention.

“Okay, I’ll hire him,” Holbrooke told John. He muted the TV, and then turning to me, he added, “In case you didn’t notice, I just offered you
a job.” I found myself thoroughly enjoying the scene. I had never had a remote pointed at me before. Holbrooke added yet another task: opening his thin brown leather briefcase to find a clean pair of socks to change into in the middle of all this. I had been looking at John taking his seat and watching a little of Andrea Mitchell’s newscast myself, still waiting for Holbrooke to reengage with whatever it was he had asked me to come to his office to discuss, then turned to him to ask, “That’s wonderful, but could you tell me what the job is?”

“I want you to be the new director of the Balkans for the new office I have just created: the Office of South Central European Affairs.”

I thought about insisting on a name change for the office before accepting (South Central Europe sounded more to me like Switzerland than the Balkans), but decided I could fight that one later. I accepted. He glanced at his watch to see that it was about 7:30
P.M.
and that he was late for something. He threw some papers in his briefcase (as well as the dirty socks), explaining that John would tell me the details. Before he left, he encouraged me to make whatever personnel changes I wanted in the office and said, “See you in New York on Sunday at noon.”

John and I walked into his office, next to Holbrooke’s, where he filled me in on what would be happening in New York. The United Nations General Assembly would be starting its fall meetings. I was to accompany Holbrooke to meetings in New York that would take up most of the week and would be primarily focused on the Bosnian delegation, expected Sunday afternoon. The task was to convince the Bosnians, and others, that lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia, as many in the U.S. Congress were calling for, would not so much help the Bosnians as it would embolden the Serbs and increase the bloodshed.

However, the U.S. position needed to go beyond simply opposing the lifting of the arms embargo. We needed to show the Bosnians, starting with President Alija Izetbegovic, that we were serious about finding a solution to a crisis that had spanned two administrations, caused thousands of civilian causalities and human rights violations on a scale not seen in
Europe since World War II, and was ruining the transatlantic relationship just when it needed to become stronger in addressing post–Cold War challenges. Izetbegovic needed to know that America was committed to ending the war and achieving a just solution for the Bosnians. We would not abandon the problem, or leave the Bosnians to their fate. We would be committed to the end.

Since my time in Yugoslavia with Ambassador Eagleburger, things had not gone well there. Yugoslavia, relatively small though it was, was a symbol for both East and West, having defied Stalin, but never integrating with the West. It also was a leader in what was then called the Third World and was a key player in the so-called North-South dialogue. In the beginning of the twentieth century, south Slavic peoples came together to resist the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was seeking to replace the Ottoman Empire, now in fast retreat. The collective interests of those south Slavic peoples had long given way to centrifugal forces as each republic, especially the more economic advantaged northern ones, looked for a way out of Yugoslavia. Slovenia’s exit was relatively painless, but the fact that large Serb minorities had lived in Croatia and Bosnia for centuries would make the declaration of independence of those two republics far more problematic. The fact that Bosnia’s population was some 30–35 percent Serb would make its own declaration especially difficult. Immediately after the holding of the independence referendum by the Muslim-dominated government, the Serbs, especially those in the rural areas of eastern Bosnia, rose up to declare their own right of self-determination so that they would not be a minority in a new Bosnian state.

Sitting with John after the “interview” with Holbrooke, I asked him if that was how most decisions were being made in there, pointing over at Holbrooke’s now-empty office. He smiled and said, “No, most are far more chaotic than that.”

John explained what had led Holbrooke to change directors earlier in the day. John had recommended me for the job in the morning, and Holbrooke agreed, with the proviso that he had to meet me personally.

I had met John Kornblum for the first time just the previous day, quite randomly. I usually walked to the Tenleytown Metro station from my home in Washington, D.C., but running a few minutes late I had hopped on the M-4 commuter bus, recognized John, and sat down next to him. He was absorbed in the sports page, and so I introduced myself as the deputy director for the northern tier of the soon-to-be-defunct Office of Eastern European and Yugoslav Affairs, several rungs below the principal deputy assistant secretary.

John was one of the great career Foreign Service officers, a person whose knowledge of Europe was unmatched. He had been in the center of many of the crucial decisions about Germany since the early 1970s: the Four Party Arrangements, which enhanced stability in Germany; and the East-West process in the mid-1970s, which created the Helsinki Final Act and in turn had created the Conference of Security and Co-operation in Europe, later the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. These were the main elements of the political and security architecture in Europe that normalized relations with the Soviet Union and introduced the concept of human rights as an element of European policy. He was one of the great minds in NATO and understood the delicate balance of U.S. leadership and European ownership. He understood the threat that instability posed in the Balkans to all that had been achieved—and would need to be achieved—in the transatlantic alliance.

He also had flair and knew how to get things done—something that obviously had appealed to Holbrooke. A few years before, John was serving in Germany as the United States minister in Berlin. This was the senior civilian job in Berlin and it made John responsible for all U.S. policy in the city. He had proposed that President Reagan’s 1987 visit for Berlin’s 750th anniversary celebration be transformed into a political initiative. Against great opposition, John had worked out an agreement to have the president stand at the famous Brandenburg Gate on the border between East and West Berlin, and had proposed the key sentence in the president’s speech calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

I thought about whether I should discuss the article he was reading on the Redskins and their quarterbacking woes at the time, whether Heath Shuler, the Redskins number one draft pick that year, was the answer (he was not, though he did go on to have a career in politics), or talk about the future of Europe.

Forty-five minutes later we walked into the State Department, and I thought I had had the best D.C. mass-transit conversation on Europe I would ever have. I was wondering when I would get to talk to him again.

At 8
P.M.
I left Kornblum’s office to meet with the Bosnian team and introduce myself as their new boss. I stopped to call my family and my dad in Little Compton, Rhode Island. I told him about what had happened, that I was very pleased but could not be sure that Holbrooke might not fire me the next day. “I doubt it,” he said in his laconic New England style. “He doesn’t strike me as someone who likes to admit making a mistake.” I weighed how much of a compliment that was, but decided that Dad probably had a point about my job security.

At 8:30
P.M.
, the Bosnian team was still hard at work in their offices. I sat with a few of them: Sue Bremner, working on Bosnia; Chris Hoh, on Croatia; and Phil Goldberg, on the Balkan humanitarian portfolio. They were writing talking points for the secretary’s meeting with Balkan leaders for the UN General Assembly meetings. I asked to see all the materials, explaining I wanted to know how they viewed the situation.

The Balkan unit of the Office of Eastern European and Yugoslav Affairs had been a demoralized group. Several had quit in protest at a do-nothing U.S. policy. George Kenney, Marshall Harris, and Steve Walker had all resigned, and eight others in the Office of Eastern European Affairs sent a joint letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher to protest the policy. When Phil Goldberg, who later became the chief Bosnian desk officer, listed his accomplishments at the end of the performance-rating period (an assignment some officers take five pages to complete), he did it in four words, “I did not resign.”