The Secretary (41 page)

The French and the British had made their own gaffes on Tunisia and Egypt, and had
been even further behind the United States in catching up with the popular mood on
the Arab street. Nicolas Sarkozy’s government had shipped tear gas to Tunisian police
just two days before Ben Ali had boarded a plane into exile. The French foreign minister
Michèle Alliot-Marie had vacationed in Tunisia during the crackdown, flying on the
private plane of a regime crony. Sarkozy sacked her within weeks. While people demanded
freedom and respect on Tahrir Square, the British foreign minister William Hague had
warned that the unrest was detrimental to Middle East peace efforts—no matter that
the peace process was dead. In an attempt to undo some of that damage, the British
prime minister David Cameron rushed to Cairo to be the first world leader to visit
postrevolution Egypt, just ten days after Mubarak resigned. Now France and Britain
seemed to be trying to make up further for the damage to their images by calling on
Gaddafi to step down. They started to talk about the need to intervene in Libya and
protect civilians. A flood of Libyan refugees was sailing across the Mediterranean
and landing on European soil. Europe didn’t want more immigrants. It had enough problems.

On March 3, Obama gave a press conference; this time, he named Gaddafi and called
on him to leave power. A few days later, the Gulf Cooperation Council called on the
United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The Arab League, long a hollow
and impotent body, was plagued with the same ills as the region: it didn’t represent
the people and was beset by rivalry and disagreements between its twenty-two member
states. The league never took decisions of any consequence, and its secretary-general
Amr Moussa was a former foreign minister of Egypt who had served under Mubarak. But
on March 12, Arab foreign ministers attending a special meeting at the league’s headquarters
in Cairo voted unanimously in support of a no-fly zone. Syria and Iraq abstained.

I was flabbergasted: Arabs calling for military action against one of their own? Not
even in 1990, when George H. W. Bush put together an international coalition to liberate
Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s army, did Arab countries unanimously participate: those
who did were in it ostensibly to help Kuwait, not to rein in one of their own as they
would be doing in Libya. The old myth of Arab solidarity had been truly punctured.
Of course, Gaddafi’s antics, his bizarre wardrobe, his rambling, interminable speeches
at the UN General Assembly every year, and his delusions about being the king of Africa
drove the Arabs crazy. At an Arab League summit, he had once called the Saudi ruler
a liar. No one would be sorry to see him go. The Turks still insisted that military
action was a ridiculous idea. But the clamor for action was growing, as was criticism
of Obama for standing idly by while civilians were being killed.

Sarkozy had come out ahead of everyone and recognized the Libyan opposition group,
the Transitional National Council, as the legitimate representative of the Libyan
people. The Libyan opposition was pushing the United States to follow suit. But Washington
was still only saying “a” legitimate representative. I sometimes rolled my eyes at
how much time U.S. officials spent on nuances and semantics. It was lost on people
who were being shot. But I could see that in this case the definite article made all
the difference because it had legal and financial implications. And I knew the weight
that America’s words carried. Cameron and Sarkozy, even Erdo
ğ
an, were scrutinized mostly at home, their words or missteps the subject of some opinion
pieces here or there. There would be a ruckus in the House of Commons in London if
the British prime minister met with the wrong political representative. But once Washington
embraced the new Libyan opposition, it would be hard to undo. The United States first
wanted to know more about the rebels.

With the world debating what to do about Libya, Clinton planned to check in on the
state of postrevolution Egypt and Tunisia, Libya’s neighbors. Huma, Philippe, and
Jake were putting the final touches on the planning, weighing every event, every location,
and every meeting on the schedule for Cairo and Tunis. Here again, if Hillary met
with the wrong activist or visited a specific location, it could send an inadvertent
signal of a change in U.S. policy. But the secretary would first stop in Paris, deal
with a nuclear crisis, and get an American out of the claws of Pakistan’s intelligence
agencies.

*   *   *

The Book was in chaos, a reflection of the state of the world. The Building was struggling
to keep up. Every day brought new changes in Egypt and Tunisia, and the briefing notes
that the Near Eastern Affairs section was contributing to the Book were already outdated
by the time they were printed. While Libya’s revolution had been gaining momentum,
a devastating earthquake and tsunami had hit Japan on March 11, and the country’s
nuclear energy reactors were failing. Washington worried the Japanese were not moving
fast enough to contain the crisis and was concerned about the health and safety of
thousands of American troops in Japan, who were also being drafted into the relief
efforts. The U.S. Navy was also on its way to help. The crackdown in Bahrain was continuing.
Egypt was navigating its transition. Tunisia was learning to live without Ben Ali.
Protests had erupted in Syria. In Pakistan, Raymond Davis, an American contractor
suspected of being a CIA agent, had been arrested after allegedly shooting two men
on the streets of Lahore in January. And then, of course, there was Libya.

*   *   *

On Sunday evening, March 15, Molly Montgomery and Andrew Johnson, the line plane team,
settled down to work through the nighttime flight to Paris. They needed a definitive
version of the secretary’s daily briefing book in seven hours. When SAM landed at
nine the next morning, Clinton would head into a long day of meetings. Molly snacked
on beef jerky that her husband had made for her. They asked Washington for extra briefing
materials, for more information. Every official Clinton would be speaking with in
Paris wanted to discuss the Japanese nuclear crisis, what the United States would
do to help. Molly and Andrew also had to think about Tunisia and Egypt. The American
embassy in Egypt was overwhelmed and barely finding its footing—it didn’t know all
the new players on the scene. Huma wanted to know whether the secretary could meet
with this activist or that minister. No one had any firm answers. All the usual talking
points that Molly and Andrew were getting from the relevant country desks in the Building
were now irrelevant and outdated; with Jake, they rewrote and refined policy on the
plane from scratch and then rewrote it again. Hillary was reading the Book as usual
and somehow stapling papers. She kept walking out of her cabin and borrowing Molly
and Andrew’s stapler.

Jake had fleetingly thought about how exciting it was to be going to Egypt, but now
all he could think of was Libya, that the clock was ticking, how Gaddafi was threatening
to flatten the rebel city of Benghazi. He checked in regularly with the White House,
relaying the latest to his boss.

The back of the plane was packed with a record twenty-one journalists. SAM hadn’t
seen such a large press contingent since Madeleine Albright had traveled to Pyongyang
in November 2000. DS agents and officials had been sent ahead to the different stops
on commercial flights to make room for the journalists who would record the historic
visit of the American secretary of state to post-Mubarak Egypt.

When we landed in Paris, our in-boxes contained an updated list of events. There was
now a meeting with the representative of the Libyan Transitional National Council
sometime on Monday, to be determined (TBD). A note said it could end up being Tuesday.
There was a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister. Though she would see Takeaki
Matsumoto at the G8 meeting, they would meet à deux to discuss the response to the
earthquake in Japan in detail. Clinton wasn’t just meeting with the new French foreign
minister Alain Juppé. Now she would also be received by President Sarkozy himself.

Sarko was a fan of the United States and was often referred to as Sarko l’américain.
He loved Hillary, and she enjoyed his charming French je ne sais quoi. Sarko saw her
not just as the American chief diplomat but as Hillary the woman. A year ago, she’d
come to the Elysée Palace to meet him. As she walked up the steps on her way in, her
black kitten heel shoe had slipped off her right foot, and Sarko caught her hand in
time and supported her while she found her footing. The moment was immortalized in
a picture, a copy of which Hillary sent to Sarkozy with a note: “I may not be Cinderella
but you’ll always be my Prince Charming.” After the hour-long meeting, he didn’t just
wave good-bye to her from the steps of the Elysée, he walked her to the door of her
car. The warm ties and trust would come in handy to keep the impetuous Sarkozy from
dragging America into an uncontrolled spiral in Libya. He was becoming increasingly
vocal about military action, but the contours of what he was proposing were very vague.
Exasperated American officials at the UN were accusing the French of grandstanding
and dragging America into “their shitty little war.”
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*   *   *

Hillary had arrived in Paris with a reasonably clear vision about what needed to be
done in Libya but uncertain about whether all the factors were aligned. So she came
with her legendary checklist. Her critics mocked her for being a good Methodist girl
who simply checked things off a to-do list, to which she would retort that at the
end of the day what mattered was that she got the job done.

She got to work. She sat down with Sarkozy and explained to him what a no-fly zone
entailed and what it did not deliver. It wouldn’t be enough to protect civilians.
The rebels would need more. But before implementing a no-fly zone, it was necessary
to take out Gaddafi’s air defenses. Was France ready and able to do that?

Next she sat down with the Emirati foreign minister Abdullah bin Zayed to talk about
Libya but also Bahrain. Bob Gates had been in Bahrain over the weekend, urging America’s
ally to implement quick reforms to respond to the demands of the protestors. Baby
steps were simply not enough with Iran looking to exploit the unrest.

“Time is not our friend,” he had said. The Sunni Gulf monarchies were always ready
to crush their Shiite minorities out of religious hatred for their sect and historic
discrimination. The United States sympathized with the Bahraini protestors, though
it worried more about Iran. Blinded by its own history with Tehran, the United States
feared Shiite radicalism more than Sunni orthodoxy.

The Bahrainis agreed that time was key and watched Iran’s extending hand with horror.
But they had a better idea about how to push back against Tehran, and democracy had
nothing to do with it. Just as we were landing in Paris, two thousand Saudi and Emirati
troops were driving across the causeway and onto the island of Bahrain to restore
their vision of order. They gave no notice to the United States of their plans. Officials
who got wind that something was under way were told to stay out of it. Saudi Arabia
had its own restless, alienated Shiite population in the Eastern Province, and the
military move was a message to them as well.

Clinton admonished bin Zayed for the deployment of troops. This looked nothing like
reform. But almost in the same breath she also asked exactly what the Gulf countries
and the Arab League had in mind when they called for a no-fly zone over Libya. Hillary
wanted to get a sense of people’s real intentions, not just their public statements.
She was ready to go as far as the Arabs were ready to go, and now that they had made
those statements, she wanted to assess their sincerity—theirs and that of everyone
else so desperate to dispatch fighter jets over Libyan skies.

In Libya, Gaddafi’s troops were advancing quickly east, beating back the opposition.
Soon they could be in Benghazi, the rebel stronghold. The pressure for action was
mounting by the hour. In Washington, no decision had been taken yet about the course
of action. Hillary continued working on her checklist.

Over dinner with all the G8 ministers, she spoke to William Hague. The British were
pushing for a no-fly zone as well. She spoke with Lavrov, who opposed it less vehemently
than when she’d seen him in Geneva in February. It was no longer “no, no, no” but
simply “no.” The Germans were not keen at all.

Clinton still needed to get a feel for what the Libyan opposition was made of, or
at least its American-educated leader, Mahmoud Jibril. The advance line officer for
this trip, Antoinette Hurtado, was doing everything possible to make that happen.
While Clinton went from meeting to meeting, Antoinette had been on the phone all afternoon
with the representative of the Libyan Transitional National Council, trying to get
a sense of when she might be able to get him into the same room with Clinton and change
that TBD event on our schedule into a confirmed meeting. Antoinette had arrived in
Paris herself only a couple of days ago, for one of the shortest advances she had
been on. Before leaving, she had been given an Emirates cell phone number with instructions
to get the man on the other end of the line to Paris safely.

Being on European soil was not protection enough against Gaddafi’s wrath and long
arm, so Jibril’s arrival and the location of his meeting with the secretary were kept
secret. He was flying into Paris from the Gulf on a private jet lent by a benefactor,
his exact arrival time uncertain. The meeting was first slated for the early afternoon,
but then he called to say the plane wouldn’t be able to take off in time. Antoinette
found it nerve-racking but inspirational to speak to the man who was risking his life
by standing up to a dictator. She conferred with Huma. Clinton was going into a series
of meetings. Perhaps they could slot him in before the G8 dinner. Too tight. It would
have to be after the G8 dinner, at Clinton’s hotel. All evening, as she guided Clinton
from meeting to meeting to the dinner, Antoinette nervously checked her BlackBerry
to make sure Jibril had arrived and was in place. As an additional security precaution,
Jibril had asked to avoid the front entrance of the hotel, so Antoinette arranged
for him to be taken in through a back entrance. He was waiting in a hold room on the
secure floor, just down the hall from Clinton’s suite, chatting to Gene Cretz, the
spiky-haired ambassador to Libya who had feared for his own life after WikiLeaks released
his diplomatic cables about Gaddafi. Chris Stevens, a tall, lanky career diplomat
with hunched shoulders who had also recently served in Libya and knew Jibril, was
in the room as well. Chris, who spoke good Arabic, had just been appointed Washington’s
liaison with the rebels and would soon be making his way to Benghazi. Just after ten
in the evening, they got word that Clinton was on her way up.