To the Secretary Read online

  While embassy reporting was energetic—and frequently colorful—in describing anti-Americanism, it was less than candid in pushing back on the policies that caused it or insisting on a seat at the policy table. Yet experienced diplomats such as Richard Arndt insist that “policy is not just a factor, it is the only factor.” If getting people to like us were easy, it would have been done long ago. The fact that it is so hard suggests two alternatives: either work in new ways to achieve it or agree with Glassman that it is a waste of time.

  Of course the WikiLeaks operation was itself an example of anti-Americanism. Assange, speaking of his motivations, told the New York Times that the United States had become “the greatest threat to democracy,” with a government and society dominated by the military, its people cowed into conformity by what he called “the security state.” His anti-American views were a magnet for supporters and volunteers drawn from all over Europe who made common cause with him, and U.S. government pressure only galvanized them.

  America ought to welcome a discussion that includes outlier and iconoclastic ideas like Glassman’s and others’. Asking uncomfortable questions is the foundation of a thoughtful approach. The dozens of commissions on public diplomacy spurred no revolution in thinking because the usual suspects in Washington cannot or will not think differently. Until someone convenes a panel with diplomats fresh from the field, the sounds of protests still ringing in their ears and the tear gas still smarting in their eyes, we won’t have the dialogue we need to move public diplomacy in new directions.

  Such a panel might start with this observation from Anthony Quainton, former director general of the foreign service and former ambassador to Peru, Nicaragua, Kuwait, and the Central African Republic. “We’ve made the assumption for five years now that everyone wants Western-style democracy and capitalism. Well, the reality is that that assumption may be wrong, and then you are really swimming upstream.” 69

  Chapter 3

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  CRISES:

  “Post Will Continue to Monitor the Situation”

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  The night is filled with a constant cacophony of sounds: mostly chanting and the singing of hymns, but interspersed with screams of grief, prayers shouted from loudspeakers and barking dogs.

  —U.S. Embassy, Port-au-Prince

  January 16, 2010

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  SOMETHING IS WRONG. IN SECONDS A CHARMING foreign boulevard goes from postcard perfect to a war scene. A peaceful protest turns ugly. Strikers block major roads and the smell of burning tires fills the air. The usual urban sound track judders to a halt amid gunshots, running footsteps, and the clang of hastily cranked shop shutters. The leaked cables from 2006 to 2010 included reporting on political crises including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan; coups in Thailand, Guinea, and Honduras; the Israel-Hezbollah-Lebanon war; and the Russia-Georgia war.

  Sometimes Mother Nature delivers the disaster. The power fails and cell phones start dying. The hotel air conditioning stops working; so do the toilets. Water is no longer safe to drink. Rumors are everywhere, but facts are scarce. The years 2006–2010 saw major earthquakes in China, Italy, Chile, and Haiti; massive bushfires in Australia; floods in Jeddah; and a deadly cyclone in Burma. These equal opportunity calamities struck rich and poor countries alike, although poverty affected recovery rates.

  More subtle but just as devastating are economic crises. In 2008 an unprecedented economic disaster unfolded on a global scale; millions of people lost their jobs, homes, pensions, or life savings. The reactions of their governments varied as they dealt with underlying structural weaknesses in their economies. In Europe, it brought about the near withdrawal of Greece from the eurozone—and the near joining of Iceland. Jobless rates in southern European countries approached 25 percent, and the debt-to-GDP ratio in Greece neared 150 percent. Debate over where to lay blame prompted nasty exchanges. While leaders fulminated, austerity measures led to widespread riots, strikes, and the fall of one government after another. Welcome to chaos, the frequent offspring of crises.

  American diplomats have a responsibility to protect American citizens in a world full of unsafe places. Of course, the easiest way to protect them is to convince them to stay home. The State Department issues stern travel warnings for specific countries, instructing Americans to “reconsider their travel plans in light of current political tensions and the possibility of violence.” The U.S. government would like Americans to stay away from—at this writing—some thirty-seven countries. Some brook no argument: North Korea, Iran, and Syria. But other countries slapped with travel warnings have historical and complex American connections, such as Mexico, Israel, Colombia, El Salvador, and the Philippines. Americans live and work in these countries; many more have deep family ties to them. While the State Department hopes Americans will stay away, embassies deal with the inevitability that Americans will be there, all the same.

  Americans are globe hoppers. They work in NGOs, church groups, charitable organizations, civil society, and for media outlets reporting on all of the above. They run everything from health clinics to banks to educational exchanges for students, professors, and entire universities. They are contractors and advisors, people with sought-after skills who are admired—and hired. American consular officers help their fellow citizens overseas in dozens of ways. They issue passports to newborns and help eighteen-year-olds register to vote. They handle the minor crisis of a backpacker who lost his passport in a local bar, but they also deal with citizens who are ill, injured, or dead. For the American community abroad, the embassy is a first responder.

  American embassies are in a unique position to chronicle and analyze these crises, and sometimes to predict them. In a natural disaster such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, cables read like chapters in a gripping narrative. Long after television reporters had left the scene, embassy officers chronicled the painstaking efforts to put Haiti back on its feet. The cables depict an embassy improvising through broken lines of communication and infrastructure, coordinating assistance and response, and displaying the professionalism of an experienced consular corps working flat out.

  In many such situations it is Washington that has the global view—embassies might not be able to see beyond the haze of tear gas, smoke, or wreckage. In the global economic crisis, for instance, embassy roles were bound to be limited. Most focused on the value they could add by describing how events played out in their host country, knowing that their observations were only a small part of a complex picture. On the other hand, during more traditional crises, embassies knew they had the full attention of Washington—but for only a limited time. The Haiti earthquake was neither the first nor the last. It was preceded by quakes in Sichuan, China, and L’Aquila, Italy. It was followed a month later by a Chilean earthquake of an even greater magnitude, which in turn was followed, about a year later, by a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

  In the WikiLeaks cables, diplomats provide details that take readers beyond the headlines. They describe how Iceland’s economic pain came from the disarray of its officials, who seemed unable to summon the will to phone Washington. They illustrate how the unfathomable response of the military junta in Burma to Cyclone Nargis arose from a tradition in which omens matter, soothsayers are routinely consulted, and numerology governs decisions. Cables on Honduras describe a deeply polarized country’s efforts to address a coup that seemed to have an equally polarizing effect in Washington.

  EMBASSY AT THE EPICENTER: THE HAITI EARTHQUAKE

  The magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck at 4:43 p.m. on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, when the roads were busy, children had been dismissed from school, and shops were full of customers. Security camera footage of panicked guards in the National Palace gives some idea of the terror, while aftermath photos of dust rising from the gigantic white edifice, with its three domes either collapsed or at jarring angles, give an idea of its power. None of the fourteen governmen
t ministry buildings in Port-au-Prince was left intact.

  Deputy Regional Security Officer Peter Kolshorn recounted in DipNote, the State Department’s official blog, how he raced to rescue embassy staff.

  All I could see was dust and gasoline flowing down the road. The severity of the situation hit me when I walked down the street to an embassy housing complex and saw a car in the driveway . . . but no house. I looked over the edge of the ridge and saw the crumbled remains of the house and people buried in rubble. An embassy officer was buried up to her waist, face covered with dirt and blood and calling for help. To the left, a man tried to free himself from the rubble. Further to the left, an arm protruded from the wreckage. My head was spinning as I contemplated how to get them out.

  Kolshorn described the indescribable:

  I was nauseated from the gasoline fumes all over the street. The walking wounded appeared like shadows out of the dust. I made radio contact with my boss and asked for a vehicle to transport the injured . . . Information began to flow in, both from the embassy radio and people on the street: the National Palace, Hotel Montana, and the Caribbean Market had all collapsed; roads were impassable; and embassy employees were unaccounted for. It was a nightmare.

  With no vehicle, Kolshorn improvised stretchers from ladders and metal gates.

  The trek down the hill seemed to take forever, as we moved slowly to avoid the injured and dead who covered the road. Sounds of praying and screams of loss and pain filled the air. It was horrific. We heard the cries of children beneath the rubble; we stopped and with other survivors we managed to free one.

  All told, it took Kolshorn seven hours to get to the road and reach transport, “a moment of elation in the nightmare . . . Then, the chaos really began back at the embassy.”1

  The embassy unleashed a tour de force of reporting, sending 162 cables, the first one transmitted seventy-two hours after the earthquake and running until February 28 (the final day of the tranche of leaked cables). Still to come, months later, were a cholera outbreak and disputed presidential elections.

  Many of the cables were situation reports, or sitrep cables, painstakingly detailing each damaged aspect of Haitian society: transport, including ports, airports, and roads; infrastructure, such as electricity and water; hospitals and clinics caring for the injured; and conversations with both Haitians and the international community on how to set up one of the most comprehensive recovery efforts ever attempted.

  By any standard, Haiti is a special case. It usually ranks at the bottom of any development list in the Western Hemisphere, and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) ranks it at 166 out of the 187 countries it measures.2 It is often buffeted by natural disasters; it suffered four hurricanes in 2008. Even without disasters, nearly a fifth of its ten million people are considered “food insecure.” 3 Although it lies just seven hundred miles from the United States, the tragedy of its endemic poverty, corruption, and dysfunctional governments make it feel like another world. Haiti’s people have lived through decades of military interventions, dictatorships, and seemingly entrenched political instability. For years the United Nations has been in-country, helping to quell political violence and ensure stability. At the time of the earthquake, the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, was the most recent incarnation of the organization’s presence.

  Sadly, MINUSTAH lost 101 people, including the secretary general’s special representative, his principal deputy, and scores of senior staff, when their headquarters at the Hotel Christophe crumbled. Tragedy touched the U.S. embassy as well. Cultural Affairs Officer Victoria DeLong was killed when her home collapsed. A total of 11 U.S. government workers, ranging from embassy local staff to Centers for Disease Control workers, died. In all, 104 Americans were killed out of a population of some 45,000 American citizens living and working in the country, some of whom carried both U.S. and Haitian nationality.

  The first sitrep from the embassy was grim.

  We continue to experience severe aftershocks. It is estimated that half the embassy residences are structurally unsound and uninhabitable . . . Post continues attempting to contact the Government of Haiti Ministers, several of whom are reported injured by the Haitian press. The Ambassador has been unable to reach any GOH officials by phone . . . MINUSTAH’s response has admittedly been hampered by the fact that of the estimated 400 UN staff in the Hotel Christophe, approximately only 50 made it out.4

  The embassy was quickly concerned about the absence of any police presence, particularly worrisome because as jails collapsed, almost all the prisoners escaped. Many police were killed, others were seeing to the needs of their families, still others had no means to get to work. Some worked in civilian clothes, their uniforms left in their destroyed homes. Police vehicles were useless without fuel. Communication was cut off because police stations had no electricity and could not keep phones or radios charged. Roving gangs looted with impunity and large numbers of people wandered the streets.

  “Looters dragged a USAID contractor from his vehicle at gunpoint on January 13 as he was leaving the parliament, after spending hours digging out bodies, including two dead Senators, Michele Louis and Jacque Wilbert. Thieves shot his vehicle and pulled him out; he gave them his cash, then got back into his car and left the scene.” 5 Adding to the grimness, “the Petionville police station is also plagued by citizens who are depositing the corpses of victims on the property.” 6

  Getting help into Haiti was a logistical hell. Flights could not land at the damaged airport for the first two days and were diverted to the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor on the shared island of Hispaniola, notwithstanding the fact that the only highway connecting the countries was too damaged for vehicles. Ships bringing in cargo could find no viable berths—many jetties lay underwater. There was no gas for vehicles, no service for cell phones, no electricity for lights, and people were increasingly desperate for food and water. Massive amounts of rubble and unburied cadavers hampered recovery efforts. A reporting officer described the street scene: “Damaged vehicles remain abandoned in the middle of the road, some with drivers and passengers still inside. An increasing number of bodies, many uncovered, line the streets and are beginning to decay.” 7

  And a few hours later:

  After nightfall, living in Port-au-Prince is an eerie and surreal experience. The city is mostly dark, with very few vehicles on the streets. The odor of decaying corpses is beginning to permeate the air. The night is filled with a constant cacophony of sounds: mostly chanting and the singing of hymns, but interspersed with screams of grief, prayers shouted from loudspeakers and barking dogs. After an aftershock occurs, the background noise increases in a wave of screams rising from the city.8

  Secretary of State Clinton flew to Haiti at the request of President René Préval, arriving four days after the quake in a Coast Guard cargo plane; however, even she was not immune to the airport congestion. The embassy reported, “Préval cited the fact that the Secretary’s plane had to circle the airport and delay landing due to air traffic as an example of the lack of (aid) coordination.” Préval told Clinton that his only means of communicating with the prime minister and cabinet members was “by having them arrive at his residence by motorcycle.” 9

  The secretary and her team set in motion the assistance and coordination that was to follow for months. While in agreement over most issues, Clinton noted that Préval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive were resistant to the idea of refugee camps to house the 1.5 million homeless, an idea for which there was no good alternative. She effectively made the decision for them. “We need to work to sell them on the idea,” the secretary told the embassy. “Haiti is still in shock, but now they can see and hear the response.” 10

  By the end of the first week, signs of improvement began to emerge. U.S. government agencies are nothing if not specialized, and soon embassy sitreps evolved into detailed damage assessments of each sector of Haitian society, with a can-do strategy about how to get things up and run
ning. The embassy’s Narcotics Affairs Section took on the police stations and prisons; U.S. Navy engineers focused on the ports; USAID’s Food for Peace, partnering with the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), took on the task of delivering food to two million people. To illustrate the challenge, the embassy reported, “Due to inaccurate information, WFP transported commodities for 5,000 people, but 20,000 people arrived to collect food rations. To resolve the situation, WFP reduced the supply per person from 5 to 3 days.” 11

  The embassy officers seemed eager to report glimpses of recovery; gradually the tenor of their reporting changed from horror to cautious optimism. Their cables tell Haiti’s story from many angles: from the shock of destruction to efforts to get organized to signs of new life and hope. For example, the roads got slightly better. A trip from the Dominican Republic, normally about an hour, had taken five hours post-earthquake, but was soon down to three. By day twelve the embassy reported fuel deliveries had restarted, bringing the mixed blessing of more vehicles on damaged and rubble-strewn roads with massive traffic jams and long delays. Banks and wire transfer companies began to disburse funds, and fruit and vegetable street vendors slowly returned.