HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (24 page)

At a forum later that day, Hillary announced that the United States was pouring $17 million in aid into the country to prevent attacks and assist survivors. In meetings with top Congolese officials, she had raised the issue directly, telling them that the United States
could not condone the government’s tolerance of systematic rape. But she couldn’t help feeling that she needed to do more. Shortly after her trip, Burns Strider, her 2008 faith adviser, e-mailed her to ask how she was doing. “I just came out of the Congo,” she wrote back. “I cannot begin to tell you. Terrible. The pain, the atrocity, what’s going on here.”

The suffering gnawed at her, but she also drew strength from what she had seen and heard. “The thing that gives me hope,” she wrote, “is that there are women who have escaped who turned right around and went back to help those who haven’t escaped.” Hillary doesn’t cry much in front of other people, save for that famous moment in New Hampshire on the campaign trail, when she credited her supporters for helping her find her voice. In times of crisis during the campaign and at the State Department, friends and aides say, she kept her composure when others around her were losing theirs.

The way Hillary mourns, friends say, is to pour her emotion into healing and fixing, an approach deeply rooted in the teachings of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. That’s what she did when she returned from the Congo, even though she was supposed to have some downtime. She reached out to a wide circle of friends, aides, and spiritual advisers to see what could be done for the women of the refugee camps. “She was so mortified by what she heard, she was e-mailing everybody while she was on vacation,” said one State Department source.

“She has something more driving her than just power. She has a very strong moral compass that she leans into,” said one longtime friend. “So she doesn’t wear [religion] on her sleeve, but I think if you had any length of conversation with her as a Methodist, and talked to her about her faith, she would be very insightful.”

Hillary ordered Ross and Cohen to go to eastern Congo. They wanted to talk directly with soldiers and police to get a better sense of how corruption contributed to gender-based violence. But embassy officials refused to put them in contact with corrupt soldiers.

Figuring he couldn’t come up with a solution unless he understood the root of the problem, Cohen seized on his first opportunity
to circumvent the embassy staff. Riding in the midst of a long motorcade, he jumped out of his car, ran up to the front of the line of vehicles, and demanded to get in the front seat of the lead car, which was driven by a security officer. He didn’t need an embassy translator because he spoke Swahili. He and Ross ended up talking to enough soldiers to get a sense of why government troops were participating in the systematic sexual abuse of women by local militias.

Soldiers took on extra work as muscle for the militias because the central government’s cash payment system invited large-scale embezzlement. The government would send bundles of banknotes to generals, who were supposed to distribute them to their troops. Instead, the generals, who operated more like warlords than high-ranking military officers, pocketed most of the money.

If Ross and Cohen could figure out a way to ensure that soldiers were adequately paid, perhaps the troops would start protecting the women of eastern Congo instead of contracting with their assailants. They devised a plan for the government to pay soldiers through mobile technology, going around the generals. President Joseph Kabila threw his weight behind the idea, and the Congolese parliament passed a law allowing for mobile payments. But the law gave regulatory power to the central bank, which aligned with the generals and refused to set up the program.

Cohen and Ross also tried to create a text warning system for refugee camps that were in danger of being overrun by militias. The idea was to declassify intelligence on the militias’ movements from a UN peacekeeping force and send it to the heads of the refugee camps, hospitals, and NGOs in real time. But it never got off the ground for two reasons: Ross and Cohen couldn’t guarantee that the information wouldn’t be intercepted by one militia or another, and alerting refugee camps about militia movements might create a “presumption of protection” that obligated the peacekeepers to intervene militarily.

Though Ross and Cohen came up empty in the Congo, Hillary never stopped looking for ways to reduce corruption and sexual predation there. At home, she launched an annual conference on
ending sexual violence in the region. Both the enduring spirit of the Congolese women she met, and her failure to find a fix, stayed with her for years.

“She hears these stories, not just with her head and her intellect—stuff goes through her heart,” explained a close friend who also has visited Congo and shared insights with Hillary. “What we discussed is how resilient the Congolese women are. Hillary’s view is ‘It’s not difficult to go to the Congo. You are bearing witness, and you are giving them respect.’ The women in the Congo hang together and give each other courage, and I think Hillary recognized that.”

For someone who was considered a Luddite as recently as 2008, Hillary builds her own personal networks in ways that strikingly resemble the modern construction of massive political movements. She often finds ways to connect with people on levels that appeal to them—like a microtargeting program that synthesizes a Web user’s friends, interests, and lifestyle, then markets back to them based on those preferences. To the extent that it is calculated, and a lot of it is, people tend to appreciate the effort. A lot of politicians are like that, but most of them aren’t as good at it. Bill wins people over with his charm, but Hillary has to work harder to find commonality and develop relationships. As such, Bill’s alliances have a more transient nature—his political friends come and go—while Hillary’s tend to be more lasting.

One test of this may be the extent to which the new allies she made as secretary, from tech titans to Pentagon brass, stick with her if she runs for president. On the innovation front, her outreach to the top executives at big companies mirrored efforts she made to bring women leaders from around the world into State Department–backed initiatives to aid women and girls, as well as the public-private partnerships she created for the Shanghai Expo and an international “clean cookstoves” program.

In January 2010, a couple of weeks before she delivered a major address on Internet freedom, Hillary invited executives from Twitter, Google, Cisco, and the like to a private dinner at the State Department. I don’t claim to be an expert on technology, she told
them. I don’t claim to be the most familiar person with this, but I know what all of you are doing is important. And I’m in a position where I can sort of help amplify the impact that you guys are having.

“Use me like an app,” she said, eliciting a round of laughter.

The catchphrase helped Hillary communicate a nuanced message. She wasn’t going to write computer code in the wee hours, but she was all in on both innovation and business. She believed that a partnership between the government and American companies could help both the execution of foreign policy and the expansion of American business opportunities. Moreover, American commerce could be used as both a carrot and a stick in foreign policy; most countries like the idea of a new American plant coming to their country and abhor the idea that the United States would force its businesses to move out.

A few months after the dinner at the State Department, Ross and Cohen led a delegation of five tech company executives to Syria. President Bashar al-Assad had raised the issue of American sanctions with Bill Burns, the undersecretary for political affairs, earlier that year. How could America talk about Internet freedom on the one hand, Assad said, while imposing sanctions that prevented countries like his from acquiring the technology that would allow for the free flow of information? If tech companies were granted waivers from sanctions, Assad figured, they would pour into his country and boost the economy.

At the time, the trip was reported as an effort by the United States to lure Assad away from his alliance with Iran by showing him what the American tech companies could do for his country.
But that was a smokescreen; the actual story showed a different, more aggressive play, using tech to show Assad who held all the cards. According to a source familiar with the trip, Ross and Cohen really brought the executives—from Microsoft, Cisco, and Dell, among others—to Damascus to disabuse Assad of the notion that their companies were itching to get into the small Syrian market.

“The truth is they didn’t give a shit,” the source said. “What was really going on was the companies communicating to Assad that
Syria was no more important to them than Rhode Island. That they were fully supportive of the policies keeping them from doing commercial transactions in Syria.” The companies would take their cues from the U.S. government about whether to push for waivers.

Then U.S. officials floated a bigger threat. “What we said, which enraged them,” the source said, “is if you don’t put in place a certain set of human rights reforms in your country, then not only are we going to deny sanctions waivers for these companies, but we are going to get sanctions waivers for other companies, which, oh, by the way, you don’t want in your country.”

In the end, after Assad failed to meet a ninety-day deadline for real human rights reforms, the United States quietly gave waivers to some of those companies, including Skype, in an effort to wreak havoc on Assad.

While he was there, Cohen tweeted that he had just enjoyed a world-beater of a Frappuccino at a Syrian university. Cohen, an international adventurer who had once sneaked into Iran, wanted young Syrians to know that the U.S. government was on the ground and interested in them. Senior State Department officials, most notably Steinberg, were furious. America was gently trying to get back in the business of engaging Syria directly, and Cohen’s tweet didn’t serve that purpose. Ross and Cohen could hear the executioners sharpening their swords again.

But a few days later, after they returned, Hillary sent a strong message to her own staff and the White House about where Ross and Cohen stood in her mind. During a speech to the U.S.-Russia Civil Society Partnership Program, she went off script to talk about her tech force. “I saw Jared Cohen when I came in. I don’t know if Alec Ross is here or not. But who else—anyone else here from your team, Jared?” she asked from the podium at the Renaissance Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. “We have a great team of really dedicated young people—primarily young people—who care deeply about connecting people up.”

In case the message hadn’t been received, Hillary crystallized it a moment later. “I’m very proud of the work they’re doing. They
have been everywhere from Mexico to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Syria to Russia and every place in between.”

One of the lessons Hillary has drawn from decades on the public stage, for better and for worse, is that public criticism is not, in and of itself, a reason to stop pursuing a policy. Her newfound interest in the power of technology abroad and at home, as well as her reliance on aides who came from outside her inner circle, is a testament to her survivor’s willingness to set a new strategy in the aftermath of failure. But they then became a sign of her commitment to following through on the new course, despite bumps in the road.

In four years, she was unwavering in her support of the 21st Century Statecraft concept. She demonstrated fidelity not only to the philosophy but to the people who implemented it, even when that meant pushing back on the White House or on her own inner circle at State. For Hillary, loyalty is a two-way street, and her defense of her innovation team bred the kind of loyalty that can’t be purchased from a political consulting firm, and that will follow her out of State. She now has scores of loyalists who are poised to convert their expertise with data, social networking, mobile technology, and movement building into political work. Some of them joined her when she turned to philanthropic work in the spring of 2013. And some of the hundred-plus State employees who became the 21st Century Statecraft crew are certain to provide the building blocks for a next-generation presidential campaign, one that some aides suggest could make Obama’s 2012 effort look archaic, if she runs again.

“She had people very, very close to her that are ready to go, as you can imagine,” said a close Clinton friend who worked at State. “Those people that are supporters, and people like that, would actually put together a twenty-first-century campaign unlike the 2008 campaign. There’s this new cohort of early-twenties to maybe thirty-five-year-old people, and they are just intellectually different than the people that ran [past] campaigns.”

As secretary of state, Hillary, like an incumbent president, was able to flex political muscles under the cover of acting in America’s
interests. She couldn’t attend campaign rallies or raise money for Democratic candidates, but the State Department offered countless ways to keep her friends involved, address deficiencies in her operation, and reach out to powerful forces in the business, government, and nonprofit worlds. In addition to the donor contacts for the Shanghai Expo and her focus on closing her own digital divide, Hillary built public-private partnerships around empowering women and girls; she sent corporate leaders around the world to act as ad hoc diplomats and seek new avenues for commerce; and she kept up her relationships with politicians of both parties in advancing State’s interests on Capitol Hill. In those ways, she tended to the Clinton political machine.

When Obama’s top lieutenants met in the Cabinet Room of the West Wing of the White House on September 10, 2009, they came armed with concerns about the president’s health care push. Tea Party Summer was in full bloom. Across the country, lawmakers had been under assault at town hall meetings during their August recess, and the rest of the agenda was getting subsumed into the maelstrom. Was it worth all that sacrifice? Not for much of the cabinet. As they settled into nameplated leather chairs around the oval mahogany conference table donated by Richard Nixon, one secretary after another complained that his or her priorities were getting crowded out by a health care debate that was also taking its toll on the Democratic Party’s standing.