HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (37 page)

“Everyone who worked on [Chen] from the State Department side had worked on the Wang Lijun issue,” said one State official.

Koh determined that there was ample precedent for giving Chen sanctuary, on a short-term basis, for the purpose of providing medical care. The broken foot, ironically, would allow Chen to walk into the embassy. But there were other complications, not the least of which was the diplomatic crisis that could ensue if the United States interfered in China’s relationship with one of its own citizens. Hillary was about to travel to China for a round of the Strategic & Economic Dialogue and, her aides said, was very well aware of the potential for the Chen situation to roil the conference.

“This is actually kind of an easy one for me,” said Hillary at
one a.m. “We cannot turn this person away. I’m clear-eyed about the difficulties—we can manage them—but I feel very confident about this. Let’s do it. And let the White House know we’re doing this, so that they have visibility. Go get him.”

Then she went back to bed, leaving her aides to work out the final details.

“It was another example of not running away from a problem,” said a person who was involved in the discussion. “You could have lawyered that particular problem to death, because if you just dragged it out, inaction would have been its own decision, because he wouldn’t have gotten in.”

If the decision was an easy one, the nuts and bolts of executing it would prove more complicated. On a practical level, Chen was a fugitive. If he hitched a ride with a Chinese friend to the embassy gates, they could both be stopped and arrested. The way around that was for the United States to send a van to a
rendezvous point where Chen, riding in another van, would be delivered. The American van would then bring him safely back to the embassy. Technically, he probably wouldn’t have immunity just by climbing into an American car outside the embassy, but State officials determined that it was highly unlikely that the Chinese would create an incident by pulling over an American car.

In a car chase scene out of an action film, the drivers of both vans realized they had been tailed to the rendezvous point. One van turned into an alley, and the other pulled up alongside it, facing the other direction. The sliding side doors were opened, and American officials grabbed Chen by the lapels, yanked him into their van, and sped off to the safety of the embassy. The Chinese cars, in hot pursuit along the way, stopped once the van carrying Chen was inside the embassy gate.

Over the course of a few days, American ambassador Gary Locke, along with Koh and Campbell, who had converged on Beijing, worked to “find out what Chen wanted and then to cut a deal with the Chinese that gave Chen what he wanted,” according to a source familiar with the discussions.

Chen, who was something of a celebrity within the tight-knit international human rights community but hardly a kitchen-table name, wanted to be treated at a hospital, be reunited with his family, and then be allowed to attend a university in China; he did not want long-term asylum at the embassy or in the United States. The Chinese signed off on the deal. Campbell called Hillary’s plane, which was en route to Beijing for the S&ED session, and said the agreement was in place. The State Department, in dramatic fashion, had struck a blow for freedom. Or so it seemed.

A few hours later Campbell called back to say that Chen had balked and was still at the American embassy, unwilling to leave his secure spot for the hospital even with assurances from the Chinese government that he would not be seized. “Chen is a very jittery guy,” said one American official, “and it’s not because he doesn’t have reason to be jittery.” But he had a deal blessed by the Chinese and American governments in hand yet still didn’t feel safe.

When Hillary’s plane landed, she went to the opening of the conference, and Sullivan went to the embassy to help coax Chen into leaving for the hospital. Eventually, with an escort from American officials, Chen agreed to go. On the way to the hospital, he asked to speak to Hillary by phone. “
I want to kiss you,” he told her.

Hillary put out a statement, confirming that Chen had been transported from the embassy.

The Chinese, in an effort to save face, put out a
harshly critical statement. The American intervention was an “interference in China’s internal affairs, which is completely unacceptable to China,” the statement said, and it called on the United States to “apologize for that” and “carry out a thorough investigation into the incident, deal with those responsible, and promise not to let similar incidents happen again.” The public scolding was a small price for the United States to pay for having secured Chen’s freedom.

But then the situation grew complicated again. The next morning Chen told American officials he had had a change of heart. He wanted to leave China for the United States with his family in tow, and he was about to start applying serious political pressure to Hillary.

As the Chinese and American officials watched their carefully orchestrated deal unravel,
Chen used his connections to human rights activists to call in to a Washington hearing of the Congressional-Executive China Commission, an organization set up by Congress to monitor the American relationship with China. With Representative Chris Smith (R-N.J.), a leading conservative advocate for human rights and a critic of Hillary, chairing the hearing, Chen said he no longer felt comfortable with the deal.

Romney, who was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, pounced on the unfolding debacle. He could slam the president for a major foreign policy snafu and try to drive a wedge between Obama and Hillary.

It is “
apparent, according to these reports, if they’re accurate, that our embassy failed to put in place the kind of verifiable measures that would assure the safety of Mr. Chen and his family,” Romney said while campaigning in Virginia. “If the reports are true, this is a dark day for freedom, and it’s a day of shame for the Obama administration. We are a place of freedom, here and around the world, and we should stand up and defend freedom wherever it is under attack.”

It was just the kind of story that could breathe life into the Romney assertion that Obama was weak on democratic values. Romney had even used the
word freedom
three times in two sentences to hammer home the point. Some State Department officials were reading media reports from the United States that seemed to lay blame at their feet for being too trusting of the Chinese—even though it was Chen, not his government, that had reneged on the deal.

Sullivan and Campbell sat down with Cui Tiankai, China’s vice foreign minister. Thank you for the hard work, Campbell told him, but we’ve got to change the deal.

That’s not going to happen, Cui said.

Campbell tried to sell Cui on the idea that Sullivan was particularly influential with Hillary and Obama and was there to deliver a message directly from them.

Figuring they’d made it this far, Sullivan picked up the routine. The president and the secretary want these things for Chen, he said.

Cui, a veteran diplomat, was unmoved.

The Americans, who were starving after around-the-clock shuttle diplomacy, saw it as a particularly harsh rebuke when Cui had their food taken away.

As this minicrisis unfolded, Hillary was getting updates from her aides during breaks in the S&ED talks. At one point, she pulled a few senior State officials into a side room on the margins of the conference and delivered a pep talk.

“Our people did nothing wrong,” she said. The State Department and embassy staff had “acted in good faith” and worked their tails off in trying circumstances. She wouldn’t let Chen’s change of heart reflect poorly on the people who had been working so hard to secure his release. There was still time to save the day.

“That struck me as being very protective of her staff,” said an American official who was in the room.

Back in Washington, White House officials were paying close attention to the spiraling situation, which was now playing out in news reports and becoming a bigger issue on the campaign trail. Sullivan called Denis McDonough and reported that there were still some challenges to resolving the situation.

“Yeah, I see that,” McDonough replied tartly.

In consultation with White House aides back in Washington, State officials decided that only Hillary herself stood a chance of getting the Chinese to agree to a second deal—and risked losing face if she failed.

“We knew we had one big play with her,” said one American official who was in China.

The plan was to get Hillary into a room the next day with Dai Bingguo, the powerful state councilor, and let her make the case directly to him that it was best for both sides to right the situation. “We all agreed on a game plan, talking points, the whole nine yards,” said a second source.

The next morning Hillary’s aides sent word to their Chinese counterparts that Hillary wanted to meet with Dai privately on the sidelines of an official breakfast. The Chinese pushed back, but the Americans held their ground. It is a personal request from Hillary, they said, knowing that Dai would be hard-pressed to refuse what was basically a demand veiled as polite insistence. When Hillary got in the room with Dai, she told him that the Chen situation was blowing up in the United States. Chen had called in to a congressional hearing the previous day, Hillary said.

Dai’s jaw dropped. Surely she had been mistranslated, he said. Chen didn’t really call in to a congressional hearing, did he?

Hillary’s power and prestige might have given her room to work, but she was also forced to put her personal credibility on the line. The United States had pulled off a caper of questionable legitimacy to give Chen asylum, negotiated his freedom with the Chinese government, and then turned back on a publicly announced deal. Chen might have been a little eccentric, but a lot was riding on this moment for her, for Obama, and of course, for the blind dissident who couldn’t make up his mind.

Still, she boldly stepped farther out onto the limb. If China didn’t play ball, shes intimated, the trust that had been slowly built up between the two countries through the S&ED and other interactions might just evaporate.
Chinese and American officials were in the process of wrapping up a conference that produced fifty outcomes on issues ranging from climate change to international maritime law; some of that progress could be jeopardized if there was no resolution to the Chen situation.

“She just, through kind of a piercing gaze and a stiff but calm tone, got Dai to see we were not kidding around—that this was a big, big deal,” said one American official.

“If we do not resolve this, we’re going to have a problem,” Hillary said.

If it was a bluff, Dai didn’t call it.

Hillary thought she had a solution that could work for all sides. If China declared Chen a free man and processed a passport request
from him, he could travel to the United States. China could say they had dealt directly with their own citizen. The United States could be certain that its efforts to shield Chen had not been in vain. And Chen would be able to move his family to America. Dai liked the idea enough to task his aides to work with Hillary’s team to put together the details of a plan that could be brought to Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao.

Hu huddled with Dai and Cui at the end of his meeting with the American delegation, which American officials took as a good sign that serious consideration was being given to the plan. In the middle of the day, after working with their American counterparts, Chinese officials put out a statement indicating that Chen was eligible to apply for a passport. It would take another couple of weeks for everything to fall in line. But Hillary’s face-to-face talk with Dai had turned a political disaster into a diplomatic success for the administration, and it had protected the Strategic & Economic Dialogue that she had worked so hard to build.

“She invests heavily in personal relationships,” said one of her senior aides. “She spends huge amounts of time in these meetings, not just kind of going through her talking points but getting to know the person, asking them about things they care about. So she establishes a baseline level of credibility that she’s not there just to transact but she’s actually building relationships. With Dai, she had built up a relationship over a long time.”

Rather than the “dark day for freedom” and “day of shame” for Obama that Romney had declared, Hillary’s diplomacy had delivered a human rights coup. America liberated a Chinese political prisoner and did it with the assent of the Chinese. She had made the decision to go get Chen without asking for permission from the White House, and for at least a day, it had looked as if it would blow up in her face and cause some collateral damage to the Obama campaign. But ultimately the Romney attack was turned on its head. The Chen episode was a win for Obama.

Around the same time, Hillary was lobbying the White House on another issue with serious potential repercussions on the campaign
trail. She wanted to issue an apology to Pakistan for a
November 2011 NATO air strike in Peshawar that had mistakenly killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers. In late 2010 and early 2011, as her effort to woo Pakistani leaders with diplomacy and development assistance had taken a backseat to drone strikes and other U.S. counterterrorism measures, the relationship between the two countries had suffered, leaving little reason for the United States to keep a spotlight on it. The relationship had all but disintegrated when SEAL Team 6 raided Bin Laden’s compound, and the NATO strike blew up what was left of it. Pakistan immediately ordered the CIA to stop conducting drone operations out of one air base, and—more important—it closed off supply routes from Karachi, the port city on the Arabian Sea, to Afghanistan, forcing the United States to rely on a northern route through Russia. That gave Russia more leverage in its politically delicate relationship with the United States.

Hillary argued that the United States should comply with Pakistan’s demand for an apology—the mistake, after all, had cost Pakistani soldiers their lives; and at least as important as the question of whether it was the right thing to do, an apology was in the best interests of the United States preserving its tenuous relationship with a country that was both infested with terrorists and armed with nuclear warheads. Moreover, it was costing the United States money and time to use the Russian route. It didn’t make sense for America to stand on ceremony when the refusal to issue an apology came with a price, both in terms of dollars and in conducting the war in Afghanistan, she thought.