HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (46 page)

In his remarks following the meeting with Suu Kyi, Obama credited Hillary with her work in Burma.

“
I could not be more grateful, not only for your service, Hillary, but also for the powerful message that you and Aung San Suu Kyi send about the importance of women and men everywhere embracing and promoting democratic values and human rights,” he said. Then he and Hillary boarded Air Force One for the flight to Cambodia and the long one-on-one in his cabin in which they discussed her decision to leave office and the prospect of her jetting into the escalating crisis in the Middle East.

All the while, Obama’s aides and Hillary’s aides had been in discussions among themselves and with Anne Patterson and Dan Shapiro, the American ambassadors to Egypt and Israel, respectively. The Egyptians, who talked directly with the leadership of Hamas in Gaza, were key intermediaries in the cease-fire negotiations.

That night Obama excused himself early from a dinner in Phnom Penh to call Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. Obama began to get the sense that a deal could be struck and urged Morsi to get back to him with any developments. “You can call me back as late as you want,” Obama told him, “if you think there’s information you need to let me know about.”

A few hours later, around one a.m. in Cambodia, Ben Rhodes roused a slumbering Obama in his hotel room. Morsi was on the line. The outlines of an agreement were coming together. Obama told Morsi that he was considering sending Hillary to the Middle East because he thought she could help bring Israel toward a cease-fire. But, he said, he was only willing to do that if Morsi vowed to meet with her personally. He couldn’t send her there to get a cold
shoulder. Much of statecraft is stagecraft, and Obama wanted to make sure Hillary had a solid script in hand before she left. Between the two calls with Morsi, Obama had spoken with Hillary, and he was increasingly leaning in the direction of sending her.

By the next morning, he was sure. In a holding space at the Phnom Penh convention center, where they were attending an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, Obama huddled with Hillary, Jake Sullivan, and White House national security aides Rhodes and Tom Donilon.

“Let’s definitely do this,” Obama said.

For all her strategic planning, Hillary is often at her best and most decisive when faced with an emerging crisis. Like a veteran hitter who remains even-keeled under pressure, her steadiness is born of her experience. She’s been through a lot of situations where it seemed like the world was crashing in on her. The plan, heading into Obama’s Asia trip, had been for Hillary to get credit for an impressive bit of long-term diplomacy in Burma. But it was the worsening conflict in Gaza and Israel that quickly became the focal point of her last major overseas voyage.

Part of the reason Hillary made sense as the intermediary in the first place is that she had a good relationship with the Israelis, certainly better than Obama had. “Of everybody in his shop, she’s the right one to be there,” Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida Republican who ran the Foreign Affairs Committee, said at the time. “I’m sure the Israelis feel like I do that she was a better senator in terms of pro-Israel feelings than a secretary of state. But you know, you work for your boss.”

On the flight from Cambodia to Israel, though, Sullivan began having second thoughts about the wisdom of the mission. He had been a strong advocate for making the trip, but there had been a difference of opinion among Hillary’s advisers. The risk that she would fail to get a cease-fire—or worse, that a full-scale war would break out while she was on the ground in the Middle East—was real
enough that Sullivan couldn’t shake from his mind images of Israeli soldiers pouring across the Gaza border.

They landed in Jerusalem shortly before ten p.m. local time on Tuesday, November 20—about forty-eight hours before guests were scheduled to arrive for Hillary’s annual Thanksgiving dinner in Chappaqua. She and her team went directly to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Advisers to Netanyahu and Hillary crowded into his small personal office, dragging in extra chairs. Shapiro, David Hale, who had succeeded George Mitchell as the special envoy for the Middle East, lawyer Jonathan Schwartz, and Jake Sullivan joined Hillary to form the American contingent. It seemed to the Americans that the entire Israeli leadership was in the room. In addition to Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, and Miami-born Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer were among the Israelis who participated.

Hillary planned to spend an hour with the Israeli leader, but the meeting dragged on into the early morning hours, as advisers shuffled in and out and noshed on fruit and cookies. Rather than a two-sided debate, the Americans and Israelis were trying together to come up with an offer of concessions that Netanyahu could live with and that would satisfy the Palestinians enough to bring about a cease-fire agreement. Some of the Americans were struck by the Talmudic style of discussion among the Israelis. Netanyahu would suggest a possible solution, and one of his advisers would challenge his thinking directly in a manner that contrasted sharply with the deferential treatment the president of the United States expected in meetings with foreign guests.

The free-flowing discussion made little progress, even though both sides had the same goal. “Everybody was just trying to figure out how to crack the nut,” said one of the participants. But there remained a huge gulf between what the Palestinians wanted from the Israelis and what the Israelis were willing to give. It wasn’t going well.

“I’m not sure we should have come,” Sullivan told a colleague
during a break in the marathon session. “It’s going nowhere. This is probably a big mistake.”

Hillary, who was due in Ramallah the next day for a talk with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, left Netanyahu’s office with nothing in hand.

“It wouldn’t take but one direct rocket hit somewhere to lead to a ground assault. Things were hanging on the knife’s edge,” a meeting participant said. “When we left that night, it was not clear to me that we had a way forward.”

But overnight, Netanyahu’s aides called Hillary’s team and asked for another meeting in the morning. She agreed to see Netanyahu after her session with Abbas, and Sullivan and Schwartz headed back to the prime minister’s office to try to lay groundwork. By the time she returned to Jerusalem, Netanyahu had found concessions he felt comfortable with. He gave Hillary enough “in her pocket to be able to go to Cairo and get the deal closed,” said one of her aides. Essentially, in exchange for an end to Palestinian rocket shots into Israel, Israel would halt its strikes and would agree to open up crossings on the Gaza border, which would allow Palestinians to move freely and reengage in commerce.

In Cairo, Hillary sat down with Morsi, Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr, and Essam al-Haddad, the top national security adviser to Morsi. Because the United States did not negotiate directly with Hamas, the Islamist military group in power in the Gaza Strip, Egypt, which had a relationship with Hamas, was the key to getting the Palestinians to agree to, and observe, a cease-fire. From Cairo, Hillary spoke to Netanyahu by phone. Obama also placed calls to Netanyahu and Morsi. Hillary, according to sources close to her, kept emphasizing that Thanksgiving was fast approaching. She had to leave soon if she was going to get home to her family.

Finally, she told the Egyptians the pot wasn’t going to get any better. The Israelis had signed off, and it was time for Morsi to do the same.

Hillary was playing hardball. “This is the deal, and we are announcing
it tonight,” she told Morsi, Haddad, and Amr, according to a source who was present. “It’s happening.”

The Egyptians were risking an Israeli invasion of Gaza, Palestinian lives, and the international embarrassment of pulling out of a deal. For Morsi’s fledgling government, that amounted to a big gamble. Eager to show he could be a serious player on the international stage, Morsi agreed to the terms.

Hillary and Amr held a press conference in Cairo that night and distributed the points of what was, in the end, a pretty straightforward formal cease-fire. It was clear from later releases by the White House that some side deals had been cut, but the important part, from the standpoint of Hillary and Obama, was that the Palestinians had agreed to stop firing at the Israelis and vice versa. Suddenly, in addition to the expected victory lap in Burma, Hillary had a second trophy from her trip.

One aide likened the mood to the aftermath of liberating Chen Guangcheng. “We had been in a very unpredictable, difficult situation where at several points along the way it didn’t seem like it was going to work out, and then it did at the last minute,” the aide said.

One of her aides congratulated her as she boarded her plane for the long trip across the Atlantic.

“Well, let’s see,” she said, knowingly skeptical of the shelf life of any peace in the Middle East. “Has it broken yet?”

Darrell Issa, the high-energy chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was at the White House for, of all things, the signing of a whistleblower protection act, when he bumped into Hillary in a West Wing stairwell. It was November 27, about three weeks after Obama’s reelection, and Issa had been fighting with State Department officials for a raft of information on the Benghazi attack, including various memos and cables. An olive-skinned, black-haired, Toledo-born grandson of Lebanese immigrants, Issa was positively disposed toward Hillary after more than a decade of occasional interaction. She was always polite, remembered his name from his earliest days in Congress, and deferentially answered yes to most routine requests. If their relationship wasn’t warm, it was at least cordial.

Shortly after the Benghazi attack, Hillary had called Issa to offer assistance in his investigation. “I was in the Senate—I get it. You have an obligation,” she had said then. “I would feel the same way, and I want to cooperate. I will give you as much as I can. But I want to underscore that this should not be politicized.”

She had also offered to provide witnesses above and beyond the number the committee sought and had helped ensure that Issa had access to an early briefing for congressional staff on Capitol Hill. Before Benghazi, she had brought him up to the State Department, along with other members interested in foreign policy, for a series of private lunch briefings. He was always impressed with her ability to
dive right into substance, picking up a conversation where it had last left off.

So when they ran into each other in the stairwell and pulled off into the quiet atrium of the West Wing basement, Issa wasn’t the least bit surprised that Hillary was prepared to answer questions about the status of his sundry requests of her department. One by one, she told him she was working on each question. He began to get the sense—perhaps a confirmation of the bias he had against an administration that had fought him on a set of investigations—that it was the White House, not Clinton, that was impeding him. In his view, the White House had “lawyered up” and taken the position that it would provide only the documents and testimony that White House officials believed were necessary to his investigation.

Issa challenged her on Undersecretary Pat Kennedy’s refusal to hand over materials. Without throwing Kennedy under the bus, she said she grasped why Issa was upset. She understood his frustration, she said, and was working to get him more information. Fair or not, he perceived Hillary as an honest broker whose hands were tied by an administration for which transparency was more of a talking point than a way of doing business. He thought she had negotiated the treacherous waters of Washington politics better than other secretaries of state, including Republicans Colin Powell and Condi Rice, and was therefore his best hope for getting Obama to accede to his requests.

That helps explain the question he asked just before they parted ways.

“Hillary, are you going to stay on until this is resolved?” Issa asked.

For Hillary, it was the only truly tough question he had posed in their brief chat. She answered not with her typical laugh of avoidance but with a subtler smile. Then she was gone.

Their exchange was a telling snapshot of a time when Republicans were much more focused on Obama than on Hillary. There was a renewed focus on investigating the administration and proving that it had covered up scandals in service of the campaign. For
example, House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) charged that
the president might have known about the Justice Department’s probe into CIA director David Petraeus’s affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, which had prompted his resignation just after Election Day. (Hillary showed Petraeus her gracious side in the aftermath of that scandal, writing him a note and calling to express her sympathy. “I have a little experience,” she joked, referring to her husband’s infidelity.)

Even three weeks after the election, while she was still secretary of state, Hillary had utility to Issa. She could prevail, or at least try to prevail, on the president to be more cooperative. In a December interview in Issa’s House Rayburn Office Building committee suite, as he got ready to go to the White House Christmas party, he called Hillary a bright spot in the administration.

“The front end of it, Hillary’s part of it, was very good. By the time you got to Undersecretary Kennedy, he came in with the Obama standard playbook,” Issa said. “I don’t think she’d lie to me. In that sense, I trust her like any politician and particularly any diplomat—every word within a statement has to be carefully made sure you heard it correctly. But no, when you look at Eric Holder, I do not trust him. I do not believe he is trustworthy. I do not believe he is honest. In the case of Secretary Clinton, I think her personal standing—her legacy of tough but honest, diplomatic but not disingenuous—I think it’s important to her.”

Issa blamed Obama, not Hillary, for what he viewed as an inadequate response to the attack. “When the call came in at three o’clock in the morning, the failure wasn’t viewed, at least as of today, as Secretary Clinton’s,” he said. “It was really an Obama failure.”