conspiratorially, “—EJK in a meeting at this embassy.” Her lip quivered. “You are not of value on that issue.”
I wondered how much she was frustrated by my criticism of America’s role in Pakistan and how much she just found me personally annoying. I explained, trying to stay deferential, that the State Department had adopted a policy of acknowledging the human rights reporting, even if we didn’t confirm it. “Well, that may be the case in DC,” she sniffed. She fingered the loop of pearls at her neck. “This isn’t DC. And we do not discuss that issue here.”
It would be three years before the gutting of Mahogany Row, but in national security hot spots like this, you could see the power slipping away from diplomats in real time. Pakistan was the perfect illustration of the trend: for decades, the Pentagon and the CIA had bypassed the United States’ civilian foreign policy systems to do business directly with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders. In the years since September 11, 2001, they’d gained more freedom than ever to do so. Standing in the warm Islamabad summer, I wondered at Robin Raphel, so keen to avoid tough questions about a foreign military and its entanglements with our own. What did she understand her role to be, at a time in which so much of that role was being carved away and carted off? When nineteenth-century pundits suggested quarantining diplomats, lest they bring back mixed allegiances, was this what they meant? Was this something old or something new?
FOR DECADES, ROBIN RAPHEL embodied a tradition of old-school diplomacy. Born Robin Lynn Johnson, she grew up in a sleepy lumber town in Washington State, tearing through the National Geographic magazines her father collected and dreaming of the wider world. At Mark Morris High, she was voted “most likely to succeed.” “She seemed to have a worldly sense about her,” remembered one classmate. In college, she’d leapt at opportunities to travel, spending a summer in Tehran with a church group, before heading to a junior year abroad at the University of London.
“Are you still religious?” I once asked her. She snorted derisively. This seemed an absurd question to her. “What do you mean, ‘am I still religious’?” she snapped. When pressed, she waved a hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t say one way or another.” If Robin Raphel had time for spirituality, she didn’t have time to share it with me. She was all flinty pragmatism. She prided herself on it.
After college, she spent a year studying at Cambridge and found a dazzling set of fellow Americans with their own international dreams and yearbook superlatives. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and the dorms of Oxford and Cambridge filled with debate about an American proxy war gone wrong. There were eerie parallels to another war that would, decades later, have a cataclysmic impact on Robin Raphel’s life: another new administration faced with a fatigued public, an uncooperative partner force, and an elusive insurgency with safe havens across a tactically challenging border.
Raphel, then still Johnson, started dating a young Rhodes Scholar and fellow University of Washington graduate, Frank Aller, and befriended his roommates: Strobe Talbott, who would go on to become a journalist and deputy secretary of state, and an aspiring politician named Bill Clinton. In their modest house at 46 Leckford Road in North Oxford, the friends spent hours agonizing over the threat of the draft. Clinton and Aller were both classified as “1-A”—available to be drafted—and both opposed the war. Clinton considered various strategies for avoiding the draft but ultimately decided against them, as he put it, “to maintain my political viability within the system.” Aller, on the other hand, stayed in England, on the run from the draft and agonized by the resulting stigma. A year later, he went home to Spokane, put a .22-caliber Smith & Wesson in his mouth, and blew his brains out.
I asked Raphel how Aller’s death, so soon after they dated, affected her. “Oh,” she said, as if I’d asked her about a fender bender. “I was very upset, needless to say!” She paused, realizing how she’d sounded. “As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’m passionate about being dispassionate.” Robin Raphel wasn’t about to let emotion be an obstacle to the life on the world stage she was, even then, beginning to craft. In the following years, her path would wind from Tehran to Islamabad to Tunisia.
OVER THE COURSE of that journey, Raphel’s critics would not share her dispassion. By the end of her career, she would be called a traitor, a turncoat, and a terrorist sympathizer. In the Indian press, she was called, with delight, “Lady Taliban.” The astonishing nadir would come during the Obama administration. Four years after our run-in in Islamabad, Raphel arrived at her desk on the first floor of the State Department, in a sea of cubicles not far from the cafeteria. She checked her email and took a few routine meetings. It was early afternoon when she saw the missed calls. The first was from Slomin’s Home Security; someone had been trying to get into Raphel’s house. The next call was from her daughter Alexandra, who was panicked. Raphel had to get home immediately, Alexandra said. Raphel got into her Ford Focus and drove the twenty-minute route to her home in Northwest Washington, DC.
What she arrived, she saw a dozen FBI agents crawling over her modest two-story Cape Cod–style house. Two earnest-looking agents in plainclothes approached her and showed her their badges. Next they handed her a warrant.
It specified that Robin Raphel was being investigated under 18 U.S.C. Section 793(e), a criminal statute that covers the illegal gathering or transmission of national security information:
Espionage.
VIETNAM WAS A SPECTRAL HORROR for the friends at 46 Leckford in the late 1960s, but for other young men, the war had an almost magnetic pull. Richard Holbrooke, who years later became close to Strobe Talbott, and through him, Bill Clinton, sought out the war as a proving ground. His experiences there would echo through forty years of American warfare. Decades later, he would become one of the last voices to carry the lessons of Vietnam into the modern conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Holbrooke was a New Yorker, born to Jewish parents. He was “Dick” to his friends, until his elegant third wife enforced a transition to the more genteel “Richard.” (His enemies never transitioned.) Dick Holbrooke was grasping, relentless, wore his ambition on his sleeve—the kind of person who could go in a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you, one friend said. He was oblivious to social graces in the pursuit of his goals. While making an impassioned point, he once followed Hillary Clinton into a women’s room—in Pakistan, she would stress in the retelling. A former flame recalled waiting with him, endlessly, for a cab during a torrential storm in Manhattan. When one finally approached, he kissed her on the cheek and hopped in without a word, leaving her in the downpour. As Pamela Harriman, the socialite-turned-diplomat, once remarked tartly: “He’s not entirely housebroken.”
He always struck me as vast—not so much taller but somehow more expansive than his six foot, one inch frame. He had pale eyes and a gaze like a bird of prey, but also an irrepressible twinkle, his thin lips always on the verge of a smirk. His eruptions of temper were legendary, but he would just as often go still, dropping his voice to a near whisper. He deployed both tactics in a singular negotiating style he compared to “a combination of chess and mountain climbing”—flattering,
