influence in rebel-held areas in 2013 through an interesting mix of charity and intimidation. It helped the poor but brutally punished anyone for violating sharia law and was virulently anti-Shia. In early 2013, he said, this organization began warning its followers that the U.S. State Department was trying to sow dissent among jihadis. ISIS was the coming thing, he said.
Bringing Back Our Girls, Slowly
A week later, on April 14, 2014, I got a sense of just how rapid the rapid-response mechanism of CSCC was. Most Americans had never heard of Boko Haram when news organizations began reporting that the group had kidnapped 276 girls from a secondary school in Chibok, a town in Borno State, Nigeria.4 Boko Haram was an Islamic terrorist group formed in 2002 in northeastern Nigeria. Its aim was to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state under sharia law. According to U.S. intelligence, Boko Haram had formed an alliance with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in 2011. Over the past few years, Boko Haram had been responsible for hundreds of attacks, multiple bombings, and thousands of deaths in northeastern Nigeria, murdering far more people than al-Qaeda.5
Alberto came to me and said this would be a good opportunity for CSCC to branch out a bit and do some counter–Boko Haram social media and show support for the kidnapped girls. He proposed that CSCC do some quick mock-ups. Great. The next day, CSCC showed me some potential banners. They were poorly designed, not very modern-looking, and quite bland, but what the heck, government wasn’t known for its aesthetic sense. I approved them immediately because I didn’t want to delay our efforts.
In the meantime, the story had captured people’s attention. A hashtag started trending on Twitter: #BringBackOurGirls. It turned into a social media supernova when First Lady Michelle Obama posed for a picture holding up a sign with the handwritten hashtag. “In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters,” she said in a video.6
I didn’t think about the banners again and just continued to monitor the situation on the ground. Ten days later, Alberto came to see me and said, I need your help on something. What about? Well, he said sheepishly, the banners had not been able to get through the clearance process. What? The Africa bureau had objected to them. We made some changes, he said, and they were approved, but then the Bureau of Intelligence and Research objected to those changes. It was a bureaucratic standoff, and he wanted to see whether I could fix the problem. This was insane. A ten-day-old tweet might as well not exist.
The clearance process was unmistakable evidence that State was a horizontal culture as well as a vertical one. Almost every memo or note or paper that was going from one level to another, or one bureau to another, was subject to the clearance process. Any bureaus, functional or regional, that had a stake in the paper had to “clear” it before it went to the next level. And since they were so protective of their equities, they wanted to weigh in to make sure someone else wasn’t treading on their turf. This illustrated another axiom at State: many more people could say no than say yes. A deputy assistant secretary or a special assistant could not initiate policy or even commission an anti–Boko Haram tweet, but they could kill it by refusing to clear it.
Even when things did get through, the clearance process made a mockery of deadlines. It optimized for purity over urgency. Things that I originally expected to take hours would take days; things that I thought would take days would take weeks; and things that I thought would take weeks would take months. And I haven’t even mentioned the reclama process. Don’t know that word? I didn’t either. A reclama—from the Latin reclamare, meaning “to cry out in protest”—was a request made through the chain of command to reconsider a decision. So this meant that even after the final decision had been made by a principal and cleared, you could request that it be overturned. To me, it seemed like asking for the referee’s call to be reversed after the game was over. At State, the term was used as a verb, as in “you can reclama it.” And that’s what had happened to the Boko Haram banners—they had been reclama’d again by the Africa bureau.
When Alberto left my office, I picked up the phone and called David Wade, the Secretary’s chief of staff, to explain the situation. He had a one-word response: “Jesus!”
The banners were cleared and posted within two hours.
The Ben Cave
There’s nothing grand about the West Wing. The offices are small and dark, the hallways narrow, the entrance areas unprepossessing. It’s pretty underwhelming. I was there during my first week for my initial meeting with Ben Rhodes. Ben’s office was a grotto, a long, narrow cave with no windows. He was adjacent to the Navy Mess, about a 15-second walk from the Oval Office.
Ben was Obama’s foreign policy boy wonder, his chief speechwriter on foreign policy, and, in some ways, his foreign policy alter ego—though Ben was later criticized in the press for saying that himself. Ben’s official title was Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting. Everyone at State told me he was my equivalent at the White House, but that was a disservice to Ben. He would become my closest and most reliable touch point at the White House, and from first to last, he was generous and supportive.
Ben is a cool presence. Pretty much all Obama’s people were. It’s not that he avoids looking you in the eye, but he often looks away or up or down when he is speaking. This seems to be in part because he really does concentrate while he’s talking, rather than just rattling off practiced phrases, as lots of people in Washington do. He had already been working for President Obama for five years, and I was the new kid. When you’re in government, you look at every new person as someone who can potentially advance or set back your agenda.
He wanted to talk about two topics: the BBG and counter-ISIS. BBG was the acronym for the Broadcasting Board of Governors—the truly dreadful name for what was also known as U.S. International Broadcasting, made up of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. These legacy media organizations were originally part of the United States Information Agency and then became quasi-independent by virtue of the 1999 legislation, which also created my job.
BBG had a $750 million budget and about 3,500 employees, which made it one of the largest news organizations in the world. But few Americans knew about it. This was in part because of Smith-Mundt, which mandated that it be directed abroad (Voice of America broadcast in more than 60 languages), and in part because it didn’t do much journalism that broke through in the U.S. It was also cursed with a contradictory mission: it was government-supported independent journalism. If that sounds strange, that’s because it is. Its employees saw themselves exclusively as journalists, but they were also tasked with creating content “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States,” as its enabling legislation puts it. Hmm, how do you create objective independent journalism consistent with American foreign policy objectives? That’s a tough one. Ben said President Obama was interested in U.S. international broadcasting and wanted to see what more we could do with it. “It’s a lot of money,” he said. The President, Ben added, would like to sit down with me and Jeff Shell, the new chairman of the BBG, and talk about it. Ben said I should get my thoughts together and we’d schedule a meeting.
The other place where Ben thought he could help was counter-ISIS messaging. He supported CSCC, and had an idea on how to enlarge the platform. He said two Defense Department “influence” sites were being disbanded because of budget cuts. His idea was that DOD could essentially hand them over to State, and we would run them and pay for them.
Ben rummaged around his desk and found a glossy brochure about the sites, prepared by the Defense Department. The pamphlet described them as “cost effective, 24/7 influence with proven impact.” It felt a little like he was a realtor trying to sell me that dark apartment on the second floor.
