Information Wars. Richard Stengel
officers will always stand unless you tell them to sit) and gave me an overview of what the Secretary was doing that day, what had happened in the news that might affect some of our issues, and what to look out for.
It was also useful because it gave me something to do while I attempted to log on to State’s outdated computer system, which was impossibly slow and required two automated fobs plus several passwords. And that was not even for the classified computer system, the so-called high side, which took even longer. On a good day, this process took 7 to 8 minutes; but on many mornings, it could take half an hour, especially if you had to call IT, which was not infrequent. I hadn’t seen a computer system like that since the 1990s. I sometimes used to try to calculate how many millions of dollars a year the American taxpayer was paying for State employees to wait for their computers to boot.
Like so many in government, I had gotten used to communicating with the staff and department on Gmail, which was faster, easier to use and search, and didn’t take an eternity to get on. This started during the nomination and confirmation process—when you didn’t yet have a government account—and continued pretty much until the end. While the State system was not so clunky that I’d resort to a private server, I completely understood why so many people used alternative means for unclassified communication. Although you weren’t supposed to use Gmail for official business because of the Presidential Records Act, which mandated the preservation of all federal emails, few of the politicals followed that rule. What most people did was then send the Gmail chain to their federal email address. I know I did.
At 8:20, I would dash out of my office for the trek to the seventh floor. After walking up the staircase (it was much faster than the elevators, which were often shut down for dignitaries), I went through a side door that took you to what was known as “Mahogany Row.” Mahogany Row is the rather claustrophobic suite of offices where the Secretary and the two deputies sit. It got its name from the dark wood paneling, but to my inexpert eye, it looked, well, fake. In fact, almost everything on Mahogany Row was fake. When the suite of offices was first opened in the new State Department building in 1961, it looked more like a 1950s motel with sliding glass doors, wall-to-wall carpeting, and acousticaltile ceilings. When the wife of then Secretary of State Christian Herter arrived for a diplomatic reception for Queen Frederika of Greece and saw it for the first time, she burst into tears.
Over the next 25 years, money was privately raised to turn the reception rooms and the executive suite into a space that looked like it was from the early Federal period. In came the Hepplewhite chairs, the Duncan Phyfe tables, and somber oil portraits of all the former Secretaries. Mahogany Row was finally finished in the mid-1980s. When I first visited there to meet with Secretary Kerry, it gave me a kind of historical vertigo. After entering the building through the modern 1960s deco entrance lobby on the south side, you took the elevator to the seventh floor, where you stepped back into the 19th century.
When visitors go to Mahogany Row, they have to check in at an imposingly high desk, where security guards verify your name and take your cell phone. They take your phone because Mahogany Row is a SCIF—a sensitive compartmented information facility, always pronounced “skiff,” like the boat. A SCIF is a secure area protected from electronic surveillance where you could review classified information. In the early security briefings I had at the department, I was told by State security that you were liable to be spied on by a hostile foreign power in any part of the Building that was not a SCIF.
Outside the side door to Mahogany Row were a couple of Victorian-looking cubbyholes for State employees to store their phones. You put your phone in a small compartment and got a tiny key. One of the unintended benefits of being in meetings on Mahogany Row is that people weren’t surreptitiously checking their phones. A few times in those early weeks, I was sitting in a meeting on the seventh floor and felt my BlackBerry buzz in my pocket. I would instantly leap up, excuse myself, and dash outside to lock it up, praying all the while that I had not allowed the Russians or the Chinese to penetrate the seventh floor.
The 8:30 took place in the Secretary’s conference room, which was cattycorner to the entrance to his office suite. It was a narrow rectangular room with terrible acoustics. The Secretary was always the last to arrive—usually a few minutes late. He’d scoot into the room in shirtsleeves, sit down, and start talking. He moved fast and didn’t like to waste time. It was always a bit of a stream of consciousness—what was on his mind at that moment. By 8:30 he’d had his PDP—President’s Daily Brief—and perhaps even had a phone call with Bibi Netanyahu or Sergei Lavrov. His engine was already revved. In fact, John Kerry had as much energy as any human being I’ve ever known. When I walked beside him down the long corridors of the State Department, I always had to skip a little to keep up. He’s permanently leaning forward. That was his attitude about the world as well. To plunge in, to move forward, to engage. There’s no knot he doesn’t think he can untie, no breach that he can’t heal. For him, the cost of doing nothing was always higher than that of trying something. As he often said, “If we don’t do it, it won’t happen.”
The Secretary sat at the head of a long, rectangular table. To his right was the Deputy Secretary of State for policy, and to his left was the Deputy Secretary of State for Management. Next to the Deputy for policy sat the Secretary’s chief of staff, and next to the Deputy for Management sat the Under Secretary for Political Affairs. The other regulars in the meeting were the Under Secretary for Management, the Secretary’s two deputy chiefs of staff, the assistant secretary for public affairs, legislative affairs, and the spokesperson. The assistant secretary for public affairs was the only assistant secretary there. Only three of the six Under Secretaries were invited. Even though there were no place cards at the table, there was a strict seating chart. Before I went to my first meeting, my chief of staff drew a makeshift diagram for me and said my chair was between those of the head of policy planning and the deputy chief of staff on the south side of the table. I sat in the wrong place my first couple of times, until someone kindly pointed out the correct seat.
The first words out of the Secretary’s mouth were almost always some version of, “A lot going on,” “Lots of balls in the air,” “A lot of crap happening.” (One morning he said with a smile, “When have I not said that? I’ve got to stop saying that!”) Some mornings the Secretary launched into a tour of the international waterfront. He would touch on half a dozen issues, from helping the Syrian “moderates” to the civil war in the Congo to an upcoming trip to Kazakhstan. He would often talk about what was bothering him, like the uselessness of Congress (“They have a complete inability to do their job”); the habitual leaks from meetings he attended at the White House (“With our usual discretion, there it is on the front page of the New York Times”); the fecklessness of certain world leaders (“He doesn’t understand the first thing about economics”); Americans’ lack of interest in international relations (“There are no exit polls on foreign policy”); and the vagaries of Washington (“This is a city of snow wimps!”). He understood that just hearing what was on his mind had value for us.
In general, people would speak rapidly and tell the Secretary something he ought to know (Sir, an American in our embassy in Lima was arrested for assault); or what they were doing (Sir, I’m meeting with the deputy foreign minister of Malaysia to discuss counterterrorism efforts); or just something he might find amusing or interesting (I once surprised him by saying that CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, had the biggest news bureau in Washington, with more than 350 people).
On mornings when something was bothering him or we were in the midst of one crisis or another, or he just seemed a little down, he would sidle into his chair and mumble something. That was a universally understood signal. Because when we went around the table, people would then say, “Nothing this morning, Sir.” There were days when almost the whole table of 15 people did that. Sometimes it’s diplomatic to say nothing. But even on those days, when the meeting ended, he would bound out of his chair and offer some exhortation, like “Go get ’em,” or “Let’s get it done.”
Comms and the 9:15
At State, and pretty much everywhere in Washington, “comms” is the standard shorthand for “communications,” which basically means any and all of the outward-facing stuff, from