Information Wars E-Book

Richard Stengel

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine and an Under Secretary of State, was on the front lines of the new global information war. At the time, he was the single person in government tasked with unpacking, disproving and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, in 2016, as the presidential election unfolded, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself, weaponizing the grievances of Americans who felt overlooked. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three players had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we all know about Trump. In a narrative that is by turns dramatic and eye-opening, Information Wars walks readers through of this often frustrating battle. Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Mohamed bin Salman to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea - a scheme that became the model for their interference with the 2016 presidential election. An urgent book for our times, Information Wars stresses that we must find a way to combat this ever growing threat to democracy.

Leseprobe

Also by Richard Stengel

Mandela’s Way

You’re Too Kind

January Sun

RICHARD STENGEL

HOW WE LOST THE GLOBAL BATTLE AGAINST DISINFORMATION

— & —

WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

First published in the United States of America in 2019 by Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Richard Stengel, 2019

The moral right of Richard Stengel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 638 5

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 902 7

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

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London

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www.groveatlantic.com

For Mary, Gabriel, and Anton

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Richard Stengel

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Glossary of Acronyms

Introduction

PART I Welcome to State

PART II Getting There

PART III The Job

PART IV Information War

PART V The Battle Is Engaged

PART VI Disruption

PART VII What to Do About Disinformation

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

GLOSSARY OF ACRONYMS

BBG—Broadcasting Board of Governors

CDA—The Communications Decency Act

CN—Congressional Notification

CSCC—The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications

CVE—Countering violent extremism

DC—Deputies Committee

DRL—Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

EAP—East Asian and Pacific Affairs

ECA—Educational and Cultural Affairs

EUR—European and Eurasian Affairs

FLEX—Future Leaders Exchange

GEC—Global Engagement Center

H—Office of Congressional Affairs

IVLP—International Visitors Leadership Program

J—Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights

L—Legal Department

NCTC—National Counterterrorism Center

NEA—Near Eastern Affairs

NSC—National Security Council

PA—Public Affairs

PC—Principals Committee

PDP—President’s Daily Brief

P—Under Secretary for Political Affairs

R—Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs

SCA—South and Central Asian Affairs

S—Secretary of State

INTRODUCTION

The first thing you notice when you walk into the White House Situation Room is how cramped and stuffy it is. There’s so little space that if people are already sitting at the table, you have to slowly snake your way in between them like you’re taking a seat in the middle of a row in a crowded movie theater. Excuse me … Pardon me … Sorry. And try not to bump the National Security Advisor. For some reason, the air-conditioning doesn’t work all that well, so it can get pretty fragrant. And unless you’re the President of the United States, every guy keeps his suit jacket on and his tie tightened.

It was early in 2014, and it was my first time in the room with President Obama. I was the new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. He was in shirtsleeves and came in without greeting anyone—focused, intense, all business. I had known President Obama when I was a journalist and had that chummy, jokey rapport with him that journalists and politicians cultivate. But this was a side of him that I had never seen before.

The meeting was about the role of international broadcasting, which was part of my brief at the State Department. International broadcasting meant the legacy organizations that were better known during the Cold War: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. You may not pay attention to them anymore, but they still have a $750 million budget—a nontrivial number even to the federal government. Ben Rhodes, the President’s deputy national security advisor, sketched out the topic and then called on me. I started to lay out all the traditional stuff that these entities were doing, and I could see the President was impatient. “I caught the pass, Rick,” he said without a smile. Hmm. In a nanosecond, I pulled back to 30,000 feet and said, well, the real problem was that we were in the middle of a global information war that was going on every minute of the day all around the world and we were losing it.

Then, a different response from the head of the table. “Okay,” the President said, “what do we do about it?”

That is the question. There is indeed an information war going on all around the world and it’s taking place at the speed of light. Governments and non-state actors and individuals are creating and spreading narratives that have nothing to do with reality. Those false and misleading narratives undermine democracy and the ability of free people to make intelligent choices. The audience is anyone with access to a computer or a smartphone—about four billion people. The players in this conflict are assisted by the big social media platforms, which benefit just as much from the sharing of content that is false as content that is true. Popularity is the measure they care about, not accuracy or truthfulness. Studies show that a majority of Americans can recall seeing at least one false story leading up to the 2016 election.1 This rise in disinformation—often accompanied in authoritarian states by crackdowns on free speech—is a threat to democracy at home and abroad. More than any other system, democracies depend on the free flow of information and open debate. That’s how we make our choices. As Thomas Jefferson said, information is the foundation of democracy.2 He meant factual information.

Disinformation is as old as humanity. When the serpent told Eve that nothing would happen if she ate the apple, that was disinformation. But today, spreading lies has never been easier. On social media, there are no barriers to entry and there are no gatekeepers. There is no fact-checking, no editors, no publishers; you are your own publisher. Anyone can sign up for Facebook or Twitter and create any number of personas, which is what troll armies do. These trolls use the same behavioral and information tools supplied by Facebook and Google and Twitter to put poison on those platforms and reach a targeted, receptive audience. And it’s just as easy to share something false as something that’s factual.

One reason for the rise in global disinformation is that waging an information war is a lot cheaper than buying tanks and Tridents, and the return on investment is higher. Today, the selfie is mightier than the sword. It is asymmetric warfare requiring only computers and smartphones and an army of trolls and bots. You don’t even have to win; you succeed if you simply muddy the waters. It’s far easier to create confusion than clarity. There is no information dominance in an information war. There is no unipolar information superpower. These days, offensive technologies are cheaper and more effective than defensive ones. Information war works for small powers against large ones, and large powers against small ones; it works for states and for non-state actors—it’s the great leveler. Not everyone can afford an F-35, but anyone can launch a tweet.

Why does disinformation work? Well, disinformation almost always hits its target because the target—you, me, everyone—rises up to meet it. We ask for it. Social scientists call this confirmation bias. We seek out information that confirms our beliefs. Disinformation sticks because it fits into our mental map of how the world works. The internet is the greatest delivery system for confirmation bias in history. The analytical and behavioral tools of the web are built to give us information we agree with. If Google and Facebook see that you like the Golden State Warriors, they will give you more Steph Curry. If you buy an antiwrinkle face cream, they will give you a lot more information about moisturizers. If you like Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson, the algorithm will give you content that reflects your political persuasion. What it won’t do is give you content that questions your beliefs.3

So, what do we do about it?

First, let’s face it, democracies are not very good at combating disinformation. I found this out firsthand at the State Department, where the only public-facing entities in government that countered ISIS messaging and Russian disinformation reported to me. While autocracies demand a single point of view, democracies thrive on the marketplace of ideas. We like to argue. We like a diversity of opinion. We’re open to different convictions and theories, and that includes bad and false ones. In fact, we protect them. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously argued that the First Amendment protects “the thought that we hate.”4 And frankly, that’s a handicap when it comes to responding to disinformation. It’s just not in our DNA as Americans to censor what we disagree with. “The spirit of liberty,” said Learned Hand, “is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”5

Disinformation is especially hard for us to fight because our adversaries use our strengths—our openness, our free press, our commitment to free speech—against us. Our foes use free media just like political candidates do. They understand that our press’s reflex toward balance and “fairness” allows them to get their own destructive ideas into our information ecosystem. Vladimir Putin knows that if he says the sun revolves around the earth, CNN will report his claim and find an expert who will disagree with it—and maybe one who supports it just to round out the panel. This quest for balance is a journalistic trap that Putin and ISIS and the disinformationists exploit. In a fundamental way, they win when an accepted fact is thrown open for debate. Treating both sides of an argument as equal when one side is demonstrably false is not fair or balanced—it’s just wrong. As I used to tell the foreign service officers who were working to counter disinformation, “There aren’t two sides to a lie.”

What is perhaps most disturbing is that disinformation erodes our trust in public discourse and the democratic process. Whether it’s Mr. Putin or ISIS or China or Donald Trump, they want you to question not only the information that you are getting but also the means through which you get it. They love the stories in Western media about information overload and how social media is poisoning the minds of young people. Why? Because they see us questioning the reliability of the information we get, and that undermines democracy. They want people to see empirical facts as an elitist conspiracy. Social media was a godsend to their disinformation efforts. On Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, information is delivered to you by third parties—friends, family, celebrities—and those companies don’t make any guarantee about the veracity of what you’re getting. They can’t; it’s their economic model. And your friends are not exactly the best judge of what’s fact and what’s not. Under the law, these companies are not considered publishers, so they are not responsible for the truth or falsity of the content they are delivering to you. That is a mistake. They are the biggest publishers in history.

Not that long ago, the internet and social media were seen as democratizing and emancipating. The idea was that universal access to information would undermine authoritarian leaders and states. In many cases, it does. But autocrats and authoritarian governments have adapted. They have gone from fearing the flow of information to exploiting it. They understand that the same tools that spread democracy can engineer its undoing. Autocrats can spread disinformation and curtail the flow of accurate information at the same time. That’s a dangerous combination for the future of democracy.

This challenge is different from those we’ve faced before. It is not a conventional military threat to our survival as a nation, but it is an unconventional threat to our system of beliefs and how we define ourselves. How do we fight back without changing who we are?

As you will see, I don’t believe government is the answer. In a democracy, government is singularly bad at combating disinformation. That’s in part because most of those we are trying to persuade already distrust it.6 But it’s also not good at creating content that people care about. That’s not really government’s job. Early on at the State Department, I said to an old media friend, “People just don’t like government content.” He laughed and said, “No, people just don’t like bad content.”

This is not a policy book, though there is policy in it. It’s not a traditional memoir, though the book is in the first person. It’s not journalism, though I’ve tried to use all the skills I learned over a career as a journalist. Is it history? Well, it’s somewhere between the whirlwind of current reporting and what we once called history. But with today’s accelerated news cycle, where memoirs come out a few months after the actions they describe, it’s more like history as the Greeks saw it, a narrative about the recent past that provides perspective on the present. It’s the story of the rise of a global information war that is a threat to democracy and to America—a story that I tell through my own eyes and experiences at the State Department.

I spent a little under three years at State during President Obama’s second term, from early 2014 to the end of 2016. I came to it after seven years as the editor of Time and a lifetime as a journalist. As head of Time, I used to say my job was to explain America to the world, and the world to America. That’s not a bad definition of my job at State. I brought other experience with me as well. I spent three years working with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography. I was the head of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The official description of my job at the State Department was to support U.S. foreign policy goals by informing and influencing international audiences.7 Some people called it being “propagandist in chief,” but I liked to say that I was the chief marketing officer of brand America.

The story is not a view from the top. Despite that opening anecdote, I was not in the Oval Office conferring with President Obama on key decisions. But it’s not a view from the bottom either; I was the number-five-ranked person at the State Department. In the grand scheme of things, the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy isn’t a big deal, but the job is not a bad vantage point from which to tell this particular story. No, I couldn’t see everything that the President or the Secretary of State saw. But in government, it’s harder to see below you than above you. While I missed a lot of what those below me saw, I saw a lot of what those above me missed.

There’s a lot in the book about how government and the State Department work. I found government too big, too slow, too bureaucratic. It constantly gets in its own way. And sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Like, now. I used to joke with my conservative friends that they should be in favor of big government because big government gets nothing done. But at the same time, I came to realize that the only people who could really fix government are those who understand it best. The dream of an outsider coming in to reform government is just that—a dream. This also bears repeating: I found that the overwhelming number of people in government are there for the right reasons—to try to make things better. To work for the American people. To protect and defend the Constitution. They are true public servants. Even when I grew frustrated, I never doubted that.

The rap on me in government was that I saw every problem as a communications problem. I wouldn’t say this was quite true, but I saw that communication was a critical part of every problem. And that not thinking about and planning for how to communicate something generally made the problem worse. And you know who else saw it that way? ISIS and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. For all three of them, communications—what we in government called messaging—was not a tactic but a core strategy. They all understood that the media cycle moves a lot faster than the policy cycle, and policy would forever play catch-up. They knew that it was almost always better to be first and false than second and true. One problem with the U.S. government is that we didn’t really get that; we saw messaging as an afterthought.

Even though my position had enormous range—covering educational and cultural exchanges as well as public affairs—I ended up focusing on two things: countering ISIS’s messaging and countering Russian disinformation. Before I went into government, smart people told me to find a few things to concentrate on and not to worry about the rest. As it turned out, I felt like these two issues found me. History happened, I jumped in, and I worked on them to the exclusion of almost everything else. Both involved a global trend: the weaponization of information and grievance. ISIS perfected a form of information warfare that weaponized the grievances of millions of Sunni Muslims who felt spurned by the West and by their own leaders. Russia spent decades developing its own system of information warfare, which helped Putin weaponize the grievances of Russians who felt a sense of loss at the fall of the Soviet Union.8 In fact, our word “disinformation” is taken from the Russian dezinformatsiya, which was reportedly coined by Stalin.9 Both ISIS and Russia saw and depicted America as a place riven by hypocrisy, racism, and prejudice, and the primary source of global injustice. This book’s narrative is chronological, and the story rotates back and forth between Russia and ISIS, a structure that reflects the reality of my job. I tell the story in real time with the knowledge I had at the time.

And then, two-thirds of the way through my time fighting these battles, Donald Trump entered the American presidential race, and it felt like everything suddenly connected. The information battles we were fighting far away had come home. Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS. Russian propagandists had been calling Western media “fake news” long before Donald Trump. The Russian disinformation techniques we saw around the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine were transposed to the American election space. Only this time, they were done in English—pretty poor English mostly—not Russian. For ISIS, Trump’s candidacy confirmed all that they had been saying about the Islamophobia of the United States and the West. Trump’s “Muslim ban” was propaganda gold for ISIS. All three of them—ISIS, Putin, and Trump—weaponized the grievances of people who felt left out by modernity and globalization. In fact, they used the same playbook: ISIS sought to Make Islam Great Again; Putin yearned to Make Russia Great Again; and we know about Mr. Trump. The weaponization of grievance is the unified field theory behind the rise of nationalism and right-wing strongmen.

I found that there was a malign chain of cause and effect among the three. In fighting Assad and seizing territory in Syria, ISIS helped create an exodus of Syrian refugees, millions of whom made their way to Europe. Putin’s indiscriminate bombing in Syria accelerated that mass relocation. Then Russia, through disinformation, helped weaponize the idea of immigration by stoking fears of refugees and terrorism. And along came Donald Trump, who made the fear of immigration a central part of his campaign.

I see that very clearly now, but did I see it then? Not really. Did anyone in the U.S. government see it? I’m not sure. If people did see it, they didn’t talk about it, and not much was done about it. I’m not sure how much we could have done anyway.

Every scene in the book is designed to show how both Russia and ISIS weaponized information and grievance; how Russian disinformation entered the American election; how Donald Trump weaponized grievance and used many of the same techniques and strategies as Russia and ISIS did; how government isn’t much good at responding to a threat like this. In many ways, the fight against ISIS’s messaging looks like a success story. We actually did a fair amount, and ISIS went from seeming omnipresent on social media to being confined to the dark web. But the truth is, I don’t know that what we did made any difference. Crushing ISIS militarily had a heck of a bigger effect than dueling with tweets. As I used to tell my military colleagues, losing a city to ISIS sends a terrible message, but taking a city is the best message of all. Ultimately, it’s not a military fight; it’s a battle of ideas between Islamic extremists and the much larger audience of mainstream Muslims. ISIS was always more of an idea than a state, and that idea is far from dead.

The fight against Russian disinformation was murkier. It was difficult to get started, didn’t gain much traction, and then mostly faded away. Combating Russian disinformation was harder than countering ISIS in part because everyone agreed that ISIS was an irredeemable enemy, while lots of people at State and the White House were ambivalent about hitting back at Russia. Some of that hesitance came from people who didn’t think it was the government’s job to counter any kind of disinformation, which is a fair point. Some of it came from people who thought that countering Russia’s message only made things worse. And some came from people who felt that it was more effective to treat Russia as a fellow superpower (even though it was not) than a fading regional player.

But the scale of Russian disinformation was beyond what we were capable of responding to. The Russians had the big battalions; we had a reluctant, ragtag guerrilla force. They also had the element of surprise. Maybe a few old Cold Warriors might have seen it coming, but mostly we did not. It hadn’t been all that long since the 2012 election when people had mocked Mitt Romney for saying that a revanchist Russia was our number one geopolitical foe. Frankly, it’s not that they were so sophisticated, it’s that we were so credulous. The Global Engagement Center, created during my final year and designed to be a centralized hub for countering all kinds of disinformation, is potentially a powerful weapon in this fight.

Finally, when it came to countering Donald Trump’s disinformation, we were pretty much paralyzed. No one wanted to do that. Let me correct that: plenty of people wanted to do it, but almost no one thought it was practical or right or legal to do so. Moreover, everyone at the White House and at the State Department thought, Well, Hillary is going to win, and the White House really didn’t want it to look like we were putting our finger on the scale. After all, the Russians and Trump were preparing to question the integrity of the election when Trump lost. No one wanted to give them any evidence they could use to say the election was rigged, which is precisely what they would have done.

For the first six weeks after Donald Trump entered the race in June 2015, Russia did almost nothing to support him. The Russians seemed as bewildered as the rest of us at what he was doing. They were always and resolutely anti-Hillary, but it took them a while to become pro-Trump. They were reading the polls too. When they did come around to supporting him, it was pretty clear they didn’t think he would win. What they wanted was a loss close enough that they could question the legitimacy of Mrs. Clinton’s victory. They were as surprised by Trump’s victory as, well, Trump was.

I saw Russian disinformation enter the American presidential campaign and was alarmed by it, but to this day, I’m not sure what impact it had. Russian messaging had a lot of reach but hardly any depth. Sure, Russian ads and stories on Facebook reached 126 million people, but those 126 million people saw exponentially more content than a few Russian ads.10 Moreover, as data today suggests, the ads themselves were not very successful. People didn’t recall them or act on them. What had a more significant effect was the false and deceptive content that the Russians seeded onto all platforms, not just the buying of ads on Facebook. But in the end, disinformation tends to confirm already held beliefs; it’s not really meant to change people’s minds. Disinformation doesn’t create divisions; it amplifies them.

So, did Russian disinformation tip the election to Donald Trump? I don’t know. By televising hundreds of hours of Trump’s campaign speeches, CNN did a whole lot more to elect him than Russia Today did. Televising his rallies sent a message to voters: this is important, pay attention—after all, we are. And millions of voters’ deeply held antipathy to Hillary Clinton did a lot more to defeat her than a few hundred Russian trolls in St. Petersburg. The Russians sought to sow doubt about the election, hurt Hillary, and help Trump, without any expectation that it would tip the balance.

My experience in government changed my view of the information and media industry in a fundamental way. As a journalist, I had always seen information as the lifeblood of democracy. That’s how the Framers saw it too.11 Like so many, I saw the rise of the internet as a fantastic boon to global freedom and democracy—the more knowledge people had, the better able they would be to choose how to govern themselves and live their own lives. I still do. But these new tools and platforms are neutral. As Aristotle said of rhetoric, it can be used for good or ill. I came to see that dictators and autocrats and con men quickly figured out how to use these new tools to fool and intimidate people. They used the tools of democracy and freedom to repress democracy and freedom. We need to use those same tools to protect those values.

I had always believed in the notion that the best ideas triumph in what Justice William O. Douglas called “the market place of ideas.”12 This notion is found in John Milton and John Stuart Mill and is a bedrock principle in our democracy. But everyone presumed that the marketplace would be a level playing field. That a rational audience would ultimately see the truth. I think we all now know that this is a pipe dream. Unfortunately, facts don’t come highlighted in yellow. A false sentence reads the same as a true one. It’s not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth does not always win.

In foreign policy, there’s the classic divide between realism and idealism. When it came to information, I’d always been an idealist. I believed that sunlight was the best disinfectant. I left office as an information realist. Disinformation, as I said earlier, isn’t a new problem, but the ease with which it can be spread on social media is. Today we are all actors in a global information war that is ubiquitous, difficult to comprehend, and unfair. It is a war without end, a war without limits or boundaries. A war that we still don’t quite know how to fight.

To say the truth is under attack is a beautiful phrase. But the problem is that people have their own truths, and these truths are often at war with one another. We no longer seem able to agree on what is a fact or how to determine one. The truth is, it’s impossible to stop people from creating falsehoods and other people from believing them.

So, looking back, there was a lot that we saw that we did something about. There was a lot that we saw that we didn’t or couldn’t do anything about. And there was a lot that we just didn’t see. I saw part of the picture but not all of it. I wish I had been able to connect the dots faster. I wish I had been able to do more. And there was always the sense that it couldn’t happen here.

PART I

Welcome to State

 

The Turnstile

When you walk into the 21st Street entrance of the State Department, you have to show your ID to the uniformed guards standing outside the building. They peer down at your card to check the tiny expiration date in the upper left-hand corner before waving you through, exactly the way they have been doing it since the Korean War.

Once you’re past the guards, you have to pass through two tall, automated metal doors. To get them to open, you step onto a four-by-six-inch magnetic carpet in front of them. Some mornings you just had to touch the carpet and the doors would spring open. Sometimes you had to jump up and down. And sometimes you had to open the doors yourself. On many mornings, you would see diplomats in sensible suits hopping up and down before putting their shoulders to what must have been a two-hundred-fifty-pound door.

Once you were through the double doors and into the lobby, you needed to pass through one of five clunky-looking metal turnstiles that probably didn’t look modern when they were installed 25 years ago. You inserted your card in a horizontal slot in the main part of the turnstile and then entered your PIN on the keypad. The problem was the keypad. It was loose and soggy, and the smudged protective plastic cover made typing hard. About a third of the time when you typed in your number, it didn’t register. When that happened, you moved over to the next turnstile and started all over again.

So, each morning, as you entered what everyone always called “the Building” to do your day’s work for American diplomacy, there were a series of small fraught negotiations that failed about as often as they succeeded.

The Lobby

That eastern entrance to the State Department was the main entrance when the Building opened in 1941. It was designed in the late 1930s to be the home of the War Department. But a few years after construction started, the War Department realized that it had already outgrown the building’s capacity and commenced work on what would become the Pentagon. It was decided that the new building would house the State Department.1 The site, in a part of the District known as Foggy Bottom, was not a very glamorous location, then or now. For the employees of the State Department, who had been in the ornate Old Executive Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, it was like moving to a much less desirable zip code.

Established in 1789 under President George Washington, the State Department was the first cabinet-level agency to be created under the new executive branch. It was responsible—then and now—for managing the foreign affairs of the U.S. government. The first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, had a staff of one chief clerk, three subordinate clerks, a translator, and a messenger. There were just two diplomatic posts, London and Paris. Today, the department has more than 40,000 employees, over 200 diplomatic posts, and a budget of $50 billion. In addition to the high-level diplomacy conducted by ambassadors and envoys, the State Department does more prosaic tasks, like issuing passports for American citizens and visas for foreigners traveling to the United States.

The architecture of the State Department is not what most people think of when they imagine Washington, D.C. With its unadorned limestone art moderne exterior and its portico of rectangular columns that look like a giant sideways sans serif letter E, State’s new headquarters owes more to Mussolini than to Pierre L’Enfant. When you enter the two-story terrazzo lobby, with its floor-to-ceiling pink Tennessee marble, you are greeted by an enormous 50-foot-wide mural called Defense of Human Freedoms, which was designed for the War Department. At the center of the painting, four panels depict small-town American life and Roosevelt’s four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. These freedoms are defended by American GIs on the left side of the panel in gas masks and on the right side by American infantrymen in helmets firing M16s. Across the top of the mural stretches the wingspan of a B52 bomber. In 1954, the diplomats of the State Department found it to be too warlike for an agency dedicated to peace, and the mural was covered up by plywood and draperies, which were only removed two decades later.2

The Marshall Office

My office was on the fifth floor of the original building. I shouldn’t say “my office”—it was the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, and it was a plum. In fact, it had been the office of Secretary of State George Marshall when the building first opened. The ceiling is 25 feet high (when my youngest son first saw it, he said, “Dad, you could have two basketball hoops on top of each other”) and featured three enormous, round lights that looked exactly like the flying saucers in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The office was a strategic asset in a city of beautiful offices. After all, people did make a correlation (inaccurate though it might be) between the size of one’s office and how much power one had. For that reason, I liked to have meetings with foreign ambassadors and ministers in my office, where I would serve tea and coffee and let them take it all in. (The office came with its own State Department china.)

There was another anomaly about the office, one that was not necessarily an advantage: it wasn’t on the seventh floor. The seventh floor was where the Secretary sat, as well as his two deputies and all the Under Secretaries except one: me. Yes, the seventh floor was a physical space, but it was also the mythic locus of power in the Building. The phrase “the seventh floor” was uttered hundreds of times a day at the State Department: “The seventh floor isn’t happy.” “The seventh floor wants to do the deal.” “The seventh floor is going up against the NSC.” Just as the phrase “the White House” is shorthand for the President, “the seventh floor” represented the Secretary of State.

My office was on the fifth floor and not the seventh thanks to the astute real estate sense of one of my predecessors, Judith McHale, who was Under Secretary for Hillary Clinton. In 2008, after she was sworn in, she was shown the dark, rather grotty office on the seventh floor where the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy normally sat. At the same time, someone mentioned that the Marshall office on the fifth floor in the old State building had just finished its renovations and was available. Judith chose beauty over proximity to power, and almost every morning when I walked into that lovely space, I silently thanked her.

But because I was not physically on the seventh floor, I was constantly walking or trotting—and sometimes sprinting—to it for meetings. And it was a hike. The State Department was the most nonintuitive, mazelike structure I’ve ever worked in. One reason is that when the building was expanded in 1961, the new parts were grafted on to the old building in a completely inorganic way. To remedy that, the hallways were numbered and marked with a rainbow of colors. The legend was that Henry Kissinger had the halls painted different colors so that he could find his way around—though the idea that Secretary Kissinger was wandering the halls of the Harry S. Truman Building strikes me as implausible. I would leave early for meetings to factor in the time I would be lost. What helped one navigate is that there were enormous posters from different countries at the end of each hall. So I always remembered that my office was at the juncture of the picture from Thailand (a boy walking across a rope bridge over a river) and one of a Hindu temple in India, and that when I was going up to the seventh floor, I turned left at the picture of a snowy St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.

Even after a decade in the building, foreign service officers would still get lost. But at least after a few months I stopped having to send text messages to my staff to come and rescue me. Like so many people there, I figured out a few different ways to get to where I had to go and then stuck to those paths religiously. It was a little like diplomacy.

The 8:30

Washington is an early-morning culture. When I was editor of Time, one of the first things I did was change the regular all-hands editorial meeting from 10 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. People were aghast. At State, meetings usually began at 8:30, but many started at 8, or even 7:30. But there was one meeting at the State Department that was the most exclusive in the building, and it was known only as “the 8:30.” It was the Secretary’s meeting.

When I first started talking to people about joining the State Department, some State veterans said to me, “You have to make sure that you’re at the 8:30.” Condoleezza Rice had an 8:30. Madeleine Albright had an 8:30. Secretary Clinton had an 8:30. For all I know, Thomas Jefferson had an 8:30. Secretary Kerry continued the tradition. This was an invitation-only meeting from the Secretary for about a dozen senior staff, and it set the tone—and much of the action—for the day. It was a chance to see and hear the Secretary first thing. In the building, the 8:30 was something of a mystery. Not everyone knew about it. It was a little like a secret society. And like any good secret society, it had its rules and protocols.

My day did not actually begin with the 8:30, but it was because of the 8:30 that I scheduled an 8. After I had gone to a few of the Secretary’s meetings, I realized that I needed to be briefed about what was happening. So I started a small meeting in my office at 8 to go over what might come up and what public diplomacy equities would be useful to talk about. On my staff at State, I had four “special assistants.” These were bright young foreign service officers who were like my eyes and ears on what was going on in the world and, more important, in the Building. They each “covered” geographical areas as well as policy functions. So, one might handle Asia, refugees, and legal affairs. Another handled South America, educational exchanges, and consular services. Each morning, one of the “specials” would meet me at 8 to go over material before the 8:30. Usually, they stood in front of my desk (young foreign service 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 a local newspaper interview to a speech at the United Nations. After the 8:30, I jumped into the comms meeting, which was held just across the hall in the chief of staff’s office. The comms meeting was even smaller than the 8:30 and consisted of the chief of staff, the deputy chief of staff, the spokesperson, the assistant secretary for public affairs, and the chief speechwriter.

We sat at a round wooden table in a room that had a lovely view looking south toward the Lincoln Memorial. This was the most informal and candid meeting of the day. It ranged much further afield than simply comms. Yes, we might complain about a negative story that was in that morning’s Washington Post, but we would also look ahead to the Secretary’s speeches, trips, and interviews and try to plan not just for the current crisis but for the one around the corner. There was always a lot of discussion of what the White House did or didn’t want us to do. And there was always a fair amount of wry laughter.

This was dangerous, because the chief of staff’s office had a discreet side door that led directly to the Secretary’s private office, and often the Secretary would pop in to say something or call out for the chief of staff. I remember once spending much of the meeting discussing the fact that the Secretary wanted to take his windsurfing board on a trip to the Middle East because he would have a day at Sharm al-Sheikh, in Egypt, which had a beach. We were all laughing about this when he poked his head in, and then became pretty silent. He didn’t take the board on the trip.

The centerpiece of the comms meeting was that day’s press briefing. For reasons that were unclear, the State Department was the only government agency besides the White House that did a daily press briefing. I personally thought this didn’t make much sense and caused way more problems than it solved, but I was in a distinct minority on that one. Our spokesperson was then Jen Psaki, who had come from the White House communications shop. Jen was very good at what she did: she was smart, good-humored, hard to rattle. She was also routinely pilloried, caricatured, and memed by Russian state media, which coined the word “Psaking,” defining it as talking about something you didn’t understand. She took this in stride. Every morning, she would list the issues that were likely to come up that day in the briefing and go over her answers on the trickier ones. We would tweak and make suggestions. It was a good way of getting a waterfront view of policy.

The actual press briefing was held in the public affairs briefing room, a cramped, subterranean space with a podium at the front, behind which was perhaps the worst step-and-repeat banner I’d ever seen, bearing the words, “U.S. State Department.” It made viewers think they were seeing double. The foreign press, as they were called, had little cubbyholes and desks off the briefing room. They were a somewhat motley crew that ranged from crackerjack correspondents for big foreign news organizations like the BBC, Die Welt, and the Guardian to reporters from obscure Asian newspapers who barely spoke English. Add to that the handful of correspondents from state-supported Russian outlets who delighted in asking adversarial questions with dozens of often inane follow-ups. The whole crew was presided over by Matt Lee, the senior diplomatic correspondent for AP, a crotchety, contrarian, immensely knowledgeable reporter who for some reason was always given the first question at the briefing.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, I would dash out of the comms meeting to make the large formal meeting that was called the “Senior Staff Meeting” on the calendar but was always referred to as the “9:15.” This was the more general meeting for the top 100 or so people at the department—all six Under Secretaries and their chiefs of staff, the 25 or so assistant secretaries and their deputies, the heads of bureaus, and any ambassadors who might be in town. On Mondays, the 9:15 was held in the Holbrooke Room, a large, low-ceilinged, secure space. This meeting always showed one curious characteristic of foreign service officers. There were days when I arrived at, say, 9:10 and the entire room was empty and I thought, Maybe the meeting has been canceled? Do I have the wrong day? At State, people were not late for meetings, but they were never early either. What was uncanny was that no matter how large or small the meeting, people would arrive a minute or two, sometimes just thirty seconds, before it was scheduled to begin. So, the Holbrooke Room could be empty at 9:10 and then have 100 people sitting down at 9:14. And when the Secretary arrived at, say, 9:18, it looked for all the world as if everyone had been sitting there chatting happily for half an hour.

The centerpiece of the Holbrooke Room was an enormous, polished wooden table around which the senior staff sat. There were place settings on large pieces of white cardboard. To an outsider, the name cards would mean nothing: they contained a single capital letter. D or P or J or R. The tradition was that each Under Secretary and each Deputy Secretary was referred to by a single initial. Thus, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs was always known as P. The Deputy Secretary for political affairs was known as D. The Under Secretary for Management was M. The Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment was E. That all made sense. But my title, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, was known as R. Why R? No one had a good answer, except that P, D, and A were already taken.

I generally sat between J (Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights) and T (Arms Control and International Security). Some of the assistant secretaries sat at the end of the table, but most stood against the wall opposite where the Secretary sat. The 9:15 was the most communal of the department’s meetings. In the minutes before S arrived (yes, that’s the initial used for the Secretary), you could hear the hum of chatter and gossip. (Gossip was the lingua franca of the foreign service.) When he strode in, everyone got quiet. He usually began with a folksy hello. Because this was a more public meeting, the Secretary’s demeanor was both more upbeat and more formal than it was at the 8:30. He usually mentioned the same concerns he’d had at the 8:30, but typically in a shorter, sanitized version, along with a handful of announcements. He also regularly delivered what the department referred to as “attaboys” to individuals or departments that had done something positive.

This meeting was less for the Secretary than for the workhorses of the department: the regional assistant secretaries. The State Department was divided between functional bureaus—like mine, arms control, and international security—and regional bureaus, like Europe and Eurasian Affairs, African Affairs, and Near Eastern Affairs. Geography was power at the State Department, and the regional bureaus were the powerhouses in the Building. Dean Acheson compared them to the barons at a feudal court.3 The analogy was still apt. At State, it was important to own territory. And people protected it fiercely. If you tried to launch a program in one of the assistant secretary’s regions and she objected, it went nowhere. State was a Jeffersonian culture in the sense that the institution seemed to believe that the regions knew better than the center.

The Secretary would go around the room and call on the assistant secretaries. Yes, they were the workhorses, but there was definitely a show-horse aspect to this meeting, as the assistant secretaries gave a kind of bravura tour of their own areas with names and details designed to impress everyone with the depth and the reach of their knowledge. The assistant secretary for Africa might say, “Mr. Secretary, there was a coup in the Congo, and I’ve been in touch with our embassy. No danger to any U.S. personnel. You’re going to meet with the president of Nigeria next week and the trip is coming along well. I spoke to him yesterday, and I sent up a read-ahead memo on the trip this morning.”

At these meetings, you realize pretty quickly that there is no such thing as “the foreign policy of the United States.” We talk about it all the time, and the media writes about it, but it’s an invented idea. If you walked into the State Department and said, “I’d like a copy of the foreign policy of the United States,” no one would know what you were talking about. There is no such document. The foreign policy of the United States is mostly what the President and the National Security Council signal is our policy, and then folks at the State Department interpret it according to their own lights. People react to what is urgent and important, and figure out a way forward. Oftentimes, foreign policy seemed to be made by whoever made a convincing case—because often no one else had a case to make.

In government in general and at State in particular, meetings are not preparation for work, they are the work. People prepared for meetings, they participated in them, and then they summarized what had happened for another meeting. In government, meetings are the product. People judged how they had done that day by how the meetings had gone. My specials would sometimes say, “We crushed that meeting, Sir.” When a meeting didn’t go so well, people plotted about how to make the follow-up go better. I almost never heard anyone at a meeting at State say something was going badly. At worst, people would say it was “moving along” or “progressing.” Delivering bad news was avoided, and in fact, people often prefaced their remarks by saying, “And some good news from …” Two sentences I never heard uttered at a State Department meeting: “Let’s make it bigger.” “Let’s do it faster.”

The Foreign Service