Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (51 page)

“Do you think we can prevail in Afghanistan?” Clinton asked. “No,” replied Putin sardonically, “no more than we could. But that doesn’t mean you are wrong to be there—at least until you get rid of al Qaeda.”

In keeping with his practice when Bush was president, Clinton had diligently informed Jim Jones, the retired Marine general who served as Obama’s national security adviser, about his trip to Davos and the likelihood that he would meet with foreign heads of state. Despite his incautious conduct in the campaign, Clinton was no loose diplomatic cannon. Obama would soon learn that he and his team were capable of handling the most sensitive and difficult mission without trouble.

Without seeking or gaining much notice in the North American press, Clinton and his friend Frank Giustra traveled to Colombia and points south in March on the Canadian mining magnate’s MD-87 jet. It had been two years since Giustra, who had gained so much unwanted notoriety for his uranium venture in Kazakhstan, thanks to the
New York Times
, first committed $100 million of his personal fortune to what would become known as the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative—and later renamed the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership. They had persuaded Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire whose fortune was thought to be the fourth largest in the world, to match Giustra’s commitment with another $100 million.

As a business executive who had climbed from a very modest background, Giustra believed in Clinton’s vision of alleviating and perhaps someday eliminating poverty through “social enterprise.” To provide lasting jobs and significant income to the poor, the most effective programs would encourage investment based on market demand—preferably with environmental, social, educational, and health benefits
that addressed the broadest needs of a community. Giustra had earned most of his money from mining industries that rarely left anything of value behind after depleting a region’s valuable commodities.

The communities in greatest need often lacked the basic elements of enterprise: affordable financing, technical skills, a trained workforce, marketing networks, and even basic transport for farm and craft products. With a boost of capital and advice, for instance, small agricultural producers could obtain inputs like fertilizer at lower bulk prices, and sell value-added produce to supermarkets or hotels—in short, by connecting small cooperatives into the supply chains of much larger corporate businesses.

Giustra was eager to see whether this theoretical approach would work. Visiting Colombia, they were able to glimpse the beginnings of progress, stopping first in Cartagena, the beautiful coastal city whose old architecture and alluring beaches were drawing tourists—and hotel investment.

There Giustra and Clinton visited an “inverse trade fair,” organized by CGEP, where executives from six local hotels displayed their purchasing needs—and 150 people, representing fifty-five local makers of everything from vegetables, fruits, and bread to candy, linens, dolls, and other souvenirs, showed up to present their wares and make connections. Many of the potential suppliers represented disadvantaged groups, including teen mothers and the disabled, who were brought to the fair by NGO sponsors. The hotels had agreed in advance to buy at least 20 percent of their needed goods and services from local sources. Next, CGEP planned to train young people from poor neighborhoods for hotel employment.

From Cartagena, they flew northward along the coast to Barranquilla, where they visited one of several successful schools funded by the singer Shakira, who had grown up there. Giustra and Clinton had agreed to provide $2 million to her charity, known as Pies Descalzos (Bare Feet) after the title of her first major-label album, to provide income and food support to the 1,500 poor students in her schools for two years.

Finally they traveled inland, deep into a mountainous jungle region, to visit an organic spice cooperative run by a group of local Afro-Caribbean women. For hundreds of years, women in this rural area
had been growing abundant crops of cilantro, basil, ginger, turmeric, and paprika.

With sporadic NGO assistance, a few local women had created a small business they named Taná and established marketing ties with supermarkets in Colombia’s larger cities. They had drawn together more than sixty of their neighbors. They had earned some extra money for their families, and had even obtained an organic certification, but were never able to amass enough capital—or qualify for a loan—to expand much. The low volumes and primitive packaging had left them unable to rise above a subsistence level. Now CGEP was proposing to help them redesign their packaging, improve their processes, recruit more growers, and expand their marketing, even to other countries—to grow and prosper.

Investing in this kind of project, Giustra understood, was only possible for “patient capital”—and the most patient capital would be the kind of money made available by him and Slim, which would be reinvested in employment rather than taken as profit. Years would pass before they knew whether CGEP’s approach was working, whether they had the right staff and strategies. And if it did work, that uplifting knowledge surely would have to be its own reward. The chance of any American media outlet featuring this kind of story was nil. On that score, neither of them harbored any illusions.

Owing to his experience in dealing with the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina, Clinton had come to be seen as an international “master of disaster.” His work as the U.N. special envoy overseeing tsunami aid had been successful, although little noticed in the media. Nobody who had been paying attention was surprised when, on May 18, the United Nations announced that Clinton would become the international body’s “special envoy” for Haiti, at the secretary-general’s request.

During 2008 the impoverished Caribbean island, one of the poorest and worst governed countries in the world, had been struck by four destructive hurricanes that killed eight hundred of its people, destroyed more than half of its agricultural production, and drowned its cities and
villages in avalanches of mud. Damage to buildings and infrastructure was estimated at $1 billion. But again the worldwide recession had victimized the poorest of the poor, with pledges of international aid slow to materialize as the Haitians struggled to survive, let alone recover.

Having spent his 1975 honeymoon with Hillary there, Clinton had long been fascinated by Haiti—and, for an American politician, he was popular with the Haitians who remembered how his threat of armed force had dislodged a military junta and then restored the elected left-wing president, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to office in 1994. Little had improved since then, and much had gotten worse. In addition to its chronic economic and governance problems, the country was an ecological ruin, as the harvesting of trees for fuel left mountainsides bare, letting fertile soil wash out to sea.

Clinton had responded to the crisis by devoting much of the September 2008 session of CGI to the creation of a “Haiti Action Network” that would focus commitments and investment on the island. In March he had visited some of the CGI commitment sites there, and in April he had helped to raise $324 million for relief and reconstruction at an international donors conference in New York. When the secretary-general asked him to take the job of special envoy—which meant, among other things, making sure those donors fulfilled their pledges—he agreed instantly. It was an undertaking he approached with characteristic if not justified optimism.

‘’It is an honor to accept the secretary-general’s invitation,” he told a reporter for the
Miami Herald
, which broke the story of his appointment. “Last year’s natural disasters took a great toll, but Haiti’s government and people have the determination and ability to ‘build back better,’ not just to repair the damage done but to lay the foundations for the long-term sustainable development that has eluded them for so long.”

In Haiti, however, the response from political leaders and commentators was equivocal. While President René Préval welcomed Clinton’s appointment, local politicians from left and right suggested that this was merely another ploy used by foreign authorities to control Haitian affairs and exploit the Haitian people. Clinton had broken promises to rebuild Haiti in the past, they said, so why should anyone believe him now?

Short of a massive emigration from the broken island, Haiti’s troubles were intractable and likely to frustrate everyone who sought to solve them. Despite Clinton’s insistent optimism, he had no illusions about what he would face as the special envoy. He also had no idea how much worse the island’s misfortune would soon become.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sometime early in the summer of 2009, Clinton first learned of a strange invitation. From various people, his staff had heard that Kim Jong-il, the “dear leader” of North Korea, desired his presence in Pyongyang, the capital of the outlaw communist regime. Specifically, the Hermit Kingdom’s dictator had suggested that if Clinton came to visit, his government would release a pair of American journalists imprisoned there and allow them to return home with the former president.

Four months earlier the journalists—Laura Ling and Euna Lee, both employed by Al Gore’s Current TV—had stepped across the border from China into North Korea, where soldiers immediately seized them. A colleague who escaped then reported their capture. Diplomatic efforts to secure their release had failed. Held in a Pyongyang guesthouse rather than in prison, the two women were nevertheless subjected to a trial for the crime of attempting to defame the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and sentenced to twelve years hard labor.

As time went on there appeared to be a real risk that Ling and Lee would be sent to a prison camp. Laura’s sister Lisa Ling, a well-known U.S. television correspondent and anchor, was terrified that unforeseen circumstances—such as the death of Kim, then sixty-eight and thought to have suffered a stroke—could lead to disaster for the prisoners.

The rumors about a potential Clinton rescue took on greater reality in early July. The North Koreans had permitted the women to make a few telephone calls directly to their families, and in the most recent conversation, obviously monitored by their captors, Laura and Euna had told their families the U.S. government would have to request “amnesty”—and send Bill Clinton—to secure their release.

Nobody else was acceptable, as their mother, Mary Ling, explained in a pleading letter to Hillary. The North Koreans, she wrote, “do not want former Vice President Al Gore as they consider him only as the girls’ employer.” They also rejected other potential rescuers, including
Bill Richardson and Jimmy Carter. The message was clear: If Clinton didn’t come, the women would be sent to a labor camp.

On July 10, Hillary called publicly for a grant of amnesty, shifting from the tone of earlier statements urging the release of Ling and Lee on “humanitarian” grounds. The women and their families, she declared, “have expressed great remorse for this incident, and I think everyone is very sorry that it happened.”

In the meantime, Clinton had heard directly from Gore as well, who reiterated the North Korean demand and asked him to go. Over the ensuing weeks, Clinton and Band talked several times with Thomas Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser. The White House was nervous about any such “freelance” contact with the North Koreans, who had recently tested another nuclear weapon and come under heavier U.N. sanctions as a consequence. Tensions had risen to a new level on the Korean Peninsula, in Japan, and even in China, which had denounced its ally’s reckless action.

Donilon, his deputy Denis McDonough, and others in the administration seemed especially wary of any mission that involved Clinton, due perhaps to lingering political animosity. But in the face of a continuing, heavily publicized campaign to free the women spearheaded by Lisa Ling, the administration had to act if there was any possibility of freeing them.

Backchannel sources in New York, at the North Korean embassy to the United Nations, and in Pyongyang had reiterated to State Department officials the regime’s demand for Clinton to visit Kim. No one else would be acceptable.

In desperation, Lisa Ling had sent a letter in July directly to Obama via his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, whom she had met and befriended in Hawaii. “I took my journalist hat off last year to stump for you during the campaign,” she reminded him. Indeed, she had been among the celebrity organizers of Asian Americans for Obama, speaking for him and raising money across the country. (Both Clintons and Band were well aware of Ling’s activism for Obama, which was of “no concern” to them.)

“I know that President Clinton is a complicated request,” she admitted, “but the signs that the [North Koreans] are ready to deal are more apparent than ever. Mr. President, our families beg you to send Presi
dent Clinton as an envoy to secure the release of my sister Laura and Euna Lee. . . . With terror in her voice, my sister said, ‘If something is not done very soon—this week—we will be sent to a labor camp.’ Please help her avoid this, there’s no one else who can.”

From Clinton’s perspective, the only question was whether the North Koreans were serious about letting him bring the women home. With assurances from the White House, he agreed to go without hesitation—as he had already told Lisa Ling he would, through a mutual friend.

Within the White House, a debate still raged over whether or not to send Clinton, but on July 30 Obama ordered a green light. The anticipated departure date was August 4—a tight schedule with even tighter operational security. A leak might ruin the chances of success. The list of those “read into” the mission at the White House and State Department was very limited. Clinton’s staff cleared his schedule, without revealing the reason to anyone.

To arrange aviation, they approached Steve Bing. “I’m taking your plane,” Clinton told him. “But I can’t tell you right now where we’re going.” Bing’s white Boeing 737 was in a hangar near Los Angeles, in Burbank. For transportation to Burbank, they asked Andrew Liveris, the chief executive of Dow Chemical, who readily agreed to lend them the company’s plane without knowing why.