Assignments for the times before leaving the paper about four years ago. Paul was seen as one of the journalistic pros, reporting in the city on National Security affairs, and in his new book, the ambassadors, he applies hhis Extensive Knowledge of National Security establishment to highlighting the valuable roles plaided by some veteran played by some veteran diplomats. He singles out four in particular, ryan crocker, Ann Patterson and Chris Stevens as examples of how senior skilled state Department Officers have worked with our military and intelligence communities in such countries as afghanistan, iraq, syria, pakistan and libya to combat terrorism and manage challenging situations. At a time when the u. S. Diplomatic corps is being downsized and disparaged, pauls book is a reminored of the vital reminder of the vital contributions ofri some of the state departments finest, the risks theyve sometimes had to take and the courage theyve often shown. The professionalism and high mindedness of our diplomats were, of course, further on dismay in recent days during the display during the impeach appointment hearings in the house. Senior state Department Officials stepped forward to tell what they saw, heard and thought while their political bosses have declined so far to testify. Paul will be in conversation here with someone else who knows his way around both the pentagon and the state department but as an insider. John kirby spent 29 years in the tnavy specializing in Public Affairs and rose to become the navys top spokesman and then the chief spokesman for the department of f defense. John after retiring from the military in 2015 with the rank of rear admiral, john shifted to the state department where he served as spokesman and assistant secretary for Public Affairs during the final year and a half or so of the Obama Administration. He now appears on cnn as an analyst of military and diplomatic issues. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming paul richter and john kirby. [applause]g [inaudible conversations] good evening, everybody. How are yall . Thanks for coming out here on a cold, wet night here in d. C. [inaudible] thank you, sir. Well, as mr. Graham said, i dont think there could be a better time for a book like pauls. Because the Foreign Service, the Career Foreign Service has really beenbe brought to the foe of americas imagination now in light of the impeachment inquiry. And it doesnt really matter where you are on the political side, whether youre for or against what theyre doing on impeachment, you can see just by watching any little bit of the testimony inin the last couple f weeks how professional, how skilled these men and women are and sort of derive from that some of the core attributes that they bring to theom effort. Which is not unlike in many ways the way the military brings skill and professionalism to what they do. So id like to start, paul, because i know this was a book long in the making, but what gave you the idea for this topic . What gaveou you the idea for it and why those four Foreign Service officers . I started thinking about this book when i started work at the state department. I was covering it right after 9 11, and i noticed pretty soon that every time there was a new crisis in some part of the world usually the middle east or south asia the Senior Management at the state department would turn to one of the small group of the same trusted veterans to be ambassadors out there. These people had rotated from crisis to crisis for years to all these places where there was always, you know, extra pay for danger or there was always risks to them. Orbut somehow they liked it and were trusted. And i thought if i could get to these people, i bet theyd have a terrific story, and it would help me understand more about what to think about the middle east and all these ventures that weve had that, many of which seems to go so wrong. So i settled on four. These arent the only people who are in this category, but i thought they were especially good examples of it, and their stories together kind of told the story of the same 15year period well. So the first one i chose was ryan crocker. Youve probably herald of him. He was a sixtime ambassador. And in the period that im writing about, he went in the embassy c in afghanistan twice led the embassy in afghanistan twice. He led the embassy in iraq once at the kind of the height of the civil war there. Finish i also chose Ann Patterson whos had just about every bad job in the state department. And during the period im writing about, she was the ambassador to paktan and then the ambassador to egypt. She went on later to be the Top State Department official for the middle east as well. Then i also chose robert ford who was in this period political counselor and then number two in the embassy in iraq. He was a guy who took five tours in iraq. Think of that. He didnt even he had doubts about the war all the way along, and yet he volunteered five times too go. I think he had more time in iraq during this bad period than any other Foreign Service officer. And then after iraq was over, they sent him to syria which sounded like it was going to be a calm, maybe boring gig. And then immediately war broke out, the civil war broke out. And then the last person that i, that i decided to focus on was Chris Stevens. You all probably know of stevens. He was the number two in the Libya Embassy before the civil war and then when the civil war broke out in libya in 2011, washington needed somebody to go into libya, to sneak into libya to be the probably washingtons eyes and ears on the ground, somebody who would figure out who they rebels were and try to find out who was important and what they needed to know about them. So theres a lot of Foreign Policy in the book, but its mostly a book about these four people andnd their struggles; their struggles against the bad guys and their struggles against difficult local leaders in these countries. And sometimes their struggles with washington too, you can imagine if. Especially those ofom you who he wibeen in Government Service knw all about that. So these were ambassadors kind of in a different mold from most ambassadors. In calm places ambassadors function largely to pass on messages between washington and foreignly leaders. But these were all situations where there was chaos, where there was violence, everything was uncertain. And in a number of these situations, their bosses in washington had to send them in and asksk them to kind of improvise, to try to figure out what needed to be done and with who and to make it up as they went along. Just to give you one example of that, ryan crocker in early 2002 after the taliban government had fallen, crocker went into afghanistan to tryry to help the formation of a new government. And the interim leader was a guy named hamid karzai who had been a schoolteacher and a publicist, but he had no experience running a country. Er so hee and crocker got together every morning before dawn at the palace, and the first question always would be what the hell do we do now. So together they picked a cabinet, they tried to settle on an agenda for this new state that had almost no money. They had to try to make peace between warlords who were feuding and trying to kill each other. It was just a long struggle. I spokeit to a cia officer who s there at the time with crocker, and, you know, the cia was in first in afghanistan. And he said that sometimes karzai needed to be given a little kick, you know in he, karzai didnt know what he was doing, he was a little passive. But if he needed a kick, crocker would give him the kick, according to the cia official. Now, all of these people faced a lot of danger. Robert ford, when he went to iraq at first, they sent him down to be the oneman occupation government for one of the provinces, and there was nobody there there was a battalion of marines, but there was no government. There was, you know, nobody in charge. The utilities were all, you know, broken down. All the big employers in the province had stopped operating. And so it was just a vacuum. And militia, shia militia were getting organized to try to take over and assert their authority. So ford ran into them immediately, and it became a test of wills because, you know, the authorities in baghdad couldnt allow alternate governments to take hold. So one day ford was on a trip to a village to peek to a to speak to a religious leader. Heio sat down with the leader, d a few cups of tea, and suddenly this shia militia broke in, broke the door down, grabbed his translator who was a young iraqi dental student. Took him outside and began beating him and announced to crocker and his, and his military aide that they were holding them indefinitely. So it looked like did i say crocker . I meant ford. It looked like they might be stuck there for who nose how long until who knows how long until ford realized that he had a meeting later that day with an official of the same militia. Ing and so he talked the, he talked these young militia men into releasing him, but it was a close, it was a close call. And afterwards ford said to the military aide, look, i want to go on and have that meeting with their boss later on tonight. And the military aide, this marine major, said are you crazy . Its my car, were going back to the base. [laughter] so there was no meeting that night. Anyway, later on during fords tour there he got crossed up with the militia of another shia leader, sadr, who became a big danger to the u. S. And ford was getting death threats. He realized that he was on their list for assassination by the time he left in december of that year. So later on when ford got to syria, as i said, he expected it to be calm, and then civil war broke out immediately. Ford decided that he was going to protest the fact that the assad regime was shooting unarmed demonstrators in the street. So that made him really unpopular with the regime. Pretty soon he was being chased through the streets by plain if clothe plain clothes security men. They were staking out his house, and there, they attacked the emy finally and tried to break in through the roof. Ford almost had to order the marine guards to shoot at them. So for m all of these four, you know, there was really never a time when they were entirely safe in these posts. Theres a great adage i love that says a diplomat who says yes means maybe. A diplomat who says maybe means no, and a diplomat who says no is no diplomat. [laughter] but actually, when you look at the story of these four, they were not afraid to offer dissenting views inside their government and, of course, to the leaders that they were working with in the nation. And i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that strain in the Foreign Service, this power of dissent, the dissent channel, what that means and how each of those four were able to use that authority and that power, the credibility of dissent, to actually move policy forward. Right. Well, most of the time these diplomats, these career diplomats carry out Administration Policy without a peep no matter what they think ofth it. Thats what theyre supposed to do. Theyre participant of a professional part of a professional, nonpartisan body, and thats the way theyre supposed to be. Theyre supposed to be independent advisers who help implement policy. But they all are their red lines, their personal red lines which sometimes never, they never meet during the course of a whole career. But at other times, they do come out. And i think over the last couple of decades theres been mostly because of policy differences and then now with the Trump Administration as weve seen in the impeachment testimony, some career diplomats feel that theres been also ethical, you know, theres been abuse of power. So occasionally they do run up against them. Now, so their chases are if they really feel choices are if they really feel seriously enough about it, they can leave the foreignn service. Or they can file a dissent through this channel called the dissent channel that the state departments had for a very long time. But they all, all of the four in my book kind of really struggled with this issue at times because they felt strongly about our policy in the middle east in various ways. There wasnt any issue, any if ethical issue as there is now. But, for example, ryan crocker strongly disagreed with the decision to go into iraq, and he and bill burns and another diplomat wrote a famous memo that,o called the perfect storm memo which laid out everything which could go wrong in iraq. He hoped to pass it up the chain. He hoped it would change some minds. And it got partway up the chain, but it didnt really change minds because the president , people who had the president s ear wanted to go ahead with the invasion anyway. Crocker had a meeting at one point with his staff k and he said this iraq invasions going to happen, and its going to be the biggest mistake that youll ever see in your lives. But i, you have to make a decision about whether you want to go forward and support this president. And for myself, im going to go forward and support him. So crocker did. He went to baghdad and helped out right after the invasion, and he went back again in 2007 to help out as ambassador. But he had a lot of doubts and misgivings, and he said after he retired that this idea of, you know, following all Administration Policy is a lot easier, is a lot harder than it sounds. And they sometimes, sometimes they, their arguments had continued and had an effect over a long period. Whenen crocker was in afghanistn in 2011, the Obama Administration wanted to pull out troops fairly abruptly. And, basically, everybody in the administration and a lot of other people in the state department and the military were arguing for going slow. And the argument was kind of uinever fully resolved, it just kept going on. Thats a great segway to my next question which is about the broader middle east. I mean, thehe story of these for diplomats is also a story of American Intervention in the middle east, particularly over the last 20 years or so and southcentral asia, to be sure, afghanistan, pakistan. Were there commonalities in views of these four over the role of america in this part of the world, or did they have great differences amongst them . There were some differences but there were a lot of commonalities too. I think most of these Foreign Service people are kind of Foreign Policy traditionalists. They believe in the kind of common Foreign Policy views that have been worked out over the last 75 years since world war ii. Theyre internationalists, they believe the u. S. Should have a leading role in the world and that our influence is underwritten by force, but we shouldnt use it too much. And one thing they also believe is that the u. S. Should be slow to get into conflicts and then also slow to get out of them because as crocker always says, americans are convinced with our influence, our military and economich tools we can get in, e can reshape parts of the world, and so we dash off and we try to, you know, exert our will. But then pretty soon we discover that things arent changing as fast as we like, and we get discouraged and weot want to leave. Etand so theres a lot of political pressure to move to pullpr out quickly. And the Foreign Service people always despair of this because they understand that these, you know, that having effects in Foreign Policy take a long time. There was this german sociologist, max weber, who said that Foreign Policy is like driving a nail slowly through a really hard piece of wood. And i think thats the kind of consensus view of the Foreign Service people. You know, things take time, they need a lot of effort, more effort than americans usually realize. And time is often something that the military doesnt have. And is so one of the themes in the book whichmi i thought fascinating was the relationship that all four of these diplomats had with their military counterparts. And the waxing and waning of that relationship. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of the militarystate relationship in these conflicts and how these diplomats were able to sort of manage that and maybe some better than others. Right. Well, these interventions of after 9 11 really threw the military and the diplomatic corps together in a way that they hadnt been thrown together, id say, since vietnam probably. They often had different agendas, and they couldnt always see eye to eye. I remember robert ford telling me one time he understand the iraqis better than he understood the american military. There are cultural differences that run deep. In the beginning of the iraq period especially, but also in afghanistan, there were a lot of conflicts that have been written a lot about between the diplomats expect generals. And they just and the generals. And there were periods when they just went their own way, they werent even communicating with each other. I talked n to kind of junior Foreign Service officers whod seen generals and ambassadors yelling at each other in front of the iraqis, which was not good. But the problem with all that rancor that, you know, things just dont get done. And sodo after a while it became apparent that things were not in concert, as the Bush Administration wore on, it became an increasingly physical, disruptive problem. So by the time David Petraeus and ryan crocker went to iraq during that period called the surge where bush was sending in more troops to try to calm this civil war, crocker and petraeus realized they needed to get along. They needed to work in harmony just to get things done. I mean, otherwise the iraqis could ki