it was, at the time, unclear whether this meant development aid or military assistance or both. (“Nobody can do that better than me,” he added helpfully.)
Tom Countryman was one of many senior officials who emerged from their first meetings with the Trump transition team alarmed. “The transition was a joke,” he remembered. “Any other administration changeover, there were people who were knowledgeable about foreign affairs, there were people who had experience in government, and they had a systematic effort to collect information and feed it to a new team. In this case, none of those things were true.” He presented the transition team with detailed briefing papers on nonproliferation issues, marked “sensitive but unclassified,” since few members of the team had security clearances. But they showed little interest in nuclear weapons. What they did show was a “deep distrust for professional public servants,” Countryman said. They hadn’t come to learn, he realized with a sinking feeling. They’d come to cut.
Then the firings began. Typically, even politically appointed ambassadors in important places, especially ones without overly partisan reputations, stay on until a replacement is confirmed, sometimes for months. The Trump administration broke from that tradition: shortly after taking office, the new administration ordered all politically appointed ambassadors to depart immediately, faster than usual. Pack your bags, hit the road.
After that, the transition team asked State Department management to draw up a list of all noncareer officers across the Department. Countryman began to fear that the next target would be the contractors hired under an authority specifically designed to bring subject matter experts into American diplomacy. The Department was full of these. They played pivotal roles in offices overseeing the most sensitive areas of American foreign policy, including in Tom Countryman’s. “These were the best possible experts on issues like Korea and Pakistan,” he remembered. “And in the arms-control bureau there were a number of them that were not easily replaceable.” They were “necessary.” The United States couldn’t afford to lose them. But “the concern that they were going to dump everyone they could dump was palpable.” And so he’d spent the weeks leading up to that day in Jordan quietly lobbying State Department management, helping them devise arguments against what he feared might be a wave of firings of the Department’s experts.
In fact, that’s what he’d assumed the call was about. What was unthinkable, ahistorical, seemingly senseless, was that it would in fact be about career officials like him. Countryman insisted it was no great sob story for him personally. He had been around a long time. He had his pension. But it was a troubling affront to institutional culture. Tom Countryman had an unimpeachable record of service across Republican and Democratic administrations. He’d had a few contentious moments in Senate hearings, but they’d earned him more respect than ire. Senators “would come up to me after and say, ‘I really like the way you shoot straight,’” he recalled. Perhaps, he speculated, the administration was trying to send a message that the United States was no longer interested in arms control. Or maybe they’d gotten into his private Facebook account where, during the campaign, he’d posted criticism of Trump to a small circle of friends. “To this day, I don’t know why I was singled out.”
IN FACT, TOM COUNTRYMAN had not been singled out. The White House, Chacon told him, was relieving six career diplomats of their jobs that day. Some were more explicable than Countryman. Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, who served around the world for more than forty years, had been involved with both the secretary of state’s email accounts and diplomatic security, and had spent the preceding year swept up in the torrent of campaign coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email server and the controversy surrounding Benghazi. David Malcolm Robinson had been assistant secretary of state for conflict and stabilization operations, a bureau with an amorphous portfolio that conservative critics said amounted to that deadliest of terms in Washington: “nation building.” But three others—assistant secretaries who worked under Kennedy and had nothing, as far as anyone could tell, to do with Benghazi, had also gotten the axe. “That was just petty,” said Countryman. “Vindictive.”
It was just the beginning. A few weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Erin Clancy’s phone rang—the personal one she kept in a beat-up blue wooden case. She had just landed at John Wayne Airport in Orange County and was standing in the February California sunlight, in her jeans and T-shirt, waiting for a rental car. “Hold on the line,” said the scheduler. “We’re having an emergency team meeting.” The team was the deputy secretary of state’s, where Clancy, a career Foreign Service officer, was posted. She sat within spitting distance of the secretary of state on the seventh floor: through the secure crash door, past where the sagging drop ceilings and linoleum floors end and the opulent wood-paneled receiving rooms begin, in the legendary corridor of power known as Mahogany Row. Jobs on Mahogany Row were elite postings, held by the best of the Foreign Service; the Ferraris of State Department personnel, but more reliable.
Clancy held on the line. Her partner, a State Department alum, gave her a searching look. Erin shrugged: beats me. The fired officials so far had at least been in Senate-confirmed roles. Her team consisted entirely of working-level officers, and the most elite and protected of them at that. They’d assumed they were safe.
In the weeks since Tom Countryman and the other senior officials cleared out their desks, the Department had been dead quiet. By this time in most administrations, the deputy secretary’s office would be humming with activity, helping a new secretary of state jumpstart his or her agenda. In this case, the new administration had yet to even nominate a deputy secretary of state and wouldn’t for months to come. When the last deputy, Tony Blinken, was in the job, Clancy and the rest of her team had arrived at 7 a.m. and worked twelve- to fourteen-hour days. Now they sat with little to do, taking long coffee breaks at 9 a.m. each day, waiting for orders that never came. “No one’s asking us for anything, we’re totally cut off, we’re not invited to meetings, we had to fight for every White House meeting,” she remembered. “Our morning meetings were, ‘well, have you heard this rumor?’ That was no way to formulate US foreign policy.” Eventually, the acting deputy, Tom Shannon, told them they might as well take a break. So Clancy had caught a flight out of DC that morning, to see her mother.
When Yuri Kim, the deputy secretary’s chief of staff and a fellow Foreign Service officer, came on the line, her voice was solemn. “Great,” she began, in a tone that suggested this would not, in fact, be great. “Thanks everyone for your time. We just found out that we’re all being asked to move on.” The entire deputy secretary’s staff was assembled: five in the room back on Mahogany Row, two on the phone. Everyone spoke at once. “How?” they asked. “Why?” They should go to their union, one suggested. They should go to the press, offered another. “Your assignments are broken,” Clancy remembered being told. “Who knows if you have your next job, maybe you don’t. It’s utter chaos. And it’s out of the blue. No reason.”
Kim, usually a fierce advocate for her team, became mechanical. They had forty-eight hours. There would be a meeting with the office of human resources the next day to walk them through next steps. They should use the little time they had left to start making preparations.
When the call was over, Clancy hung up and turned to her partner, dumbfounded. “We’re all being fired.”
Like a lot of young diplomats, Erin Clancy had joined the Foreign Service after 9/11. She wanted to make the world safer. She moved to the Middle East for six years. She’d been in Damascus when the American embassy there was overrun by protesters. She’d narrowly avoided kidnapping.