How Rice's Posse Struck Back

By Elaine Shannon

For all its globe-trotting glamour, the life of a diplomat can also be harrowing. In 1997 David Welch volunteered to drop into northern Iraq to broker a cease-fire between two feuding Kurdish militias that Washington hoped could eventually help overthrow Saddam Hussein. For Welch, there was one major risk to going in: he wasn't sure how he would get out. "What's your evacuation plan?" fretted Jim Steinberg, then Deputy National Security Adviser in the Clinton White House. "Five hundred bucks in cash," Welch replied, "and a bottle of Scotch."

As it turned out, the Scotch went for toasts. The rival Kurdish warlords, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, signed an accord and unified their commands. Talabani is now the President of Iraq. Barzani is a powerful political leader in Iraq's relatively stable north. And Welch is one of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's top deputies, tasked with jump-starting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which the Bush Administration hopes can add some much needed luster to its foreign policy legacy.

The growing visibility of figures like Welch is one more sign of Dick Cheney's diminished role in the Bush war cabinet. During Bush's first term, the views of the U.S.'s diplomatic corps were largely dismissed by neoconservatives allied with Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But as the Iraq war drags on and its chief advocates fade, the diplomats are stealing some late-game limelight. That's due in large part to Rice, who has consolidated her authority over the Administration's foreign policy and made course corrections that have resulted in a denuclearization pact with North Korea, a new push in the Middle East and tentative moves toward negotiating with Iran and Syria about the future of Iraq.

Carrying out Rice's agenda is a handpicked team of weathered foreign service officers who have spent their careers troubleshooting and cutting deals in some of the most remote capitals of the world--the State Department's Hellhole Gang. "They've all been tested on the front lines," Rice told TIME. "I tend to like people around me who served in really difficult posts. It's a mark of character. It's a mark of toughness. It's a mark of being able to operate under difficult circumstances and not lose your perspective."

In addition to having done hot-spot duty, the members of the Hellhole Gang are distinguished by their pragmatism, which has allowed them to serve under Presidents of both parties. The team includes Rice's new deputy, John Negroponte, who was the first U.S. ambassador to post-Saddam Baghdad; David Satterfield, Rice's special adviser on Iraq, who served in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq; Anne Patterson, former ambassador to Colombia, who oversees law-enforcement training in Iraq and Afghanistan; Welch, who was in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in 1979 when it was seized by a violent mob; Nicholas Burns, Rice's No. 3, a Balkan-wars specialist and the point man for dealing with the Iran nuclear issue; and Christopher Hill, the U.S. envoy for multilateral talks on North Korea.

Though Rice sets the policy tone, she provides her sidemen with room to improvise. "She gives people a lot of autonomy," says Burns. "She trusts us to go out on these negotiations three, four, five days at a time." That paid off last month when Hill helped secure North Korea's agreement to eliminate, in principle, its nuclear-weapons program--a deal that infuriated the Hellhole Gang's hard-line rivals. And yet even with Cheney's decline, the hawks could gain the upper hand again if countries like Iran and North Korea rebuff U.S.-backed diplomatic proffers. "I can't remember a time when there were so many challenges around the world confronting our country simultaneously," says Burns. "We think we can handle them. We've got the diplomatic firepower." It's up to the Hellhole Gang to prove it.