Nor did Haley, after learning of the North Korean attack on BX 411, attempt to contact John Sullivan, the acting US secretary of state. Trump, despite his tweet promising a new national security team, had failed to nominate a replacement for ousted secretary of state Mike Pompeo, leaving Sullivan in his second stint as acting secretary.
According to Haley, she did not attempt to contact Acting Secretary of State Sullivan on the night of March 20 because he was traveling. She was “not sure where John [Sullivan] was or what time it was there,” she later told commission investigators, and she did not want to expend valuable time trying to track him down. Others, however, have pointed to a general sense within Haley’s office that Sullivan’s staff was either nonresponsive or unhelpful. Some aides felt that Sullivan remained loyal to ousted secretary of state Rex Tillerson and was openly hostile to Haley, seeing her as ambitious and devious.
The lack of coordination within the State Department was in large part a function of the vast number of senior positions that remained unfilled during the Trump administration—including the top job. The State Department’s Policy Planning Office, which was normally charged with developing long-term strategy, had instead assumed control over day-to-day operations that should have been conducted by assistant secretaries—officials who did not exist because they had never been nominated, let alone confirmed. Even under Tillerson and Pompeo, decision-making would often grind to a halt owing to lack of staffing. “The State Department was like a ghost ship,” one foreign service officer explained.
Still, Sullivan was well liked within the State Department and generally seen as pragmatic and effective. His popularity, however, worked against him with Trump, who saw him as a holdover from Tillerson’s time as secretary of state. Sullivan’s relationship with the president made whatever support he enjoyed from State Department staffers irrelevant and, possibly, counterproductive. “She’s no idiot,” this foreign service officer said of Haley. “Trump thought Sullivan was a swamp guy. He hated those guys so much that the fact that she went around [Sullivan] and humiliated him would be a plus.”
Rather than contacting Sullivan, Haley called her deputy in Washington, Jon Lerner. Lerner had been appointed with no foreign policy experience—he was a political strategist who handled analytics on both of Haley’s campaigns for governor. To the extent that Lerner had a foreign policy outlook, he harbored a general anti-communism that, by his own description, had extended into a broad distrust of regimes that he saw as anti-American. Haley called him “Lemon” because of his dour demeanor.
In the course of their late-night phone call, Haley and Lerner settled on a strategy to use the shootdown, and North Korea’s belligerent response, to drive a deep and permanent wedge between China and North Korea. And so Haley’s second call after Lerner was to the Chinese mission and its ambassador, Ma Zhaoxu.
If Haley’s political career had rewarded her for her obvious passion, Ma’s had taught him to keep his composure. Ma had first won notoriety as a college student in China when that country was slowly opening to the outside world. Improbably, he had been named best speaker in an international debate competition in 1985. In the 1980s, to Chinese people, who were generally unable to even travel outside the country, the sight of a slim Chinese student beating foreigners in debates was a source of real pride and brought him a kind of celebrity. (Ma still met people on the street in China who remembered him from the 1980s.) From there, Ma rose steadily through the ranks of the Chinese foreign ministry, eventually serving as its spokesperson. Where many of his predecessors had been prickly, Ma had a way of appearing completely unruffled, remaining calm in the face of hostile questions. When asked about Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Prize–winning author imprisoned by the Chinese authorities, Ma calmly asserted that “there are no dissidents in China.” Ma was never defensive as the press spokesman. His appointment as ambassador to the UN was intended to signal China’s confidence in its suddenly very important place in the world.
Ambassador Haley’s effort to make the shootdown a turning point in relations between Beijing and Pyongyang fell flat. She implored Ma to think about the schoolchildren on Flight BX 411, but he was unruffled. Ma merely noted that the loss of life was regrettable, but that there had been many regrettable aviation accidents over the years. Haley even tried a veiled threat, warning that this was the sort of event that might very well prompt a military response from the United States. Ma said that this, too, would be regrettable—one senseless tragedy begetting another. He remained utterly unmoved.
In retrospect, it seems unlikely that any Chinese diplomat—whether possessed of Ma’s talents or not—would have allowed himself to be drawn into colluding with the United States against his own foreign ministry. “I have no idea what Haley was thinking,” admitted a former State Department official. “She had to realize that Ma wasn’t going for a walk in the woods with her.” Instead, Ma suggested that Haley speak with the North Koreans directly, offering to host the meeting in his office.
Ma’s proposal appears to have caught Ambassador Haley by surprise. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. Within North Korea, Sweden was the “protecting power” for US interests, serving as an embassy by proxy. In the United States, North Korea had a mission at the United Nations, a line of communication that diplomats sometimes called “the New York channel.” Now Ma was suggesting that Haley activate this channel.
Haley was unsure how to respond. She ended the call, telling Ma she would call back.
The ambassador and Lerner conferred again by phone about whether to take the meeting offered by Ma. Lerner was strongly against it: using the New York channel would reward North Korea for the shootdown, he argued, and holding the meeting at the Chinese offices would convey weakness on the part of the Americans. They decided that they needed to give the Chinese time to worry—for the possibility of a military response to set in. Some of Haley’s aides have said that her political ambitions clouded her judgment about what she might achieve. Haley and Lerner dispute this strenuously. Meeting with the North Koreans would, in their view, have sent the wrong signal.
Haley called Ma back at 2:42 AM and said that, without a formal apology from North Korea, no meeting would be possible. Ma said that he regretted her decision, and that he would miss her presence in the morning. This was when Haley became aware that the State Department had agreed to meet with North Korea’s representatives without informing her.
Although Haley did not know “where John [Sullivan] was or what time it was there,” the Ops Center did. At the same time that one watch officer at the communications hub had contacted Haley, another had reached Sullivan as he was traveling abroad. The officer had quickly informed the acting secretary of state about North Korea’s attack on BX 411.
Sullivan, after thinking about it for a few minutes, settled on an unusually aggressive step: he asked the Ops Center to call the North Korean ambassador in New York immediately.
While the State Department’s uncoordinated attempts to manage the emerging crisis have come under considerable criticism, we feel obliged to note that, by all accounts, the State Department Operations Center functioned efficiently through the night of March 20. This commendable performance is in keeping with the center’s record of fast and effective management of communications between diplomats. Several historical examples can help to contextualize the center’s performance on March 20 and throughout the turmoil that followed.