He is about to become more famous – or, possibly, infamous. This week Galbraith, America’s first ambassador to Croatia, will be grilled under the klieg lights by congressional investigators and members of the House International Relations Committee. He will be asked about his secret role in permitting Iranian arms to be sold to the Bosnian Muslims, notwithstanding a U.N. arms embargo. The Republicans see a potentially juicy campaign issue, a Democratic reprise of the arms-for-hostages scandal that shook the Reagan administration in 1986. GOP staffers would like to picture Galbraith as an Ivy League Oliver North, deceiving Congress to make deals with the ayatollah.
Strictly speaking, the scandal isn’t much of one. Galbraith broke no laws. He did not come to the Iranians bearing a cake or a Bible, . . . la Robert McFarlane in Iran-contra, but rather merely looked the other way when the Iranians began shipping arms to the Bosnians in 1994. Righteous indignation may not be easy for Galbraith’s GOP inquisitors: most Republicans, including Bob Dole, had wanted to lift the arms embargo that Galbraith helped evade. In the end, the Clinton administration’s wink-and-nod policy toward rearming the Bosnians helped force the Serbs to the bargaining table, bringing peace to the shattered former Yugoslavia.
So is Galbraith a hero? Certainly in his own mind, say his friends with a smile. The Harvard-Oxford-trained diplomat is in some ways a throwback to the days of the colonial proconsul, an adventurer in the mold of 19th-century British aristocrats in pith helmets. But he is also a mediagenic operator who knows how to manipulate and short-circuit the cumbersome, rulebound machinery of modern diplomacy. The question is whether he was perhaps too clever – and whether his publicity-conscious moralizing will return to haunt him.
Galbraith is a crusader for human rights. As a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he had used congressional pressure to help free his college classmate Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto from jail. He has trekked with Afghan freedom fighters and dodged Saddam Hussein’s bombs with the Kurds. Appointed ambassador to Croatia by President Clinton in 1993, Galbraith saw a chance to rescue the Bosnian Muslims, who were on the verge of being crushed by the Serbs. After the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia, a few arms trickled in to the Bosnians from their fellow Muslims in the Mideast. But Croatia, which separates Bosnia from the sea, was able to choke off most arms shipments. It was up to Galbraith to help persuade the Croats to make peace with the Bosnians.
He accomplished this in large part by appealing to the vanity of Croatian strongman Franjo Tudjman, who longed to be accepted by the West. Galbraith convinced Tudjman that the road to favor in Washington was through friendship with Sarajevo. In March 1994 Croatia formed a federation with Bosnia. Within days planeloads of Iranian arms began arriving at Zagreb airport, waiting for shipment over the border to the weapons-starved Muslims.
There remained, however, the awkward impediment of the U.N. arms embargo. Ambassador Galbraith cabled Washington for instructions on what to tell Tudjman about the embargo. What he got back was no instructions: after consulting with national-security adviser Tony Lake, President Clinton decided that the United States would take no position on shipping arms to the Bosnians through Croatia. In effect, Clinton decided simply to look the other way. In Zagreb, Tudjman asked Galbraith what he meant by “no instructions.” “Look at what we don’t say,” answered Galbraith. Tudjman took the hint.
In Washington, the CIA and Congress were kept out of the policy loop. The Clinton administration feared leaks that would anger NATO allies. But in May, when CIA Director Jim Woolsey learned about the increased arms shipments, he demanded to know what was going on. White House aides sought to mollify him with an internal investigation by the Intelligence Oversight Board, an interagency watchdog not known for sharp teeth. By the autumn of 1994, the CIA began intercepting radio transmissions and phone calls of Bosnian leaders bragging about American covert actions to supply them with arms. The boasts were idle: though Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke had discussed the possibility of running some kind of covert operation with the Bosnians, his superiors in Washington had nixed the idea.
While the IOB was – very slowly – exploring the legalities of his actions, Galbraith was becoming the heartthrob of Zagreb. In a two-page spread last summer, a Zagreb women’s magazine, Gloria, pronounced the 45-year-old divorc to be “the most attractive diplomat in town.” When he entered a movie theater one night he was greeted by a spontaneous round of applause from the audience. “Look, it was deeply satisfying,” Galbraith said. “I just wish it wouldn’t happen on a date.” Galbraith’s approval rating in the 4.7 million-person country hit 82 percent, second only to Tudjman’s.
In a secret report, the IOB eventually cleared Galbraith, as well as the White House, of any wrongdoing on the arms shipments. But inevitably the story leaked, and Republicans immediately began expressing outrage over what they called “Iran-contra II.” In part, congressmen were mad about being kept in the dark. And during a campaign year, Republicans are eager to saddle a Democratic administration with the baggage of arms deals with Iran – no matter if the circumstances are far differ- ent from 1986. A more serious issue is whether the Iranian arms pipeline strengthened ties between Sarajevo and Tehran that will be hard to break.
Galbraith is confident, even cocky, that he can handle these issues when he testifies this week. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, he defended the moral rightness of his actions. Under the Dayton accords, the Bosnians are sending home their Iranian allies. Without the peace agreement, “genocide would have triumphed in Europe,” he says. This argument may be convincing – unless the Iranians still in Bosnia start shooting at American peacekeepers. In any case, not a few Hill staffers and their bosses are itching to get Galbraith. As a key staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Galbraith had been the scourge of GOP foreign-policy makers in the Reagan-Bush years. “The Republicans have been lying in wait for years,” said Robert Oakley, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. Galbraith may be legally clean and morally correct. But in the political wars, he still makes a tempting target.
