A Model Diplomat Shines Light On a Dark Time in U.S.-Russian Relations

A Model Diplomat Shines Light On a Dark Time in U.S.-Russian Relations

BOOK REVIEW: Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir from the Front Lines of Russia’s War Against the West

By John J. Sullivan/ Little Brown and Company

Reviewed by: Calder Walton

The Reviewer — Calder Walton is Assistant Director, Applied History Project, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West and Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire

REVIEW — Ambassador John Sullivan is the epitome of a public servant and a true American patriot. I had an inkling of this when I heard Ambassador Sullivan eloquently speak earlier this year, but it was only reading his remarkable memoir that I appreciated the true depths of his character and public service. In today’s age of hyper partisanship in the United States, Sullivan is the type of old-fashioned diplomat who can easily be imagined to have been lost forever. Thank goodness there are still folks like Sullivan helping to steer US foreign policy.

It is an illustration of his professionalism, leadership, and respect that he earned from his colleagues, that Sullivan remained as ambassador in Moscow for two different administrations— appointed by President Donald J Trump, he was asked to continue under the Biden administration. Sullivan’s seat in Moscow placed him at the center of the whirlwind of US-Russian relations under Trump, and during Putin’s march towards his disastrous war in Ukraine in February 2022. Sullivan’s memoir is the first draft of the history of the war in Ukraine, written by someone who was intimately involved with all the major US decisions and well placed to comment on the Kremlin’s.

Sullivan’s memoir, Midnight in Moscow, should be read by anyone who wants to understand the current quagmire of Russian relations with the West and Putin’s war in Ukraine. Sullivan’s book takes readers from his upbringing in the Boston area, to law school, private practice as a lawyer, to the upper echelons of the State Department. Sullivan evidently retained his pugnacious Boston Irish-American outlook to the present day, with references to ice hockey sprinkled through the book like flakes on a Dunkin’ Donut.

Ambassador Sullivan comes from a family of public servants. His uncle was U.S. ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan. He followed in his uncle’s path. John Sullivan’s career was meteoric, taking him to the top of the State Department, where from 2017 to 2019 he served as Deputy Secretary of State. But it was his decision to apply to become U.S. ambassador in Moscow—technically a demotion in Foggy Bottom— that was really his most significant career move, and lies at the heart of his memoir. After making it clear that he was interested in the Moscow job, Sullivan’s application was supported by then Secretary of State under Trump, Mike Pompeo. When Sullivan met with Trump to discuss his application, the president could scarcely believe that he really wanted the job in Moscow, believing Pompeo was pressuring him to accept it. But Sullivan made clear that it was his decision alone. After a Senate confirmation hearing, he set off for Moscow, which after February 2022 would become literally behind enemy lines. One of the many extraordinary facts revealed in Ambassador Sullivan’s memoir is that, after arriving in Moscow, he did not once speak with President Trump.


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Sullivan arrived in Moscow not as a veteran Russia hand, nor as a Russia hawk, but instead somebody who was going to try to make US-Russian relations better. He found his hopes dashed. As Sullivan recalls, the typical reaction he encountered among counterparts at Russia’s foreign ministry was to blame everything on the United States— and ask him what he, Sullivan, was going to do about it. Faced with this kind of intransigence, Sullivan has very little positive to say about most of the Russian diplomats he interacted with, with the exception of Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov.

Sullivan is a good student of history. He was acutely aware that in his posting to Moscow he was following in the footsteps of the great US strategist on US-Soviet relations, George Kennan, who was US ambassador in Moscow in the early Cold War. As Sullivan points out, many of Kennan’s conclusions about the sources of Soviet conduct, espoused famously in his long telegram of 1947, remain true today. They involve social, economic, and military dysfunctions, including a fierce strain of Russian nationalism, militarism, anti-democratic impulses and an acceptance among many for the “need” of a strong leader in such a vast country, a deep seated insecurity based on a fear of foreign subversion and invasion, and the obfuscation of facts— that the truth is something that can be merely fitted to whatever policy the Kremlin needs to pursue on a particular day.

Russia’s intelligence services feature prominently in Sullivan’s memoir. Most people probably have a vision of how the Russian Security Service (FSB) routinely harasses foreign diplomats in Moscow. But Sullivan’s memoir reveals the true grim reality. The US embassy in Moscow, and its diplomatic missions elsewhere in Russia, rely on local employees, namely Russian nationals, to do much of the embassy work. (This lies in sharp contrast to Russian diplomatic missions in the United States, which import staff from Russia, many of whom are intelligence officers under diplomatic cover). The use of local staff in Russia presents a counterintelligence nightmare for the US government. It is not difficult to imagine how the FSB can blackmail Russian staff to collect intelligence from inside the US embassy. Sullivan recounts one example when the FSB was discovered to be pressuring a long standing and friendly local employee. When he was briefed on the case, the briefing officer, presumably a CIA officer, explained that the employee’s child was ill and needed medical care. Sullivan interjected that they were going to pay medical bills if the employee decided to work for the FSB. No, replied the briefing officer, they were going to cut off the medical care unless he did so. What parent would not agree to cooperate in these despicable circumstances?

Sullivan reveals that the FSB and Russian government frequently made the US embassy choose between its security and whatever particular policy the Russian government was pursuing. The leverage they wielded, which they used frequently, was to deny visas to US personnel who were needed to carry out repairs, and other such matters, at the US embassy. Of course, if the policy agenda the Kremlin was pursuing was accepted, those visas would be granted. Sullivan’s memoir shows how, when the US government gave an inch, the Russian government would invariably demand a mile. Everything was a struggle.

Sullivan’s tenure as US ambassador in Moscow took place amid the frenzied atmosphere of the Trump-Russia saga. He has some important commentary on that entire bizarre episode. First and foremost, Sullivan states that he did not see any evidence that the Russian government held compromising material on Trump. This was, as readers of these pages will probably remember, the essence of the so-called Steele dossier, written by a former MI6 Russia hand and head of station in Moscow, Christopher Steele. This does not mean, of course, definitively that the Russian government does not hold such compromising material on Trump. Instead, Sullivan offers a more nuanced view of what was going on between Trump and Putin: the former president seemed sincerely to believe in a highly personalized form of diplomacy, viewing Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Xi Jinping, to say nothing of Victor Orban, as strong leaders who should therefore be respected— and not, as most people see them, as authoritarians and dictators. Rather than viewing compromising material, Kompromat, as the motivating factor behind Trump’s embrace of Putin, Sullivan views it as part of a broader trend, a fetishization by the former president for “strong men”.


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Sullivan’s memoir also takes readers headlong into life in Russia during the COVID pandemic. It is, however, particularly insightful into the run up to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. These chapters of Ambassador Sullivan’s memoir should be read by everyone who wants to understand Putin’s motivation, and how the US government responded. Reading these chapters, it becomes acutely clear that Putin was singular in his ambition to take “back” Ukraine. He telegraphed his ambition to the world in statements and misleading historical essays. One of the great successes of U.S. intelligence, along with the British, was correctly forewarning and exposing Putin’s invasion plan, but of course that did not ultimately stop the war.

It is equally clear that Putin viewed the US government as weak. Sullivan highlights the role of alleged Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, a story that made news headlines in 2020 and featured in the U.S. presidential election that year. But it was the US government’s ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 that surely showed the Kremlin that Washington was no longer the power it once was. Putin decided to seize the moment. The result, as we have all seen, was carnage, massacres and Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Sullivan’s memoir also reveals the burden that holding this most extreme job in US public service can have on someone’s family life. He was separated from his family for long periods; his wife, Grace, could not leave her highly powered law practice in Washington DC. Tragically, Grace, who was evidently the love of Ambassador Sullivan’s life, died from cancer in 2022.

At several points in the book, Sullivan claims that he is not an historian. I think he is doing himself injustice. It’s evident that, in fact, he is an Applied Historian— meaning that he uses the past to inform an understanding of the present. Sullivan’s training as a lawyer makes him into a good Applied Historian. The law is, after all, concerned with interpreting the past, drawing on precedents and distinguishing historical differences.

Sullivan’s historical outlook is reflected in the final section of his memoir, which to my mind is one of the most interesting. In it, Sullivan draws direct parallels between the mechanics and justification of Adolf Hitler’s 1939 attack on Poland, which started the second world war in Europe, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine eight decades later. Sullivan uses as his analytical framework the charges brought against the Nazis at Nuremberg after the war: that in their invasion of Poland, the Nazis instigated a crime against peace. As Sullivan shows, Putin used similar pretexts to launch his invasion of Ukraine as Hitler did in Poland: claiming to rescue victimized ethnic Russians/ Germans, stranded away from the motherland, who need protection. Hitler, like Putin, instigated false flag operations (attacks, sabotage and the like) as excuses to roll forces in. Of course, as Sullivan points out, there are differences between the Nazi past and the Russian present. For all his despotism, Putin is no Hitler.

But still, as Sullivan’s analysis shows, the charge of a crime against peace may be a useful mechanism to bring Putin and his associates justice. With luck, that is exactly what will happen one day.

Midnight in Moscow earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats

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