A Casualty of Level-10 Frustration

In this age of scandal, government officials more often quit in shame than resign over principle. So Washington took notice last week when Marshall Harris, a 32-year-old desk officer at the State Department, publicly left his post after reaching "level-10 frustration" at the Clinton Administration's erratic Bosnia policy. "I thought about resigning last month when Secretary Christopher said the U.S. was doing all it could," he says. "But the real kicker came when I found out we were putting heavy pressure on the Muslims to come to an agreement in Geneva, and using the threat of withholding air strikes around Sarajevo as part of that pressure. It's wrong to pressure a legitimately elected government to agree to a dismemberment that has been forced by a brutal campaign of aggression that we could have stopped and can still stop."

Like George Kenney, who resigned as the State Department's Yugoslav affairs officer in August 1992 to protest George Bush's supine Bosnia policy, Harris could not stomach Clinton's inaction "against genocide and the Serbs who perpetrate it." Now that the U.S. is ready to send in the Air Force, it would seem an odd time for a dramatic stand. But not to Harris, who considers the Administration's role a tawdry sellout.

Trained as a maritime lawyer, Harris served as a diplomat in England, Bulgaria and Macedonia. He liked Bill Clinton's campaign promises to do more for Bosnia, and thought something would come of Christopher's maiden speech decrying the dangers of Serb aggression. But he and other working-level officers who had to write the daily press guidance reconciling Bosnia's brutal carnage with a stand-back American policy grew increasingly dismayed as Clinton backed away from using force.

Harris' path to resignation was anything but straight. "There have been so many twists and turns in our policy that it's been a real roller-coaster ride," he says. Considered energetic and capable by his superiors, he proved unusually outspoken for a mid-level Foreign Service officer. In April he and 11 colleagues wrote a letter to Christopher urging military intervention to help the Muslims; the missive somehow leaked to the New York Times. In May, when Christopher asked the allies to lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian government and bomb Serb targets, "we were excited that the U.S. was finally moving the right way. That went straight to hell in a matter of days," he says, when Christopher returned empty-handed. Last week's bomb-or-not-to-bomb contortions made up his mind. "I had to leave because my conscience wouldn't allow me to keep advocating and implementing policies that will bring about the partition of Bosnia," he says. "I could have just turned in a resignation letter and walked out the door, but I did it publicly because I hope it won't be just a quixotic gesture." Representative Frank McCloskey, an opponent of Clinton's Bosnia policy, hired Harris immediately.