Baghdad's new 'mayor' made name with her grit

Barbara Bodine has a reputation earned by service in tough Mideastern situations.

WASHINGTON - Barbara Bodine has a lot of experience standing up to tough men.

The highest-ranking woman in the United States-led interim government in Iraq, Bodine has helped negotiate the release of hostages from Yemeni tribesmen, survived an airplane hijacking and endured a monthslong Iraqi siege of the American Embassy in Kuwait.

As ambassador to Yemen during the terrorist attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole that killed 17 sailors in October 2000, she faced down an FBI supervisor whose heavy-handed investigation, Bodine believed, was damaging U.S.-Yemeni relations.

Now, as chief administrator of Baghdad and the country's central region, Bodine must not only help revitalize that male-dominated society. The career foreign service officer must also, in a sense, stand up to the swaggering American military, which has assumed a controversial lead role in the rebuilding of Iraq.

Bodine is one of three regional administrators reporting to Jay Garner, the retired Army lieutenant general who heads the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. The Pentagon agency is trying to fix Iraq's infrastructure and turn the former dictatorship into a democracy.

Garner's other administrators are both retired generals, and for now, Bodine is the only civilian in this top lineup. However, the White House reportedly is considering appointing former State Department official Paul Bremer to be Garner's boss.

Bremer's appointment would quell criticism from Congress, world leaders and many Iraqis themselves that leaving the Pentagon in charge gives the impression the United States wants to install a military puppet regime. But administration opinion on the appointment is divided, and no announcement has been made.

For Bodine, it's a typical high-pressure situation. Friends, who describe Bodine as soft-spoken but firm, say she can handle it.

"She had to stand between the Yemeni government and the U.S. military when she was U.S. ambassador to Yemen during the USS Cole incident, so she is the right person to stand up to the U.S. military in insisting on the restoration of Iraqi civilian authority in Baghdad as quickly as possible," said Mark Juergensmeyer, director of global and international studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

A tall and slender brunet, Bodine, 54, was born in St. Louis and raised in California. Bodine graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a bachelor's degree in political science and Asian studies.

After earning a master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, she entered the foreign service. At the time, women were discouraged from learning difficult languages like Chinese, Russian or Arabic. "They said we'd go off and get married," Bodine told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1999.

Not Bodine. The diplomat, who has never married, studied Chinese in preparation for a career in Asia. But her path took an unexpected turn in the mid 1970s when she was stationed in Saudi Arabia.

She learned Arabic and served in Baghdad for about 18 months in the early 1980s. By 1990, she was deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait when Iraq invaded the tiny desert emirate.

Iraqi forces surrounded the embassy compound, cutting off water and electricity to force the American diplomats to withdraw from the country.

For four months, the diplomats held out, drinking boiled water from the embassy swimming pool and eating stockpiles of canned tuna. The United States evacuated Bodine and other Americans in December 1990 shortly before launching the Persian Gulf War.

Years later, on a visit with family in St. Louis, Bodine blanched when her uncle offered tuna salad for lunch. "She'd had enough," Jack Bodine recalled in an interview. "She could never look tuna fish in the eye again."

Barbara Bodine could not be reached in Iraq for comment.

But Marta Colburn, a former resident director of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies in Sana, worked with Bodine after she was appointed ambassador to Yemen in 1997.

Colburn said Bodine's gender was an advantage in Yemen, a young Persian Gulf democracy that allows women to vote. "She had access to both male and female networks. The female network system is not as apparent, but it's nevertheless an area where a lot of power is negotiated and used," Colburn said.

In the interview with the Post-Dispatch, Bodine described how overcoming gender barriers at the State Department allowed her to empathize with Yemeni women.

"If I sit with a Yemeni woman and she's talking about breaking through barriers, the resistance, hostilities and all of the problems she's going through, I know what she's talking about," Bodine said. "If a 35-year-old male officer hears this, it's intellectual to him. He has no context for it."

In Yemen, Bodine was known as a cat lover: She had three in her home and six more in her garden. She once even flew with a sick feline to what her uncle believes was Saudi Arabia, where there was a veterinary hospital. "She spent three or four days there with her cat, so she's really devoted to them," Jack Bodine said.

When she served in Yemen, kidnapping was a problem, especially for American oil workers. Bodine often found herself involved in negotiations to free Americans.

In 1999, Colburn was kidnapped by Yemeni tribesmen while on a sightseeing trip. Bodine pressed the Yemeni government to proceed cautiously, and Colburn was released unharmed.

"She's very diplomatic in her manner of operating in Arab and Middle Eastern society. She knows how to take cultural clues, and yet she's also very firm in what she believes are U.S. interests," Colburn said.

But the Cole bombing strained Bodine's relations with American antiterrorism officials. She famously butted heads with the FBI's then-chief of counterterrorism, John O'Neill, who arrived in Yemen with some 300 heavily armed investigators.

"Barbara said that's overkill. After all, we have no right to come in here and literally invade a country with our agents," said Jack Bodine. "She had O'Neill sent back to Washington, and of course that did not endear her to the FBI or the CIA."

O'Neill later quit the FBI and became security chief at the World Trade Center, where he died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Emotions appear to still be raw over the Cole incident. Former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, who worked closely with O'Neill, curtly declined to comment on Bodine. "I'm sorry, I can't help you," he said.

In January 2001, Bodine was on a flight from Sana to southern Yemen when an armed Yemeni, who said he supported Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, hijacked the plane. It was diverted to Djibouti, where the crew overpowered the hijacker.

Bodine and other passengers fled through an evacuation chute. "Barbara said she never ran so fast in her life," Jack Bodine said.

After leaving Yemen in September 2001, Bodine became diplomat in residence at her alma mater, UC-Santa Barbara, where she recruited students into the foreign service. She lived quietly with her two cats, down from nine in Yemen.

Then, a couple of months ago, the State Department told her to prepare for Iraq.

But military officials, suspicious of Bodine's actions in the Cole case and wary of civilian involvement in the reconstruction effort, worked behind the scenes to derail her appointment.

"There were some people in the government who did not want her to get this assignment, but as you can see, the State Department won out, because she got it," Jack Bodine said.

Journalists dubbed her the "mayor of Baghdad," but Bodine had competition. An Iraqi exile named Mohammed Mohsen Zubaidi declared himself mayor and issued orders to municipal workers for 10 days until U.S. forces arrested him April 27.

Since then, Bodine has monitored efforts to recover looted museum artifacts and identify Iraqis to serve in a new government. She also oversees the vetting of former members of Hussein's Baath Party for their fitness to return to government.

"She says she wants to quickly work herself out of a job," said Juergensmeyer, the global studies director at UC-Santa Barbara. "Her cats are in a boarding house and her house is temporarily rented, so we expect her back soon."

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