Tested by conflict and diplomacy, Carmela Conroy says she is ready for Congress

Carmela Conroy needed to put an end to the trash fire.

For a decade, the U.S. Navy had tried to negotiate with local Japanese authorities to bulldoze a private trash incinerator next door to the Atsugi Naval Air Facility, the largest U.S. base of its kind in the Pacific. The incinerator was throwing a cloud of toxic fumes into the neighboring base six months out of the year.

Concerns about the pollutants had become a readiness issue for the Navy; aviators were reluctant to be posted at the base, concerned that their families were being fumigated by toxic emissions. While Japanese forces were also at the base, local authorities were hesitant to be seen as acquiescing to the demands of a foreign military.

Conroy, by then in her second year in the foreign service, was assigned to the Tokyo embassy in 1998 and tasked with shutting down the facility once and for all.

She took a different tack, escalating and broadening the parties that could help her apply pressure. While soldiers might be America’s boots on the ground, she acted as the penny loafers in the conference room trying to improve conditions on their behalf.

As an embassy official, she had access to Japanese officials that the base commander did not, allowing her to elevate the issue and get it on the agenda for discussions between the U.S. and Japanese governments, including a shoutout on former President Bill Clinton’s talking points. As a former Spokane deputy prosecuting attorney and corporate lawyer for Nissan, she was able to navigate Japanese law.

As a young negotiator, she also had a sense for which pressure points might be more effective.

Residents on the base were not the only ones affected by the plume, but because incinerators were common on the island nation where property for a landfill was at a premium, locals were unfazed by the potential hazard. Conroy gathered data showing just how toxic the plume was, as the incinerator destroyed not just common trash but hazardous medical waste, and took this data to the surrounding community.

After getting locals on board, Conroy took those constituent concerns to the Japanese parliament. It took two years of lobbying, leveraging, finagling and negotiating, but before Conroy’s assignment in Japan was complete, the incinerator was leveled.

Today, Conroy is the Democrat candidate hoping to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and represent Eastern Washington in Congress. While she’s never run for office before, Conroy believes her wealth of experience overseas dealing with conflict has prepared her.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Conroy started her next assignment back in Washington, D.C., as a watch officer, tasked with taking in overseas communications and news reports and summarizing these for consumption by cabinet secretaries. On her second day in the office, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she was in the nation’s capital answering calls of support from America’s allies.

The job is seen as a stepping stone for diplomatic staff seeking to climb the ladder. While Conroy believes it gave her deeper insight into the political machinations of Washington, she wanted to be back out in the field solving problems. She took an assignment exercising her legal background in a job focused on international trade and competition agreements, including work securing the Kimberly Process, an accord meant to prevent the trafficking of conflict diamonds – jewels mined from war zones that often fund belligerents.

Under a since-scrapped rule, Conroy and other foreign service officers were required to accept a “high-hardship” assignment once every 12 years by voluntarily bidding on an assignment in a dangerous region, or else they were likely to be sent by the State Department involuntarily. She reassured her parents, who would have preferred her to stay in an office in Washington, D.C., or Tokyo, that an assignment managing reconstruction efforts in Bamyan, Afghanistan, was the practical choice.

There, she persuaded a warlord to trade his guns for rice.

A blustering Tajik military leader believed to be overseeing 400 militants had claimed to have twice that many under his command, demanding compensation for 800 in exchange for disarming and pledging their support to the elected government of Pakistan. The head of the United Nations agency in charge of disarmament efforts had cut off negotiations, distracted by more pressing concerns and angered by the warlord’s attempts to gin up his negotiating position.

The military leader and his ill-trained men were sequestered in the mountains and unlikely to be an urgent threat, but still outnumbered local allied forces three-to-one. The reconstruction team’s military commander asked Conroy to intervene.

She was successful, which she partially credits to her willingness to assuage the bruised egos of the warlord and the U.N. agency head, and her unwillingness to get emotionally invested in their prior tit for tat. In the end, the warlord relinquished 400 rifles, and his group promised nonaggression in the form of a document inked by 400 thumbprints in exchange for cash payments, food and farming tools for 400 families.

To the relief of Conroy’s parents, her next three-year assignment was in Japan. To their chagrin, she would return to Afghanistan, leading refugee efforts from the Kabul embassy, a frenetic task as neighboring Pakistan threatened to expel millions of Afghans who had been displaced by the U.S. invasion and prior conflicts.

Stacy Nichols, a foreign service officer who led the political office in Kabul at the time, said conditions there were tenuous at the time and most foreign service officers were living and working inside the heavily guarded embassy compound. For Conroy to be effective at her job, she needed to be in the community.

“I have colleagues who were understandably anxious when they had assignments where they had to go outside the wire, but for Carmela this was an everyday part of her job, and she never blinked,” Nichols said.

Conroy was adept at managing the myriad agencies, nongovernmental organizations and community groups that needed to be coordinated and kept on board, Nichols said, and was the go-to person to persuade VIPs visiting Kabul not to take unnecessary risks, because she managed to do so without them feeling disrespected.

After a year in Kabul, Conroy received her highest-level diplomatic assignment in the Middle East, serving as the consul general in Lahore, Pakistan.

As in Kabul and Bamyan, terror attacks and insurgents were a real concern in Lahore. Conroy recalled a car bomb that went off near her on the other side of the compound’s walls as she was preparing to host a turkey trot, a footrace on Thanksgiving Day.

Unlike in those prior assignments, when Conroy was one among several foreign service officers, she was the face and voice of the U.S. in Lahore.

The near-unraveling of relations with Pakistan

Relatively little has been written in American media about Conroy’s overseas service, with one notable exception: the diplomatic crisis created after a man claiming to be a consultant for the Lahore consulate shot and killed two Pakistani men, and a third was killed when struck by the car sent to retrieve that American.

Raymond Allen Davis was driving through Lahore when two armed Pakistani men on a motorcycle reportedly tried to carjack him in one of the busiest intersections of the city. He shot both through the windshield of his car, got out, took pictures of the two men, and then executed one who was still moving. Both died at a hospital.

The mob was ready-made, Conroy said, as there likely were a thousand people in the immediate vicinity of the intersection.

Davis radioed for a driver to extract him from the scene as traffic constables walked up to his vehicle and opened his doors. He turned himself in.

A car deployed from the consulate got stuck in traffic, the driver jumped the median and drove into lanes for oncoming traffic, hitting and killing a third Pakistani man en route. Pakistani officials requested the men in this car be produced for questioning, but the U.S. refused, and the occupants fled the country.

Johnathan Curley

Conroy was at home finishing an interview with a Pakistani magazine, where she was slated to be the first foreigner to be on the cover, when she said she learned what had occurred. She was a frequent subject of local media stories, as Pakistani companies would pay local media for articles photographing her wearing Pakistani clothes or attending restaurant openings and movie premieres.

The incident quickly became a major diplomatic incident, threatening the tenuous partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan. Videos of the shootings played on local media, and religious political groups claimed that Davis was a CIA spy, noting that he had previously worked with the notorious Blackwater military contractor and questioning why he had been traveling alone with a handgun, pocket telescope and GPS equipment.

Davis was, in fact, a CIA spy, though this was not confirmed for more than a year. Pakistani officials anonymously claim the two men he had killed were members of the Pakistani spy agency, the Inter-Service Intelligence, trying to intimidate Davis amid souring relations between the two spy agencies, though this was never confirmed.

“These were very difficult times,” said Robin Raphel, who served at the time as a U.S. ambassador managing aid in Pakistan. “The embassy didn’t know who this guy was. To be fair, there were dozens of contractors crawling around the place, desperate to find ‘terrorists,’ but the situation surrounding Davis was very embarrassing and awkward for the U.S.”

Today, Conroy said she knew at the time who Davis worked for. But the directive from headquarters was clear: He needs to be removed from Pakistan. Higher -ups in Washington, D.C., applied significant pressure on the Pakistani government, reportedly threatening aid and the two country’s diplomatic partnership.

Conroy was not told as much at the time, but three months later a Pakistani compound containing Osama Bin Laden would be raided by American special forces, and U.S. officials did not want Pakistani intelligence services to have an American asset in their possession when this happened.

In a news conference, Conroy publicly claimed that Davis was just a consultant for the embassy who acted in self-defense. (Conroy maintains to this day that Davis was defending himself against carjackers.) At the conference, she also argued that Davis had diplomatic immunity and should be removed from the Pakistani cell where he was held. But Pakistani officials, under pressure from opposition political groups already wary of America, didn’t budge.

“My personal opinion was that the Pakistani intelligence authority saw this as an opportunity to get one over on their American counterparts and used Ray to do that,” Conroy said.

There were demonstrations outside the courthouse calling for Davis’ death, and others close to the embassy. One of the local TV stations reported that the crowd was calling for Conroy, specifically, to be arrested.

All the while, Conroy, following the directive from D.C., continued to call for Davis’ release and scheduled regular visits to ensure his security and health.

“(Conroy’s) handling of this situation with Davis was a standout performance,” Raphel said. “She was managing the backlash, managing Davis, who she had to make sure was reasonably well-looked-after, and she ensured the final solution to all of this was well-managed. She didn’t think it up, but managed it very well.”

Davis’ release was arranged only after a multimillion-dollar blood money payment was made to the families of the two men he had killed, allowable under the country’s religious law, and enraging many who still suspected, but had not yet had it confirmed, that Davis was a U.S. spy. Six weeks later, Bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces without the foreknowledge or cooperation of the Pakistani intelligence agency, again inflaming tensions.

“That whole year was a complete fiasco,” Raphel said.

A quieter chapter

When Conroy first traveled to Bamyan, she told her parents that she felt she could make a difference there, but also that traveling into danger was a requirement of the job that would not need to be repeated.

After more than four years in the region and a series of security incidents, the work was not only straining her parents, but her health, she said.

The month before Davis’ arrest, Punjab governor Salman Taseer was assassinated by his bodyguard, a member of the same police unit that Conroy’s own bodyguard worked for. Her house in Lahore ended up on a list of targets for a terror cell, though the plot was foiled.

She didn’t want to return to Washington, D.C., where it seemed career officials constantly jockeyed for positions, and instead chose to take an assignment in Norway. There, she still had relative independence and important work, but there was a considerably lower risk of car bombs in Oslo.

Three years later, she became director of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor for South and Central Asia.

The election the following year of Donald Trump as president marked a turning point in the State Department and across the federal government, Conroy said.

“The Trump administration’s relationship with all career government people was to approach them with suspicion,” Conroy said. “They didn’t trust career people would do what they wanted, or that they were actually committed to the U.S. government generally and not just the last administration.”

It wasn’t uncommon, Conroy noted, for new administrations to be wary of career officials, but overtime this suspicion tended to relax. Not so under Trump, even when in 2018 she took “the least political job I could imagine,” as the director of a Japanese language and cultural studies school in Yokohama.

“It seemed like the filter for whether someone was doing a good job or a bad job became whether the White House could use it to announce a triumph,” she said. “The Department of Labor was great, as long as those labor statistics showed a White House win, but if those stats indicated trouble, the White House was spitting on those statistics and the people publishing them.”

In 2020, she retired from the foreign service. Two years earlier, her parents, who had been pillars throughout her life, died in a car crash, and she decided it was time to return home.

In Spokane, wanting to rebuild a sense of community in the hometown she had visited but hadn’t lived in for decades, Conroy got involved in the League of Women Voters, the local conservation group Friends of the Bluff, signed up for urban forestry training so she could lead fire safety activities and applied to become a precinct committee officer for the county Democrats.

At her first meeting with the Democrats, she was told that the chair at the time, Nicole Bishop, planned to resign amid “intraparty conflict.”

The party had been in disarray in recent years with older and younger Democrats at odds. In 2020, Ed Wood resigned as the party’s chair, accused by various progressive groups within the party of disrespect and insults. Bishop, who was believed to better represent that younger, more progressive wing, was unable to bring the old guard on board, said Lu Hill, who until earlier this year held a position on the county party’s executive board.

Conroy said she put herself forward for the leadership role “on a whim,” thinking she had the experience to put the party back together. To her surprise, this relative newcomer to Spokane was elevated to lead the party, and Conroy pledged to not relitigate past grievances but to instead focus on building the party going forward.

Hill and two other members of party leadership told The Spokesman-Review that she largely succeeded.

“She was a breath of fresh air for the party, and brought a level of maturity and consistency that the party hadn’t seen in a long time,” Hill said.

If Hill had any regrets about Conroy’s leadership, it was only that she wasn’t in charge longer.

Conroy said she wouldn’t have run for Congress if Natasha Hill, a Spokane attorney and Lu’s sister who had unsuccessfully run against incumbent Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in 2022, had decided to run again, or if state Rep. Marcus Riccelli or state Sen. Andy Billig decided to run.

But no big names in Spokane politics came forward, and several of those figures that Conroy had expected to run were instead encouraging her to do so, she said.

In August, Conroy received more than 22% of the primary election vote, easily defeating her Democratic rivals, small business consultant Ann Marie Danimus and Dr. Bernadine Bank. She will face off against Republican Michael Baumgartner, the current Spokane County treasurer and one of the best-known figures in Spokane politics.