It was nearly 3 o’clock in the morning when the phone rang in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, an impoverished, war-torn country on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

Hours earlier, Rex Tillerson, then a young, up-and-coming country manager at Exxon, had just wrapped up three days of contentious negotiations over an energy deal with the Yemeni government, an agreement that would fundamentally reshape the country for years to come. Exhausted, he had gone to sleep around midnight, hoping for an uneventful flight home to Texas at 6 a.m.


It was the prime minister calling, demanding to see Tillerson immediately. When he arrived at his office half an hour later, the reason for the summons became clear: Yemen wanted new terms and was prepared to play hardball.

But Tillerson stood firm, according to a person in the negotiations, and the Yemenis more or less caved: “The prime minister tried to retrade the deal and Rex just basically just said no.”

It was a serious test for Tillerson and a preview of the diplomatic skills he would hone in the years to come. “Rex can say no and do so in a way that is not offensive and doesn’t create unnecessary battles,” a Tillerson associate said. “The government of Yemen was not going away. And we needed to deal with it.”

The story, from the early 1990s, helps explain why President-elect Donald Trump picked Tillerson — a slick, tough Texan seen by friends and foes alike as a talented practitioner of the art of the deal — to be his top diplomat.

Some have found the pick puzzling: Tillerson has articulated no grand theory of world affairs, and his scant public comments on U.S. foreign policy have focused on what he knows best — energy. Critics have expressed alarm over his warm relationship with Russia, his lack of government experience and the potential blowback from having an oil executive serve as America’s face to the world.

“I’ve been resisting the urge to drink since 7 a.m., when I read the news,” one State Department staffer said.

But interviews with close associates and a review of his record at Exxon reveal a pragmatist whose views put him firmly in the American foreign policy mainstream. And what Tillerson, 64, may lack in traditional diplomatic training, supporters say, he’s made up in years of wrangling recalcitrant and corrupt foreign regimes.

Since becoming Exxon’s CEO in 2006, and before that as head of the oil giant’s international division, Tillerson has presided over operations in some 200 countries, positions that put him in contact with a global rogues’ gallery of strongmen from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Chad’s Idriss Deby to Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh.

That experience, according to friends and allies, makes him well-suited to go toe-to-toe with some of the world’s nastiest people. “The good Lord didn't put oil in all freedom-loving democracies across the world,” incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said Tuesday.

“There are a bunch of countries around the world that are not nice places,” said Ray L. Hunt, executive chairman of Hunt Consolidated Inc. and a longtime friend and business partner of Tillerson’s. “There is nobody I can think of who can better manage those relationships on behalf of the United States than Rex.”

Announcing the pick Tuesday morning, Trump cast Tillerson as a throwback to the days of great-power diplomacy — a master statesman whose task would be to “promote regional stability and focus on the core national security interests of the United States.” And Tillerson reinforced the message, calling for “strengthening our alliances, pursuing shared national interests and enhancing the strength, security and sovereignty of the United States.”

The nomination came packaged with supportive statements from Robert Gates, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley — a trio of George W. Bush-era heavyweights who represent the Republican Party’s realist wing. (Their consulting firm, RiceHadleyGates, has done work for Exxon.) Tillerson also has the strong backing of former Vice President Dick Cheney, a longtime confidant of the Exxon chief’s predecessor, Lee Raymond, and an avowed foe of the realists.

Accounts depict Tillerson, a personal friend of arch-dealmaker James Baker, as an aggressive but polished negotiator, the kind of wheeler-dealer Trump sees in the mirror. “He’s ruthless,” said a former Western diplomat who has dealt with him. “But not like Raymond. That guy was fucking ruthless.”

Along with Yemen, Tillerson’s years leading Exxon’s operations in Russia forged his understanding of how to operate in difficult environments abroad — when to apply pressure, and when to turn on the charm. “Those early assignments where I worked internationally and the things I learned there have served me well ever since,” he told an interviewer in 2007.

“Watching Rex in these negotiations was just remarkable because he could be as tough as nails,” a Tillerson associate said. “Afterwards, on the plane, he’d go over and sit down beside the people he was negotiating against and make small talk as if they were friends of long standing.”

But Tillerson’s ties to Russia, which brought him into close contact with Putin, are already drawing fire from Democrats and hawkish Republicans, threatening a bitter confirmation fight.

“I don’t agree with everything he’s doing. I don’t agree with everything a lot of leaders are doing. But he understands that I am a businessman," Rex Tillerson said of President Vladimir Putin in February. | AP Photo

“It's a little startling, at the height of the slaughter in Aleppo, to nominate as secretary of state a recipient from Putin of Russia’s Order of Friendship,” said Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, noting the award bestowed on Tillerson by the Russian leader in 2013.

As recently as February, Tillerson boasted about his relationship with Putin in a talk to students at the University of Texas, though he added: “I don’t agree with everything he’s doing. I don’t agree with everything a lot of leaders are doing. But he understands that I am a businessman.”

Tillerson negotiated personally with Putin over Sakhalin-I, a risky oil project in the country’s frigid and foreboding Far East. In his book “Private Empire,” journalist Steve Coll quotes an unnamed Exxon official who told him the Kremlin leader “blew his stack” when Tillerson demanded that the deal proceed entirely according to Russian law, rather than as an executive order. During the final round of talks with Putin, Tillerson rehearsed the negotiations — with a colleague playing the volatile Russian president.

A former State Department official who knows Tillerson disputed the idea that he would be too close to Putin. “They’re not exactly judo buddies,” this person said.

“He is as hard-nosed and no-nonsense as they come,” said Dmitri Trenin, a Russian analyst at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I expect him to correct the policies which unnecessarily helped make Russia an adversary of the U.S.”

Friends pushed back on the idea that Tillerson would be uninterested in promoting American values abroad, pointing to his lifelong devotion to the Boy Scouts of America as evidence of a principled core. “Sense of duty, loyalty, faithfulness, loyalty — he embraces all of that,” one friend said. “That means more to him than probably anything.”

Others noted his sideline interest in global health issues, disputing the notion that he might approach the job as an atavistic practitioner of realpolitik. “I don’t think this is somebody who looks at the world as a large billiards table,” one associate said.

If anything, Tillerson comes across in Coll’s account as a hardened skeptic of autocratic leaders like Putin, whose erratic temperament and persecution of political rivals like oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky rattled Exxon’s executives. But his somewhat narrow experience may have left him ill-equipped to handle the kinds of complex political situations he might face in Foggy Bottom.

“His feel for political economies in poor countries was limited,” Coll writes in a section on Nigeria — a weakness he attributes to Tillerson never having lived abroad for an extended period. Coll, who criticized Trump's pick this week in The New Yorker, faults Tillerson for failing to reckon with Exxon’s unpopularity in the country’s Niger Delta, where insurgent groups posed a constant threat to the oil company’s operations.

Although he worked closely with Bush administration officials in Russia, Tillerson has also defied U.S. policy on occasion. Coll tells the story of how, in 2011, Exxon expanded its operations into Iraqi Kurdistan, brushing off the Obama administration’s entreaties to stay away and angering the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, which feared the Kurds would use their newfound oil wealth to seek greater autonomy. “I had to do what’s best for my shareholders,” Tillerson explained to stunned State Department officials, one of whom confirmed the incident to POLITICO.

But Tillerson was also known to fold when the power dynamics weren’t in his favor. In one particularly fraught negotiation described in a 2008 State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, he haggled with the government of Kazakhstan over Exxon’s stake in the Kashagan oil field. Tillerson insisted on paying the “market price” for the oil, but the Kazakh government was demanding a discount.

“ExxonMobil told us that CEO Rex Tillerson had decided that Exxon was going to hold the line on this issue,” the cable reads. But he didn’t hold out for long, the cable concludes: “ExxonMobil evidently decided that the risk of being permanently shut out of development prospects in Kazakhstan was not worth the further argument on the market value of its existing Kashagan stake.”

Tillerson’s worldview is hard to pin down, given how little he’s said about core foreign policy issues.

“He’s not an ideological man,” said John Hamre of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has spent more than 100 hours discussing foreign policy with Tillerson, a board member, over the past 11 years. “Rex is an engineer, so he brings an engineer’s precision in thinking about the dimensions of a problem. He wants to understand all the players, all the factors.”

Another friend relayed the story of how, in the three weeks between his assignment in Yemen and his new post in Russia, Tillerson spent his vacation in the Library of Congress, reading everything he could about Russian history and politics.

Most of the media coverage of Tillerson has focused on Russia, but he may have his most immediate impact in rebalancing U.S. relationships in the Middle East, where Sunni-majority countries in the Persian Gulf have chafed at what they see as President Barack Obama’s tilt toward Shiite Iran. At Exxon, Tillerson has had long exposure to the oil-rich Sunni monarchies, and diplomats in the region expect the Trump administration to work quickly to patch up those relationships.

“I think that will be a high priority,” one person who has spoken with Tillerson said.

Quick facts on Rex Tillerson, Trump's pick for secretary of state On Tuesday morning, President-elect Donald Trump officially announced he picked ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his choice for secretary of state.

Tillerson has also taken positions sharply at odds with Trump’s campaign rhetoric. In 2007, he spoke in favor of free trade as he expanded on ExxonMobil’s view of the world during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Energy made in America is not as important as energy simply made wherever it is most economic,” he said.

Five years later, in another CFR speech, he praised Canada’s energy policies because “they allow markets to work, they allow free markets, they allow free trade.” America’s security, he argued, depended on having reliable sources of energy from around the world — wherever they might be found.

“If you don’t like the people you’re buying it from, that’s a different issue. That’s a different issue,” he said.

Tillerson also hinted at some skepticism about the Obama administration’s so-called pivot to Asia, and its implication that a war-weary United States was reducing its footprint in the Middle East.

“So if, then, the U.S. said, well, we can now redeploy those defense resources elsewhere in the world, the question you have to ask is, well, then who steps into that void? And most likely it's going to be a large consuming country is going to step into that void,” he said.

“You mean a China?” an interviewer interjected.

“Well, they're a large consuming country,” he said to laughs.

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report.