Washington's green house

One of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States took place on January 29th 1994 in the Oval Office of the White House.

President Bill Clinton was at his desk. In front of him were two sets of documents. One urged him to reject an application from Gerry Adams for a visa to enter the US. This recommendation had the backing of the British government; Warren Christopher, the US secretary of state; Janet Reno, the justice minister; Louis Freeh, the FBI director, and the US embassy in London. The other advised the president to allow Adams into the country. It had been submitted by Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and his colleague, Nancy Soderberg.

Anthony Lake is a Massachusetts cattle farmer and academic with several books on foreign policy to his name. He started his Washington career in 1970 as a special assistant to Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's national security adviser, but resigned after the US secretly invaded Cambodia, a betrayal of Nixon which the FBI acknowledged by tapping his telephone for nine months. Two years later he threw in his lot with the Democrats and joined Senator Edmund Muskie as foreign policy adviser. He went on to become director of policy planning at the State Department under President Jimmy Carter, and played a role in the joint British- American effort to persuade the white Rhodesian government to step aside in the late 1970s. When Clinton ran for president he took Lake on as foreign policy adviser, and then brought him into the White House as national security adviser.



Nancy Soderberg, a 1980 graduate of Vanderbilt university, is the daughter of a Scots-Irish mother and a Swedish-American father. She served Senator Edward Kennedy as foreign policy adviser for seven years, which made her the obvious choice as point person on Ireland when President Clinton brought her into the National Security Council (NSC) as staff director. Her past association with Kennedy sparked suspicions in London that Soderberg would be a covert supporter of nationalist causes. But despite the green dress she wore at the Clintons' St Patrick's Day party in 1994, and a long-standing friendship with John Hume, the Northern Irish SDLP leader, she had a reputation in Irish-American circles as someone unsympathetic to their favoured causes (such as the fate of IRA fugitives and the MacBride Principles campaign on job discrimination in Northern Ireland). She was held responsible-by pro-nationalist activists-for steering Kennedy away from support for Joe Doherty, the IRA man who won widespread Irish-American backing for his (unsuccessful) fight against deportation.

Soderberg's first inclination was to refuse the Adams visa request "because of the terrorist thing," an insider would say later. But she and Tony Lake had the task of calculating all the domestic political angles of foreign policy issues. The question was: might granting the visa actually be a smart move?

PRESIDENTIAL SYMPATHIES

They were aware of the direction in which Clinton wanted to move on Ireland. He had made certain "Irish promises" during his election campaign. As governor of Arkansas Clinton had never shown much interest in Irish issues, but he had thrown in his lot with the small number of influential activists among the 42 million Americans who claim Irish descent, mainly concentrated in New York and Boston. Besides, Clinton's mother was a Cassidy (a county Fermanagh name) and his father, William Jefferson Blythe, had Irish ancestry. Moreover, Clinton had a personal axe to grind with the British Tory party after it had openly sided with George Bush. He was also naturally sympathetic to the Irish lobby, having witnessed the start of the Troubles in the late 1960s, when at Oxford, from the viewpoint of a British press which was then supportive of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement.

The first indication that Clinton would pursue a different policy on Northern Ireland from his predecessor George Bush (who more or less ignored the topic) came in an upstairs room in the Sheraton Hotel, across from Rosie O'Grady's pub in Manhattan, on the night of April 5th 1992. The New York Democratic party primary election was just days away and Bill Clinton was struggling hard to beat off a challenge from his maverick Democratic rival, Jerry Brown of California. The room had been hired for an "Irish Forum" to which the candidates had been invited to answer questions of concern to Irish-Americans.

Clinton arrived first. For half an hour he answered set-piece questions from a panel of four: Mayor Raymond Flynn of Boston, Patrick Farrelly of the Irish Voice, Ray O'Hanlon of the Irish Echo and Martin Galvin of Irish Northern Aid-"Noraid" as the IRA's prisoner support group in North America was called. Mayor Flynn kicked off, asking Clinton if he would appoint a peace envoy to Northern Ireland. Flynn, an anti-abortion Catholic, was heavily involved in the Clinton campaign, rallying blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" in Pennsylvania and Illinois to the Clinton cause. Clinton said that he would appoint an envoy, and added revealingly: "I think sometimes we are too reluctant to engage ourselves in a positive way because of our long-standing special relationship with Great Britain and also because Ireland has seemed such a thorny problem. In the aftermath of the cold war we need a governing rationale for our engagement in the whole world, not just Northern Ireland. I think the United States is now in a position to think clearly about positive change."

If anyone in the US State Department or the British Court of St James had been made aware of this (the meeting went unnoticed by the American and British media) red warning lights would have begun flashing. Here was a potential US president expressing his intention of becoming involved in an area which had always been regarded as an internal British problem.

It was the Noraid man who asked Clinton if, as president, he would grant a visa to Gerry Adams-then MP for west Belfast. "I would support a visa for Gerry Adams and I would support a visa for any other properly elected official," he told Galvin. "I think it would be totally harmless to our national security interests, and it might be enlightening to the political debate in this country about the issues involved." As he left the room a reporter asked him if he knew Galvin's connections. "Hey, come on, I'm doing the best I can," said Clinton.

Encouraged by his attitude, a group of Irish-Americans came together at about this time to support Clinton. The initiative came from Chris Hyland, a Clinton campaign official whose job was to organise ethnic groups in support of the candidate. Hyland first contacted Niall O'Dowd, the bearded, wise-cracking publisher of the weekly Irish Voice in New York, a lively newspaper which the Tipperary-born O'Dowd had founded in the 1980s, in which Gerry Adams had a regular column. O'Dowd in turn recruited Mayor Raymond Flynn of Boston and Bruce Morrison of Connecticut. Morrison, a one-time member of Congress who had resigned his seat to make an unsuccessful run for governor in his home state, was a well-respected figure in Washington and eager to position himself for a job in a Democratic presidency. He was not an Irish-American, but he was revered in the Irish-American community because of his work in Congress in securing 48,000 US visas for Ireland in the 1991 Immigration Act, which ended the problem of undocumented workers. Morrison also had valuable past connections. He had been to Yale with Clinton, and had worked with Hillary Clinton.

"Irish-Americans for Clinton/Gore" devised a strategy of engaging with the Democratic party on Irish issues rather than confronting it, as in the past. Whatever their private enthusiasms for Sinn Fein or a United Ireland, its members had one common, overriding goal: to involve the US administration in an attempt to end the violence in Northern Ireland.

THE IRISH NETWORK

Following Clinton's victory in November 1992, the group lost no time in arranging a meeting in Little Rock with the transition team. Mayor Flynn, O'Dowd, and a small group of supporters spent two hours with Chris Hyland and Nancy Soderberg in the Arkansas state capital. Morrison's flight from Connecticut was delayed by a snow storm and he participated in the meeting by conference call from Memphis airport. Their key point was that Clinton should get involved in Ireland, and signal to Sinn Fein and the IRA that the US, the only world power with real clout in London, would keep an eye on the peace process, and nudge it along. The US would show that there was a political dividend for those who were prepared to put violence behind them. In that way President Clinton could help to bring peace to Ireland.

After he was sworn in on January 20th 1993 Clinton showed little urgency about keeping his Irish promises. Adams applied for a visa on March 22nd and was turned down under a clause in Section 212 of the US Immigration and Nationality Act prohibiting the issue of a visa to any alien who has engaged in "terrorist activity." But the Irish issue was put on Clinton's agenda on St Patrick's Day, March 17th, when the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds, came to Washington for the traditional annual meeting between the Irish leader and the US president. Reynolds told Clinton privately that he had something going with John Major and that the president should not press the envoy issue, about which the British were very nervous. The Taoiseach was referring here to discussions with Major about a Joint Declaration-which the two governments were to publish later that year. Clinton took a liking to Reynolds and promised to be "there for the Irish" not just on St Patrick's Day but every day of the year. Publicly, he limited himself to saying that he would support any joint initiative of the British and Irish governments.

The Irish-American group, renamed "Americans for a New Irish Agenda," had in the meantime opened up lines of communication to the White House, regularly talking to Nancy Soderberg-and to members of Sinn Fein, still treated as pariahs in the political worlds of Belfast, London and Washington. In September Morrison and O'Dowd put a small group together to travel to Ireland on a fact-finding mission. The group included Bill Flynn, the burly, blunt-talking president of Mutual of America, a big New York insurance firm, and Charles "Chuck" Feeney, the millionaire chairman of General Atlantic Corporation. None of these men had been tainted by association with the IRA or Irish republicanism, but wanted to do something to help end the violence in Ireland. Bill Flynn was a pillar of the New York establishment who had hosted a lunch for Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Northern Ireland secretary, in New York, in an attempt to break new ground. Their participation clearly demonstrated that the initiative among Irish-Americans was passing to corporate Irish America-where one in four chief executives claims Irish descent. The old guard of Noraid supporters were not on board. Mayor Flynn was not with them either; he had reaped his reward and gone to the Vatican as US ambassador.

After the fact-finding group returned to the US it emerged that the IRA had honoured an informal seven-day ceasefire during their visit in order to signal to the White House and London that they were serious about peace and disciplined enough to stop fighting when discussing political benefits. One of the benefits they hoped for was an Adams visa.

TEMPORARY SET-BACKS

Two months later Mayor David Dinkins of New York inadvertently set the cat among the pigeons. The African-American mayor was winding up a press conference in New York when a television commentator, prompted by Ray O'Hanlon of the Irish Echo, asked Dinkins if he would invite Adams to the city. Dinkins, fighting a losing battle for re-election, committed himself on the spot. On October 25th the mayor sent a letter to President Clinton asking for Adams' visa request to be reconsidered on the basis of the peace dialogue then going on in Northern Ireland between Adams and John Hume.

The reply from the White House was a poke in the eye for Irish American activists. Bearing Clinton's signature, it was curt and to the point: "As you know, Adams has applied on several occasions over the past years for a US visa, and each time he has been refused under US immigration law because of his involvement in terrorist activity... I continue to believe we should not allow Gerry Adams a waiver. Credible evidence exists that Adams remains involved at the highest level in devising PIRA strategy."

The British embassy in Washington was delighted with the letter, as was unionist opinion in Northern Ireland. This president was going to stay on the right track after all. They were particularly gratified because feelings were running high among Northern Ireland Protestants at the time. The Shankill bombing had taken place just four weeks earlier, on October 23rd, killing 10 people, and Gerry Adams had helped to carry the coffin of the IRA bomber. But the White House was taken aback by the anger of the many Irish-American leaders who felt betrayed. Adams wasn't a hero to everybody in establishment Irish America, but there was anger at the White House seeming to take its line from Whitehall. "We've been hung out to dry," said O'Dowd. Bruce Morrison called for the sacking of the political officer who had drafted the letter. The initials PIRA, standing for Provisional IRA, smacked of British terminology and infuriated the Irish-Americans almost as much as the decision. Galvin said the letter "seems to have been written by an official of the British government." Many blamed Nancy Soderberg for either writing the letter or letting a text drafted by the State Department slip past her desk.

Apparent victory for the British had been achieved at the price of a Democratic president snubbing the Democratic mayor of an important city (the letter had been leaked to the media). The political people in the White House knew how badly this played in domestic politics. The next time might be different.

It was not long in coming. A month later the dynamics of the situation changed. John Major and Albert Reynolds issued their Joint Declaration at Downing Street in December 1993. The prospect of an IRA ceasefire increased. A strong signal emanated almost immediately from the White House that a new visa application might succeed. It came in reply to written questions submitted by the Irish Times Washington office to President Clinton. One asked whether the time had come to grant Adams a visa, given that the British government had established contacts with Sinn Fein with a view to bringing about a ceasefire, and that Irish-Americans wanted to hear at first-hand what Adams's peace proposals were. An Irish diplomat consulted by the White House cautioned that a repeat of the Dinkins episode would be disastrous. He also signalled that Dublin was not averse to the visa being given-a crucial factor for the NSC. After much redrafting the president's written reply stated that he would "keep the issue under review as the developing situation warrants," especially in the light of the Downing Street Declaration.

Seeing that the door had opened a chink, O'Dowd and Bill Flynn met in a Manhattan pizza parlour-which was raided a week later in a mafia drugs bust, and closed down-to plot the next step. They were joined by a New York barman called Ciaran Staunton, who was Sinn Fein's unofficial representative in the US. Together they worked out a ploy to force the president's hand. Flynn, conveniently, was chairman of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy Inc, a prestigious think-tank whose honorary chairman is Henry Kissinger. Flynn would arrange for the organisation to invite all the political leaders in Northern Ireland, including Adams, to a "peace conference" in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. It would be more difficult for Clinton to turn Adams down this time.

On January 5th Adams applied again for a visa. The situation in Washington had now changed. With the prospect of a ceasefire, the Sinn Fein leader was coming to be regarded as essential to any peace process. Both Albert Reynolds and John Hume-who had been cultivating allies on Capitol Hill for two decades-made it clear they had no problems over a visa. Senator Kennedy began to lobby on the Hill for support for an Adams visit. The Massachusetts senator, demonised over the years for his troops-out call in the early 1970s, had in fact taken a strong anti-IRA line for many years. He had, however, persuaded Clinton the previous year to appoint his sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, ambassador to Ireland, changing the dynamics of British-Irish-American relations. Kennedy was facing re-election for the first time in six years and was not inclined to incur the wrath of the Irish American community. He rallied Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Clairborne Pell and Senate Majority leader George Mitchell, all of whom were key committee chairmen in the then Democratic upper chamber. President Clinton now had political cover to keep an election promise-if he wanted to. Alone among Irish Americans on Capitol Hill, Tom Foley, the Speaker, friend and benefactor of both governments but also a committed Anglophile and frequent guest at the British embassy, stood out against granting a visa. Foley had no significant Irish-American vote in his Washington state constituency.

A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP?

It is history now that President Clinton backed the recommendation which Lake and Soderberg placed on his desk that Saturday morning in January: that he should grant Adams a waiver for 48 hours to visit New York. This delivered a blow to British diplomacy in the US from which it has yet to recover. With memories of Tory help for George Bush in the presidential campaign, a senior White House official said that if relations with the UK were damaged, "We can live with that." It was a dramatic reversal of the feeling of allied solidarity between the two powers during the Gulf war just three years earlier. US policy on Northern Ireland was at that point effectively hijacked-moved from the State Department to Anthony Lake's office in the White House, with its pictures of Hereford cattle on the walls and hot lines to London and Moscow.

Adams arrived in New York to be greeted by Dr George Schwab, the president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and former Jewish resistance fighter against the British in Palestine who is now a respected New York academic. Adams was clearly travelling down the same road.

Clinton's defiance of his own administration heavyweights set the pattern for future US policy and radically changed the decision-making process in the US capital so far as Northern Ireland was concerned. There were four more "visa wars" in the coming months, and in each case the new forces won through, despite rearguard actions by the British government which at times seemed on the brink of success. When the ceasefire was called in August 1994, Sinn Fein asked that the veteran IRA man Joe Cahill be granted a visa to enter the US at short notice to explain the IRA action to American supporters. London recommended against it. So did the State Department. Albert Reynolds telephoned the White House and said it was essential to the peace. The visa was granted. There was another disagreement over the level at which Adams was to be received by the administration when he came to Washington a month later. This ended in a kind of draw: Adams received a welcoming telephone call from Vice President Al Gore when he arrived in Washington, as compensation for not actually being admitted to the White House, to which London was adamantly opposed. There was a further struggle over access to the White House on Adams's next US visit.

Each time the argument over the issue went down to the wire, with the UK in conflict with the NSC, and an unlikely coalition of important Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, every step of the way. In March this year it seemed that London would prevail in what was the last of the big visa battles. Adams, applying again for a renewal of his visa waiver, asked the president to lift the long-standing ban on fundraising which had been imposed on him in the US. Sir Patrick Mayhew came to Washington and was assured by the State Department that this time the administration view would prevail. Adams would not be allowed to raise funds because the IRA had not declared the ceasefire permanent or given up any of its weapons, nor would he be invited to the president's St Patrick's Day reception in the White House. Even Anthony Lake and Nancy Soderberg were said to be "on side" this time, or at least neutral.

THE GREENING OF CLINTON

Then, two days before a decision had to be announced, and as Irish-Americans were bracing themselves for a defeat, everything changed. President Clinton was invited to play 18 holes of golf by Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Democratic party and a crucial ally of Clinton both in the party and on Capitol Hill. At the 17th hole, Dodd asked about the fund-raising issue. "I haven't made my mind up yet," Clinton replied.

That was enough. Dodd called Senator Kennedy and told him all was not lost. Kennedy immediately began lobbying the White House, emphasising the weak point of the British argument: Adams was already allowed to raise funds in the UK.

Then followed one of the most extraordinary episodes in the visa wars. The president sought out Tony Lake and said: "Find a way to do it." Niall O'Dowd of the Irish Voice was startled to receive a call from the president's national security adviser at his New York office. Lake asked O'Dowd to get a statement from Gerry Adams which would allow the president to consider lifting the fund-raising ban. By late in the evening, after several calls back and forth and exchanges of draft statements, with both Soderberg and Lake sitting up late in the west wing of the White House, an acceptable commitment was secured from Adams in which he said he was prepared to discuss the decommissioning question. Neither the British nor Irish embassies were brought into the negotiations. When the decision to lift the ban was announced the next day John Major was furious. For a week he refused to take a telephone call from Clinton, in order to show his anger. Adams even received an invitation to the White House St Patrick's Day party where a huge crowd cheered Clinton to the rafters.

The event was further confirmation of the irrelevance of the US State Department in what had become an important foreign policy issue for the US. Now the key figures are Anthony Lake, Nancy Soderberg, and former senator George Mitchell, a close friend whom Clinton made economic adviser on Ireland when he retired from the senate in 1994. "We don't count any more, on Ireland. The NSC has complete control," said a senior State Department official recently. Jean Kennedy Smith goes straight to the White House on important matters, not to the State Department. When British or Irish politicians come to Washington they know that Anthony Lake's office in the White House is where the real action is. In the last two months the political figures invited to Lake's sanctum have included Michael Ancram, the Northern Ireland minister, Gerry Adams, Dick Spring, the Irish deputy prime minister, and David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader. A routine has been established whereby the vice president or the president drops by for part of the visit.

An important part of the special relationship between London and Washington has been fundamentally altered: indeed the Irish would claim that it is they who have the special relationship now, one which will be consummated by President Clinton when he visits the Emerald Isle at the end of November. The greening of Clinton-who told the Boston Globe he has come to feel himself to be an Irishman-will be complete.