Deal Was Race Against Clock for U.S. Envoys : Negotiations: Threatened invasion was put in motion. Word of launching moved Cedras to yield.

Dusk was gathering in Port-au-Prince as retired Gen. Colin L. Powell picked up the secure telephone line kept open for the U.S. negotiating team from the Haitian military headquarters to the White House.

On the other end of the line, Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, Powell’s successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded an urgent warning in his Polish accent: Wrap this thing up and get out of there. This operation is on a very tight schedule, and it is not going to wait, Shalikashvili said.

Indeed, four hours earlier, at about 1 p.m. in Washington, Defense Secretary William J. Perry had walked into the Oval Office with a message from the Pentagon command center: If the invasion was to take place Sunday night, as scheduled, the paratroopers who were to be its spearhead had to start loading into their planes at Ft. Bragg, N.C. President Clinton, uncertain if Powell, former President Jimmy Carter and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) would be able to get a deal, decided not to wait.

“Pack ‘em,” he told Perry.

In the hours after that decision, as the afternoon wore on with no agreement in sight, tensions rose, both on the ground in Port-au-Prince, where followers of the military government were surrounding the site of the talks, and in the Oval Office, where Clinton and his advisers were growing increasingly concerned both that the talks would break down and that Carter’s determination to “grind it out,” as one senior official put it, could put the delegation in harm’s way.

In the end, it was only a breach of military security that saved the day. Shortly after 5 p.m., as Haitian military leader Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras and Carter held yet another round of inconclusive talks, Cedras’ second-in-command, Brig. Gen. Philippe Biamby, burst into the room holding a cellular phone to his ear: “We have word they’re on the way,” he said. In just over an hour, Carter was on the phone to Clinton to tell him a deal had been sealed.

Exactly how the Haitians came to know the invasion had been launched remains unclear. At the White House, some officials speculated that the Haitians may have had spotters near Ft. Bragg who saw the 61 planes take off. Others, knowing that television networks had pictures of the planes that they had agreed to keep off the air, believe one of the networks let word slip.

In any case, the news had a dramatic and decisive effect on the talks.

After two days of inconclusive negotiations, Cedras and Biamby had finally agreed to the one point that had hung up the deal for the entire day--a date by which they would cede power. Until then, the Haitian leaders stubbornly had insisted they would leave only after the Haitian Parliament had passed a new law granting them and their followers amnesty for human rights violations. Clinton had made clear to Carter and his colleagues that such language would be unacceptable, fearing the generals could use their power to intimidate the Parliament into not voting on the law and thereby stalling the agreement.

“That was the sticking point,” a senior Administration official said. “We needed that date certain.”

The day had begun inauspiciously. Early in the morning, Clinton held a meeting with National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, Perry and Shalikashvili.

Clinton had talked with Carter in the wee hours of Sunday morning, after Carter had completed a late-night meeting with Cedras. The message from that meeting had not been reassuring. There were “glimmers” of hope, an official close to the talks said, but little more. That morning, Clinton had talked with Powell as well. He, too, had offered few reassurances.

Closeted in the Oval Office, Clinton and his advisers reviewed plans for the invasion they expected to have to launch that night. The President departed shortly thereafter, heading to the nearby Foundry United Methodist Church to attend Sunday services. Even there, however, the possibility of a war to come was not far distant.

As the President bowed his head, the church’s pastor, the Rev. J. Philip Wogaman, asked the congregants to join him in prayer for the oppressed and hungry people of Haiti, for America’s troops and for Clinton as he confronted “the awesome and sometimes very lonely responsibilities of leadership and decision.”

For Clinton, aides say, the prospect of military action had become very real. “We were not at all sure if the negotiations would work. He didn’t know. But he didn’t want to be deterred,” an official said.

In the meantime, Carter was insisting on letting the negotiations go as late as possible, ever hopeful that, somehow, something would happen at the last minute to make the Haitians yield.

As the afternoon wore on, the tension became unbearable to some. Lake and William H. Gray III, Clinton’s special envoy to Haiti, both developed agonizing toothaches. Lake rushed to the dentist in the middle of the afternoon. Gray stayed behind, preparing to brief exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on the lack of progress in the talks.

Then came the breakthrough. As Haitian resistance began to crumble, Powell was once again on the telephone to Washington, urging that the Administration take the deal. Some of Clinton’s advisers were concerned--much of the agreement was vague. The pledge that the Haitian generals would resign, for example, did not even mention their names, referring only to “certain military officers of the Haitian armed forces.”

Don’t worry, Powell argued, according to a senior official present in the Oval Office for the discussions. “Let’s not get too hung up on the refinements of this. Once you’ve got 15,000 troops down here, the dynamics of this place are going to change dramatically,” the official recalls Powell saying. “That’s your assurance.”

“We could have spent the next three days going back and forth. We needed to get to closure,” the official said.

“A lot of this was face-saving, things to allow these guys (the generals) to save face,” the official noted.

Clinton was inclined to agree, but, characteristically, he wanted to take one final look before signing off. At roughly 7 p.m., Carter called to say the deal was in place. But Clinton, a senior aide said, wanted to “walk it around the room one more time” to make sure no one had missed anything.

U.S. Embassy officials rushed to fax a copy of the one-page document, signed by Carter and Emile Jonassaint, Haiti’s military-installed president, to the White House. An aide was summoned to ensure that the French and Creole translations matched the English.

At 7:45, Clinton gave his assent. The planes were recalled.