THE WORLD : THE IRA : Clinton’s Entanglement in Ireland Continues Apace--Despite the Bomb

The day after the Irish Republican Army broke the 17-month cease-fire with a massive bomb in London’s Docklands, Nancy Soderberg of the National Security Council organized a conference call from the White House.

She spoke to two dozen leading Irish Americans--congressmen and senators, businessmen and publishers. They were collectively shattered by the news that at least two people were dead and more than 100 injured by the bomb. In effect, she told them to pull themselves together; this was not necessarily the end of the peace process. The White House was not about to cut its links to Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.

While the Irish and British governments had severed all ministerial contacts with Sinn Fein until a new and permanent cease-fire was affirmed, President Bill Clinton was still prepared to talk to everyone--even those with fresh blood on their hands.

Clinton, so often accused of being fickle, is staunchly committed to what had promised to be a foreign-policy triumph for his presidency--and a vote-winner among the more than 40 million Americans of Irish ancestry. But he is now in the bizarre position of being closer to Sinn Fein than the Dublin government.

The White House is not just the broker of peace, and more than the dominant player. It is, Clinton’s aides conceded privately last week, the only party still talking to all sides.

Soderberg is staff director at the NSC, the third-ranking official after W. Anthony Lake, the NSC advisor, and his deputy, Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger. Foreign-policy aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) until she joined the White House, Soderberg has long known most players in the Northern Irish drama--except for Sinn Fein and the IRA. While working for Kennedy, she had, as a matter of personal moral repugnance for terrorism, refused to meet them.

Just an hour before the bomb had exploded, Adams had phoned Lake to warn him of bad news: The cease-fire was about to be broken, after a contentious meeting of the army council of a very frustrated IRA. Convinced that the British government was not prepared to respond to the cease-fire with serious political negotiations, the army council decided to use its traditional weapon: a terrorist bomb aimed at an unarmed civilian target.

The dismayed Irish Americans on the other end of the line could hardly restrain their relief when Soderberg said Clinton would press on with his mission to bring peace to Northern Ireland after 25 years of guerrilla war. They had feared that Clinton would recoil in horror from a policy that had brought him so close to terrorism.

They suspected British Prime Minister John Major had already been on the phone to the Oval Office, to say, “Told you so.” They were partly right. Major had called, but was too astute to rub Clinton’s nose in the Docklands rubble.

Major wanted to stress that Clinton should not overestimate his political dependence on the Unionists. Certainly, with a razor-thin majority of three seats in Parliament, he wanted the continuing support of the nine Ulster Unionists. But he felt a genuine mission to resolve the Northern Irish crisis, if he could. And Major was most interested to learn if Clinton still believed Adams could be trusted, whether he had been genuinely distraught on the phone.

For both Clinton and Major, the role of Adams inside the IRA’s councils was key. For the U.S. president, this would determine whether the cease-fire and peace process could be restarted, and whether Adams could be a reliable interlocutor in the future. But for Major, there was a further issue: Whether Adams’ discomfiture meant the long-term British strategy was finally succeeding in provoking a possibly lethal split within the IRA.

The army-council decision to declare a cease-fire in August 1994 passed by the most narrow of margins, 5-4. Broadly, the IRA in the north and the Belfast brigade and IRA prisoners--Adams’ power base--wanted the cease-fire. The southern units, influenced by a skeptical Brian Keenan, and the tough rural battalions of South Armagh who looked to a local leader, “Slab” Murphy, were far less certain.

That 5-4 vote in the IRA council hinged on Clinton. According to internal IRA minutes: “There is potentially a very powerful Irish American lobby not in hock to any particular party in Ireland or Britain . . . . Clinton is perhaps the first U.S. president in decades to be substantially influenced by such a lobby.”

The IRA was right. Four years ago this week, as the Vietnam draft and the Gennifer Flowers scandal seemed to sink Clinton’s hopes in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, he had one piece of good news. His old Yale Law School classmate, Rep. Bruce Morrison, had joined with Boston’s Mayor Raymond L. Flynn to found Irish Americans for Clinton. They even sent volunteers to New Hampshire to help. And Kennedy assigned Soderberg to Clinton’s foreign-policy team.

In April 1992, during his desperate battle to win the New York primary, Clinton told his Irish American supporters that, if elected, he would send a peace envoy to Northern Ireland; authorize a visa for Adams to come to the United States, and challenge the British allies on human-rights abuses. Everything that has happened in Northern Ireland in the last three years has flowed from those Clinton commitments. And it was rewarded by the cheering crowds in Belfast and Londonderry last November, in what Clinton called “the best day of my presidency.”

Despite his efforts to be even-handed--inviting the Unionists to the White House as often as Sinn Fein--Clinton has yet to resolve the real problem. The Unionists do not want to be part of a United Ireland, while Sinn Fein will ultimately settle for nothing less. All the diplomatic maneuvering has turned on the meaning of that word “ultimately.”

Adams, by accepting the principle that the Unionist majority can only be brought into a United Ireland through their consent, has pushed the date of “ultimately” far into the future. Too far, grumble Murphy and Keenan. Too far, grumble IRA prisoners, hoping for an amnesty.

Both British and U.S. intelligence assessments last week agreed Adams was genuinely surprised by the news that the cease-fire was about to end. By his own choice, to add to his claim that Sinn Fein was separate from the IRA, Adams was not in the IRA’s decision-making loop.

It was not always so. Adams had been commander of the Belfast Brigade of the IRA and army chief of staff. While imprisoned in the Long Kesh internment camp, Adams had been a key figure in the movement’s weird and short-lived flirtation with Marxism, then in the decision that there had to be a political as well as military strategy. “With an Armalite in one hand and a ballot box in the other,” was Adams’s slogan.

The weakness in this was that the ballot box was not helpful to Sinn Fein. Roughly 60% of Northern Ireland’s voters are Protestant and overwhelmingly vote for the Unionist parties, which insist on remaining part of Britain. The remaining Catholic vote is split--going mostly to the Social Democratic and Labor parties, which believes in a united Ireland but only by nonviolent means.

Sinn Fein routinely gets 8% to 9% of the vote in the North (even less, around 2%, in the Irish Republic). In fact, the mathematics of the elections suggest that almost as many Catholics vote for the Unionist parties as vote for Sinn Fein. This explains why Sinn Fein was so appalled by Major’s proposal for elections to pick negotiators for all-party talks. Elections are not kind to Sinn Fein.

But the week before the London bomb, Adams had been in Lake’s office, signaling he might be ready to swallow the elections plan. It would have to be part of a package that included all-party talks on a constitutional future, some prisoner amnesties, demilitarization and most of the other proposals in the report of Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.)--the nearest thing to a peace envoy Clinton could find.

That package deal remains the most likely next step--if Adams and Martin McGuinness can reassert their political authority over the restive IRA. Sinn Fein is desperately trying to avoid any repeat of the murderous split in its own ranks that marked the birth of the Irish Republic 75 years ago. And they fear British intelligence and the Unionists want to provoke just such a civil war. That bomb in London may have been the first shot in a internecine conflict within the IRA.