Envoy Puts ‘Indiana Jones’ Spin on U.N. Job

When Bill Richardson, America’s U.N. ambassador, and an entourage of other U.S. officials landed here for a three-day, high-stakes diplomatic mission last month, things got off to a shaky start.

A trip to the central market to sample the mood of the people--and pick up souvenirs--was canceled because of rioting. Then civil war broke out across the river in the Republic of Congo, and the night here shimmered with tracer fire and echoed with the thud of mortars. And to top it all, the man Richardson had come to see, President Laurent Kabila, was playing hard to get. Kabila, the rebel leader who had just overthrown Africa’s longest-serving dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, was ensconced with his Cabinet in his stronghold in Lubumbashi--a two-hour plane ride away.

Richardson, cultivating a reputation as the Indiana Jones of U.S. diplomacy, was undeterred. After all, this is the guy who shared roasted goat--tufts of hair still attached--with Sudanese rebels last year to negotiate the freedom of three Red Cross workers. So at 5 a.m. the next day, Richardson--diplomats and reporters in tow--launched into 36 frenetic hours of diplomacy, culminating in a meeting with Kabila and his Cabinet. Dangling millions of dollars in U.S. aid and investment, he extracted a reluctant commitment from Kabila to cooperate with a U.N. investigation into allegations of murder and abuse of Rwandan refugees by his army.

But the defining Richardson moment came hours later at a U.N. refugee center--a cluster of wood-frame buildings floored with plastic sheeting--near the city of Kisangani. Many of the 2,000 people in the camp were children orphaned when their parents died in the bush, perhaps massacred by soldiers under Kabila’s command.

Richardson, sweat dripping from his chin and mosquitoes dive-bombing his unruly hair, posed amid a dozen children to read a statement to a television camera reminding Kabila of his commitment to cooperate with refugee workers and the U.N. investigation.

To admirers, it was an example of Richardson’s ability, rooted in his background as a New Mexico congressman, to frame international issues in easily understood, human terms. But to critics, here was one more instance of what one sneeringly called the “showboating CNN diplomacy” he has made his specialty.

That mirrors the central question hanging over Richardson’s unconventional approach to his job: Is he the populist Latino (his mother is from Mexico, his father from Massachusetts) reaching out to developing nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and forging a new diplomatic style for the United States?

Or is he using his U.N. appointment as a catapult for his undisguised political ambitions, a job that can give him the gravitas--and the consistent national publicity--missing from his tenure in the House of Representatives?

Personal Style Brought to Job

Richardson, 49, acknowledges speculation that he is positioning himself for a run at the vice presidency on an Al Gore ticket in 2000. But with a wave of one of the hand-rolled cigars he orders from a Sacramento tobacconist, he dismisses such talk: “I see that as extremely remote.”

Whatever the answer, it is certain that in his four months as U.N. ambassador, Richardson has rewritten the job description in a fashion unmatched by any of his predecessors, including Madeleine Albright, now secretary of State.

To a post that has seen more than its share of brainy academics, policy theorists and career diplomats, Richardson brings skills learned on the committees and in the cloakrooms of the House, on Indian reservations in his old New Mexico congressional district and on improvised, unofficial trips overseas to “snatch,” as he puts it, hostages and prisoners.

U.N. veterans say there hasn’t been an American ambassador quite like him since 1971-73, when the job was held by another lifelong politician, George Bush.

Richardson relies less on a mastery of policy details than bonhomie, acute study of his allies and adversaries and the knowledge that his relationship with Bill Clinton is close enough that he can pick up the phone and reach the president.

By now, it’s pretty much assumed around the U.N. that Richardson is bored with the diplomatic grunt work that consumes most other ambassadors and that he sometimes may be a bit fuzzy on the details.

Hand him “talking points” for a Security Council session, and his gaze may wander. But ask him about Kabila, and he eagerly confides: “He reminds me of a street-smart Chicago ward heeler. You can deal with him, but he’s always skating on the edge.” Then he gleefully drops his voice an octave and imitates the Congolese president leaving a message on Richardson’s telephone answering machine.

His unabashedly political style simultaneously charms, alarms and puzzles many of his U.N. colleagues, who are drawn in by his brio but troubled by his wanderlust.

“Mr. Richardson is an extraordinary ambassador; he’s not of the typical mold of U.S. ambassadors here,” said Razali Ismail, the ambassador from Malaysia and president of the U.N. General Assembly. “He’s open to hearing other points of view. . . . But we don’t see him very much, which is a pity. They could have sent someone else to [the Congo]. He’s needed here.”

Lessons Learned in Congress

The prospect that he may be above all a political climber seemingly troubles U.N. people little at this point. Certainly there are fewer uncharitable judgments muttered in corridors about Richardson’s ambitions than there were six months ago about Albright using the U.N. as a steppingstone to her State Department post.

This is testament in part to his ability, demonstrated throughout his congressional career, to cloak his fiercely focused ambition in a geniality that reaches across ideological lines and his ability to mold himself to suit his current environment.

Richardson himself touched on that in explaining his repeated electoral successes during 14 years in Congress.

“In my congressional seat, I was very open about speaking Spanish to get the Hispanic vote,” he said. “I used to kid that I look like an Indian so I would get the Indian vote, and I would adjust in the white areas. I got broad support. . . . I came from a very bicultural background. I think that allows you to understand and appreciate other countries, cultures, racial sensitivities.”

He has a similar take on his prescription for success at the U.N.: “The United Nations is a parliamentary body, just like the Congress is a parliamentary body, and in a parliamentary body you can’t make personal enemies. You have to fight someone one day and then the next day you’ll need his vote.”

It has fallen to Richardson to be American ambassador during a critical period for the world body, squeezed by a U.S.-induced financial crisis at the same time it is seeking to reinvent itself for the post-Cold War era.

U.N. officials are counting on him to retrieve the more than $1.1 billion the United States owes in back dues--or at least a big chunk of it--from a Republican-dominated Congress that harbors deep reservations, even hostility, toward the organization. Congress and the Clinton administration in turn want him to round up backing among the U.N.’s 184 other member states for a program of internal reforms, scheduled to be announced Wednesday by the U.S.-backed secretary-general, Kofi Annan.

So the post contains potential political pitfalls as well as opportunities. Already, for example, there is grumbling in some quarters that Richardson came out on the short end of both his negotiations with Kabila and his bargaining with the Republicans in Congress. His sometimes tenuous grip on policy details also can cause his staff to wince. When he stumbled over a bit of recent Congolese history during a public appearance in Kinshasa, the capital, one of the diplomatic pros on the trip said quietly, “Close enough for government work.”

Relaxing on his plane en route to New York from Congo (formerly known as Zaire), Richardson concedes the U.N. post is “more daunting than I thought, because of all the bureaucracies. Before [as a House member], I had to deal with one bureaucracy: the Congress. Now I have two: the State Department and the U.N.”

But Richardson doesn’t act like a man daunted by his surroundings. He has moved quickly to put his signature on the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

In addition to adventuring in Africa, Richardson jets all over the United States speaking to community and student groups. This, he explains, is part of his effort to build support for the U.N. among the American people, but of course it also ensures him news coverage on local television all over the country.

He also is popular on the New York social, political and sports scene, turning up at A-list dinner parties, boxing matches and Yankee games and trying to bond with the city’s popular Republican mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Richardson and his wife, Barbara, a part-time antiques broker, maintain a heavy social schedule at the U.S. Mission’s official residence atop the Waldorf Towers just off Park Avenue. They have reached out in particular to delegates from developing nations, with one African envoy saying that he spent more time with Richardson at one of his dinner parties than he had with Albright in a year.

At least a couple days a week, Richardson--who is paid $133,600 a year--is in Washington for regular meetings with Albright and other top foreign policy aides to the president and for congressional negotiating sessions.

Childhood Spanned Cultures, Personas

Born on Nov. 15, 1947, in Pasadena, Richardson divided his youth between Mexico City, where his father was a prominent banker, and an exclusive boarding school in Middlesex, Mass.

Ralph Cygnan, a professor at UC Irvine Medical School who was a classmate at the school, remembers Richardson as a popular, intensely competitive pitcher on the baseball team who arranged for the squad to visit Mexico one spring. What surprised Cygnan at the time was how easily Richardson shifted from one culture to the other.

“At Middlesex, he seemed like the WASPiest of the WASPs, but when we went to Mexico, he fit right in there,” Cygnan said.

Richardson was drafted by the then-Kansas City Athletics while he still was in high school, but his pitching career ended with an elbow injury caused by throwing one too many curve balls. He went on to Tufts University, his father’s alma mater, majoring in political science, and in 1971 landed a job in the State Department’s congressional liaison office. Four years later, he became a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Along the way Richardson married Barbara, his high school sweetheart.

The couple left Washington in 1978 to settle in New Mexico, where Richardson worked as executive director of the Democratic State Committee. Two years later, he offered himself as the party’s sacrificial lamb against entrenched Republican Rep. Manuel Lujan. Although he lost as expected, Richardson ran a surprisingly strong race, and two years later, in a new, Democratic district created by reapportionment, he won easily.

Richard Lehman, who represented the San Joaquin Valley in Congress for 12 years and became one of Richardson’s close colleagues, said that what stood out above all in Richardson’s congressional career was his persistence.

“When he wanted an amendment or something for his district, he’d pound and pound and pound, but very low key. He never let his ego get in the way of his objective,” said Lehman, now a Sacramento lobbyist.

Richardson was visiting North Korea, a country with no official diplomatic ties to the U.S., on a congressional fact-finding trip in 1994 when a U.S. Army helicopter with two men aboard strayed into North Korean airspace and was downed. Staying in touch with the State Department by telephone, Richardson negotiated the release of the surviving soldier and the return of the body of the other, who had died in the crash.

That led to what Lehman calls Richardson’s “parallel life” as America’s unofficial liaison with pariah states. Besides his mission to Sudan, he met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro for five hours to secure lower visa fees for migrating Cubans, helped win the release of an American woman imprisoned in Bangladesh for drug smuggling, negotiated with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein the freedom of two U.S. businessmen who had blundered into Iraq, and returned to North Korea to secure freedom for a Seattle man who had illegally crossed the border and was promptly arrested for spying.

One of his few failures was an unsuccessful attempt to win the release of five Western tourists kidnapped by Kashmiri separatists in 1995.

Deep Research Precedes Meetings

He prepares for a trip by scouring for information on the person with whom he will be negotiating. For an April meeting with Mobutu, while the Zairian dictator, ailing with cancer, was still in power, Richardson interviewed four of his attending physicians and a mining company lobbyist in addition to the usual array of State Department and CIA experts.

Such research pays. For example, on his way to the Sudan in December to try to free the Red Cross workers held by rebel leader Kerbino Kwanyih, he learned that Kwanyih’s youngest daughter recently had died of measles and that his son was now sick. Richardson sealed the deal for the captives’ release by offering to Kwanyih, as part of the ransom, help with health conditions in the rebel camp.

It’s still not clear, however, how successful he was in his recent negotiations with Kabila. There are signs that Kabila may renege on the deal, and Richardson already is being accused by human rights groups of bungling the negotiations.

Meanwhile, resentment is growing among U.N. member states toward conditions the Congress is preparing to attach to repayment of $819 million of the dues the United States owes the world body. Principal among them is a congressional demand, backed by the administration, that the U.S. share of the cost of maintaining the U.N. drop from 25% to 20% of the total.

Richardson must negotiate that reduction--which of course means that some other countries will have to pay more--with the U.N. membership. What will other members ask in return? Possibilities include adjustments in the disproportionate number of Americans--and close American allies--holding top U.N. posts, reducing U.S. influence over the organization.

Confronted with these prospects by reporters at a recent news conference, Richardson laughed and brushed aside his questioners as “pessimists.” Then he turned and hustled down the hall.