The Billionaire Who Wasn't (32 page)

On Monday, September 6, 1993, Feeney, O'Dowd, Bruce Morrison, and Bill Flynn met in the coffee shop of the Westbury Hotel in Dublin to discuss their strategy. Feeney looked like a vacationer in a zipped jerkin and black slacks. O'Dowd passed around a document in which the IRA pledged to conduct a weeklong cease-fire, starting at midnight the previous Friday. It had already been in effect for forty-eight hours. Ireland was at peace, if only for a few days, and it had been achieved by the four guys in the coffee shop. O'Dowd then destroyed the document, in keeping with his promise to Sinn Fein that it would remain strictly confidential.

Feeney experienced on this trip a level of secrecy that would have impressed Harvey Dale. Everyone had a code name for telephone conversations. Gerry Adams was the Chairman of the Board and the IRA, the Football Team. The Irish Americans were known as the Connolly House
Group because they met Adams in the Belfast Sinn Fein headquarters, named after James Connolly, a leader of the 1916 Rising in Ireland. The U.S. ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith, was known as
speir-bhean
(visionary woman). Chuck Feeney was referred to—with a distinct lack of imagination—as CF. When traveling around in a hired car, they communicated only through scribbled notes in case the driver was spying on them.

The group went first to meet the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds, who was heavily engaged in backdoor diplomacy himself. “Albert just threw everyone else out of the office and conducted a two-hour seminar with us,” said O'Dowd. They visited s
peir-bhean
at the American embassy. They then drove the 100 miles to Belfast and met the Northern Ireland secretary, the British government's pro-consul, Sir Patrick Mayhew, in Stormont Castle and embarked on a round of all the political parties. The Reverend Ian Paisley, leader of the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party, which was fiercely opposed to Sinn Fein and deeply suspicious of Irish Americans, said to Feeney, “We know where you are coming from.” “How so?” asked Feeney. He said, “You are an Irish American.” “Yes,” responded Feeney, “but it doesn't preclude me from helping.” The climax of their visit was an intensive session with Adams and his colleagues at the heavily fortified Connolly House. They came away convinced that the militants on both sides were looking for a way out of the impasse.

The secret IRA cease-fire ended on Monday, September 13, after Feeney, O'Dowd, Flynn, and Morrison were safely out of the country, with a powerful explosion that wrecked the Stormont Hotel in Belfast.

The group made several more trips to Ireland. Once, in Belfast, Feeney went off to hire a car to drive them to Derry and returned with a bargain-price economy model into which the Irish Americans, including the towering figure of Bill Flynn, had to squeeze for the 128-mile round trip. Adams recalled that in their meetings Feeney said little, but when he did speak it was usually incisive and straightforward. “Sometimes people come and they have their advisers, and they have their line, and if they are running for public office they are influenced by all of that,” he said at Sinn Fein's office in Belfast. “Other people come who are quite powerful and they have their little touches of egotism and expect to be treated in a certain way. Chuck didn't come with any of that. All the time I have known him it was exactly the same. I never saw him as being secretive. I saw him as being ordinary. He
has taken biscuits out of his coat pocket that he had picked up from the hotel bedroom—custard creams,” he said laughing. “I wouldn't call that frugality. He's paying for the hotel. I also think he likes to take a rise out of people in that regard.” What was extraordinary to Adams was the traveling that Feeney did. “He would come in here having come from Australia on his way to San Francisco, and we would ask, ‘When will we meet again?' and he would say, ‘Well, I'm going back to Australia, then I am going to Hong Kong, then Limerick.'”

A secret back channel of communication was established linking Adams and President Clinton, going through Ted Howell of Sinn Fein in Belfast to Niall O'Dowd in New York, Trina Vargo in Senator Edward Kennedy's office on Capitol Hill, and Nancy Soderberg in the National Security Council in the White House. It was used to allow Adams to provide President Clinton with the assurances that he needed to give him a forty-eight-hour visa waiver in January 1994 to attend a Northern Ireland peace conference at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Adams's visit was a media sensation. The British government was outraged. Feeney was delighted.

President Clinton, wearing a tuxedo and a green bow tie, held a St. Patrick's Day party at the White House six weeks later, to which Feeney and the other members of the Irish American group were invited. The buffet included green chocolate bowler hats, Blarney cheese, and Irish coffee cake. Feeney and O'Dowd chatted with Senators Edward Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, and George Mitchell in the crowded East Room, where guests mingled with Hollywood celebrities such as Paul Newman and Richard Harris. O'Dowd recalled Feeney quietly talking to one of his heroes, eighty-seven-year-old civil rights activist Paul O'Dwyer of New York. The evening ended with Bill Clinton and Northern Ireland politician John Hume singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

Feeney was in Australia in August 1994 when he got an urgent message from O'Dowd. He was needed in Belfast, as dramatic events were about to take place. “He jumped on a plane, flew to L.A., from L.A. to New York and met me at Kennedy, and we went over to Ireland, it was that important to him,” said O'Dowd. The IRA was on the brink of a cease-fire. Sinn Fein needed reassurances in person from the Irish American peacemakers that this would produce a political dividend in the United States. Chuck Feeney's presence was essential. He had made a commitment that he would put up money for a Sinn Fein lobbying office in Washington, D.C. Such
Irish American support for the peace strategy of Sinn Fein would make the possibility of a dangerous split among IRA supporters in America less likely.

Feeney joined the amateur emissaries once more in Dublin on August 25, 1994. The group went first to see Albert Reynolds at his office in Dublin. The prime minister surprised them by vehemently rejecting anything other than a permanent cease-fire. “They were leaving to go to Belfast and I told them straight out—if you go to Belfast, I said, and you come out talking about a three- or six-month cease-fire, I'm not with you. It's not acceptable. It's either all or nothing,” he recalled years later over coffee in a Dublin hotel. “And I could see all their faces looking at me around the table. And Bill Flynn said nothing. And Chuck Feeney said nothing. O'Dowd and Bruce Morrison, I think, were a bit taken aback.”

The next day in Belfast the group, now including Joe Jamison and Bill Lenihan, representing the U.S. labor movement, tried to figure out over breakfast at the Wellington Park Hotel whether the cease-fire would be declared permanent. Feeney predicted confidently it would be. “Chuck was the only one who said exactly how it would play out. He read Sinn Fein perfectly,” said O'Dowd.

Inside Connolly House, Adams calmly told the group, “We're talking about a complete cessation.” They emerged into the media scrum. Feeney had previously managed to dodge the cameras, but this time he was too late. A freelance photographer climbed onto a railing and took a picture from above as he hung back behind the others. Feeney, a small figure in suit and tie behind Adams, was clearly identifiable in the picture that appeared in the Dublin newspaper,
The Irish Times
, the next day, though his name was not in the caption.

Shortly afterward, the IRA declared a “complete cessation of military operations,” starting at midnight on Wednesday, August 31. Six weeks later, on October 13, the loyalist paramilitary groups also announced they were going on cease-fire.

Chuck Feeney negotiated directly with Sinn Fein officials on the funding for an office in Washington to promote a political alternative. “We gave $20,000 a month for thirty-six months to Sinn Fein—a total of $720,000, and there were dollops on top of that,” said Feeney years later. “It was the right thing to do. It proved you can bring people around to your thinking.” A British barrister sympathetic to Sinn Fein, Richard Harvey from the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers in London, negotiated the figure and the
drawdown arrangement, said Sinn Fein official Ted Howell. The money would go by wire transfer to a body set up in New York called Friends of Sinn Fein, presided over by lawyer Larry Downes. “We met and went over everything over a soda,” said Downes. “He made it clear from the start that this money would be for a democratic process, exclusive of any violence.” All accounts were submitted to the Department of Justice in Washington. Adams said that “not one penny” of Feeney's money went to the IRA. Feeney emphasized that it was an “absolutely personal” donation from his own funds. At the time, he was officially taking a salary as chief executive of General Atlantic Group of $500,000 a year. The matter was too political to be linked publicly to the work of the Atlantic Foundation and its directors.

Feeney's initiative was applauded by the White House. “Our whole approach on this was that the more interaction and engagement with them [Sinn Fein], the more moderate they would become,” said Nancy Soderberg about his funding for the Sinn Fein office—a prediction that was to come true as time passed. Feeney took a personal interest in the location and furnishing of the office in a modern building near Du Pont Circle in Washington. Gerry Adams formally declared the office open at a reception in a Washington hotel in March 1995, grandly referring to it as Sinn Fein's “diplomatic mission.” There was hilarity when an English reporter, Peter Hitchens, asked if it would have a military attaché.

Feeney later gave $200,000 to Gary McMichael, a political representative of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association, which had carried out many murders of Catholics in Northern Ireland, in order, he said, to balance things. He thought McMichael was like Adams, a person who genuinely wanted to achieve peace.

There were setbacks. On February 2, 1996, Feeney was in his San Francisco office when someone called him to say that the IRA had ended its cease-fire in protest against the lack of political progress. It had exploded a massive bomb at a large business development in London known as Canary Wharf, killing two men and injuring thirty-eight people, and causing damage estimated at $150 million. Aine McCarthy, then Feeney's project manager, glanced over at him after he replaced the receiver. Tears were running down his cheeks.

The cease-fire was renewed on July 20, 1997, and on April 10, 1998, the main parties in Northern Ireland and the British and Irish governments
signed on to what became known as the Good Friday Agreement, setting out a plan for devolved government, the early release of paramilitary prisoners, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, reform of the police and criminal justice system, and new relationships between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

In the following five years, as the political process played out, Feeney directed a total of $30 million through Atlantic Foundation to worthy projects in Northern Ireland, including $2.5 million to community groups to help Republican and Loyalist ex-prisoners move into “positive politics.” Atlantic Foundation provided funds to help such people become involved in community development and to provide nonviolent alternatives for justice in areas where policing was still a problem. In 2006, the IRA finished a process of decommissioning, that is, destroying, its weapons, which included tons of explosives, rocket launchers, and heavy machine guns, and in 2007, it took the final step of supporting the reformed police force. Chuck Feeney was invited to witness the formal launch on May 8, 2007, in Belfast of a power-sharing administration, including Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party. The week before Feeney was in New York where he fell and required several days' hospital treatment for his knee. However, the philanthropist, who had just turned seventy-six, insisted on flying across the Atlantic for the highly-emotive event in the Northern Ireland Parliament Building, known as Stormont, attended by the British and Irish prime ministers and scores of political and community figures. He arrived unshaven and in an open-neck shirt and hung around the back of the crowd of VIPs in the main hall, leaning on a walking stick. “It's rare in life you get to write ‘finish' to a major undertaking in such a satisfactory way,” he said. “Today is that day.” Atlantic continues to pour money into Northern Ireland to underpin the peace.

Gerry Adams reflected that the intervention of the Irish American peacemakers and President Bill Clinton brought the cease-fire forward by about a year and that scores of lives were saved. “It was key to the timing and the development of the breakthroughs which came, and it was key to us being able in many ways to argue [to the IRA] that there was an alternative way forward, and part of the alternative way forward in helping our struggle was the international community.” It was crucial to Sinn Fein to get the commitments from the White House on access and visas, the right to raise funds in the United States, and promises that Sinn Fein would be treated like other parties.

Another important factor was the opening of a Sinn Fein office in Washington. “Chuck was the person who signed up to do that,” Adams said. “From that first meeting, he was the guy that delivered. All of the group played a huge role in delivering, but Chuck was the guy at the end of it all, when we were putting forward a proposition, who did it, in an understated way. I have learned since that when he was coming in to play a role, he researched and checked out and explored and investigated and cross-checked. He is extremely well-informed. He had informed judgments. To say that he is naive is totally untrue. The Irish peace process is the most successful U.S. foreign policy issue and those in at the birth of that have been validated and vindicated, and Chuck more so in that he put up hard cash, he put money where his mouth is. The investment he made to the peace process was pivotal. It was a brilliant investment. I am a huge fan of his. Even if he had never come near the Irish peace process, I think he is one of the most decent people I have ever met. He represents the very, very best of America where you can actually use power and influence in a very positive way for humanity, and I am lavish in my admiration.”