An American Envoy Who Brokers in Souls

He has been called “a diplomatic Red Adair,” but Rep. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has become a truly rare thing in the field of international politics: a broker of souls. Not hundreds, thousands or millions of souls, Yalta-style, but one or two at time, unwitting hostages or prisoners whose freedom he has won through often tedious talks doggedly pursued with wily adversaries.

Richardson, who was born in Pasadena and grew up in Mexico City, attributes his success in negotiating with such diverse partners as Saddam Hussein and former Haitian strongman Raoul Cedras to his experience negotiating agreements between Navajos, Hopis and Apaches in his northern New Mexico congressional district. In place of a big stick, his is an approach that seeks to balance many perspectives on the same situation.

Sometimes stubbornness pays, too. In one case in North Korea, he refused to leave the country after he was officially expelled when talks for the release of an American helicopter pilot went sour. He waited his unwelcoming hosts out, daring them to chase him away, running up a $10,000 bill in phone calls conferring with the State Department, and eventually he prevailed. The captive American and the remains of a second crew member were turned over to Richardson.

What does it mean that Richardson has chosen to make a specialty of winning the freedom of falsely imprisoned Americans around the world? Apparently, his coups in this arena contributed to his nomination for ambassador to the United Nations. Yet this is one of the outermost orbits of American foreign policy management, the tawdry business of international hostage negotiations, monitoring of elections and human rights cases and emergency humanitarian relief missions. Officially, the federal government doesn’t make deals with terrorists or “rogue nations,” or at least it’s not supposed to. For that reason, this enterprise is usually left largely to an ever-changing pack of media-hungry freelancers and diplomat wannabees, from puffed-up Wall Street businessmen and Texas millionaire adventurers, to a trickle of Washington legislators. Most never really progress beyond the photo opportunity stage of involvement.

Richardson’s “special envoy” missions have had a studied informality that works to his advantage. He usually arrives in a country with a message from his friend Bill Clinton, but the exact status of his mission is left deliberately ambiguous. As he chooses, he can be the concerned outsider, or alternatively, the insider with a passionate personal touch. His talks in the Sudan with rebel leader Kerbino Kwanyih last month were apparently deadlocked on a $2.5 million ransom demand until Richardson asked to visit with Kwanyih’s ailing child. It was a touching gesture that seems to have changed Kwanyih’s resolve on the ransom demand. The three humanitarian workers held hostage were released in return for a Jeep, some radios, rice and, significantly, a pledge of assistance specifically to improve child health in the rebels’ area.

In an era of international politics increasingly dominated by terrorism, Richardson’s deft parachute-and-rescue diplomacy begins to look like a necessary skill in the standard diplomatic repertoire of the New World Order. One theorist of international relations, James Derderian has dubbed this latter-day specialization “paradiplomacy.”

Much has been made of U.N. Ambassador and Secretary of State-designate Madeleine Albright’s formative foreign policy experience of being born in Czechoslovakia and living to see it liberated, first from the Nazis and then from the communists. According to one commentator, these experiences planted in Albright the belief that wrongs can be righted through determined strategic pressure from the United States.

How deeply is Bill Richardson’s international point of view shaped by his heritage in Mexico (his mother is Mexican), a nation that has been both closely allied with, as well as occupied and involuntarily annexed by, the United States? It is inspiring to see a Mexican American legislator operate outside of the well-trafficked domestic and social policy arenas that are the metier of most minority officeholders. Richardson, a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, even has moved beyond the hemispheric context, seemingly at home in a truly global domain. This is a foretaste of what American foreign policy will look like as more Latinos, blacks, Asians and other long-excluded communities begin to play a larger role in shaping the total picture of American policy around the world.

Richardson made a point of that new vision when, speaking at the White House after his nomination, he thanked “la communidad Hispana” and the “first Americans, the Native Americans,” for their support and pledged to be a bridge between the United States and the struggling nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

It may be that the New Mexico lawmaker’s success in widening the cast of characters shaping American foreign policy is as important as are his triumphs at the negotiating table. At the same time, his efforts as a “soul broker” and his elevation to the Cabinet-level ambassadorship will bring to center stage the larger question of whether humanitarian diplomacy should continue to languish at arm’s length from our foreign policy apparatus.