The Billionaire Who Wasn't

by Conor O'Clery

  O’Dowd, who had no idea how rich Feeney was until the October 1988 Forbes article, saw in him a product of a distinct, family oriented Irish American community in New Jersey. “There’s a whole containment thing there, a whole personality, a very identifiable, separate Irish existence,” he said. Feeney became emotional, and was sometimes moved to tears, when talking to O’Dowd about his parents who had passed away and their impact on him. In contrast to other rich Irish-American businessmen O’Dowd knew, who were mostly Republican, he found Feeney leaning to the left of the Democratic Party. “Here was this guy, one of the richest men in the world, a flaming Communist!”

  They discussed Irish politics a lot. Feeney was distressed by the violence in Northern Ireland, where the outlawed Irish Republican Army was waging a guerrilla war against British control of the province. The IRA campaign targeted members of the majority Protestant population who had any connection with the British army or the Northern Ireland security forces. On November 8, 1987, an IRA bomb placed at a British war memorial killed eleven people attending a remembrance service in the town of Enniskillen, only a few miles from Feeney’s ancestral home. Feeney was in London. He saw the gruesome aftermath on television. He thought, “This is madness, it has to stop.”

  “Maybe I was naive at that stage,” said Feeney, “but I took the view that this is not the way Irish people react—by blowing up kids at commemoration events.” He was particularly moved by the heart-wrenching story of how a nurse, Mary Wilson, died in the rubble holding the hand of her father, Gordon Wilson, saying, “Daddy, I love you very much.” Feeney’s daughter Leslie remembered him saying after the Enniskillen bombing, “In my lifetime, I want there to be peace, this has to be resolved in my lifetime.” “He was always taking these things to heart,” she said. “His attitude was—with my wealth I have got to do something.”

  O’Dowd had good contacts in Ireland, and he received indications that the IRA was ready to move in the direction of peace. But its political wing, Sinn Fein, and its leader, Gerry Adams, were ostracized by the British, Irish, and American governments, and there was stalemate. With the end of the Cold War and the election in 1992 of a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, O’Dowd believed that the United States could form a bridge to bring the Sinn Fein leaders into the political mainstream and nudge a peace process forward. He got the idea of creating a small delegation of respected Irish American figures to act as amateur envoys to help promote a dialogue among the three governments and all the parties in Northern Ireland. To be politically acceptable, the delegation had to include significant figures from corporate Irish America with no history of support for the IRA. Chuck Feeney was the first name that came to his mind.

  Feeney’s agreement to participate didn’t give O’Dowd much leverage when he went to recruit others. “It was no use at all. Nobody knew who he was, that’s the truth. Getting Bill Flynn was much bigger.” Bill Flynn, head of Mutual of America on Park Avenue, was a pillar of corporate Catholic respectability in Manhattan. He was chairman of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a member of countless charitable and educational boards. Trade union executive Joe Jamison and former congressman Bruce Morrison from Connecticut, a hero to the Irish for his success in winning visa concessions, also joined the group, which called itself Americans for a New Irish Agenda. Their first mission was to Arkansas in January 1993 to lobby the incoming Clinton administration.

  To show Chuck Feeney that Gerry Adams was serious about ending the violence, O’Dowd arranged for a private meeting between the two men. Feeney and O’Dowd flew to Dublin and were picked up by Sinn Fein guides at their hotel and taken to a house in a working-class area. At the time, Adams was under constant threat of assassination. On March 14, 1984, loyalist gunmen had fired twenty bullets into his car and he had been seriously injured. The bespectacled, black-bearded Sinn Fein leader was always on his guard and changing his schedule.

  Feeney and Adams talked in the cramped living room, one on each side of a tiny fireplace, as burly guards stood outside. “Even though I had been briefed about who this guy was, it was in the middle of one of those mad hectic days when you are meeting a whole lot of people,” recalled Adams. “But I was very impressed by him. He didn’t pontificate. He was very unprepossessing, very down-to-earth and ordinary. I talked about the ongoing efforts to build a peace process, the importance of dialogue, the importance of trying to get people outside the box to come in. My view at that time was that you don’t change the people, you change the political conditions. If it was a contest between Ireland and Britain, the Brits would always win because it was an unequal contest. It could be that people from outside the box could change things.”

  Feeney had “an innate feeling” about Adams. He was convinced that the Sinn Fein leader was trying to achieve what Irish Americans overwhelmingly wanted, taking the gun out of Irish politics. “Chuck can figure people out,” said O’Dowd. “He liked Adams a lot. They were the two smartest men I have ever been with in one room. They had a very good conversation about what America needed to do.”

  John Healy, however, was furious when he heard about the meeting. “He screamed at me. ‘What are you doing?’” said O’Dowd. For Healy, there were serious implications for the founder of a major philanthropic foundation having dealings with the head of an organization regarded as the mouthpiece of a terrorist group by the U.S., British, and Irish governments. Adams was widely reported to be a member of the IRA’s army council, though he always denied it. In the ghettos of Belfast he was a folk hero, but he was barred from traveling to Britain and America, and his voice was banned from British and Irish radio and television.

  But Feeney was undeterred. A second meeting was arranged to show him conditions in war-ravaged Belfast. O’Dowd was told to bring him to a house in Ballymurphy, a working-class nationalist area of West Belfast. He and Feeney traveled in one of Belfast’s old-style black taxis that served the nationalist area. They saw British soldiers patrolling the scorched and rubble-strewn streets with rifles at the ready. They knocked on the door of a two-story row house with a small garden in front. A large man came to the door and eyed the two men with suspicion. “What do youse want?’ he asked. “Are youse peelers [police]? Are youse collection men? Are youse here to fucking get me? Get the fuck out of here! Get away from my house!”

  O’Dowd had gotten the address wrong. The pair ran down the little garden path with the householder in pursuit. “I was petrified at this stage,” said the publisher. “Then the completely insane thing is, we’re out on the street, who comes by in a big reinforced armored taxi but Gerry Adams on his way to meet us at a totally different address.” The doors of the taxi opened from the inside and they climbed in and sped off. “We were in fits laughing,” said O’Dowd. “Here was one of the richest men in the world being chased as a debt collector.” Feeney was taken with the fact that the door of the armored taxi could not be opened from the outside, as a precaution against being ambushed.

  Back in New York, the Irish American group arranged to visit Ireland for a round of public meetings with all parties, including Sinn Fein, as a way of bringing them in from the cold. They asked for a brief cease-fire from the IRA to establish the credibility of the Irish American group with the Clinton administration. It took some months to organize, but at last the message went out secretly to IRA commanders: No attacks should be staged for one week in early September 1993. There would be no announcement. Only the White House and the Irish American delegation would know.

  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 speir-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.