On December 13, 1996, President Bill Clinton, in a ceremony at the White House, announced the nomination of Bill Richardson as US Ambassador to the United Nations. Just a few days earlier, the congressman from New Mexico had been using his diplomatic skills in a much less grand setting.
Richardson was in a remote part of southern Sudan in a chief’s hut eating grilled goat. He was there to persuade Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, a rebel leader opposed to the Sudanese government, to release three Red Cross workers he was holding captive.
Richardson has long traveled to faraway places to negotiate the release of Americans held by dictators and despots. While in the Clinton administration, he was referred to as the “thug undersecretary.”
The former two-term New Mexico governor recently admitted to unspecified involvement in efforts to secure the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, both imprisoned in Russia. The US government has declared the couple “wrongfully arrested”.
For many lawyers, negotiation plays a large role in their practices. While Richardson isn’t haggling over the nuances of a corporate transaction or which driver ran a red light, lawyers can still learn about the deal from the man who has gone back and forth with a who’s who of tyrants, including Saddam Hussein. , Fidel Castro. Hugo Chavez and two generations of Kims in North Korea.
In a recent phone interview, Richardson, 74, shared a few pages from his playbook. It offers a much more complete version in How to sweet talk a shark. In this 2013 title, Richardson offers a world of lessons for lawyers in a behind-the-scenes look at some of his successful and failed negotiations.
US Women’s National Basketball Association player Brittney Griner, who was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and later charged with illegal possession of cannabis, leaves the courtroom following the court’s verdict in Khimki outside Moscow on August 4. A Russian court found Griner guilty of smuggling and possessing narcotics after prosecutors sought a nine-and-a-half-year prison sentence for the athlete. Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images.
‘Bad people like him’
“President Clinton,” Richardson tells me, “was once asked at a press conference, ‘Why are you sending Richardson to all these dictators,’ and he replied, ‘Bad people like him.’
Clinton was serious. Richardson credits his success to the willingness of despots to work with him. Despite Chavez’s strong anti-Americanism, the former Venezuelan president once told Richardson that he “was the only American politician [he] could really cope with.”
“I try to come prepared,” Richardson tells me. “You do your homework, you know your enemy’s desires, you know their sensibilities.”
Speaking about relations with North Korea, Richardson says: “You have to respect their culture. You should try to connect with them personally. You can’t give them talking points at the State Department about how they practice human rights violations and torture. You don’t give them some nice, nice rhetoric, but you are respectful.”
He adds: “You try to learn where they are internally and mentally at the time of the meeting. You want to find out what their actual thinking is.” The experienced diplomat says that you should ask: “Why did they agree with me with me? They must want something.”
Richardson says he has benefited as a negotiator from living “between worlds,” the title of his 2005 memoir. He grew up in Mexico City, the son of an American banker and Mexican mother. Spanish was his first language.
“This allowed [me] to appreciate cultures other than America, so when I was negotiating, for example, in Latin America with Fidel Castro and Maduro [Nicolás Maduro Moros, president of Venezuela], I would speak Spanish and it would create a better personal connection that could lead to a breakthrough,” explains Richardson. “I believe in general that anyone who appreciates other languages, cultures, ways of life, has an advantage as a negotiator, as a lawyer.”
The 2008 presidential candidate also points to his experience in Congress, holding frequent town hall meetings, as a training ground for his later work. “My congressional district was very, very diverse. A big Hispanic community, a big Native American community, a big Anglo cowboy community, with a lot of land and water issues that needed to be resolved,” Richardson says. “Many times I took officials with me and we tried to arrange or mediate in the meeting itself. This led me to enter into negotiations, trying to solve the problems.”
Richardson’s attempt at hostage negotiations happened by accident. “You could say I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he thinks.
In 1994, Richardson was in North Korea as part of a congressional delegation concerned with dismantling the country’s nuclear facilities. While there, a US military helicopter crashed after flying over the demilitarized zone in North Korean airspace. One of the pilots died in the crash, and the other was taken prisoner.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher gave Richardson his marching orders: Don’t come home without Bobby Hall or David Hilemon’s remains. Richardson refused to leave and after two weeks the mission was successful.
“I was worried they wouldn’t answer me and I’d end up incarcerated myself,” Richardson’s children. “Eventually, it worked.”
“Learning firsthand that I had helped an American reunite with his family is one of those good feelings that doesn’t go away in a hurry,” Richardson says. He now had a side gig, which has led to being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on five occasions.
Richardson’s negotiations are sometimes atypical. Usually, “negotiators are balanced, coherent and willing partners”. But to him, they are often “narcissistic despots and power-hungry tyrants who cared more about their own skins than their countries.” He says he is sitting “across some of the most unpredictable and irrational people on the planet.”
In 1995, Richardson was in Iraq trying to win the release of two American contractors sentenced to eight years in prison for wrongful entry into the country. Richardson, while meeting with Saddam Hussein, crossed his legs, revealing the bottom of his shoe – an insult in Arab culture.
It was unintentional. But the Iraqi president slammed his fist on the table and stormed out of the room.
“I remember asking the Foreign Minister, ‘Is he coming back?’ Am I the toast?”’ Richardson recalls. “He said, ‘He’s coming back, but you have to apologize. So Saddam returned. You know, he had these beady eyes and he started looking at me. And I decided, well, I’m not going to apologize. I will be respectful. And I think he kind of respected that.”
Many believe that hostage trading makes bad policy. It encourages America’s enemies to take more Americans as prisoners.
“Look, I don’t agree with that premise. You cannot be a white lily and a perfect lily. It will take something,” Richardson retorts. “We must stand by our fellow Americans. We cannot leave the Americans behind and there is often a price to pay.”
Richardson’s rules
There are no “hard and fast rules” when it comes to negotiations, Richardson says. However, the former ambassador has some basic principles he uses that lawyers can apply to their negotiations.
First of all, “You have to talk,” Richardson tells me. “Negotiations are about commitment. Communication is better than silence. Argument, reasoning is better than stone. Yes, I agree, conversation is free, but you can’t afford not to talk to each other. You won’t solve things just by insulting and not talking to each other. My view is that you engage personally.”
Then, he says, “once you get the deal, take yes for an answer and take it fast and leave. Go away. Don’t leave them guessing.”
“I’ve been criticized for saying this,” adds Richardson, but “dealing with a dictator is easier than dealing with a country that has rules and parliaments. If you hook up with a bad guy, a dictator, you’ve made the deal, you don’t have to wait around.”
In some cases, Richardson says, “don’t ask for a yes.” Rather, “assume a yes. Then just present it as fact and see if they object.” If they don’t, “take it, it’s yours.”
While negotiations are about compromise, don’t always ask for one, advises Richardson. Instead, “invent the compromise together.”
When he arrived in Sudan to secure the release of the trio of Red Cross workers, rebel leader Bol demanded $10 million. “I started laughing,” Richardson recalls. “I said: “Forget it. Let’s have a meal and find common ground.’ And the common ground was, I devised a compromise. I said, ‘Listen, I just visited your health care facilities. I just found out that your little girl died because you have no doctors here, no medicine. How about I get you some medicine and some Red Cross supplies?’ “
In exchange for medicine, food and other humanitarian aid – and no money – Bol agreed to release the hostages.
These days, Richardson directs the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, a nonprofit organization that promotes global peace and dialogue by engaging with countries and communities not typically open to more formal diplomatic channels. The center’s activities include negotiating the release of prisoners and hostages held by hostile regimes or criminal organizations. It also provides training and advice to governments and non-governmental organizations transitioning to democracy.
“I learned how to negotiate with some pretty bad people,” Richardson says. But “my basic principle is, just because they’re bad guys doesn’t mean you can’t get a good deal.”
Randy Maniloff is an attorney at White and Williams in Philadelphia and an adjunct professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law. He runs the website CoverageOpinions.info.
This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.
