By Quentin Peel, James Harding, Judy Dempsey, Gerard Baker and Robert Graham
FT.com site


Vaclav Havel's evening at the theatre in Bratislava was about to be interrupted. It was one of the final official appearances for the Czech Republic's playwright president. He was attending a performance of an experimental play, Le Bal, on the last night of his state visit to the Slovak capital. Two days later, he would step down as president in Prague. But there was to be a dramatic last act.

Mr Havel's signature was being sought for a sensitive document. For several days previously, as transatlantic tension over the looming war in Iraq intensified, Britain and Spain had been secretly promoting the idea of making a declaration of solidarity with the US. It was to be published on January 30 as an open letter in The Wall Street Journal and a handful of national newspapers across Europe. It would make clear that the anti-war stance espoused by France and Germany did not represent the views of all Europe.

By the time Mr Havel settled into his seat at the Hziezdoslav Theatre on January 29, the leaders of Poland, Hungary, Denmark and Portugal had been recruited. Even Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, one of the founding nations of the postwar European project, was on board.

The Czechs were more difficult. The office of Vladimir Spidla, the prime minister, in Prague said it would be impossible to secure parliamentary approval for such a declaration. It looked as if they would be left out. In Washington, however, someone thought otherwise. That was Bruce Jackson.

Mr Jackson is not an official. Nor is he exactly an anonymous private citizen. Instead, the one-time military intelligence officer and ex-Wall Street banker is a sort of freelance US envoy to the former Soviet bloc. For much of the past 10 years, he has acted as a go-between for Washington and the would-be members of Nato in central Europe, becoming a tireless campaigner for the cause of Nato enlargement.

He is a man of considerable, if ill- defined, influence within the Bush administration, having worked with such figures as Richard Perle, leading member of the Pentagon's defence policy advisory board, Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary. To diplomats and government officials all over central Europe, he is simply "Bruce".

The day before publication, Mr Jackson called the Czech embassy in Washington and urged officials not to give up efforts to get Czech support. Securing the signature of Mr Havel would add an undeniable lustre to the declaration. And with 72 hours still left before his retirement, the president could act over the heads of his government.

Sacha Vondra, the Czech deputy foreign minister, was the man who at last got through to Mr Havel, via his security man, during the interval at the theatre. The president did not have time to see the text but was told the gist - and he gave his blessing for his signature to be added.

At 10 Downing Street, where the signatures were being co-ordinated, an official asked for written confirmation. He was told by a Czech official that there was no time. The president was back in his seat. They would just have to take his word for it.

When the Letter of Eight, as it became known, was published the next morning it caused consternation round Europe. It laid bare the fundamental division between those who supported US action in Iraq and those who were opposed. It made a mockery of any common foreign policy in the European Union. But there was more embarrassment to come.

On the day of its publication, 10 more countries in central and eastern Europe - all of them candidates to join Nato, and known as the Vilnius 10 after the place of their first meeting - received a text for a declaration of their own. The statement, even more explicit than the Letter of Eight in its support for US policy, had been written by Mr Jackson.

The lobbyist had been at the Slovak ambassador's in Washington for dinner a few days previously, in the company of the other US representatives of the Vilnius 10.

They had talked about making a statement on Iraq. Its intention was to demonstrate solidarity with the US just weeks before Congress was due to vote on accepting seven of the countries into Nato. The V10 statement would ensure that any hesitant senators had no doubts about the loyalty of the eastern Europeans to the US.

With the Capitol Hill audience in mind, Mr Jackson assumed the responsibility of crafting the message. He wrote the statement and sent it to the Lithuanian embassy. The Lithuanians e-mailed it on to the rest.

The text was non-negotiable: "Take it or (do not) leave it," the e-mail said.

By the time the text landed at the foreign ministries in eastern Europe, it was late on Friday, January 31. The idea was to publish it on February 5, the day Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was due to present evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the United Nations Security Council. Indeed, the text referred to Mr Powell's "compelling evidence", even though no one had yet seen or heard it.

The Bulgarians wanted to make some amendments. Salomon Passy, foreign minister, was on his way to Washington carrying his own text. On February 4 - as the US was still overcoming the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew - Mr Passy and a handful of diplomats went to the White House. They discussed the V10 letter.

Dan Fried, director of European affairs at the National Security Council, knew all about it. He was supportive - but did not want to get into the business of negotiating the fine print. At about 4pm, the representatives of the V10 countries gathered at the Lithuanian embassy and signed off on the Jackson text, with a few small changes.

The next morning, Mr Powell prepared to make his presentation. The screens were set up to show satellite images of trucks, possibly mobile weapons laboratories, on the move. Tape recordings of Iraqi officials discussing the destruction of evidence had been made available by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Before he got started, there was more manoeuvring among the Europeans. The Bulgarians were nervous about the EU reaction. The night before, they showed the document to the French, traditional allies, who were appalled when they read the line about Mr Powell's "compelling" case against Iraq.

Mr Passy then talked to George Papandreou, the Greek foreign minister, about including some EU language. They contacted the state department to seek approval from Beth Jones, the assistant secretary for European affairs. But there was no time. The V10 declaration went out at 2pm.

It is hard to exaggerate the effect on internal European politics of the two declarations - the Letter of Eight and and the statement by the Vilnius 10. The first showed that the existing members of the EU were profoundly divided. The second demonstrated that there was indeed a different view between "old" Europe, led by France and Germany, and the "new" entrants emerging from the Warsaw pact.

Their impact had nothing to do with the contents but with the manner of their preparation. In many quarters, they were taken as evidence of a US-led conspiracy to divide Europe. It was not simply that the French and Germans had been kept in the dark. None of the procedures of the EU had been followed: neither Greece, holding the rotating EU presidency, nor Javier Solana, the "high representative" for foreign policy, had been informed.

After lengthy negotiation, Mr Solana had at last succeeded in winning agreement for a common policy on Iraq for all 15 member states on January 27, when it was formally approved by the foreign ministers. It had been a painful exercise but they could at least agree that the UN inspectors were in the country and should be allowed to carry out their work.

When the Letter of Eight was published three days later, Mr Solana first heard about it on the radio. "He was furious and disappointed," says a close colleague. "I have never seen him so depressed." He felt betrayed - both by the EU members who had signed and by the candidate countries.

"Solana was not only stabbed in the back. Our common foreign and security policy was now a shambles," the official says. "It was awful. And no minister had had the nerve to inform us beforehand of their intentions. Nobody cared about Europe. We were left almost powerless."

In London and Madrid, however, the thinking behind the letter had been to fire a shot at France and Germany, not the whole EU. "It clearly pissed off the French and the Germans in a major way and I don't think anyone shed any tears in the capitals of the eight countries," recalls one UK official who helped orchestrate the Letter. But they were also aware of the wider reaction. "Of course we did not tell the Greeks," another British official says. "They might have tried to stop it."

American involvement was suspected behind the conception of both letters: in the first, because it was first proposed by The Wall Street Journal; and in the second because of the involvement of Mr Jackson.

The document was originally proposed by Mike Gonzalez, deputy editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe. He had contacted Tony Blair's office in London and Silvio Berlusconi's office in Rome and had received a tepid response. But response from Mr Aznar's staff in Madrid was far more enthusiastic. After Alberto Carnero, the prime minister's diplomatic adviser, had drafted the first text and Mr Aznar sent it to Downing Street, the Spanish prime minister's enthusiasm infected Mr Blair.

Both prime ministers shared a resentment of the traditional behaviour of France and Germany in setting the EU agenda. In particular, they found President Jacques Chirac patronising and overbearing. But it was the Franco-German celebration of the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Elysйe Treaty on January 22 that provided the last straw.

Mr Chirac marked the occasion by declaring: "For 40 years, each decisive step was taken in Europe thanks to the motor that Germany and France represent . . . Experience shows that when Berlin and Paris agree, Europe can move forward; if there is disagreement, Europe marks time."

It was just the kind of presumption of superiority that made Josй Mara Aznar fume. Over a long lunch in Paris a few weeks later, the Spanish prime minister had complained to the French president that the Franco-German entente had relegated Spain to the mesa de los nin~os - the children's table.

The letter was, therefore, an opportunity to put France and Germany in their place. It was a chance for Mr Blair to show there was an alternative leadership pole in Europe. For Mr Aznar, it was also a means of getting back at Mr Chirac, who had in effect sided with Rabat over the the Moroccan occupation of the island of Perejil. And, for all signatories, it was a signal that the enlarged Europe could produce alliances with enough votes to in the European council to outweigh the Paris-Berlin axis.

France was swift to respond. On the day of publication, Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, cancelled a trip to Britain to meet his counterpart, Jack Straw, for dinner at his official country residence at Chevening. Mr de Villepin called to say he had pressing work to do on the forthcoming Franco-African summit. Nobody in London took this excuse at face value.

In Washington, however, the Letter of Eight received a delighted reception. That morning, Mr Bush penned the Spanish prime minister a hand-written note in block capitals. "Josй Mara, God bless you and Spain. George W," it read, according to a Spanish diplomat who handled it.

The Bush administration insist it did not have a hand in the Letter. Officials even give the impression that it came as a surprise, albeit a welcome one. But the White House had been kept well informed along the way. Officials such as Dan Bartlett, the communications director, and Dan Fried at the NSC were told of the plan to write such a letter. The day before it was published, Alastair Campbell, the British prime minister's official spokesman, sent a copy to the White House.

It was snowing heavily in Munich on Saturday, February 8. The top US and European defence, security and military officials were attending the Wehrkunde meeting. The annual get-together of the western defence top brass and civilian leadership had become a diplomatic minefield. Mr Jackson emerged from one closed session and acknowledged his authorship of the V10 Letter. "If France and Germany think they can run Europe or set up their own alliances, then so can we," he said. "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."

But the meeting was most memorable for the confrontation between Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, and Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, who a week earlier had dismissed France and Germany as "old Europe" and declared that the "centre of gravity was moving east". Mr Fischer responded with a passionate speech, begging his US listeners to understand that they had given Germany its democracy and that that very democracy made it impossible for his government to ignore public opinion and support a war.

The speech failed to make any impression on Mr Rumsfeld. When Mr Fischer returned to Berlin next day, he told his top diplomats: "There is nothing we can do any more."

In a matter of days, the mood between Europe and America had soured dramatically. The letters did not change the substance of EU-US relations in the run-up to the war in Iraq. But they did dramatically effect the atmosphere.

At Nato headquarters, however, a potentially far more serious split was emerging. Turkey, in consultation with the US, had asked for Nato support in the event that a war in Iraq resulted in an attack on Turkish soil.

The plea was contentious, in part because many in Europe suspected that Ankara had been put up to it by the US as a way to gain some vestige of international support for its military plans. But Nato tradition and its rules had always dictated that, if one member country asked for support, the alliance would not refuse it.

On February 10, in an emotion-charged meeting of the North Atlantic Council, the decision-making body of the alliance, that was exactly what Germany, France and Belgium did. The atmosphere was caustic.

"It was memorable," says one senior Nato ambassador. "For hours it went on. We had shouting matches. We had university-like philosophy sessions." The shouting got so bad at times that one ambassador says a fellow ambassador took him aside afterwards and said: "You can't say those sorts of things in the NAC." "I just did," he replied.

On February 10, the same day as the Nato meeting, Mr Chirac received a visit from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who had just come from seeing Gerhard Schrцder, the German chancellor, in Berlin. The French president knew Mr Putin was very unhappy about US policy. He was determined now to persuade him.

First, he made an abrupt and un- expected reversal to the French position on Chechnya. France had been one of the sternest critics of Moscow on human rights grounds. That day Mr Chirac praised Mr Putin's referendum on Chechnya's future. He was the first western leader to do so.

Then, while Mr Putin was in the president's office, Mr Chirac received a dozen or so carefully timed calls from national leaders around the world backing the French and German position on Iraq.

That day, Mr Putin, with whom Mr Bush had supposedly struck up a special bond, laid out a joint position with the French and Germans. "We are against the war," Mr Putin said. Mr Chirac made the same point, leaving apparently little room for manoeuvre. He said: "Nothing today justifies a war." His politeness to Mr Putin was in stark contrast to his anger at the Vilnius 10. They had, he said, "missed a good opportunity to shut up".

The differences between Mr Bush and people he had so recently called his friends were now apparently unbridgeable. It seemed an impossible divide. But he still had loyal allies: above all, Mr Blair and Mr Aznar. Against the advice of many of his most trusted aides, Mr Bush had just agreed to try to bridge the gap: he had promised Mr Blair to return to the UN and win a second resolution to authorise war. It was to prove a bad miscalculation.