The bitterness of the attack by former US ambassador to the United Kingdom, Raymond Seitz, on his counterpart in Dublin, Mrs Jean Kennedy Smith, and on former White House officials, will come as no surprise to those who were close to the events which led to President Clinton giving Gerry Adams a visa to enter the United States.

Mr Seitz, who describes Mrs Smith in his memoirs Over Here (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) as an ardent IRA apologist, was posted to London in 1991 by President George Bush and was so popular with the British that Prime Minister John Major asked President Clinton to keep him on.

Until he retired in 1994, Mr Seitz showed little interest in Northern Ireland, reflecting the priorities of the administration which appointed him. On the one visit he made to Northern Ireland he did not meet John Hume, and he sent strong signals of where his sympathies lay by taking a lift in a British army helicopter.

This incident was later obliquely referred to by US Senator Joseph Biden when he advised Seitz's successor Admiral William Crowe at a Senate hearing that he should spend some time in Northern Ireland - "and by visiting Ireland I don't mean a quick helicopter trip".

Mr Seitz, a fervent Anglophile, was being no more than a faithful, if zealous, instrument of well-established US State Department policy in steering clear of Northern Ireland. The Cold War-era special relationship meant that Washington, in the greater interests of the strategic USUK alliance, treated Northern Ireland as an internal UK problem.

Under this stricture the US embassy in Dublin also kept out of Northern Ireland affairs and was perceived by the Irish side as being more under the influence of London than independent, as former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds put it. American diplomats in Dublin sometimes crossed the Border but any with perceived Irish sympathies were kept in check. When the-then US envoy William Shannon, a Boston Irish-American, drove north in 1977 and talked with local politicians, including John Hume, he was told sharply by the State Department, according to his widow Elizabeth: "You will never go to Northern Ireland again." And he didn't.

All this changed when Mr Clinton became President. He sent Jean Kennedy Smith to Dublin with specific encouragement to visit Northern Ireland and get involved in the peace process, as acknowledged by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake in a meeting with members of a Congressional committee. The new ambassador arrived as an instrument of the President's foreign policy, not the State Department, and conflict with the London embassy was inevitable.

Mr Seitz recalls meeting Mrs Smith in London and instructing her to stay out of Northern Ireland. He concluded: "I had made an enemy, and a serious one at that, but she stayed away from the North." Mrs Smith did, however, go North shortly after arriving in July 1993 and infuriated her counterpart in London by attending a Diplock Court at the invitation of Mrs Molly McMullan, mother of one of the Ballymurphy Seven. The contrast with the helicopter ride could not have been more glaring.

But as the sister of two politicians assassinated by gunmen, Jean Kennedy Smith had no reflexive Irish-American sympathy for the IRA. When a group of Irish Americans put together by publisher Niall O'Dowd came to lobby her about a visa for Gerry Adams in September 1993, she told them brusquely it was a matter for the US consulate in Belfast. It's a British problem, not my problem, she said.

Her opinion only changed after the Joint Declaration was signed on December 15th, 1993, and the Government and others, including the author Tim Pat Coogan, persuaded her that giving Adams access to the United States could bring forward an IRA ceasefire. Albert Reynolds privately told John Major he was going to support the visa idea for the same reason.

Mr Seitz and Mrs Smith thereby found themselves lobbying for host governments deeply at odds, each seeing the other as guilty of "clientitis" State Department jargon for over-identifying with the country to which they were posted.

The issue came to a head when Adams was invited to attend a one-day conference in New York to be held on February 1st, 1994. As a Belfast resident he should, strictly speaking, have applied to the US consulate in the Northern Ireland capital, which would have left the initial decision up to Mr Seitz. But when he submitted his application forms on January 14th it was to the Dublin embassy.

This was done at the suggestion of an Irish diplomat who pointed out that a yes recommendation from the embassy involved would make it easier for Clinton to agree, and there was not the slightest chance that Mr Seitz would recommended that a visa should be given. Thus the issue was hijacked and taken out of Mr Seitz's area of responsibility.

It was clearly galling to the career diplomat to be rolled over - not just by a Kennedy - but by an amateur woman envoy whom he regarded as a loose cannon and an extension of the Irish-American lobby.

Mr Seitz had allies in the Dublin embassy in the form of two senior officials, John Treacy and Jim Callahan. They shared his views that Adams should not be considered for a visa until he renounced violence, and staged a rebellion against Mrs Smith. This took the form of a dissent cable to the State Department. Thus relations within the Dublin embassy and between the US embassies in London and Dublin reached an all-time low.

But however significant the role of the Dublin ambassador, it was President Clinton who was making the running, not the Kennedy sister in the Park. With the former Arkansas governor, the issue went beyond pandering to the Irish-American community. He witnessed the Troubles on television while at Oxford in 1969 and saw in them a parallel with the American civil rights struggle. On every occasion he insisted that he always felt strongly about Ireland, that it was personal with him.

When he became president, unthinkable opportunities to do something presented themselves. The special relationship suddenly didn't seem so important any more, what with the end of the Cold War and John Major's party openly favouring Clinton's opponent in the presidential election and the door was open to the Government and Irish Americans to engage the White House. As a result, Clinton instructed Tony Lake and his deputy Nancy Soderberg, his political foreign policy advisers, to explore ways of making an impact on the developing situation in Ireland.

Since then the impression has been given, especially in some sections of the British media, that Mr Clinton was pressurised into giving a visa by an unholy triumvirate of Smith, Lake and Soderberg acting on behest of a pro-IRA Irish-American lobby. In fact it was John Hume, Albert Reynolds, Vice President Al Gore and powerful Senators such as George Mitchell, Edward Kennedy and Chris Dodd who applied the telling political pressure.

In an interview later, Clinton said his decision to give a visa was a judgment call, taken at a point where there should be tangible evidence that there could be a reward for the renunciation of violence and beginning to walk towards peace.

The issue of renouncing violence was at the heart of the bitter differences between Seitz and Washington over the Adams visa. In a last minute bid to stave off defeat, the US ambassador to the Court of St James wrote to the State Department strongly urging that the White House require Adams to renounce violence and support the Joint Declaration before getting any visa.

The White House went along and gave the go-ahead to London to question the Sinn Fein leader at the Belfast consulate to determine whether he would publicly renounce violence and support the Joint Declaration. Publicly the White House declared: "Our decision on whether to provide him with a visa will depend on his response."

Mr Seitz must have tasted victory at that moment: the Sinn Fein leader had never renounced violence and would surely fail the test. But the White House did not actually say what the response should be and the President accepted a separate statement from Adams, which he wrote with the help of US intermediaries, saying "I don't advocate violence" and that the Joint Declaration was a first step.

What really must have infuriated Mr Seitz and British diplomats in Washington was the fact that the visa decision was taken after lengthy negotiations with Sinn Fein through these intermediaries, and that the British - and the US embassy in London - were kept out of the loop to stall any counter offensive from John Major's government. The British embassy in Washington only learned of the decision to give Adams a visa when it was reported by Reuters. That rankled deeply.

The same thing was to happen again and again, and usually Lake and Soderberg took the heat from Britain, not as the persuaders but the enactors. Clinton privately exulted in his Irish decisions. The President's relationship with his national security staff could best be illustrated by the instruction he gave them on one occasion when Adams wanted the White House to overturn a long-standing ban on raising funds in the US and they were dubious. Find a way to do it, he said.

Conor O'Clery is Asia Correspondent of The Irish Times