The White House has said that President Clinton has "full confidence" in the US ambassador to Ireland, Mrs Jean Kennedy Smith, in response to claims by a former US ambassador to London, Mr Raymond Seitz, that she was "an ardent IRA apologist".
A White House spokesperson refused to comment on another claim by Mr Seitz, in extracts from a forthcoming book, that the London embassy in the early 1990s "stopped passing sensitive intelligence to the White House because it seemed to find its way to the IRA". The spokesperson said: "We don't comment on intelligence matters."
Mr Seitz, now retired and living in Britain, was a career diplomat who had served for two periods at the US embassy in London before being appointed ambassador by President Bush. He was known for strong opposition to the granting of a US visa to the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, before the first IRA ceasefire.
President Clinton overrode the advice he was receiving from Mr Seitz, the British government, the State Department and the FBI not to grant the visa. Ambassador Kennedy Smith and senior officials in the White House, such as the National Security Adviser, Mr Anthony Lake, and his deputy, Ms Nancy Soderberg, as well as the then Taoiseach, Mr Albert Reynolds, urged Mr Clinton to grant the visa, arguing that it could lead to an IRA ceasefire.
Mr Seitz was also known in Washington for his disagreements with Ambassador Kennedy Smith over her visits to Northern Ireland, for which he was responsible as ambassador in London. She was said to have been "surprised" to learn that Mr Seitz, on one of his "very few visits to Northern Ireland", had used a British army helicopter and had not met the SDLP leader, Mr John Hume.
This was recalled at the Senate hearings on Mr Seitz's successor, Admiral William Crowe, when Democratic Senator Joseph Biden suggested that he should become "politically familiar with the landscape", adding: "By visiting Ireland I don't mean a quick helicopter ride."
One Irish-American involved in the successful lobbying of the White House for a visa for Mr Adams said yesterday that Ambassador Seitz was seen as wholly out of tune with the thinking in the White House concerning Northern Ireland following the election of President Clinton. The ambassador had been perceived as "gone native" in London and was "a joke right from the beginning".
Mr Seitz, the son of a US major general, was born in Hawaii in 1940 and studied history at Yale before joining the foreign service in 1966.