BAIL BONDSMAN TO THE WORLD

By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

The haggling under a broad mango tree in the dusty, hot Sudanese village of Gogrial had dragged on for four hours. Flies buzzed around; seven-year-old boys toting automatic rifles played among the grass huts; a vulture watched from a thatched roof. Guerrilla commander Kerubino Kwanyin Bol, in sunglasses and camouflage fatigues and with an AK-47 propped against his chair, wanted $2.5 million for the three Red Cross hostages.

"You're not getting that," Congressman Bill Richardson said. The best he could offer was bags of rice, four jeeps, nine radios, help in sanitizing the local water, and vaccines for the village children. "Can you add a tractor?" Kerubino finally asked. "Done," Richardson replied. The Treaty of Gogrial was pecked out on a battery-powered laptop computer. Richardson passed around congressional cuff links to the guerrillas. Kerubino presented him with first an elephant-hair bracelet and then a lunch of grilled goat and okra stew. Later the three tearful hostages were bundled into a rickety DC-3 prop plane to freedom.

Need an American sprung from jail in a hostile country? For the past two years Bill Clinton's favorite bail bondsman to the world has been Richardson, a beefy, cigar-chomping New Mexico Congressman whose addiction to winning people over is almost as legendary as the President's. (He once shook 8,871 hands in one day of campaigning.) Last week, after Richardson returned from his sixth rescue mission, Clinton picked him as his new U.N. ambassador, replacing Madeleine Albright, who has been nominated to the job of Secretary of State.

The two men have become good friends, in part because Clinton has so enjoyed listening to the seven-term Congressman's accounts of his Indiana Jones adventures. Richardson "has undertaken the toughest and most delicate diplomatic efforts around the world," the President said in announcing his nomination last week. Richardson negotiated the release of U.S. Army pilot Bobby Hall from North Korea in 1994, and just last month was sent back to that country to free American Evan Hunziker. In 1994 he also pressured the Burmese government to free Nobel-prizewinning dissident Aung San Suu Kyi and helped persuade Haitian military ruler Raoul Cedras to leave power. And in the summer of 1995 he pried defense contractors William Barloon and David Daliberti from the grip of Saddam Hussein after they spent 114 days in jail for mistakenly crossing into Iraq.

Richardson has kept an overnight bag in his Capitol Hill office, and a State Department officer is detailed to him to help arrange his quick flights into unfriendly territory. The State Department has found him a useful unofficial envoy to states with which it has strained relations. "It's a way to send in someone with credibility through the back door," explains a White House aide.

Richardson had just unpacked after his trip to Pyongyang to retrieve Hunziker when Sherry Early, an Albuquerque constituent, telephoned on Dec. 1 to plead for his help on behalf of her husband John, who was being held by Kerubino's forces in war-torn Sudan. Richardson says he never accepts a mission unless the family, the State Department and the country holding the hostage all invite him to mediate. Early, his Kenyan co-pilot and an Australian nurse were captured by Kerubino's men on Nov. 1, when their Red Cross plane landed at an airstrip near Gogrial. The plane was seized because it had also been carrying five wounded fighters of the Sudan People's Liberation Army, with which Kerubino's forces had been feuding for local power amid a war with the Khartoum government in the north.

A week after the phone call, Richardson and a State Department team were flying over Gogrial, where tires had to be cleared from a dirt airfield below so they could land. "I get out of the plane, and it's a surreal scene from a Tarzan movie," the Congressman recalls. A delegation of threadbare Dinka fighters from Kerubino's army lined up to greet him. Richardson had on a tie and the same blazer he'd worn for good luck in every other hostage negotiation.

The son of an American banker and a Mexican homemaker, he grew up in Mexico City and played baseball well enough to be drafted by the then Kansas City Athletics after attending a prep school in New England. At his father's insistence, Richardson left baseball behind and chose Tufts University, ending up with a master's degree in international relations. After a three-year stint as an aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he moved to New Mexico to run for Congress.

The State Department usually dreads sending Congressmen overseas because they can be loose cannons in sensitive negotiations. Even Richardson has been known to commit a diplomatic faux pas. During his Baghdad meeting with Saddam to free Daliberti and Barloon, the Iraqi leader stormed out briefly when Richardson crossed his legs and showed his shoe sole--a sign of disrespect in Arab culture. "We connected because I was honest and tough,'' says Richardson. "I didn't apologize, even when I crossed my legs."

But diplomats say he has never strayed from Washington's instructions and has a knack for finding a warm spot in even the surliest of despots. He always reads the history and psychological profile of his potential adversary. He knew that one of Kerubino's daughters had just died of measles, so when talks with the chieftain became heated, Richardson took a break and strolled over to a nearby hut to visit one of Kerubino's other children, who also had measles. "It touched him," Richardson says.

"Bill has a way of defusing tension with an offbeat joke," says his wife Barbara. For instance, at one point during discussions with the dour North Koreans over Hunziker's release, Richardson asked matter-of-factly, "Well, does he still have his fingernails?" The North Korean negotiators sat stunned for a second, then broke out laughing.

With Henry Cisneros and Federico Pena leaving the Cabinet, Clinton was under pressure to name a Hispanic to a top job. Now Richardson will have to give up the derring-do of his foreign escapades for the more refined cocktail diplomacy of a United Nations envoy. But the U.N. post could well be a launching point for the final adventure Richardson has always craved--being Governor of New Mexico.

--With reporting by Tamala M. Edwards/Washington and Scott MacLeod/Paris

With reporting by TAMALA M. EDWARDS/WASHINGTON AND SCOTT MACLEOD/PARIS