President Barack Obama burst into a meeting of Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders to try and reach a climate agreement in late Friday negotiations in Copenhagen. Obama's dramatic climate meet

President Barack Obama burst into a meeting of Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders to try and reach a climate agreement in late Friday negotiations in Copenhagen.

Chinese protocol officials objected to Obama's presence in the meeting, according to a senior administration official, who said that the president didn't want the leaders negotiating in secret.


The dramatic meeting came after a day the White House spent in a whirlwind of meetings trying to save the Copenhagen climate talks from complete meltdown.

President Barack Obama requested to hold bilateral talks directly with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao on Friday afternoon, after talks between chief negotiators couldn't make enough progress on key initiatives like transparency and monitoring. After nearly two weeks, it was largely left to China and the U.S. to craft a political deal.

Obama also wanted to meet with Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and South African President Jacob Zuma.

But by later afternoon, Singh and Wen had both left the convention center where the conference was being held —- possibly because the talks seemed to be heading towards a dead-end. Administration sources reported that they were told the Indian delegation was headed for the airport.

"Brazil tells us that they don't know if they can come because they want the Indians to come. The Indians, as I just said, were at the airport. Zuma is under the impression that everybody is coming," said the senior administration official. "Zuma at that point says, well, if they're not coming I can't do this."

But it turned out that the leaders were actually meeting together. “We're starting to get emails one by one, ‘hey Zuma is in this room, too;’ ‘hey, Singh is in this room, too,’ said the senior administration official. “So all of a sudden that's when we start to make sure we're walking up to the multilateral room.”

"The President's viewpoint was I'm going to make one last run," said the official. "They've got similar interests, there's no doubt about that."

After some logical wrangling, Obama headed into a roughly hour and a half meeting with all four leaders. Eventually, those negotiations resulted in, according to the senior administration official, a "meaningful agreement" between the most powerful nations.