According to reports in respected national newspapers, the US envoy Bruce P. Jackson was the architect behind both the letter of the eight and the Vilnius letter. He arranged a meeting in the Lithuanian embassy in Washington, where the foreign ministers of all ten countries participated. The text had been proposed in advance, but according to the press reports it was Jackson who convinced the participants to accept the proposal and to disregard efforts by Bulgaria — then a rotating member of the UN Security Council — to alter the text. Since the early 1990s, Jackson had been an informal advisor to central European governments, advising them on the road to admission into NATO. He allegedly now convinced the foreign ministers of the Vilnius ten, that their support for the US in this international conflict would give them much better chances in the US Congress when it was to vote on accepting those countries into NATO.