For a substantial part of my Foreign Service career, while
Reagan was President, I frequently crossed swords with Richard Perle at the
Pentagon. He was much superior to
me. He was an assistant secretary of
Defense; for much of this time I was a junior officer at the State
Department. However, I often worked on
technology transfer issues, and Perle was very interested in technology
transfer issues, especially as they related to the old Soviet Union. He always kept an eagle eye on CoCom, the old
Coordinating Committee that regulated technology transfers from Western, allied
countries to the Soviet Union.
My first brush with him must have been shortly after Reagan
was elected and Perle was installed at the Pentagon. I got a call from the science advisor to the State
Department Under Secretary who handled technology transfers. He said that Perle was cutting America’s
support for and participation in IIASA.
IIASA is the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
in Austria. (IIASA web site, and IIASA
Wikipedia entry.) In the Cold War 1980s
its mission was to promote cooperation between scientists from Western and
Communist countries. Perle was
apparently concerned that it might be a conduit for uncontrolled technology
transfer from the West to the East. It
was such an innocuous, academic institution that this seemed ridiculous. The Under Secretary’s science advisor and I
tried to stop Perle from blocking US participation, but as I recall, we
failed.
The good news is that IIASA survived and is still going
today, with a broader mandate, since the old bipolar Cold War has ended. It was my introduction to Richard Perle, who
always seemed to be on the opposite side of issues that we were both interested
in, from East-West technology transfers to third world transfers involving
nuclear proliferation or other high tech problems.
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