Much of my early career at the State Department was spent
dealing with Richard Perle’s office at the Pentagon on nonproliferation and technology
transfer issues. Perle was Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Global Strategic Affairs under President Reagan.
Perle’s political career started with a job as a staffer for
Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington.
Perle was one of several Jewish staffers for Jackson who went on to have
long, influential careers in Washington, including Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams,
William Kristol, and perhaps others.
Their most notable accomplishment was their work on the Jackson-Vanik Amendment,
which eventually enabled hundreds of thousands of Jews to emigrate from the
Soviet Union to Israel and the United States.
He is most famous as the reputed leader of the advisers who
persuaded President Reagan not to agree at the summit in Reykjavik,
Iceland, with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to eliminate all nuclear weapons
in the US and the Soviet Union. However,
some claim that Perle’s role is an urban myth, and that Reagan would not have agreed
in any case.
The two issues on which I clashed most frequently with Perle
and his staff were missile proliferation and the COCOM regime which controlled exports
to the Soviet Union. Perle was a hawk on
both of these issues; he wanted an agreement that allowed zero missile proliferation,
and wanted the allies to approve zero high tech exports to the Soviet
Union. These issues came together
because they both involved very specific lists of hardware and technology that
could not be exported.
My connection to the issues was supplying intelligence on potentially
damaging high tech exports by other countries and by American firms involved in
illegal transactions. My first
introduction to Perle was when he tried to end the US participation in IIASA. IIASA (International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) still exists, but was much more controversial
in the 1970s because it served as a meeting place between Soviet and American
scientists in Austria. Perle was
concerned that technology was leaking to the Soviets. I first heard of it because the Secretary of State’s
science adviser came down from the seventh floor to ask me to help him research
IIASA and hopefully defend continued American participation in it. Since IIASA still exists, Perle lost, but I
presume he restricted US participation while he was focused on it.
COCOM stood for Coordinating Committee, a group of export
control experts who met periodically in Paris to coordinate guidelines for exports
to the Soviet Union. For me, the main
intelligence focus was on whether a member was exporting something on the controlled
list. Perle would have sold nothing to
the Soviets, but American businesses were interested in selling, as were companies
in other countries that were members of the committee. There were a lot o gray areas about whether
something was covered or not, and how restrictive should the controls be. Should they cover all computers, even small,
personal ones, or only big, powerful ones?
There was a lot of argument about sophisticated, numerically controlled
machine tools. What tolerances should be
allowed?
My main interaction with Perle’s office was regarding
missile proliferation. President Jimmy
Carter’s adminsitration had been working on a treaty that would apply to missiles
the same kind of limits that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) applied
nuclear weapons. When Carter was
defeated, the Reagan administration picked up the idea and pursued it. A big problem was that the NPT was in deep
disfavor among the nations that we most wanted to join it, potential proliferators
like India, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, North Korea, Israel. They saw the NPT as highly discriminatory,
allowing nations that already had nuclear weapons to keep them, while preventing
non-nuclear states from getting them. This
perception of unfair treatment of the haves versus the have-nots carried over into
the issue of missile proliferation. Other
friendly, developed countries like the G-7 were reluctant to try to push a new,
similar treaty down the throats of the developing countries. Gradually the idea of an arms control treaty
evolved into a suppliers’ agreement not to sell missile hardware and technology
to problem countries. Perle and his
office wanted the absolute maximum controls, while American businesses and
other countries wanted to be about to sell items that were less sensitive. Arguments over lists went on endlessly.
The head of the COCOM office in the State Department was
Bill Root, who had been doing export control for years. Before Richard Perle arrived on the scene,
his office was probably somewhat of a backwater, routinely working with the
military, American businesses and other interested parties on what should be
controlled. When Perle arrived, his office
was suddenly front and center. Perle’s intransigence
led to many disputes with our allies in Paris, who wanted a less restrictive
regime.
Because I was working on developing lists of controlled
items for the missile proliferation agreement, I sometimes worked with Bill
Root and his office because they had similar lists for COCOM. The specifications in the COCOM list were a
good model for the missile list, so that they would be understandable by
businesses who wanted to know what they could sell. One day while Bill Root was helping me with the
lists, he got an urgent call. It turned
out to be Richard Perle. I left so that
he could take the call. When I came back
later that afternoon, his office told me that he had retired from the State
Department and left.
