The closest I came to interacting personally with Colin
Powell was when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I was working at the State Department on the
Missile Technology Control Regime (MCR).
One of the MTCR issues was whether we should invite the old Soviet Union
to join the MTCR. There was an MTCR
annual meeting coming up, at which we had to decide what the US position was:
to invite or not to invite. Assistant
Secretary of State Richard Clarke called a number of interagency meetings to attempt
to get agreement on a US position, but without success. We needed consensus, and invariably one
agency or another would prevent reaching consensus. Usually one of the dissenting agencies was
from the Pentagon or CIA. There were two
representatives from the Pentagon, one from the military side, the Joint
Chiefs, and one from the civilian side, the Pentagon’s mini–State
Department.
As the meeting got closer, it became more and more urgent to
agree on a US position on whether to invite the Soviets or not. I ended up writing at least one memo, maybe
more, from Secretary of State Jim Baker to General Powell. Powell (more likely one of his aides) wrote
back to Baker but did not agree. That
was the end of my correspondence with General Powell through Secretary
Baker.
Since we could not agree through the interagency process, we
referred the matter to the National Security Council. The NSC staffer for the Soviet Union was Condoleezza
Rice. We sent a memo to the White House
offering President George H.W. Bush two options: invite the Soviets or
not. Attached to the memo were two draft
instruction telegrams for the MTCR meeting which the White House would send,
depending on which box President Bush checked.
Days passed without any decision by the White House. Finally we had to go to the meeting in Ottawa
with no instructions on what to do. Around
midnight, just before the meeting the next morning we got a call from the US
embassy in Ottawa saying our delegation had a classified “niact immediate” telegram
from the White House that we had to come to the embassy to read. When we read it, it was neither of the
telegrams we had prepared; it said neither yes nor no. It was almost as if the White House had taken
half of the paragraphs from the draft saying, “invite them,” and half from the draft
saying, “don’t invite them.”
Early that morning we called Assistant Secretary Clarke to
ask advice. He said, “invite them,”
which we did. There was agreement at the
international meeting to invite them, unlike our inability to get agreement
within the US government. After the
meeting, when we got back to Washington, we were told that President Bush had
decided (who knows when) that he did not want to invite the Soviets. So, we had to go back and tell all the other
countries that were members of the MTCR that we had changed our minds, and did
not want to invite the Soviets, which we did, and we moved on. The MTCR survived and still exists and
operates.
I could never find out during the interagency process why it
was so difficult to get agreement. I
think have learned years later, mainly through the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,”
that it was related to the US clandestine support for Afghans who were fighting
the Soviets in Afghanistan. The CIA was
supplying small Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Afghan resistance, while
the Soviets were supplying large Scud missiles to their Afghan supporters. Because they were large enough to carry a
nuclear warhead, the Scuds were covered by the MTCR, and if the Soviets had
become members, it would have been a violation of the agreement to transfer
them to the Afghans. Because they were
smaller, the Stinger missiles were not covered by the MTCR. Perhaps the people above my pay grade were
worried that the Soviets would see our attempt to get them to join the MTCR as
a trick to stop the Scud transfers, and it might have prompted some type of
retaliation from the Soviets, perhaps a stronger effort to stop our supply of
Stingers.
