The personnel cuts at the State Department have hit people working on science and technology particularly hard. As a retired Foreign Service officer who spent a lot of time working on science and technology issues, I am not surprised. I was also disappointed that State cut several civil service experts in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where I also worked. Compared to the other intelligence agencies, INR is minuscule, but it holds its own with them in its analysis because of the expertise of its officers. This administration seems to be at war with foreign policy expertise as well as science and technology.
I worked on nuclear and missile proliferation during much of my career, as well as environmental, computer, and health issues. When I was in the Foreign Service, it was divided into “cones” of specialization – political, economic, consular, and administrative. I spent most of my career in the political cone as a “generalist,” but joined a newly created science and technology cone shortly before I retired. I retired in part because the State Department did not sufficiently support science and tech officers.
When I was working in INR during the Reagan administration, the Secretary of State had a science adviser, who came to me for help trying to block the Pentagon from withdrawing from IIASA, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, an independent organization that fostered cooperation between Western and Soviet scientists during the Cold War. It was my introduction to Richard Perle, who was an assistant secretary for policy at the Pentagon. He wanted to get the US out of this organization, and the Secretary’s science adviser wanted help keeping us in. I guess we won, because IIASA still exists outside Vienna, Austria, with 600 researchers from 60 countries, including the US.
After this I became the State Department representative working on an Intelligence Community National Intelligence Estimate, NIE 11-12-80, Prospects for Soviet Military Technology and R&D, published in 1980. As we sat around the table discussing my NIE, I began to feel that as a result of input from some of the other agencies, the NIE was becoming too alarmist. They were creating too strong an impression that the Soviets were going to come up with weapons based on some new technology that the US would not be about to counter. Although I had much less technical expertise than many of my colleagues, I felt that perhaps I had a better overview of the impression that was being created. So, I began to press for changes to temper the threatening tone that some weapons system we didn’t understand was going to jump up and bite us. Somewhat surprisingly to me, I began to get support from CIA analysts, to counter the opposition I got from some of the Defense analysts.
The final product was interesting because it was one of the first NIEs to be reviewed by President Reagan’s new head of the CIA, Bill Casey. I had actually toned down the NIE even further than this version, but when it went to Bill Casey for final review, he reinserted some of the alarmist language, obviously to promote the view he wanted Reagan to have of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire.
In his memoir, Turmoil and Triumph, Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shulz, wrote the following about Bill Casey:
“I was also increasingly uneasy about CIA director Bill Casey. He had very strong policy positions, which were reflected in his intelligence briefings. He claimed he was objective. But his views were so strong and so ideological that they inevitably colored his selection and assessment of materials. I could not rely on what he said, nor could I accept without question the objectivity of the ‘intelligence’ that he put out, especially in policy-sensitive areas.”
What would Shultz say about how intelligence is handled under the current Trump administration?
While I was in INR I also worked on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation in Latin America and Brazil in particular, which was very useful years later when I was assigned to Brazil as the embassy’s science officer. In addition I was the State Department representative on two intelligence community committees, the Science and Technology Intelligence Committee, and the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JASIC). The JAEIC was one of the organizations that investigated the mysterious signal picked up by a VELA satellite over South Africa that could have been a nuclear explosion, or a malfunction of the satellite. While I was in INR, the most important analysts were the ones who worked on Soviet Union nuclear and missile issues, determining what kind of nuclear devices and missiles the Soviets had and what their capabilities were. When the Soviet Union fell, the Russians began to publish this information publicly, which undermined the standing of the Soviet analysts Meanwhile, the study of nuclear proliferation among developing countries rose in importance, making my experience with Latin American proliferation more valuable.
In INR I also began to work on missile proliferation issues which eventually led to the creation of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Under resident Carter, some senior officials began looking into the idea of a new missile non-proliferation treaty like the existing nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). They needed someone who had access to sensitive intelligence and some expertise on proliferation issues which turned out to be me. It was a somewhat unglamorous issue which no senior people jumped into. I was also working on other technology transfer issues, particularly transfers to the old Soviet Union before it fell apart.
When Reagan was elected, his administration picked up the missile proliferation idea as worth pursuing, and I was one of the few people who knew anything about it; so, I began working with them on developing a missile non-proliferation treaty. We needed to know where other nations stood in developing missiles, and what the most important technologies were for building more capable missiles. I was the main person working on intelligence issues. The missile that came up most often was the Soviet SCUD, which was the least sophisticated missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. The Soviets transferred SCUDs to other countries, and developing countries used the SCUD as a model for developing their own missiles. Thus it became the baseline for the kinds of technology we would try to control.
Initially, both the Carter and Reagan administrations wanted a treaty that developing nations would join, pledging not to develop nuclear capable missiles, similar to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Initial consultations about a missile treaty were not promising. There was strong resistance to the NPT from non-nuclear countries, and developed countries were reluctant to take on another effort that would difficult or impossible to sell. Thus the goal was scaled down to a suppliers’ regime among the developed countries. A round of more formal consultations among the G-7 got support for starting the MTCR suppliers’ regime.