| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Robert Gallucci Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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You cut your teeth on this problem for America of turning over a job to a multilateral operation in your work with the Sinai force.
Yes, the Sinai peacekeeping force, the technical name is the MFO, Multinational Force and Observers, that organization was created after the peace between Egypt and Israel of 1979. And in that agreement between Egypt and Israel -- you remember Sadat and Begin shaking hands, with Jimmy Carter in the middle -- that agreement provided for a UN force to go into the Sinai as a interposition force between the Egyptians and the Israelis. But it also said that in the event the UN could not field the force, the United States would put together a multinational force. The UN couldn't field a force because the Russians and the Security Council threatened to veto it. So ironically, Ronald Reagan, following Jimmy Carter, made good on that, and created the Multinational Force and Observers, first coming into the Sinai in 1981. I joined the Multinational Force and Observers as the Deputy Director General in 1984, along with my boss, the Director General, Peter Constable, because the Director General, our predecessor, was assassinated while sitting in his armored car in Rome. So it was not for everybody, a popular peacekeeping operation.
Was he an American, the one who was assassinated?
Yes. Lamond Hunt was his name.
Give us a feel for the difficulties in putting that force together. I assume that the solders came from different countries.
Interestingly, thirteen different countries for the first decade or so of operation. But there were three battalions that formed the mainline straight-legged infantry in the sense of the force -- a battalion from Fiji, a battalion from Colombia, and a battalion from the U.S. drawn exclusively from the 18th Airborne Corps, which meant from one of two divisions, 101st Air Assault or the 82nd Airborne. And they deployed for six months at a time. So these three battalions and eight other countries participated with other units. There were helicopter units -- the Americans had a Huey unit -- the Canadians ultimately came in; the Australians; New Zealanders; lots of other countries participated. Engineering battalions, military police battalions, logistics battalions. So they were all in the Sinai, as well as an inspection corps that would go around and make sure that the Egyptians and the Israelis did not put more military force than was permitted by the agreements, that were being monitored in place on the ground. And that force, that Multinational Force and Observers, is still there, and the headquarters is still in Rome. There were no, and have not been any shots fired in anger over now roughly twenty years.
So this was a case in which the United States went the multilateral route, but really didn't leave the operation, we didn't just turn it over to the United Nations.
That's correct. And what was interesting is that unbeknownst to many Americans, and I'm sure many in the United States Congress, these U.S. battalions, and there were two in the Sinai, were under foreign command. When I was there, the commander was a Norwegian general, and there have been Dutch generals, there have been generals from lots of different countries; never an American general. Always an American chief of staff, but never an American general running the force. Always an American in Rome as head of the organization.
Did this happen because it was a symbolic presence, as opposed to an actual military threat there?
Well, one needs to be careful with the word "symbol." If you're deploying 2,000 to 3,000 military, that's a hefty symbol. But these are light infantry, lightly armed. And as you know, the Sinai is a place where tanks rumble around when there's war. So the force wasn't going to turn back attacks from either side by itself. But it was a pretty substantial tripwire to international intervention, and, more importantly and critically, a tripwire to American intervention if the peace was going to be broken.
Another of your experiences as an American civil servant trying to make real or give flesh to multilateral solution is that you served as the Deputy Director of the UN Commission overseeing the disarmament of Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. Let's talk a little about that experience. What was the mission that you had, and how did you go about doing it?
It started while I was teaching at the National War College and watching the Gulf War carefully, but from a pretty safe distance. I was asked to come back to the State Department -- I had been on assignment at the National War College -- and help draft what's known as Resolution 687, which is the peace resolution ending the war. But it's also a resolution that sets out what Iraq is obligated to do. Among other things, and this is still relevant, to give up all its capability to produce nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and ballistic missiles. We drafted that, and then I was told to go to New York and work with Ambassador Tom Pickering, who was then a permanent rep at the UN, to help get it passed. Then I was asked to stay on in New York and help set up this special commission with a very talented Swedish diplomat who was coming over to be the executive chairman; I would be his deputy. His name was Rolf Ekeus. And so we did set up a special commission, and much to almost everybody's surprise, we fielded teams of inspectors. Initially, that enterprise was, I think the current word my son uses is "sketch."
"Sketch," meaning?
It used to be "sketchy" and now it's "sketch": it worked on a rather thin margin.
We had no real way of getting these teams of experts ... after all, if one is going to go over to Iraq in a hostile environment and start inspecting, where they don't really want you to find anything, you better have people who really know about nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons. And if you're going to go to places where they might have had these weapons, these would have been targeted during the Gulf War. As people know who know about these things, if you target with munitions, a percentage of those munitions don't detonate, even the very best munitions don't detonate. So you have unexploded munitions mixed in with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and nuclear facilities. So you need explosives/ordinance disposal people to go with you, and walk in front of you as you go to do these inspections. And you need a method of getting there, you need a method of communicating, you need intelligence to know where to go, because the Iraqis are unlikely to tell you where to go.
So this was a pretty large operation to put in place -- a staging area in Bahrain, the headquarters in Iraq, as well as at the UN in New York; putting teams of experts together in each one of these areas; getting them there; moving around safely; discovering things the Iraqis didn't want us to discover; destroying these things; and getting out.
Alive.
Alive was always good. We thought alive was good, yes.
But in reading one account of your experience, I think it was a lecture you gave in Washington, one had the sense that -- and I don't say this disparagingly -- that you were making it up as you went along. In other words, it wasn't as if there was a guidebook, "First do this and then do that." So you were really driven by the problems as they emerged.
I was struck when we wrote this document, Resolution 687, and then I was asked to set up a special commission with Ambassador Ekeus, that there wasn't any model. I actually went to the IO, the International Organization bureau in the State Department and said, "What does a UN commission look like?" They said it could look like a lot of things. But I went to the UN, and they had very much the balanced ticket in mind, of diplomats from these developing countries in this hemisphere and that hemisphere. I imagined this commission of diplomats walking around in Iraq, and this was a humorous and deadly image in my mind. So I knew that was wrong. We needed experts. The U.S. government took a very interesting view. I was still working for the U.S. government on assignment to the special commission in New York, and I called up and asked for help. I would characterize their response as, "We did the war, now it's time for the UN to do the peace." This was not what I needed to hear.
So initially we were making it up, as you said, we went around to other governments and got a lot of experts -- we had French, we had Swedes, we had Dutch, we had all kinds of people. We got some Americans from the weapons laboratories, from Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos labs, but not initially a lot of help in the intelligence community, which we needed desperately. It was not enthusiastic at first about sharing information with the United Nations. So, yes, we did have to make it up initially.
I should note that you actually wrote the regulations that guided your own work. Right?
Well, yes, we did. The resolution we had drafted, but certainly all the operating guidance that we used in UNSCOM, we wrote as we proceeded. An inspection would go and we would be out for maybe eight, ten, fourteen days in Iraq, and then come back and we would review what had happened, the difficulty of getting around. Eventually, we actually got ourselves professional, which is to say we had good intelligence support, we had secure communications, the Germans gave us lift. Initially we chartered Romanian aircraft out of Bahrain to get to Baghdad, which was not ideal, and then eventually we had good German C160s taking us in. And initially the Iraqis gave us these big old buses, and they drove them. But eventually we got four-wheel drive vehicles that were given to us, and we were able to move around ourselves. We even got helicopters, eventually, Germany helicopters, for air support, moving us around. I don't mean air support in a combat sense, but logistical support, so we could move quickly from one site to another.
Isn't it surprising that the United States was reluctantly helpful in this endeavor which you were leading? Wouldn't what you were doing be a logical consequence of fighting a war in the first place?
Yes, and I think they got it wrong at first. I say this without hesitation. I think that to put it in terms I used before, when they looked at the international system and they looked at our interest, they -- "they" being some people in positions of decision-making, positions of U.S. government in April and May of 1991 -- didn't understand what an opportunity this was for an entity of the Security Council, which is what UNSCOM's special position was, to do something entirely new and exciting, which was disarm a country of weapons of mass destruction. I mean, understand, Iraq had huge quantities of chemical weapons, both mustard and nerve agent, it had a serious biological weapons program, it had extraordinary ballistic missiles, and it had a nuclear program that was on the verge of giving it nuclear weapons, that had spent from $7- to $10 billion. This was a laboratory case of a country attempting to acquire every known means of delivery and weapons of mass destruction. And we had the opportunity under UN mandate to take it all apart and destroy it.
So the U.S. government is capable of learning, and in I'd say less than four or five weeks it came around to an extraordinary level of support. By the summer, our teams were getting terrific support from the U.S. government. Initially, I think they didn't conceptualize the situation correctly.
Now, the other dilemma that you were confronted with was definitions of turf with regard to other international organizations, in particular, the International Atomic Energy Commission, which has a responsibility with regard to problems of proliferation and controlling, and which was both helpful and standoffish, as I read the story.
The history here would be, I think, a terrific case for some aspiring Ph.D. student interested in organizational theory. The IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, was created in 1957. It's been around a long time, and it does something pretty straightforward, and it does it very well. It implements agreements that are made between a government and the agency's headquarters in Vienna. Those agreements all say essentially the same thing. They say, "You can come in and look at and inspect the facilities we identify to you, to make sure that we are not diverting nuclear material for non-peaceful purposes." Pretty simple. A very important phrase there is, "facilities we identify to you": "If we don't identify a facility, you may not inspect it." So they are obligated if they adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Iraq was a Non-Proliferation Treaty party, to identify all nuclear facilities in their country. Iraq lied; it did not [identify its facilities]. So when the IAEA was inspecting in Iraq, it was doing a terrific job of what it was legally mandated to do. It was doing a terrible job of protecting international security, but it was following its regulations, and it was following and implementing faithfully the agreements.
So when we come along in 1991, as a special commission created by the Security Council, which also gave a role to the IAEA, it forced us structurally, legally, to work together. We looked over at the IAEA and we saw an incredibly talented group of people who had one kind of mindset about inspections, which is you inspect where a country tells you you can inspect. We had a different view. We were dentists here, and we were about to go pull some teeth. Our view was we had to go find where these things were, and while we would read the Iraqi declarations, we certainly didn't believe them. We had good reason not to believe them, they were pure fabrications. So these teams meshed together. So I worked jointly with the IAEA members on the same team.
Eventually, and I would say this was only a matter of days and weeks, the IAEA people who worked in the field got with the program. And the program really was finding what the Iraqis were hiding. The Director General of the IAEA was a very talented international servant, a former foreign minister of Sweden, Hans Blix. And Blix's initial reaction was, "No, this is not how the IAEA functions, it cooperates with governments." He changed that view within a matter of months. He understood what the challenge was, and the IAEA changed its practice. During those few months, though, there were some rough spots, as the clash of bureaucratic cultures went on on the ground in Iraq.
It's interesting that the next year, 1992, towards the end of the year, that same International Atomic Energy Agency insisted on doing inspections in North Korea. The North Koreans were resisting. And that same Director General, Hans Blix, now took the agency on aggressive inspections in North Korea. There was a crises over North Korea that ultimately led to those negotiations. So I would say this is a terrific case in organizational change, organizational learning.
In a way it comes by route of a special mission, an organization with a special mission, and as problems present themselves, negotiating solutions which lead to a change in consciousness.
Well said.
What were the Iraqis like to deal with? I get the sense that it was a cat-and-mouse game in which they were organized to deceive, to hide and conceal.
Cat-and-rat, I would make just a mild correction.
Sometimes I've been asked to compare the Iraqis with the North Koreans. I negotiated with the North Koreans after the nuclear issue arose, and I've said with the North Koreans one had to always be aware of face, and never insulting. No matter how difficult things were, if one wanted to keep this going, one would be very careful.
With Iraq, it was very difficult to embarrass them or to insult. The reason was is that ... I'm talking now about the Iraqi government, not the Iraqi people. This is not a cultural comment, it's a comment about the government I was dealing with, with Saddam Hussein. Their view was, "We are trying to hide this stuff from you. We will lie, we will cheat, we will do whatever we have to do. Your job is to find it. This is a contest."
At one point, I was going over for a mission -- I had been on several to Baghdad -- and I had stopped in Germany because the Germans were involved in a court case exposing the way a German company had exported components of a centrifuge, a uranium enrichment facility centrifuge, to the Iraqis. I got the information on what the German company had exported to the Iraqis, so I stopped in Bonn, and then I went on to Baghdad. And I met in the morning with the Iraqis, and I said, "Have you declared all the components of this centrifuge that you were building?" And they said, "Yes, we have." And I said, "Okay, then, where are these?" And I laid out the documents that the Germans had given me, showing that there was much more that they hadn't shown. And the fellow who was sitting opposite me, who was the Deputy Foreign Minister, disappeared and came back a few minutes later, and he said, "Tomorrow, we'll take you to where these are and you can destroy them." And I said, "But you just told me that you didn't have any more." And he stared at me, and he said, "Yes." "You were lying." He didn't admit it, it was sort of ... "What's your point?" was the tone of that.
The other thing that struck me, on our very first mission, we were interested in finding some calutrons, which are component of electromagnetic isotope separation, another form of enriching uranium to high levels in the isotope uranium 235 for the purpose of building bombs. We knew where we wanted to go, we had good intelligence. And I told another deputy foreign minister -- I was with my IAEA cohort, and I said, "Tomorrow, we're going to be going here and inspecting." And he said, "Well, tomorrow, you can't inspect there." And I said, "And why would that be?" And he said, "Because it's an Islamic holiday." And I said, "Well, you know, I have Resolution 687, and I've read through this very carefully, I even wrote portions of it. We didn't make a provision for inspections being suspended for Islamic holidays," of which there are quite a number, as it turns out. And plus, we knew that we didn't have perfect operational security, and we didn't know whether we could surprise them if we didn't do the inspection the next day. We had every intention of surprising them. So I said, "No, no we will be doing the inspection." And he looked -- this is a deputy foreign minister -- he looked at me and he said, "It would be a shame if something happened to you or members of your team tomorrow." And that was, I thought, a pretty clear threat from a deputy foreign minister.
So the bottom, or the short answer to your question without any more vignettes is they're different. The Iraqi government is a government of thugs, and I don't believe they can be trusted in any way whatsoever, and we found them quite thug-like in all our interactions.
In being able to do this, it was important that you had, at that phase of our dealings with Iraq, a lot of political support, both in terms of public opinion and the willingness of the United States to commit force, if necessary; because we had just fought this war.
For five, six years, the work of the commission was incredibly effective. And it was so not only because of the dedicated men and women who worked there, but also because of the popular support in the United States and around the world. The story at the Security Council was quite unique, at least up to that point, when we could actually work with the Russians and get intelligence from the Russians on how many SCUDs they had transferred to the Iraqis, so we would know what the SCUD count was and how many we needed to destroy. We could work with the French on nuclear energy issues and nuclear weapons issues. It was a terrific amount of cooperation and collegiality among the permanent members of the Security Council, essential to the operation of the Special Commission, something we do not now enjoy.
When you dealt with the problem of North Korea, there the modalities for achieving something, a breakthrough, were very different. Why was that the case?
The North Korean case was entirely different from Iraq. There was no recent war fought against North Korea. There were a lot of troops and there are a lot of troops deployed along the demilitarized zone, the DMZ, but there was no war. There was a period of almost seven, eight years over which the United States through its intelligence capacity was able to watch North Korea build up its capability to begin to produce fissile material, and, therefore, nuclear weapons. But nothing brought the issue to a head. We watched the construction of a reactor, of a second reactor, of a third reactor. We watched the chemical separation and reprocessing plant being constructed. But we didn't do anything through the Reagan and Bush administrations. And I don't know what would have happened in the Clinton administration had the refusal by the North Koreans to accept an inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency not forced the issue to a head. But it did in the very first days of the Clinton administration. Remember, the administration comes in in January of 1993. In February of 1993, the very next month, the North Koreans are censored in Vienna, and the issue is reported to the Security Council at the UN, and soon after that the North Koreans announce they're going to be the first nation in history to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and a crisis is born. So that's how that got going, an entirely different situation than the Gulf War.
So the negotiation in North Korea that I ultimately led, some months later, beginning in June of 1993, was one in which the possibility of military action, of war, of sanctions, was always in the background, always conditioned the discussions. But there had been no war. North Korea was claiming it was an upstanding citizen in the international community, and behaving and acting as though it was. It was not and is not that, but that was its posture. And so that's how the negotiations proceeded.
Successful negotiations involve cutting deals. [Is it fair to say that] you drew on their vulnerabilities as a society, that is, the famine and their need for energy resources, as part of the package that led to the ultimate agreement?
We got to a situation which could be characterized as you just have, but we didn't start there. We started in '93 with only knowing what we wanted, but with no real plan on how to get there. We knew we wanted the North Koreans not to withdraw from the treaty; we knew we wanted them to give up their gas graphite reactor program and their reprocessing facility, we wanted them to let the IAEA do the inspection and submit any plutonium that separated to IAEA controls. We knew all that we wanted, but we hadn't figured out what we would give them. When I first went off to negotiate with them, the section on what they had to give us was very long. The section of what we could give them in exchange was very short. I was informed that I could tell the North Koreans that they could become part of the "Asian economic miracle," which I thought was a terrific phrase, but I wasn't sure what I meant by that, and I didn't think it was going to buy a whole lot in Pyongyang. I was told I could maybe offer some inspections, that the North Koreans could come down and inspect the American military bases, to confirm that there were no nuclear weapons in South Korea from the United States, or whatever. I'm not sure exactly what we proposed, just some kind of face-saving quid pro quo, but there wasn't much there.
Only after negotiations went on for some period of time did it become clear, because the North Koreans told us, that they really wanted modern nuclear technology, not this very dangerous proliferation-prone gas graphite. I thought this was a terrific idea, not a perfect idea. A perfect idea would have been for that regime to disappear and for peace, justice and the American way to break out in North Korea, but that wasn't going to happen. Short of that, it might be as good as we could get to stop this nuclear weapons program in North Korea with an energy program that would be more proliferation-resistant -- still nuclear, therefore, not entirely safe from a proliferation prospective, but a whole heck of a lot better than the one they were pursuing.
So it was really their idea that we do a trade. It took a year of rather intense negotiations, not only with North Koreans, but South Koreans and Japanese, to get to October 1994, when we could actually make that deal called the "agreed framework."
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