Leon Fuerth Oral History

It is July 7th, 2008, and this is an interview with Leon Fuerth at the science policy division of the Elliot School of International Affairs at the George Washington University.

Because we don't have enough time to talk about your interesting life, let's start at the moment you met Al Gore [Jr.]. Whatever background to that encounter you want to fill in, feel free to do so.

I resigned from the Foreign Service in order to accept an offer by the late Congressman Les Aspin, of Wisconsin, to become a senior staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was chairing a subcommittee on covert action and was recruiting someone to run it for him. After about, I think, two years, Aspin was reassigned by the House leadership to a position on the House Armed Services Committee. The House leadership felt that he had to choose one or the other, as both together were considered an excessive burden. He left for the Armed Services Committee, and subsequently took the chairmanship of that committee. From there he went on to become the first Secretary of Defense in the Clinton-Gore Cabinet. House leadership appointed Al Gore to fill Aspin's vacated seat on the committee. The staff director of the committee asked me to come see him, and he said that the new member, meaning Gore, had expressed a desire to take advantage of his tenure on the committee, in order to study an issue “of global scope,” not stipulating what that was. The topic of arms control came up. This was in the middle or early phase of the Nuclear-Freeze movement, when it had become a national and international political force to be reckoned with, one that caught many members of Congress somewhat flat-footed because they did not understand the subject matter.

By this time I had become the Committee's staff point of reference, for information about arms control verification, which developed out of my previous expertise in the Department of State as a Foreign Service officer. So I went to meet Congressman Gore, who was commencing his second term in the House.

He expressed a desire to learn about arms control. I made an appointment to go to his office. We had a discussion at an introductory level. Like many members, Gore did not then understand nuclear doctrine, nuclear weapons, or the role of these weapons in maintaining alliance commitments. Knowledge of these subjects in Congress typically was restricted to members of the Armed Services Committees on both sides, to some subcommittees of the appropriations committees, and to some extent, the Foreign Affairs Committees on both sides. But members generally had--at that time--not developed an interest in it.

The information was not formally organized in a way that could be called user-friendly. It was scattered and chaotic unless you were an expert, in which case you could devote as much time as it took to read this specialized literature. Even then, without access to classified information, you would not be able to make critical connections because in those days, major declassifications and leaks of data about nuclear doctrine and nuclear forces were rare. Therefore the public literature was not that rich in terms of critical details.

I had already had discussions of this kind with other members, including some Republican members of the committee, but in my experience it took only an hour before their questions would be answered. If a meeting ended with “You must come back,” I interpreted that to mean, “But not soon.” Gore made the same remarks, but he turned out to be dead serious. I noticed that he allowed no interruption of our discussion, then or at any other time. He showed up on the dot, which was rare for a member of Congress, and he left instructions that the phone was not to ring in his office and nothing was to happen until we were finished.

We agreed that I would draw up a syllabus of instruction, designed so that when we were finished with that syllabus, if he completed it, I could go on my way and he would be extremely knowledgeable about arms control. To make a long story short, we executed the syllabus, and he did become an arms-control expert. Somewhere along the way, he began to say things to me that I had not previously said to him, which meant that he was processing the information in his own way. This caused me a great deal of consternation when I realized the rate at which he was absorbing what I had previously thought was my private stock of knowledge.

Around this time, I went to see Gore and said: “You have a choice. Now that you are really conversant in all these things, the choice is, do you want to try to become a factor in the formation of policy?” The answer was yes. In parallel to this and not initially related to it, I had a lull in my activities on the committee as a staffer. I was using my time to do intensive reading on strategic doctrine and on central issues relating to the use of nuclear weapons, especially on the subject of strategic stability. By “stability,” I meant a relationship between the United States' and the Soviet Unions' arsenal that might prevent either side from contemplating a nuclear first strike as a rational option. I was able to work on these analyses with the help of a few senior analysts in the Congressional Research Service, whose help was generous and creative.

During that period, I began work on a concept of strategic stability, which began with an article that I read in the New York Times, by an official of the previous administration, Jan Lodal, on the subject of single-warhead ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile], which resonated with something I had read years earlier, by Paul Nitze, on the same subject.

This was the so-called Midget-Man?

It became “Midget-Man.” At that time, there were no computers of any particular size in the Congressional Research Service. The CRS analyst I was working with was working out of his home, out of his garage, doing the calculations of nuclear exchanges that would respond to the questions I was putting to him. I was determined, based on previous experience, that anything I said about arms control would be numerically based, or at least numerically demonstrated. I had made the mistake of saying things that sounded grand in English but that were absolutely unsupportable when subjected to mathematical analysis. Gore asked the Librarian of Congress to provide the CRS analyst with a desktop computer for his office, which tremendously sped up the process.

Together we developed an analysis that showed that single-warhead ICBMs were a path toward a nuclear relationship such that either side would be foolish, if not suicidal, to launch a nuclear first strike. Gore immediately grasped the implications, especially with regard to the modernization of the US arsenal, in relation to arms control: two subjects that were being dealt with in isolation from each other. We proceeded to develop this proposal, and he understood it inside and out. Gore introduced the proposal on the floor of the House in a speech that was published in the Congressional Record.

It led to some odd consequences. The first was a phone call from a Swedish diplomat who was following arms control. He found a flaw in one of the numeric charts. It turned out to be a typo, but his call encouraged me because he was a seasoned observer. Next was a call from the Soviet embassy that said, “Moscow has asked for a copy of Gore's proposal.” The next event was an article in the New York Times that reported on a visit to Moscow by a delegation of U.S. mayors. They were led by Paul Warnke, who had been the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, but who was by then retired.

Warnke reported that the Soviets had come to the table with a translated copy of Gore's arms-control proposal, and, in effect, gave them the message, “This is serious. It could be the basis for negotiation.” So I understood at once that the premises upon which this approach to stability were based were correct enough to have caused the Soviets to essentially go way out of their way to put a proposition in front of the visiting delegation. The mayors and other political leaders in the delegation would have absolutely no idea what this was about, but Paul Warnke certainly would. I'm sure that Moscow chose him for this message because it was a way to send a feeler through an informal channel.

You talked about these as two parallel tracks, your tutorial--

The tutorial ended around the time that Gore became absolutely able to proceed on his own, with this proposal as a signature concept, to propound and to defend it in public, and to elaborate upon its implications.

When he asked you, “What can I do with this?” what did he mean by that? Did he mean in terms of policy or politics?

I don't think either one of us knew at the time. I think he merely meant, “What do I need to do in order to promote this approach?” He knew that the only other game in town for Democrats was the nuclear-freeze movement. The nuclear-freeze movement had focused on votes to kill the MX [Missile X] ballistic missile system by preventing it from going through its test phase. I made the case to Gore that if the U.S. were to test the MX missile and demonstrate that its 10 RVs [reentry vehicles] were “silobusters,” the message to the Soviet leadership would be that their favorite game was up. That is, deploying additional heavy ICBMs in land-based silos, with lots of warheads on the missiles, was a fool's game because the United States could, if it chose, destroy them.

The fact that the Soviets were responding to an arms-control proposition from Gore that, in effect, made the case for stability by de-MIRVing [multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle] meant that this was a correct assessment of how the Soviets would interpret the MX. The Democratic Congress, however, was overwhelmingly opposed to the continued development, much less the deployment, of the MX, and any Democrat who was prepared to advocate for the program was asking for major trouble. So when Gore asked how he could associate himself with it, it turned out to have a fairly significant political price, because he had to oppose Democratic sentiment in the Congress.

Did he try to build interest in this idea among his colleagues?

He assembled what became a small, fairly durable coalition. Senator [Samuel] Nunn was part of it. Senator [Charles] Percy, on the Republican side, was part of it. Some members of the House were part of it, including Tip O'Neill (Speaker of the House), the late Congressman Les Aspin, Lee Hamilton, and a few others. Speaker O'Neill was holding meetings in his office to discuss it. The idea was to strike a bargain with the administration. The administration already knew that it didn't have the votes for the MX. It had asked General [Brent] Scowcroft to create a commission to examine the issue, in the hope that Scowcroft would come up with something that would make the MX salvageable. Gore's idea was to essentially tell the administration, “In return for the critical number of votes needed for the MX, we want you to commit to design and deploy a single-warhead ICBM and to change your approach to arms control, to focus on de-MIRVing”

That position was not popular with the rest of the administration, nor with most Congressional Republicans at the time. But there were enough votes to condemn the MX if the administration didn't yield what Gore's group of moderates asked for. They did yield in the form of a letter that was delivered by messenger from the White House at the last minute to this small group of members of the House and Senate on the day--at the hour--of the crucial vote.

There was a lot of criticism of Gore and the others for having compromised. Nevertheless these members were perfectly right: this was the beginning of the end of Soviet deployments of heavy ICBMs, and it gave the [Ronald] Reagan administration its opportunity to negotiate a de-MIRVing strategic arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union. That's not bad for an insurgent group of Democrats and Republicans who understood nuclear policy well enough to understand how to redesign it.

I'm telling you all of this because that's where I met Gore, and it was under these conditions that I began working with him. While all of this was going on, he was elected to the Senate, and he asked me if I would become a member of his staff. I did. My responsibilities covered all international affairs, including international trade. So that was my sphere of operations during his time in the Senate.

During that time, I found him ready to lead creatively. For example, there was space policy with the Russians. The late Senator Spark Matsunaga had written a book about the necessity for the United States and Soviet Union to embark upon a vast, joint project that would somehow eradicate the psychological effects of 50 years of enmity. His suggestion for that project was a joint manned mission to Mars.

Fast-forward to the period just after the collapse of the USSR. Dr. Roald Sagdeev, whom Gore and I had met in the Soviet Union (but who had immigrated to the U.S.), came to see me. He had been, at the time of our first meeting, the Soviet Union's minister for space development, and for missile development as well. He subsequently met Susan Eisenhower when she was on a mission to Moscow. They had fallen in love, married, and he had come to the United States, where he was teaching physics at the University of Maryland. He came to see me, and he said that the Soviet Union's legacy space programs were nearly in free fall because the Russian government was at the edge of bankruptcy and money was no longer flowing to these enterprises. What could be done to prevent this huge human accomplishment from collapsing? Incidentally, the Russian technologists who would be left on their own to feed their families might be forced to sell their technological expertise to the highest bidder on the open market.

If you go back, you'll find speeches that Gore gave on the Senate floor during that time about space exploration with the Russian Federation as an important thing that we could do to help develop a new relationship in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Or, take the collapse of Yugoslavia. I served in Yugoslavia as a Foreign Service officer, and understood very well, years in advance, that [Slobodan] Milošević's Serbian nationalism was going to destroy the country. Then war broke out between Serbia and Croatia, when Croatia declared its independence. The brutality of the war led Gore to conclude that Yugoslavia could no longer exist as an organized state. You'll find some early speeches of his on the Senate floor, along with those of Senator [Robert] Dole. They were the first two Senators who spoke up at the front end of this conflagration and talked about what was going on.

This was in the late '80s?

Yes.

How did your impressions of Gore develop? It sounded like when you first had the appointment to meet him you might have been thinking, This is another politician who thinks he's interested--

That's exactly what I was thinking. However, by the second meeting, I handed him the syllabus for a program of self-education on arms control that would take months to execute and, in the process, test the extent of his interest. He followed the program, never missed an appointment, was never late, and we were never interrupted. I saw him bounding up the learning curve on this. I had to recognize that he was combining what I had told him into new things. Now that I've been a professor for a while, I can tell you that it is a very alarming experience--as well as gratifying--to face a class that is apparently hot on your heels and is ready to overtake you.

So you think of Gore as serious and smart.

Serious, extremely smart, very serious, able to communicate with people on whatever level was necessary about previously very abstract and abstruse subjects. Having the courage it takes not only to take positions that are contrary to those of the majority of your own party, but also to take positions that frustrate the majority will in your own party, something that I saw him do repeatedly in the years to come.

Do you also think of him as politically effective?

Obviously he was winning each of these engagements. It was not long before he could essentially entirely handle any encounter relating to nuclear strategy and arms control and could take the arguments to the second and third levels. I was impressed. I was realizing the extent of his abilities, which were not widely understood at the time.

Anyway, by the time of his selection by Clinton to be the running mate, Gore already had an international reputation as an arms controller, and more generally, as an expert on national security issues based not only on his service in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and on the Senate Armed Services Committee, but on his advocacy of the global environment as a national security issue.

Were you involved in his campaign for President in 1988?

I had to stay away from active campaigning. We sought legal advice in order to make sure that there was a firewall between anything I might do as a public employee and anything that would represent political activity. Nothing prevented me from communicating with him about current international issues of the day, because that was part of my job description. But the exchanges between us all the way through the campaign were 100 percent pure policy. His standing instruction to me from the beginning was to tell him what I thought was best for the country and to leave the political dimension to him. He meant it.

Did you think you were working for a future President?

Yes, long before we ever spoke of it.

When did you think that?

First of all, I was gradually realizing his capabilities. Second, when he was elected to the Senate at such an early age, it seemed to me then that he was on a trajectory that would go further, and I adjusted the level of my own work accordingly. For example, in matters pertaining to international trade, I wanted to help him approach these issues from a national perspective rather than a regional or local perspective.

So entering the first Clinton-Gore administration, Gore came with recognized credentials in foreign policy and international trade. He brought the Bosnia issue to the table as well.

He also voted for--

Yes, there was the critical moment of his vote to authorize the President to use force to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Gore came to this decision gradually, over an extended period of time. I agonized, but eventually my recommendation was that we needed to use force. The Republicans later claimed that Gore swapped his vote for the right to appear on television in a certain order. That is right down there with assertions that they made years later about global warming. They said that he had gone insane. You can look it up. They literally circulated messages on their hotlines to the effect that Gore had become unstable.

At the time of the vote, there was a universal fear that American casualties would be high. There was a rumor that the Pentagon had purchased tens of thousands of body bags. The prospect was that a vote for war would destroy any Presidential ambitions that Gore had. On the day and hour of the vote, as he was walking from his office to the elevator that takes you to the basement of the Russell Senate office building, and from there to the tram that takes you to the floor of the Senate, there were people waiting for him. They walked backward in a semicircle as he moved toward the elevator. I was with him because I was going to the floor with him. It was like a Greek chorus. They said, “If you vote for this, you can forget about the Presidency or anything else.”

Did he or you know any of these people?

No.

They were there just to convey that message?

Yes.

Earth in the Balance was written around that time.

Later.

Did you have any role in advising him on environmental issues, or did you discuss the book with him while he was writing it?

Initially I was perplexed by it. He had never discussed his environmental concerns with me. I first noticed something surfacing as the result of the publication of the “TTAPS” [Richard P. Turco, Owen B. Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James B. Pollack, Carl Sagan] report. The late Carl Sagan and several other eminent scientists, some of them meteorologists, contributed to this. Their analysis said that a major thermonuclear exchange--not a complete exchange, but a large-scale thermonuclear exchange--would inject enough debris into the atmosphere to radically reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface, causing an immediate, precipitous drop in temperatures, as well as all sorts of interacting problems that could disrupt animal and plant cycles all over the planet.

”Nuclear winter.”

Yes. My initial reaction was that this was another scare tactic by another component of the scientific community wanting the United States to unilaterally give up the use of nuclear weapons. I later accepted that the physics, mathematics, and atmospheric chemistry were seriously meant by the people who prepared them.

I was surprised by the degree to which Gore was exercised over this. It was only later that I realized that for him, it was the nexus of two things. I learned of his exposure to theories about climate change and global warming during his undergraduate days at Harvard. I understood that he saw nuclear weapons as just one of two ways to destroy life on the planet: the other was through climate change induced by carbon dioxide emitted as a result of industrial development.

Even so, I continued to advise him that he should maintain his focus on the usual military subjects. This was around the time that he won his second term in the Senate. We had a staff retreat, and it was at this that he announced his intention to focus his work on the themes of global warming, climate change, and environmental issues in general. My first reaction was, “There's enough going on in the world that can blow us up. I'm not going to worry about this.”

Gore hired an environmentalist to be a staff member, Rick Adcock. Rick introduced himself by bursting into my office--meaning, the cubicle that I shared with four or five other people--through a back door that was just behind my right shoulder. He peered over to see what I was writing on the computer, and he gave me a bumper sticker that read, “The environment is a national security concern.” Later, he and I used to laugh about that day because without thinking, I got up from my seat, clapped him on the shoulder, opened the door, pushed him out into the corridor, and slammed the door, because I didn't think that this was serious at all. So I was dragged kicking and screaming into this, very much demanding to be shown that all these environmental concerns were serious.

Around this time, Gore's son was seriously injured by an automobile as the family left a baseball game in Baltimore. Gore and Tipper [Mary Elizabeth Gore] moved to Baltimore, to Johns Hopkins, and essentially set themselves up in a suite where their son was. He dropped all communication with the Senate office for a time while his son's condition was critical. Eventually, he reestablished communications by means of a computer link that he had installed (at this time, a fairly rare thing). Over this link, Rick and I began to work out what became a major Gore speech establishing that climate change should be viewed as a strategic threat to national security.

When did you meet Clinton?

During the first campaign. I think it was in a meeting in New Orleans. The purpose of that meeting was to brief him on the subject of Bosnia.

So this was during the fall campaign.

Yes, Gore had been named the Vice Presidential nominee, and I was now working in close conjunction with Tony Lake, Sandy [Samuel] Berger, and Nancy Soderberg. At that point [James] Steinberg was a visiting outside expert, who was brought in to talk about Yugoslavia. So that's where I met Clinton, during this first discussion of Bosnia.

What was your impression?

He knew a hell of a lot more about international affairs than people were giving him credit for. His questions were very good, and he listened very well.

I doubt that there had ever been a Vice Presidential national security staff advisor who had been part of the foreign policy circle in a Presidential campaign before. Did you feel that way? Did you feel that you were, in effect, breaking new ground?

No, and it's important to say for the record that I was not providing political advice on government time. Only substantive advice about national security issues.

Did you have further contacts with Clinton or with that same group?

With the same group? Yes, under the same terms, which were nothing political in my Senate office, not on my time, not on the clock, when I would be drawing federal pay.

Different issues?

After they won the election, Clinton and Gore had to figure out what they were going to do about the inner-group of national security experts in particular. The arrangement they formed was to transpose this group into the White House. So Lake gave up his academic life and became the National Security Advisor. Berger gave up his law practice and became the deputy. Nancy stopped staffing for [Edward M.] Kennedy, and she became the Secretary of the National Security Council. I'm not sure what I gave up, but I became the Vice President's National Security Advisor, and that preserved the same links we had formed.

There was also a question about the terms of reference under which we would operate. Toward the end of the transition (during which Berger served as the head of the national security division of the transition process and as I served as his deputy) he, Tony Lake, and I talked about our future relationship in the administration. They said that I would have full access to national security data in real time, as they saw it, and that I would be present in my own right in the Deputies Committee meetings and on an invited basis to the Principals Committee meetings. But there was a price. I would know in real time what was happening, but I was to never go to Gore to obtain a position until an issue was ready to go to the President.

You mean a position on an issue.

Right. The concern was that because Gore was already so close to Clinton, a position on Gore's part would unbalance the process of deliberation that would happen in advance of approaching the President. I went to Gore with this proposition, he agreed to it, and that's what we stuck to. I was always able to keep him informed. He had full access to the stream of information, but we never came to the moment, until the President was scheduled, where I would ask Vice President Gore for a position or provide a recommendation of my own.

It also helped that in the initial series of Presidential-decision memoranda that went up through the NSC [National Security Council], there were frequent, handwritten messages from Clinton in the margins asking, “What does Al think about this?” One possible response would have been for Tony Lake or Sandy to pick up the phone and call the Vice President. Instead, with one emergency exception, Tony or Sandy picked up the phone and asked me to determine Vice President Gore's views, which preserved our internal discipline about this. The effect was that Gore always arrived at the table meticulously briefed, well aware of what was going on, and in a position to weigh in, often decisively--but then and only then.

Did Gore feel that this arrangement served his interests?

Oh, yes.

He didn't feel that this arrangement kept him from knowing some things at the time he wanted to know them?

No. Experience as a team soon removed this kind of worry. Gore had full access to information in real time. The understanding was that he would delay coming forward with his own views until a matter was before the President. This arrangement required some getting used to. Initially I didn't know whether I could trust my colleagues. They had known Clinton for years. Their acquaintance with Gore and with me was four months old.

And a lot of it was with your voice (over the phone) rather than with you.

Yes, that too. After the election, I went through a period where I could not enter any social gathering without people coming up to me with résumés. I felt like the groom at a wedding because people were stuffing things in my pockets--not envelopes with money, but envelopes with résumés, hoping for jobs in the new administration. I remember being at a Christmas gathering; I was hungry, and I wanted to get across the room to where the food was, but I couldn't make my way there because there were so many people approaching me.

Finally a friend of mine, a Republican White House staffer whom I got to know during our days staffing in the Senate, came to me and asked, “Are you going to take the job as National Security Advisor to the Vice President?” I said yes. He said, “I wouldn't recommend it. You should realize that you'll know what's going on, all right--two weeks after it happens.” That was his characterization of the operating environment in the administration that he served. But our arrangements were such that I knew and was participating in what was going on more or less as it began.

Once we were sure that this arrangement would be honored, that led to a sense on my part and on Gore's too that you didn't have to come in every day and spend time prying out information. What was new was going to arrive on your desk in real time.

Was the keystone to the arch the relationship between Clinton and Gore? Is that why staff members acted the way they did?

Yes.

During the transition, were you involved in any of the discussions about who would be appointed to Cabinet positions?

Not directly, but there were discussions between Gore and me about the National Security slots.

So Les Aspin becoming Secretary of Defense, your fingerprints were not on that at all.

No. But I believed he would be a good choice and said so--to Gore.

During the campaign, were you involved in debate preparation for either Clinton or Gore?

I was. I had to take unpaid leave from my office to do this. The campaign paid for my expenses to travel and come back, but that was all.

Was it for the Presidential debates or for the Vice Presidential debates?

For the Vice Presidential debates, absolutely; for the Presidential debates, no.

Can you talk a little bit about that debate prep?

You try to challenge the candidate so that the experience simulates dealing with a real, live, and intelligent debate partner and testing out approaches.

So now you're National Security Advisor to the Vice President, and you're on the Principals Committee and the Deputies Committee.

Initially, in the first administration, by Presidential instruction, I was on the Deputies Committee, meaning that I had a seat at the table in my own right. Anything I said at that table was understood to be what I thought, not what Gore was ultimately going to say.

After the second administration began, Sandy became the National Security Advisor. I acquired a seat on the Principals Committee in my own name, but at Sandy's urging I continued at the Deputies' level as well.

It was the same arrangement in that you were there to speak your own thoughts?

Same arrangement. Whatever I said during that time was understood to be my view, not a precursor of the Vice President's view, and certainly not a literal statement of what the Vice President wanted to have happen.

This had never happened before, am I right?

I don't think so.

What gained you the seat at the table with the principals? Why did they decide to do it during the second term? Was it that Sandy Berger and you had developed a relationship that made him want you in the room?

It could be all of the above. Sandy and I had an extremely close working relationship. We thought of ourselves as flying a precision formation. Our relationship was tested through eight years of hard experience.

I should also add that in the first administration, there was another transition point where Gore moved from being an invited person at the President's morning briefings, intelligence briefings, to being there because the President expected him to be there. I came with the Vice President. So we were present as the President and the National Security Advisor received their morning briefing from the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. These things helped knit the administration together at the top. I don't think we were worried about internal communications. The thing that drove us to distraction at times was leaks to the press, because the leaks to the press damaged our ability to deliberate. But we were not worried about each other in this regard.

Can you give an example of a leak to the press that hurt your ability to deliberate?

We had a meeting of one of the committees, and I remember having a discussion with several of my colleagues that was repeated verbatim the following day in the New York Times. This was a blow to mutual confidence. It was not repeated. We concluded that because people would go back to their buildings, and because everybody had a “significant other” in the form of a deputy or someone who was absolutely entitled to be cut in on what was happening, information would spread. The only cure for that was, at times, to restrict meetings to principals only. This cut down the leaks, but also had the effect of diminishing the expertise in the room during such deliberation. Leaks to the press can have the effect of constraining the deepest possible consultation in the government.

Nelson: What did you do about that?

Sometimes we went to principals only, but only under very unusual circumstances. On most occasions our view was that we needed the knowledge, and therefore had to accept the leaks. You could urge principals in the room to restrict their knowledge to themselves rather than to brief their colleagues. That helped, especially if the information was extremely sensitive and if its reaching the press could damage something important that we were trying to do, but it wasn't foolproof. The only nearly foolproof method is to undertake things in total secrecy among a very limited number of participants, totally outside the system. This can deny the participants knowledge that others hold that can make the difference between success and failure.

Let's talk about the Clinton administration's first year in office.

For the first three to four months it was a shakedown cruise. People had to get used to operating on that scale; had to get used to operating with each other; had to get used to operating under circumstances in which the timetables were unforgiving; had to get used to the ferocity of the Republican opposition, which was “scorched-earth” from the beginning.

What did you learn? What came out of that shakedown cruise?

We had to learn to trust each other. We also had to develop a network of means to communicate that was outside the formal structure, but which would not undermine it. The Deputies usually met once a week for lunch, rotating from one building to the next according to who was the host (and who was paying for the food). The principals usually met on Monday morning for breakfast with the National Security Advisor. I should add that in the second administration, as I moved to the Principals Committee, I was also able to operate at the principals' level in the National Economic Council.

Really, you were involved in the NEC [National Economic Council]?

Yes, concurrently at the Deputies' and then at the principals level. In that circumstance, I had to work out an arrangement that helped delineate domestic and international issues. So I worked out an understanding and rule of reason with colleagues on the Vice President's staff who were responsible for the domestic side of these issues so that I could shunt issues to them. Then we would talk with each other about where the junction was between these sets of issues. I could have done the same on the science side of the House, but I ran out of time and capacity. But I had close relations with both of Clinton's national science advisors.

Let's talk about some of the specific issues that the administration had to deal with.

We forgot about the evolution of the binational commissions.

Yes, let's start with the binational commissions.

[Boris] Yeltsin asked Clinton for a system that would do better in terms of converting summit-level pledges into real changes on the ground. He felt that bureaucratic inertia, if not hostility, was impeding that conversion, certainly on the Russian side and arguably on the American side as well. They agreed on a binational commission that would be operated at a very senior political level, which translated into the U.S. Vice President and the Prime Minister of Russia.

During the Transition, Gore had studied the materials that the transition teams provided about the operation of the Office of the Vice President, and he concluded that he did not want line responsibilities. So when Strobe [Talbott] approached me with the idea that Gore would cochair this binational commission, my reaction was that Gore would have to be talked into it because his natural inclination would be that it ran against his prior conclusion that Vice Presidents, or he as Vice President, should advise, rather than operate. He was at first dubious, but eventually agreed to get involved.

The U.S.-Russian Binational Commission began at a meeting in my office, with Strobe and me alone, working on blank sheets of paper. It evolved from a U.S. sketch, which was then worked out with the Russian Federation, into a joint concept. It was set up and it took off and became a model. By the end of the administration, we had binational commissions between the U.S. and Egypt, chaired by Gore and [Hosni] Mubarak; the U.S. and South Africa, chaired by Gore and [Thabo] Mbeki; the U.S. and the Ukraine, chaired by Gore and [Leonid] Kuchma. Much later on we negotiated and set up a U.S. Binational Commission on Commerce, Energy, and the Environment, with the Chinese, chaired by Gore and Li Peng initially, and then with Li Peng's successors until the end of the administration. There was a U.S.-Kazakhstan commission, chaired by Gore and [Nursultan] Nazarbayev.

I think that's the full list.

That would be enough to keep anybody occupied, because these commissions met on a twice-a-year basis, rotating between capitals, theirs and ours. They were very large operations that were undertaken on our side by a small number of people. Essentially a networked operation developed that involved the Office of the Vice President, meaning specifically the OVP/NSA, Office of the Vice President/National Security Affairs, and the rest of the bureaucracy as needed.

The Republicans insisted on believing that, at our instigation, the other Cabinet-level agencies had hired a large covert staff to run these things. They didn't hesitate to write out subpoenas looking for this staff. We found exactly one person who had ever been hired in addition to normal requirements, and that was contrary to a written instruction. The rest of it was run out of my office by me and by my staff of approximately eight substantive people, all of whom were seconded from other agencies, most of whom were active-duty military at the rank of lieutenant colonel or captain, or the Navy equivalent, with a couple from the State Department and the CIA and the Department of Commerce.

There's another story about how those evolved, how they functioned, what they tried to accomplish, what was done, how the agenda was worked out from the U.S. side, what the role of the Vice President was in all of these transactions, and how we very quickly worked out a routine in which there was a rhythm between Vice Presidential encounters--with opposite numbers in these countries--and Presidential encounters. We knew where the President was trying to get, and we figured out how the Vice President could help push the process toward that objective.

L. Fuerth, 7/7/2008 15

An example of the interplay was in the run up to a summit in Moscow. Ukraine badly wanted the President to stop in Kiev in order to build the sense that Ukraine was no longer an appendage of the Russians but that it had international stature, respected by the United States itself. This gave the U.S. side the leverage to push for a resolution of stubborn issues, such as the exchange of Ukrainian high-enriched uranium (from weapons) for low-enriched uranium from Russia, to be used in Ukrainian energy reactors.

So the creation of a particular binational commission was an ad hoc response to a particular situation that existed between the United States and that country?

It was an ad hoc response to a desperate circumstance in the Russian Federation. Their economy was at the edge of chaos. The last thing they needed was another declaration that went nowhere. They needed real assistance . So the question was always, what are the deliverables? One of the initial areas of collaboration was space research.

Then we decided to collaborate with the Russians on energy because their energy production was tanking, which was not only bad for them, but also for the world because they were becoming a net importer. The only thing that prevented them from being a major drain on production elsewhere was that their economy was in such a low state that their requirements for energy were greatly depressed. Also energy and environmental cooperation was a double hit. Their oil-extraction procedures were environmentally ruinous at the local and global levels. Locally because of outmoded production technology; globally because of the amount of greenhouse gases that they were venting into the atmosphere as a byproduct of their drilling technologies. Also, they were progressively ruining the oil fields that they were still operating. The Soviets had exploited them without regard to the future. Now the Russians were trying to squeeze whatever production they could out of them.

The Commission expanded into all sorts of other areas of collaboration at the request of the Russians. A joint committee on health rapidly began to focus on an incipient diphtheria epidemic among children, and another part of it focused on postnatal care for children, and another focused on the management of diabetes. The Russians had very high rates of diabetes, and their care methodology, even in the best of circumstances, was very crude. There were many other things, but the objective in every case was to bring about real change.

We were successful. We did not make general proclamations about collaboration in space. We worked out real collaborations, which probably saved the Russian space industry because there was an infusion of U.S. dollars into the system at just about the point where the worst was about to happen. The U.S. was getting access to the highest quality Russian technology.

Were you meeting resistance from departments and agencies within the U.S. government?

Lots of resistance in Congress, and also--at least at first--where the bureaucracy was concerned. The first suggestions that came up through the interagency system for collaboration in space were so small in scale that we rejected them out of hand. In effect we went back to the system and said that there was a need for ideas that were “Bigger, more interesting, more important.”

What we attained was a true collaboration with Russia in space research. We were in Moscow for a meeting of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission when the U.S. space shuttle docked for the first time with the Mir space station. All of us, the Russians and the Americans, were in a room watching on a big screen as this occurred through the television system on board the docking components. We built on these experiences, and achieved the international space station.

So what you're describing, as I understand it, is that once this binational commission was created with Russia and was seen as working well, more and more problems--

Fuerth:--assigned to this process. Eventually we had to do triage. The Commissions' track records were very good in terms of pushing forward things that seemed to be frozen into place. So before much longer, as we got close to one of these joint meetings, there was a process of winnowing proposals for what should be on the agenda.

The point is that we were soon turning away requests from parts of the executive branch that had begun to look at the Gore process as an extension of their own efforts, rather than as a short-circuiting of those efforts.

How did you end up with binational commissions with Egypt and South Africa? I can see Kazakhstan and Ukraine flowing in a natural way from Russia. They're all former Soviet republics.

The former began in a discussion that I was having with an ad hoc interagency group that I convened to talk about Egypt. I don't remember what the initial impulse was. I do know that at the time, I had another ad hoc group working on the question of what kind of hydrological data for agriculture we could derive if we fused information from all of our space-based sensors. We produced that plan. The Egyptians were leery of it because it involved cooperating with countries where the headwaters of the Nile originate, a factor I hadn't realized would be a show-stopper for them.

So take a country like Egypt, which is, for all of its faults, a secular government in a region threatened by fundamentalism; a government facing a huge demographic bulge of young people; a government where efforts by USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] and others to encourage economic reform had gone nowhere for years; and therefore a government that, unless it could somehow unleash sustained economic growth, was going to confront a new generation of Egyptians who had nothing to hope for. This made it worth our while to try to establish a commission. The success of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission was widely known, so when we proposed such an idea to the Egyptians, it was readily accepted. This was a huge opportunity, so we proposed it. The Egyptians were ready.

In the case of the South Africans, it began when Vice President Gore attended the inauguration of Nelson Mandela. It was just after Mandela was sworn in. We were in a huge tent for a celebratory lunch. I was seated at one table. Gore was at another table adjacent. All of a sudden Mandela, in his speech, introduced his jailer, who was an invited guest. It was a stunning moment full of hope. Gore and I exchanged notes saying, in effect, “We have a stake in this. This place is going to need help. Its success or failure is meaningful to the United States. Should we try to set up a binational commission?” Gore agreed.

Were there other countries that wanted to form binational commissions with the U.S.?

Ukraine.

I'm wondering how big a staff you had, because you were involved in so many varied--

I had a deputy who was an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was succeeded by a deputy who was an Army lieutenant colonel. I had, I think--it fluctuated--seven or eight substantive people. They were mostly military officers who were selected from slates of candidates that were sent over from the Pentagon. We had a small support staff in addition to the substantive officers. We all operated inside of a secure facility in the Old Executive Office Building. That was it: about eight or so substantive people and a small support staff. They did the most extraordinary work.

Were you able to appoint anybody by your own initiative as opposed to appointing people from lists that were constructed by others?

Yes.

It sounds like you got what you needed out of the staff people who were assigned to you. You found them to be satisfactory? You found their work to be responsive?

Oh, yes. They were highly trained, highly motivated people with impressive accomplishments behind them by the time we met.

That's impressive.

I went to my office on Inauguration Day, immediately after the parade. My predecessor's deputy, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, an Asia hand, came in to see me. He asked, “What should I tell the people?” I said, “What do you mean, what should you tell the people?” Then I realized that he was asking me whether I wanted them to stay or go elsewhere. I thought, These are the only people under this roof at this point who know how to get anything done. They are sworn to support duly constituted authority, and I represent part of that authority. I'm not going to damage their careers by disrupting them in the middle of their assignments, especially since most of them have kids in school. So I said, “Have them show up.” It turned out to be a really good decision. I didn't know in advance how good it was. In time, they were replaced, as their rotations came up, by a process of interview and selection, blind selection really. The military would send over candidates in slates of six. The existing staff would interview them. The politics were left at the door.

[BREAK]

L. Fuerth, 7/7/2008 18

I should say that at the end of the Clinton-Gore administration, the second one, every one of the governments that were involved in Commissions came in at very high levels, asking if there was any way to continue. There wasn't. These things were all discontinued by the incoming administration, with the exception of the U.S.-China group, which continued under a changed name.

[BREAK]

How about the 2000 campaign and your role with Presidential candidate Gore? You were still serving as his National Security Advisor until the end of the second term.

That's right.

Were you involved in any way--

More or less on the same basis as before. That is, I couldn't use the phones or faxes for political purposes. I would take leave as needed, mainly to participate in debate prep. Essentially the arrangement was that the campaign staff did not influence Vice President Gore's positions on national security issues. That was unusual. Normally the political leadership of a campaign finds a way to insert itself into almost every issue. But in the case of Vice President Gore's work on national security, that was not the case.

Maybe then his Vice Presidency during the campaign of 2000 lasted for at least the entirety of the eighth year of his Vice Presidency, from Iowa, New Hampshire, on through the postelection controversy.

I was not traveling with him. Occasionally, in order to go through official business easily, I would go to where he was. But with the exception of a couple of instances for debate prep, and a few important speeches that he delivered as Vice President, and not as a candidate, I didn't travel.

We'll talk about debate prep in a minute, but I'm wondering what you observed about his conduct as Vice President that year. Surely he was distracted by a lot of things.

He met his responsibilities, but it became harder.

Was the relationship that you had with the President's people on either the Principals or Deputies Committee affected by Gore's campaigning?

I don't think so. We'd been working with each other for seven years by that time.

Debate prep. The second debate's agenda was foreign policy.

Was that the debate where Governor [George W.] Bush managed to recite the names of a number of heads of government?

Yes.

Causing Vice President Gore to roll his eyes because of the artificiality of the demonstration of patently brand-new knowledge. That was an historic debate, but not for the right reasons.

The first debate was the one where he rolled his eyes and sighed. For the second debate, they were seated around the table.

Yes.

Describe your role in the debate prep.

To make sure that Gore was briefed on the pattern of decisions for which he'd been responsible; that he was thoroughly briefed on anything that was ongoing at the time before the U.S. government.

There were two speeches that he gave in this period. One was before an association of foreign newspaper editors, meaning foreign news editors who were operating in other countries. They were having a convention in Boston, and Gore delivered the keynote address. He was speaking as the Vice President of the United States (not as a candidate). The other one was at the UN [United Nations] Security Council on the first day of the new millennium, where he took the seat of the U.S. representative. On both occasions, he spoke about something called “forward engagement” and about a “new security agenda” taking form alongside the old one. The new security agenda included such things as internationally networked terrorism, internationally networked crime, proliferation of weapons of mass discussion, climate change, and mass pandemics.

Did you do any research on Governor Bush's stands on foreign policy?

I read what his stands were. In some of his speeches there were some proposals that came as surprises. They were not very good ideas, but they were new ideas. I did not think we did a good job responding to these “new ideas,” but the campaign staff regarded foreign policy as--for the most part--”off message.”

Thank you for this. Let's schedule a second session that will be devoted almost entirely to the important issues that came up in foreign policy during those years.

L. Fuerth, 7/7/2008 20