U.S. President Barack Obama's recent diplomatic effort to push past differences between the United States and Russia in order to seek cooperation on matters of mutual interest has a fascinating and little-known antecedent. In 1987, I received an unusual request. The Kremlin invited a group of American terrorism experts to come to Moscow. It said it wished to explore how the United States and the Soviet Union might cooperate in combating terrorism.
The idea seemed almost absurd. This was the bitter height of the Cold War. True, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan had hit it off personally, and the two reached some surprising arms-control agreements. But personal cordiality did not extend to other areas of superpower competition.
Many U.S. analysts suspected Moscow of backing terrorist campaigns in the Middle East and Western Europe. Meanwhile, the United States was redoubling its efforts to aid the mujahedeen in driving the occupying Soviet force from Afghanistan and backing Contra rebels against the Marxist Sandinistas who had, with Cuban assistance, taken over Nicaragua. Each side was accusing the other of sponsoring terrorism.
For 15 years I had been directing the RAND Corporation's research on terrorism, and though skeptical of the view that all the world's terrorists were linked to a command post in the Kremlin, neither did I see the Soviet Union as the United States' most likely ally in combating terrorism.
Wary of walking into a propaganda ploy, I sought advice from Washington. Officials at the State Department informed me that the U.S. government wouldn't touch the Moscow meeting with a 10-foot pole, but as a private citizen, I could do whatever I wanted (and if I went ahead, U.S. officials were very interested in what the Soviets were up to).
Foreign Policy and the New America Foundation present The AfPak Channel, a Web site bringing you the latest news and analysis from the wars and turmoil of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sign up for the AfPak Daily Brief, an e-mail newsletter sent to your in box each morning.
Only somewhat reassured, I decided to participate, but urged that a pre-meeting meeting be held with Soviet organizers to establish ground rules. We would assemble as private citizens, not national representatives. There would be no public pronouncements. No signed communiqués. No photo ops. If the Soviets insisted on ideological debates, these would be held only at 2 a.m., and attendance would be optional. The Soviets agreed, and our first meeting was set for early 1988.
Led by John Marks, a former State Department intelligence official, we traveled under the auspices of Search for Common Ground, a daring but respected nongovernmental organization. Our team included among others, Robert Kupperman, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; Geoffrey Kemp, former assistant to President Reagan for national security affairs; John Murphy from Villanova Law School; Augustus Richard Norton, then a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; Marguerite Millhauser, a conflict resolution attorney; and Robin Wright, a reporter who had written a splendid book about Middle Eastern terrorism. We were joined later by former CIA Director William Colby and Ray Cline, a former CIA deputy director. The Soviet team included officials from various ministries, academies, and institutes, as well as KGB officers who said they were retired.
Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
Brian Michael Jenkins, author of Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?, is senior advisor to the president of the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis.
The New Threatto Oil Supplies: Hackers
The Racist Who Might Head UNESCO
China's Waron Chinglish
Why Are Bush Apologists Always Picking on Me?
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE
MOSTREAD
MOSTCOMMENTED
MOSTREAD
MOSTCOMMENTED
MOSTREAD
MOSTCOMMENTED
MOSTREAD
MOSTCOMMENTED
PASSPORT
Another drug decriminalization victory in Latin America
BY JOSHUA KEATING
AFPAK CHANNEL
Why can't the Afghans fight their own war?
BY SHUJA NAWAZ
Read Full Article »