ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

talks had of succeeding?
PERINA: The talks never got very far. The Soviets could not stop either SDI or INF
deployment. The major obstacle to INF was Western European resistance, not Moscow.
Eventually arms control talks were all overtaken by events when the Warsaw Pact and
later the Soviet Union came apart. It was a whole new ballgame.
Q: From your vantage point, how did you view Reagan and his presidency?
PERINA: When I was at NATO I didn't know that my next assignment would be the
National Security Council where I would work with him much more closely. At NATO, I
had mixed views. He certainly came into office with very hardline, conservative views
that gave me concern. The Iran Contra scandal, which happened while I was at NATO,
was likewise cause for worry about his presidency. But I also felt that some of his ideas,
like SDI, were quite astute tactically, whether or not they could actually be implemented.
So it was a mixed picture, and I had mixed views. But I did not feel I really knew him
well until I worked on the National Security Council staff, to which I was recruited from
NATO in 1987.
Q: So you were on the NSC staff from 1987 to 1989. What were your responsibilities
there?
PERINA: I came in partly as a result of Iran Contra. There was a big purge at the NSC,
and many people left. It was not just Ollie North, Fawn Hall and those linked to Iran
Contra but others as well. There was a new National Security Advisor, Frank Carlucci,
and a sense that he should have a new team. He brought in Colin Powell as his deputy,
and Powell interviewed me for the job. Later, Powell was replaced by John Negroponte,
whom I also got to know well.
Q: Did you have contacts on the NSC staff or how were you chosen to work there?
PERINA: Well, as is often the case in this business, it did come from contacts. The new
Senior NSC Director for Soviet and European affairs was a think tank Soviet expert
named Fritz Ermarth. He chose as his deputy an FSO named Nelson Ledsky, who had
been the Minister and my boss in Berlin for four years. Nelson called me at NATO and
asked me to come and work on the staff on Soviet and East European issues. I flew back
to Washington to interview with Colin Powell and got the job, which required me to
curtail at NATO after only two years.
Within a few months I was working at the NSC, and one of the first issues that came up
was the visit of President Reagan to Berlin. This was the visit when he made the “Mr.
Gorbachev, open this gate; Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech. We were
working on the speech during my first week in the NSC and got into a terrible fight with
the State Department. The Department was very much opposed to this passage in the
speech, and Tom Simons as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the European Bureau
spearheaded the effort to have it deleted. The State Department’s objection was not to the
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