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

Q: OK, in 1989 you’re going to the CSCE in Vienna. Can you explain what that was and
what you were doing there?
PERINA: We discussed the CSCE earlier because I had worked on that during my first
tour in Washington. Since I had this experience, I was chosen by Jack Maresca to be his
deputy for the CSBM talks in Vienna. He was the Ambassador, and I was the deputy with
the title of Representative. He had been one of the original negotiators of the Helsinki
Final Act and was really an expert on the document. And the CSBM talks were a parallel
negotiation to the CFE talks in Vienna, which were under the CSCE umbrella but
involved only the members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Have I lost you completely
by now?
Q: No, but explain what the CFE was.
PERINA: CFE stood for the negotiations on Conventional Forces in Europe, and that was
a negotiation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact to reduce conventional forces on the
continent. It developed from the old Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction Talks or
MBFR that had hit a dead end. At the same time, the CSBM talks were intended to be for
all 35 CSCE countries, including the neutral and non-aligned countries, in pursuing
confidence-building military measures. The talks had to be separated because the
participants were different and also the CFE concerned reductions whereas CSBM talks
were largely confidence-building. The head of the U.S. delegation to the CFE talks was
Jim Woolsey, later to be CIA Director.
I was in Vienna three years with Jack Maresca, and we negotiated a CSBM agreement
but also then initiated the talks on transforming the CSCE after the end of the Cold War
into the OSCE or Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Before it had
been the Conference and then it became the Organization. This was actually an important
development because the U.S. had long resisted any institutionalization of CSCE. We had
always feared that if it became institutionalized it would become like the UN, a big
bureaucracy. We wanted it to have more of a political impact from periodic conferences,
high visibility conferences rather than permanent sessions which after a while nobody
pays attention to. Also, a permanent organization could have been more of a competitor
to NATO, as the Soviets originally intended. So we had resisted institutionalization but
the Europeans always wanted it to promote detente and the Soviets wanted it as well.
Once the Cold War ended, we relented and the whole process was transformed into an
organization with a permanent secretariat and seat in Vienna. Our delegation was tasked
with negotiating this transformation. So while we negotiated CSBM’s we also in the last
year negotiated the whole initial architecture of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, the various institutions and the bodies and how it would function
and so on. Many of these meetings took place in Prague, so we were often going back
and forth between Vienna and Prague.
Q: When you arrived in Vienna shortly before the Berlin Wall came down, how would
you describe the Soviet attitude and the East German attitude? Were they playing their
normal game?
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