The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

FSJ : Your award from AFSA for lifetime contributions to American diplomacy places you in the same company as President George H. W. Bush, Secretaries of State George Shultz, Cyrus Vance and Larry Eagleburger, and Rep. Lee Hamilton, among others. What is it about for- eign policy that has held your interest for so long? RL : I first had the opportunity to go abroad in 1954 on a boat to England as a Rhodes Scholar. And f rom that perspective, looking back at my country, I really came to a new sense of how big the world is, how many talented people there are, and how complex our relations are with other countries. I saw in the student body at Oxford people from Africa, f rom India, from Europe, in addition to scholars from England, and it was exciting. The parameters, at least in my imagination, increased very sub- stantially. And without having any idea then of how it would make a dif- ference for me in the future, clearly, I was profoundly influenced by this. What it did lead to, perhaps, was a decision on my part to go to the American embassy in London during the second year of my scholarship and volunteer for the United States Navy. They could not assure me of OCS [Officer Candidate School] but that finally was the case in January of the following year [1957]. And that led to an extraordinary experience as an intelligence briefer for Admiral Arleigh Burke, who was then the chief of naval operations. They had found, at least in the Navy, people who they felt would give accurate and dramatic briefings in the CNO Flag Plot [daily intelligence briefing] each morning for Adm. Burke and people f rom the Congress and the adminis- tration that he brought in. So I read the secrets of the nation at 2:30 in the morning and by 6:30 had put together a comprehensive briefing of what had happened in terms of world intelligence. And very rapidly, my interest in strategic foreign policy grew, and not just from the standpoint of the Navy. I was dispatched to the White House to brief President Eisenhower and to the bowels of the Pentagon to meet with Allen Dulles as the Navy representative. So this was a heady set of responsibilities for a naval watch officer who was just an ensign or a JG [lieutenant junior grade]. These were the formative experiences that have informed my life and real- ly carried through that sense of ide- alism and mission. FSJ : I know that an accomplish- ment that you’re most proud of dur- ing your time in the Senate is passage of the Nunn-Lugar Act, which was recently expanded for use beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union. Where do things stand in terms of applying it elsewhere in the world? RL : I had the experience of going to Albania last August with military personnel near Tirana to find 16 met- ric tons of nerve gas that the Albanian government had suddenly informed us that they had. This was the first opportunity, and it took a lot of paper- work through Secre t a ryof State Colin Powell, and then for the president’s own signature, to move $20 million from what had been the preserve of the former Soviet Union. But it’s the beginning, because that experience not only indicated that weapons of mass destruction may show up in all kinds of places, but that some govern- ments want to voluntarily work with us [to destroy these weapons], and even go beyond that to help reform their military. While we were up in the mountains, the Albanians informed us that there were 79MAN- PAD [Man Portable Air Defense System] missiles in another shed, and we got their agreement to destroy those, which they did in September. We have the opportunity under Nunn-Lugar for the flexibility that’s really required to go after this kind of material and to try to secure it, first of all, and to try to destroy it, if possible, and thus bring a number of situations under better control. FSJ : Are there any plans to apply the program elsewhere? RL: There are no other funds authorized, but clearly I would hope that everyone in the intelligence com- munity and in the military community is on the alert for places where we might work. There are at least 20 labs out there, some of which came from the Atoms for Peace program a long time ago. This was benign and was meant for laboratory use, but spent fuel is still out there. One of the most dramatic of these was the Vinca Project in Belgrade, where my friend and former colleague Sam Nunn’s group, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, helped extract that spent fuel from there, with some U.S. funds, though the Nunn-Lugar prescriptions at the time precluded our being involved in Belgrade. I’m a board member of NTI, so I was involved in that capacity, as a citizen instead of a federal official. FSJ : You’ve long been interested 20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 5 “We have the opportunity under Nunn-Lugar … to go after this kind of material and to try to secure it, first of all, and to try to destroy it, if possible.”