ACCESSION NUMBER:00000
FILE ID:96081301.ECO
DATE:08/13/96
TITLE:13-08-96 FORMER ADVERSARIES GET U.S. TRAINING ON EXPORT CONTROLS
TEXT:
(Commerce Department assists ex-Soviet states) (920)
By Bruce Odessey
USIA Staff Writer
Washington -- The U.S. government has been training some of its former
enemies on how to keep weapons and other sensitive material out of the
wrong hands.
Now that the former Soviet republics are U.S. allies on export
controls instead of the targets of export controls, they get lots of
help from the U.S. Defense Department, State Department, Energy
Department and Customs Service.
Possibly they get the most help from officials in the Commerce
Department, who have conducted more than 40 training programs for
their foreign counterparts in less than two years, even helping to
draft other countries' laws.
"This quickly gets into real coats-off, shirtsleeves-up drafting,
talking," Barry Carter, deputy undersecretary of Commerce, said in an
August 12 interview. "And the sooner the better for that."
During the Cold War, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral
Export Controls (COCOM) aimed to prevent the transfer of militarily
useful technology to the Soviet bloc.
With the Cold War over COCOM dissolved, and the former Soviet bloc
countries have started to cooperate with their former enemies in newer
multilateral regimes, which are aimed at preventing proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction to rogue states and terrorists.
Those regimes are the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the Australia
Group for biological and chemical weapons, the Missile Technology
Control Regime (MTCR) and the Wassenaar Arrangement for advanced
technology and conventional arms.
Carter and his full-time staff of six train their counterparts on how
all this works. Sometimes the trainees come to Washington; sometimes
the Commerce group goes to them.
Sometimes they travel into the field. A group of Russians got to meet
export-control officials in private high-technology companies around
Boston; another group got to hear in Miami how U.S. government agents
intercepted a major illegal shipment there.
The four multilateral regimes' activities form the basis for the
Commerce Department programs, but Carter said that sometimes his group
first has to persuade its trainees about the wisdom of employing
export controls at all.
"When they first hear about it they think it's lost deals, lost jobs,"
he said.
He tells them that all civilized countries should be concerned about
the proliferation of weapons and terrorism.
"If Iran or Iraq were to create problems ... they're a lot closer to
Russia than they are to us," Carter said.
The Commerce Department has a lure for cooperation: To the extent
other countries develop effective export-control systems and become
members of the multilateral regimes, the United States can export more
sophisticated computers and other technology to their industries.
Mostly Carter has found good cooperation. As for the Russians, he
believes the export-control officials he is acquainted with are
committed to cooperation, but they have to fight with other
bureaucrats at home to prevail.
The Commerce Department now has a few years' practice with this
training, starting with the Baltic republics (which are crucial
transfer points) and the countries of Eastern Europe and moving then
to the four former Soviet republics that had nuclear weapons: Russia,
Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
"These are countries -- some of which never existed before -- which
all of a sudden are expected to develop entire legal systems, control
systems," Carter said.
Now the department seeks to expand its training programs to the rest
of Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Carter said a good export-control system, by creating a paper trail of
licenses, should intercept illegal diversions of weapons material or
technology in transit (sometimes over thousands of kilometers) between
the manufacturing plant and the border; re-export controls should
catch them even beyond the border.
"Border guards are paid, if they're lucky, maybe $25 a month in some
of these places," Carter said. "You don't want to pin all your hopes
on the border posts by any means."
A paper trail showing who approved or rejected a license application
makes corruption more difficult, he added.
When Carter's team holds a program on how to operate export controls,
first the team members discuss the underlying policy issues. Then,
drawing on experts from elsewhere in the Commerce Department and other
departments, they discuss laws and regulations, licensing procedures,
enforcement, government-industry relations, automation.
Carter said the trainees seem to have most difficulty understanding
the regimes' lists of controlled items -- not surprisingly since the
notoriously obscure language confuses Western government and industry
officials as well.
Of all the former Soviets only the Russians already had an
export-control system, but they were used to dealing only with
state-run trading companies. The Commerce group teaches them about
achieving voluntary compliance from privately owned companies, a task
ever more important as privatization continues.
For U.S. companies, "it's in their mindset to go along with us," he
said. "In the former Soviet Union you have these new uppity
entrepreneurs who are not even sure why they should cooperate with the
government ... and the government officials are not used to
cooperating with them."
The Commerce Department helped officials from Kazakhstan draft that
country's export-control law, which they proudly showed Carter after
their parliament passed it. Now they want Commerce to help them write
the regulations for implementing the law.
Carter's group will help them with the regulations, possibly as early
as September, but without Carter -- he's leaving government in a few
days to resume his career at Georgetown University.
NNNN
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