We Negotiate to Avoid Catastrophe: A Conversation with Jennie Gromoll

What does it take to prevent catastrophe in a world where the stakes include nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons? This conversation explores the quiet, often unseen work of negotiation that has helped reduce global threats over decades—from Cold War arms control to the dismantlement of weapons programs in regions of conflict. Through an insider’s perspective, the episode examines how trust, verification, patience, and human relationships shape outcomes in high-stakes diplomacy, and why preserving institutional knowledge across generations may be as critical as the agreements themselves.

Our guest, Jennie Gromoll, has four decades of experience in U.S. and international weapons of mass destruction (WMD) policymaking. Jennie worked on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons negotiations and dismantlement of WMD programs. She promotes cross-discipline solutions across the international security field, and preserves lessons learned through archival documents and related oral histories. She is a Senior Fellow associated with Sandia National Laboratories, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), and the Odesa Nonproliferation Center (OdCNP). She is on the Board of Trustees of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC).

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

For decades, the global effort to control and eliminate weapons and mass destruction has unfolded through quiet negotiations, painstaking verification, and sustained cooperation among rivals and allies alike. From Cold War era arms control talks to the dismantlement of clandestine weapons programs in places like Iraq and Libya, progress has depended not only on policy, but on trust, technical expertise, and institutional continuity. What does it take to navigate these high-stake environments and how can today's professionals carry forward the lessons learned from some of the most consequential security challenges of the modern era? Welcome to Brungart Law's Lang Act, where we provide a little extra perspective through conversations with individuals from across the spectrum of society. I'm Maurice Brungart, your host. I enjoy engaging with experienced, knowledgeable, and passionate people for the opportunity it affords to enrich our understanding of the world through their eyes. The more we learn, the more likely we can become better versions of ourselves and guide others towards this aim. Today's guest is Jenny Grommel. Jenny is a senior fellow at the Sandia National Laboratories Cooperative Monitoring Center, a non-resident fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and the Odessa Nonproliferation Center. She is also on the Board of Trustees at the British American Security Information Council. In these roles, she shares guidance derived from nearly four decades of experience from her career at the U.S. Department of State and International Weapons of Mass Destruction Policy. She has worked on bilateral and multilateral nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons negotiations and non-proliferation, as well as the investigation and dismantlement of weapons and mass destruction programs in the former Soviet Union, Edoc, and Libya. She is very focused on preserving the records and oral histories of the past 60 years of efforts to control and reduce weapons of mass destruction so as to share lessons learned for continuing and urgent needs across disciplines in the near and distant future. Good morning and welcome to the program, Jenny.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Morning.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Well, tell our audience a bit about yourself, how you went from Peoria, Illinois to being a subject matter expert in the realm of non-uh nuclear proliferation.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Well, I was very lucky to hit a unique period of history when I went to school in Vienna and I worked for the former finance minister of the Shah of Iran at UNIDO, the Industrial Development Organization, and then at Chase Manhattan Bank, and then at the U.S. Embassy. The ambassador there was Helena Fantam, who had been Ronald Reagan's personal secretary for 20 years, and he sent her back as the ambassador. And Felix Black was the number two, the DCM. And I worked for the cultural attaché. Kate Cove, who was well the two women who were held hostage in Iran the whole 444 days. And why that was so important, just my junior year abroad, Indiana, partly because of my love of music. It was the perfect fit, but it was also the front line in East-West relations. And I wanted to try each one of these different organizations. And I found out that before I'd even gotten out of undergrad, I already knew I didn't want to work at any of them. And the important thing that kicked off my career was this Felix Bloch asked me if I would write a study on the peace marches going on in Germany and the effect on Austria. And the reason was I knew students and diplomats and bankers and UN people. So I wrote this report. And remarkably, that report and also being there on the front lines when it was the height of the Soviet era, this was 1983 and 84, really influenced me. And I went on my spring break for two weeks to Egypt on the Nile River cruise and then to Israel and drove across the Sinai. And that was very unusual. It was a German-speaking trip that I hopped on at the last minute, and to see both of them next to each other was very extraordinary. And so I always try to tell people with their kids make sure they see the controversial places as early as they can in their lives because seeing both sides helps a lot in your view of the world. So that's what started things. When I first came to Washington, my first job was NATO long-term planning. The fastest way to get a job at that time was to work for a defense contractor who could pay the money to get you a security clearance. But my time was spent at the Pentagon with the assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Atomic Energy, Rich Wagner, who was a famous character. And I remember calling home and saying, I have my first acronym, the Slow Pig, which stood for Senior Level Weapons Protection Group. And it was really fascinating work in the halls of the Pentagon. I'll never forget one day Caspar Weinberger is literally running past me and he trips and all his papers go across the floor. And we both look around and there's no one in sight. He's clearly incredibly late to something. And he sort of looks at me like, Can I trust you not to look at these? And I put them all back with him and handed them back. And the irony was that my next job was the Senate Iran-Contra Committee. And the reason why that was also fascinating was that the man I worked for at the UN, Jose Mahadi, had been the former finance minister of the Shah of Iran, and I couldn't understand him. And so I went downstairs to try to learn Parsi. Then in the springtime at Chase Manhattan Bank, we had the East-West accounts that I was very interested in, but also the Shadra and Shatila refugee camp funds to rebuild them. And the German banking terms I became familiar with. And then in the summertime again, I was working for Kate Cove, who I last year met, and she re-signed her book called Guest of the Revolution. And it had been exactly 40 years since I had worked for her. And what made this fascinating was that at that time, and probably still now, you were supposed to do a rotation through the different agencies and time on Capitol Hill. So as I tell people, take the internships, learn what you can. You never know what comes of it. But in this case, the irony was that, and I don't know if you'll remember, our audience will remember the Senate or on Contra Committee, but Gorbanifar was the main interlocuteur with the National Security Council with Ali North. And the process was that they were exchanging arms for hostages. So I could understand Gorbanifar with this heavy Persian accent. That was helpful because of Jose Mahabi. The German banking terms are the same in Vienna that they are in Zurich. That was helpful. And Bruce Langen had been the head of the mission in Iran, and Kate had introduced me to him when I first came to Washington, and I had gotten to know some of the other hostages. So I had the equivalent of a clearance. And the materials that were being transferred were tow missiles. And in my NATO long-term planning job, I was um I had literally the clearances for research, development, technology, and engineering for the planning stages of these missiles. So literally I had the clearances for the missiles being exchanged. So I ended up being the person, it was on the top floor of the Hart Senate office building where the ballroom was, and they built one of these fake floors and brought in a bank vault. And I was the one who went and found and accepted all the documents, all the evidence, and decided if it went to the senators or to the lawyers, who at the time were important New York lawyers who you still see defending people. And it was the first time there was a House and Senate committee together. And no this was such a political thing that the Reagan administration had been caught up in that no senator or congressman dared to not be in their seat. So what I always remember is going in and the questions from Nunn and Inoue and Cohen and Boren, Lee Hamilton was what's the latest? What have you found? What's the latest? So I was sort of the lowest level person in the Senator on contract committee. They were mostly Justice Department lawyers. But I also had a seat right inside the door. So people would see me and they would go into the bank vault and then they would come back out and see me. So I couldn't have had a more front row to Washington politics or the way the government functioned, or even to these people. And at the time, uh again, the music connection, I was walking down the street in Georgetown, and there was an Oliver Skinner organ playing at Georgetown Presbyterian Church and this famous Scottish minister. So I went in, and at that church at that time was Bud McFarlane, Dick Thornburg, James Lessinger, and I was on the Deacon's Outreach Committee with their wives and really got to know them. So the irony was that when Bud McFarlane walked through the door on the Senate Iran Contra Committee in the Hart office building, it was me he saw. And when he came out of the bank vault, it was me that he saw. And it was my materials. I knew what they were talking about without being in the bank vault because I was the lucky one who got to see things. And again, because I had this strange combination of sort of clearances, um, I was uh in the in this um front end of history, as you say.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Well, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

So that was my start in Washington.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Well, that's quite a start, and uh you actually made me think of the sort of uh cliche definition of luck, opportunity meeting preparation. Uh so going back uh slightly, what do you think prepared you uh best for the opportunity you found yourself in, and then now rubbing shoulders with all these individuals? What do you think initially set you up for success? Whether it came from your upbringing, uh your musical skill uh and the the education you received in that area. What was it?

SPEAKER_00 11:11

My motto in life is it never hurts to ask. And a good handshake, never to be forgotten. That's how you share your intent, your purpose, your your emotional connection to that person that you intend to do well by then. Um I grew up my first six years in Brussels. My dad worked for Caterpillar in Peoria. I came to Washington and I had no house, no car, no job. And um that summer, and I always try to tell people this, um, my first interview in Washington was with Andy Marshall, who was the famous head of net assessment at Pentagon. And he taught me what what the terms were about slots and positions and how very few people would have them, and Congress allocates them to the agencies, so whomever you're speaking to doesn't really have the choice. They either have one or they don't. But to make sure that everybody I spoke to connected me to two or three other people that they knew. Everybody knows somebody else to pass you on. So I spent the entire summer of 1985 interviewing, starting at a very high level with absolutely fascinating people who I ended up knowing all of my life and still working with now, even though they're older. And that was the tip. Always ask if they can pass you to more people you can get more guidance from. So one of the things I try to tell young people is it was the it was the most profound internship I could have ever had not getting a job because I spent the entire summer talking to all these people. And the musical angle was I had a part-time job at the Washington Opera selling opera tickets. So I had just come from Vienna and I knew the latest operas and the conductors and the singers and all this stuff. Um, and in the basement of the Kennedy Center was this tiny cafeteria, and Barishnikov was there that summer. So I'd go down at lunchtime and get to know these infamous artists. So it never hurts to ask. And that's basically how I ended up there. My interview, I said um uh um the group that I was in at uh Science Applications International Corporation, which was famous at the time for having just developed the wing keel of the America's Cup racing boat. So sailing's my other thing. Um, the Annapolis office had just developed this fascinating sort of wing that would keep the boat closer to the water and make it go faster. And they took that boat apart. And later, when I was in Geneva, they put it back together again, and Dennis Connor was sailing in the America's Cup in Lake Geneva on a boat that the people I knew had designed. So it was a really cool company, and at the time terrorism was a big deal, and they developed a machine to um uh determine plastic explosives, which was a very big deal. So this was a high-end technology um company, but they had um in Tyson's Corner on the ninth floor, the beautiful view of the the mountains, um, this um um uh NATO long-term policy um well, it it was a a policy shop, and I was on a contract for this NATO work. Um so fate, and it never hurts to ask. But I'd asked them why didn't you have a PhD or a graduate student? And they said, because they could tell by my handshake and by the look on my face, I was determined, I would stay late, I would follow through. Um, and all this was just shared on a Friday night at five o'clock. Saturday morning, they said, Can you start on Monday? Monday, I thought, well, this is great. I lived at Eastern Market. I drive all the way to Tyson's Corner. I'm like, well, you know, this isn't so bad. What an exciting job. I'll actually be at the Pentagon. Um, and then I figured out it was Columbus Day, and uh that's the distinction between government, which gets Columbus Day off, and private industry. So that's sort of how I got started. It it literally, and I always tell people this um, it's it's a combination of sort of fate, and as my mother used to say, you make your own love.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Uh stepping aside briefly, quick observation here, springing forward. Do you think the value on this type of networking you were exposed to, whether you took the initiative or others could see from your uh commitment and work ethic that they would uh introduce you to others, do you find that same type of um trait exists in today's environment? Or not as much?

SPEAKER_00 16:20

I absolutely do.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

What's so interesting about what's happening now with this generation, and I have a son who's 28, and he also takes this to heart on it never hurts to ask. Um I do a lot to help. Um a few years ago, there was um I wrote an article on a fading pipeline, and it was about if you had the chemical weapons inspection um and you called for inspectors and no one came. One of the things I spent time on was to ensure we had counterparts in these negotiations to make sure that the programs we had in the US were either open to or we started new ones in different regions. So I did the Middle East Peace Process at one point, and I also spent a lot of time in Ukraine and Russia and this connection to the Odessa Nonproliferation Center. They have a summer school that brings together Europeans and Russians and Ukrainians, and the irony of that was I could write to young Russians in the chat without using my State Department email address and really get to know the people out in the regions that were separated from Moscow. But the reason why I'm so absolutely certain that they have even more of this work ethic is that in the process of the last five or six years, there have been a lot of fellowships that have been set up, really impressive ones. And so there are people that are doing these fellowships who we get to know. We know their work ethic, and we know that the job market's nearly impossible. So you really get to know their character traits. And one of the things that um is really a crisis is that for international organization jobs, you need seven years of professional experience. So you'll get these global people that I know that are in their 20s and 30s, and they have these ridiculously competitive fellowships, but they those aren't considered work experience, and so they can't get on a career ladder. So to go back to sort of my lessons from the last 40 years, it's critical going forward that we do things intergenerationally cross-domain or discipline cross-regional, and then this crossover. We have got to help this incredibly dedicated generation and mid-career people who are forgotten, who don't have these fellowships, stay connected and have opportunities because it's not their fault that the job market is what it is. And again, how fortunate I was that in my 40 years, it was the heyday of arms control. We had a lot of frontline non-proliferation on-the-ground efforts to get rid of weapons mass destruction. I didn't choose that, I just was fortunate. So I tried to help a lot of people figure out sort of what's coming. But the essence of this, again, is with an example. The Kenyans would come to our biological weapons convention meetings, and all three of these treaties on nuclear, chemical, and biological multilateral treaties, they have an assistance article, and they would come and say, we need help with disease eradication. The people who could do that best were the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, who have a technical secretariat who could write an entire plan for TC fly eradication and literally come in and do it using nuclear technology to eradicate a bio and a global health crisis. It made sense that global health we were talking about in the Biological Weapons Convention. So all these conventions have assistance and have direct relations to sort of your everyday life. And if we hadn't looked at, or I'm a very rare, there's only one other person that I know who has done multilateral treaties that cross nuclear, chem, bio, landmines. I mean, it's just been a fascinating period of time. And that's a rare thing. So when I retired exactly a year ago from the State Department, I tried to figure out what's what can I bring, what can I do to thank those people who were 25 years older than I was, and it was um to bring these communities together. And so now I'm doing a lot. We declassified the negotiating record for the nuclear non-proliferation treaty 50th anniversary. And since then I said there was an agency which we can talk about in a different question, but the arms control and disarmament agency records had never been touched before we went back and declassified these nuclear nonproliferation treaty negotiations. And so the man who oversaw that at the State Department, I said, You can't, you just can't leave that there and go ahead with what's called the foreign relations of the US, the FRUS, and not touch our ECTA documents. So a year ago he said, I declassified. Classified 900 boxes, 2.5 million pieces of paper. And I sort of will them to you. We'll get them from the archives at state into the National Archives and Records Administration, NARA. And so what I'm trying to do now is to have the original documents with the ambassador and those of us who wrote those cables and the next generation to do oral histories so that the three generations are together. So I can do cross-disciplines so that we can look at the different treaties and we can host them in the Library of Congress or someplace auspicious so that people are careful about their documents. And right now is a ridiculously historic period of time. And I'm a little worried that there won't be official records that are saved in the National Archives. Because if you don't ask for assistance from the experts, and much of my realm and other agencies last year were my office of policy coordination was eliminated. The people that are left aren't being asked to draft things, so it doesn't go up, so it doesn't get saved in the archives. So I'll stop at that, but I mean everything's tied in together.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Speaking of history and uh your retirement from a year ago, what was the name of the office where you worked at the State Department for the benefit of our audience?

SPEAKER_00 23:27

It was called the Office of Policy Coordination. And my role in the International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau, and it was attached to the front office to the assistant secretary. And my role was um senior advisor for Europe and Eurasia. And part of that was to coordinate the G7 EU and NATO uh WMD policy.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

And what was and was that the name of the office when you started?

SPEAKER_00 23:56

Huh. Well, as they say Impuria, it doesn't play Empuria, it'll play everywhere else, and all politics is local. Um, I met my husband, who was a visiting uh professor in 1991 or two, and he became the head of the predecessor of the office I was in, which was called Strategic Affairs, Strategic Transition, and he did the US-China talks, the six-party talks with North Korea, the opening of Burma, um, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, all that. And what was interesting is that when he retired, our assistant secretary said, We have no expert in the regional affairs office on Europe and Russia. We're gonna move you. So I ended up being in the office where I knew all the young people and their families. I was sort of, you know, the the wife of the boss type.

SPEAKER_01 24:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Um, but it was just um a welcome place to be. And this office was sort of famous for people um being tested and being the true experts in each one of the regions, and that's why we were the policy coordinator policy coordinators across our bureau, but between the three bureaus that made up um what's called an under-secretary family at the State Department. So, four levels down as an under-secretary for international security and arms control. Um, John Bolton was a famous um undersecretary in that role. And um, they had three bureaus. One was political military, where they do the overflights of military across other countries or using coordination basically with the military for the State Department on our issues, international security issues, a different bureau that arms control, verification, and compliance, and ours was international security and non-proliferation. So we did a combination of the treaties, but also there are a lot of non-proliferation arrangements um which are like-minded countries which try to um keep um chemical or biological uh weapons, um parts and materials away from bad guys, as well as these multilateral treaties that have 190 members.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

And when you started off demographically, uh, I mean, what was the office like? I mean, you you're you're a young woman, you can speak foreign languages, you you know came out of a musical scholarship background. And you know, beyond that, what what kept you there? I mean, as opposed to pursuing a career in music. So what were your colleagues like at the time?

SPEAKER_00 26:51

My very first job was for the director of the arms control and disarmament agency. And ACTA was set up by John F. Kennedy to be an independent voice for the US government on arms control and verification. And this was so that the opinions wouldn't be rolled in with the State Department. China's a good example. We could speak to what they were doing without it being rolled into sort of openings to China. You have to remember this was 1980. By that point, it was 1987, and so what was fascinating about that was that the office where I sat had been George Marshall's suite. It was the the 21st Street entrance of the State Department, was the original Defense Department. And so my boss, the director of ACTA, sat at George Marshall's desk. And it's a very historic space, and that certainly had an impression on me as my first job in government. And his name was Major General. Of course, you know, major generals go by major general, not their first name, um, to have a two-star general as my first boss in government. Um, um, Bill Burns, and he was the father of Bill Burns, who has just been our deputy secretary of state and the director of the CIA. So an auspicious family. And the first thing we worked on was intermediate nuclear forces, reduction, treaty, ratification. So again, that's the height of the Soviet Union. Um the reason why, one reason why I'm so interested in history and saving it is that one day he comes in and he says, Welcome to the Freedom of Information Act, FYA. And it was my birthday, and I was born on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And these were the Cuban Missile Crisis documents. We didn't have computers, so it was stacks and stacks sitting on my huge government desk, which were the norm then. And ever since then, I've been fascinated by what's in the back corner of people's safes and on preserving history. So the time um I was sent off in my next job to Geneva to be the US representative to the Conference on Disarmament, which was in the League of Nations room in Geneva, which is a pretty impressive place. And um, the reason why I could be so young was that the main focus for the US and the Soviets were the bilateral talks up the hill at the Geneva mission. And so I was doing the multilateral talks, which didn't matter so much to us, on nuclear weapons free zones, negative security assurances, outer space. Um, but for other countries, this conference on disarmament was the centerpiece of international security for them. They didn't have NATO, they didn't have nuclear weapons. This was the place where things were debated and decided, and it was this same forum that negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This was the room where all this happened. And concurrently, I was helping my boss, Bob Nikilak, with the CW, the chemical weapons bilaterals with the Soviets in a place called the Villa, and at the same time doing these multilateral talks. My counterparts were people who went on to be foreign ministers and ambassadors in New York. And an example of one of them was Rafael Grossi, who is the current Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and he's currently running for UN Secretary General. So one of the things I intend to ask him if he achieves that position is could you please try to institute a change in the amount of years people have to have of professional experience before they can get a UN job or a NATO job or an OSCE job. It's nice to have a friend who might be in a position who could affect change like that. So I was the only woman in the CD for a long, long time. There was another woman who came, Martine Letz, who was a very famous Australian. And she had short hair, leather pantsuits. She had a great influence on me because I was just the opposite. I was always trying to hide and sort of blend in. But as the US rep, um, there wasn't too much chance of that. Um, and so I learned by fire. My counterpart was uh Sergei Batsanov, who was very young. His father was very important in the Soviet government, and when Yeltsin came, they told him he could have his father's job if he would help fire his father's counterparts. He said no. Um drove to Geneva on the three roads from Moscow to Geneva and has been there ever since. But he was my counterpart who was too young to be made Soviet ambassador. So here we were, two incredibly young people, um, supposed enemies, but we would always go back and do our reporting and our missions until so late we would almost miss the official occasions. And so we'd so often be sat together. He had a great sense of humor. And one day, when they said you were supposed to dress as your national dress, he came with a Coca-Cola t-shirt, very short, almost Bart Simpson father-like. Um little bit of a girth, big white tennis shoes. Um, and he was driving and dressing, obviously, as sort of the classic American in the Soviet view. So I was by myself for a long time, but one of the things I emphasize and have always emphasized is we have to be careful that we don't segregate ourselves off into groups. My father had been an engineer, I had in my DNA uh technical interest, and um, we had um obviously laboratories and lots of people at home to give us technical advice. And for the chemical weapons negotiations that started multilaterally shortly after that, we had huge delegations that had all the expertise. So I didn't need to be a physicist or a chemist or a biologist. I needed to know how to negotiate, and I needed to know enough to be able to speak for the US in a responsible way. And so um I was there sort of by myself, but my boss at home, Kathy Krittenberger, had done the same thing in Helsinki and in Stockholm and all the talks before that, and so we would rotate back and forth to Geneva. So I had incredible role models, but to make my point, I grew up with everybody together, and everything that I do for fellowships and helping people is both for men and for women. Guess I think that if we get too segregated, it's a little bit of sort of risk reverse discrimination. True. I grew up with everybody together, and I think we ought to continue to do that.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

Um, in terms of the work, so pulling back the curtain a little bit, if you could give us a layman sort of view of you know, what does non-proliferation negotiation look like when it comes to the work?

SPEAKER_00 34:42

You know, it's it's thank you for asking. Um until last year, I was a consummate insider. I had been literally in the State Department headquarters right there by the Lincoln Memorial for 38 years. And when people, when I when I left, um everything I had usually been sort of the right hand to the ambassador. I wasn't used to speaking on my own, I wasn't used to thinking on my own. I'm really good at government talking points, but writing, and people said, No, we want you to to talk. And I said, I'm not an ambassador, I'm I'm not comfortable doing this, until I realized that the thing that I could share was an insider's view of what it was like all those years on the inside. And so the way things would work is that when you're at headquarters, the State Department coordinates between the agencies. So our counterparts were the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, later on, the Department of Homeland Security after 9-11, the intelligence communities, of which there are many. Um, and our job was to coordinate. And my job as the right hand of the ambassador was to be sort of the coordinator of interagency meetings. So the first decision is um if we'll choose to negotiate, the legal department has to come out with a circular 175, which is agreement that we will enter into negotiations on a certain, particularly in bilateral arrangements, we'll we'll enter into, as the um spokespeople for the United States, a legally binding agreement. And for the multilateral talks, um, these treaties started with US Soviet agreement that we would reduce what we had, and then they were multilateralized and taken to Geneva. So the way it works is the treaty text is is put down usually by us in coordination with the Soviets, and then other countries sort of argue for their position. The difficulty of being the US representative is we have such an in outsized influence in multilateral things that it's very hard to take what's discussed between all these agencies and come up with a position and then send the position to negotiators. And then, if you're the negotiator, deploying US guidance in a room with up to 190 countries. Picture the UN General Assembly Chamber that you see during the UN high-level week where the president speaks. This is where the plenary meetings are of these big international meetings. Um I spoke to a class in France yesterday, and one of the questions was how many delegations, what language, and the UN language, there are six UN languages, but the way between New York, which is the UN headquarters, and Geneva, which is the second headquarters, and Vienna, which is the third, in Geneva, everything's done in French. So US and USSR, we used to sit next to each other. But when it became Russia, they ended up sitting in front of us. So we had 26 people on our delegation and they had exactly the same number. And what would go on was that bilaterally you'd be speaking with the Russians or the Soviets. Um, and then when you would get to the big, big meeting room, one of the things my boss taught me that I think is important for people to know about negotiations is that you'd spend six weeks at home and about six weeks negotiating in Geneva, and then six weeks at home, and you go back and forth. When I first started in the conference on disarmament, we also rotated to New York for three months a year to do UN first committee on disarmament. The way that works is there's a UN Disarmament Commission that discusses what the issues are in May. Then in the summertime, people write down what the proposal is in a UN resolution that's voted on. And then if the votes are high enough, an experts group is started, and then multilateral negotiations would go on in the conference on disarmament. So there's a process for how things get going. But to speed ahead, finally, um the important thing about negotiating multilaterally or in your daily life with more than one person is that we would have very complex guidance, which is the cable that comes that you read from on what has been officially agreed. We would game out where all the countries would be. So when the spotlight was turned on us the first day we'd come back from six weeks at home, the whole negotiation in several cases hung on what we said. And my longtime boss, Donald Maley, would sort of lean back and put his leg up and touch his fingers together. And then people knew oh my God, the US isn't just gonna come out with where they are. We're gonna have to sort of defend our positions. So the allies would have to stay up to speed and not just lean on us. Um the makeup in these talks where there was a Western European and others group. There's Western Europe plus Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea. And then there was the Eastern group, which was the Eastern Bloc at the time, and then the non-aligned. And these were countries that weren't east or west. Um and very often we had antagonistic kind of positions. So you'd sit in the back of these big UN chambers on the right, very often were the French and the Germans, remember, everything's alphabetically, and um the other countries, South Africa, um, Iran, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, they would have their own strong opinions. So they'd sort of go after it, which would sort of renew where we were before we left six weeks earlier. And when they were back in the Gordian knot, Don would sit forward and share our guidance. And the difference was that if he had done it at the beginning, the point of this is listen. Listen to what's happening, listen to what people need, because the US can either be the antagonist or the bully or the saving grace. So he would have the same guidance, and it was like riding in on a white horse that would basically save the day. Um, where if he had done it when he first got there, it would nearly shut things down. So that's how the process worked. And then the biggest problem is you come back, we're the only country that doesn't have sort of a rubber stamp or a very um supportive, sort of automatic uh parliament, um, and things have to be ratified by Congress. And so the reason why we haven't, the Conference on Disarmament, I was there when all the big treaties were negotiated. Um, and since then, um, New Start, which was um reduction of nuclear weapons, um, was the last one that was ratified uh by the US Congress. So it's been 25 years since the Conference on Disarmament has been able to negotiate because the overlying process of all this is based on consensus, and that was a US-Soviet-Russian agreement that the non-aligned could have outnumbered us. And so you had to join consensus for things to go forward. Well, the problem with that is when Pakistan doesn't want to do a fissile material cutoff treaty, everything's by consensus, and that particular treaty, which was the next one up, couldn't move forward.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

Since you obviously had the opportunity to work with counterparts uh from other countries, allied and adversarial, and harking back to the days of the Soviet Union, um give us a little of your insight, your observations, uh, the dangers of conflating, you know, opposing ideologies with guaranteed threats or hostility. And by that I mean, so we developed the first uh atomic weapon, then the Soviets. We were definite adversaries, Cold War, uh, right? Um, and you know, the rhetoric was not friendly. And if I'm and please correct me if I misunderstand, but under Eisenhower, the doctrine Was, you know, in the event of any communist aggression, we would basically launch a preemptive strike. We would be the first to hit, and not just the Soviet Union, but the Chinese as well, just for good measure. And they had nothing to do with it, right? That was part of the plan. Yet on the ground level, folks like you and your Soviet counterpart are talking to each other. And, you know, you see the human element, uh, the human side of these individuals. You know, are they actually crazy communists? Are they crazy ideologues? Uh so the crux of my question here, you know, being able to delve below the surface, and what should people know about, you know, countries that we're we're dealing with that may want to pursue a nuclear weapons program, or it appears to be, but that does not necessarily mean the same thing as a guaranteed threat. And that we can talk to these people.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

It's incredibly timely that you asked this. One of the things that one of my best examples was that our counterparts, um, I was working, that the Soviets had a huge offensive bioweapons program, and one of the leading voices in that was our counterpart in the negotiations. But when we went to Iraq and there were weapons of mass destruction, for the record, there were weapons of mass destruction. I have pieces of them. I saw biochemical weapons.

SPEAKER_01 45:34

I hope you didn't bring them home.

SPEAKER_00 45:37

I do have a bag of bacillus and thraces, and the the label on that bag had been the hotel receipt for the Al Rashid Hotel that was very famous in Baghdad for having a tile lobby floor that was George Bush Sr.'s face. So, yes, I have things I can show you. But what was fascinating was we were on a bioweapons inspection and we were going to destroy one of the famous um bioweapons facilities, Al-Hakim. And um the base before we went was in Bahrain, and we had these multilateral negotiations, multinational uh teams. And the man, Oleg Ignatieev, who I knew was a huge figure in the offensive bioweapons program, um, was on this team. And um the Russian helicopters were down, and we had to spend two weeks in Bahrain at the holiday in. And so he goes swimming. And I come down in the afternoon, and he is a lobster. He's the palest person alive, spending time in 140 degrees in a swimming pool. And I being fair skinned, had brought um sunscreen, and you can bet that our relations were different after I saved his sari soul with sunscreen, where it was literally 140 degrees when we were in traveling around Iraq for the next few weeks. And I remember once um Tikrit and Samarra were where um Saddam Hussein was from, and we went up on a beautiful sort of spiral uh monument, and at the top he said, Oh, let's take our picture. And I said, Oh, for the file. I can imagine how thick my file is now. And he laughed, and we both knew that it was for the file, so I took one as well. But it was it was such a human thing where he was famous for taking a dog's, a live dog's head and sewing it onto another dog's body so that and it survived. I mean, he was but on the human level, um, he was a really fascinating, older, gentlemanly person. When I was at um one of our multilateral meetings in Washington not too many years ago, I was talking to Anatoly Antonov, who was the Russian ambassador to the US, and he said, I missed the good old days of arms control, because even when we try now, the atmosphere isn't the same. And one of the funny things about meeting in the concrete tiny place called the villa in Geneva was they always had these nut cookies that were hard as rock. And literally, when you were new to the these meetings, people would break their teeth on them. If you've been there for a while, you knew to suck them, and we laughed about how we all knew where to sit, and we had this familiarity. Wasn't really trust, but it was familiarity. You knew what the other people would say. So, one of the things I try to tell people is um, particularly then when I was so young, and people would say, Come along as the note taker. This wasn't to be the secretary, this was to let you into the room so you could take the notes. And one of the things that happened is the Soviet ambassador would be very gruff, I did not say that. And then my boss would give me sort of a Carol Burnett kind of you know, ear thing, and I would read it back in perfect Soviet English. Um volunteer, be in the room, because I would have missed all of that if someone hadn't said, Come along, see how this works. Um, so the human element is the way things move forward. And what's fascinating about what's going on now is that we know these Iranians that are being killed, Ali Larajani yesterday, they were the negotiators for the Iran um joint comprehensive program of action um holding the nuclear weapons program. The other thing is that the leadership in Moscow, Lavrov, Mamedov, Antonov, Bastr Lyanov, who is now their ambassador in Vienna, he was part of our G8 groups that went to the different countries five or six times a year we met. We know these people. This was their life's work as well. And yet they can't hold back the fact that they are vetoing and well, they are breaking consensus and they are not allowing these treaties to do what they need to do. The chemical weapons use in Syria. You can't imagine the stalling and the efforts and the assassination weapons they've been using with Navalny and the people in Salisbury. They're they're caught they're ruining the treaties we negotiated together. So one of my big worries is when they all pass from the scene, there won't be leadership who understands the international system, much less built it, much less the weapons of mass destruction that we were negotiating. So I'm I'm it's the human element that keeps us together without question. And it's not maybe trust, but this is where Reagan came up with this trust but verify when he and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in 87, which I was sort of observing up front. Um, make sure that you can check on it. And there have been huge developments in what they call national technical means, which is basically satellite um confirmation of weapon systems and stuff. But for instance, with bioweapons, a pathogen can be used either for a vaccine or for a weapon. You can't prove a negative, and so there are treaties that can't be verified, and we're still working on that. But again, the way the Russians are behaving now, they're not allowing these multilateral groups to continue to negotiate. And so the system is collapsing. So my way of fighting back is trying to save the record and the world history so that whatever is built after this um at least has the wisdom of what we did right and what we did wrong in this sort of remarkable period of history.

SPEAKER_01 52:19

Speaking of um leadership and the the human side, uh, and using that brief moment, which almost sounds Hollywood-esque, when you're alone in the hallway and Casper Weinberger is running down the hall in trips. You know, he he's part of the cream of the leadership, and here he is falling like you know, some schoolboy, and papers going everywhere, uh, and obviously at a very emotionally vulnerable moment. I mean, that uh and he had to get somewhere, and I I am sure that only increased his stress. But from your experience, um what would you say that you saw similarly but on the positive side of people setting uh uh a proper path, an example uh for making uh the right decisions? Um what what what did you observe uh as well as people at their most vulnerable times and and how they recovered from it?

SPEAKER_00 53:37

Well, the irony of that example is my very next job only a few months later was a senator on country committee. And one of the things I remember at that time, they called it a buck slip, and it was a little piece of yellow piece of paper where you where a secretary would write down a message from somebody else. And I remember finding one of those buck slips between Caspar Weinberger and George Schultz, like swearing at each other. So I saw a lot of the sort of interpersonal stuff only shortly after that sort of encounter with Caspar Weinberger. But the things that stick with you over all these years and with all these foreigners, is um the effect of decency and the separation of your national position with your personal attributes. If you're I'm sort of famous for always telling the truth and just being straight. The benefit of the the Dutch and the Americans is that we're famous for not sugarcoating or even saying things in a in a beautiful way. We just tell the truth. And I think no matter what your position is, always tell the truth because they they often say your reputation can be gone in a second. The the way you negotiate is not what's in it for us. As an American, we look at it for what's in it for us. That's your job as a negotiator. But what makes a multilateral negotiator is what's in it for them. What is it they want? What is it that they need? Studying the other side's cultural, their history, their laws helps you understand their perspective. So if you want to be effective in life, and you're a lawyer, you appreciate this, is to know what makes people tick. And then just have an honest conversation with them. And this is what I learned from Colin Powell and Tom Pickering and all these people that were remarkable leaders, was a friendliness to be able to listen to anyone and their perspectives, the generosity of listening to them and letting them know you heard allows a trust that may just be a tiny string. But if a small country and I have a conversation in the bathroom and they've never been spoken to by a US diplomat before, if I care what their country's doing, or if I know from reading The Economist the day before what's happening there, has a huge impact. So it's the coordinator of the delegations. I always used to tell our 26 people give me the list of the countries you know or you'd like to talk to because we need to spread out and not talk to ourselves. So I think the lesson over all this is put yourself in other people's shoes. I spoke yesterday with a close friend of mine who's in Odessa with a four and a half year old, and she's having to tell her that's rain at night when the drones go over. This morning she sent me pictures of all the apartment buildings that had been hit. Put yourself in their shoes, and it will help you understand why people are scrappy or desperate or in fear of their lives if they give away a position. Um, as I said, all politics are local. Everybody involved is a person, and I think that that's probably the key to getting things done is those basic human traits that always have made great leaders, is trust but verify, and um be kind, it goes a long way.

SPEAKER_01 57:51

Speaking of um of how people act, do you find and I'm not specifically referencing just our current climate, uh, but do you find in the past decade or so we have a tendency to rush to judgment and action vice perhaps walking to interpretation and an actual accomplishment? Um or no, it's then it's still substantively all the same. The form has just changed.

SPEAKER_00 58:40

What's interesting over these 40 years is technology has changed. And the people who do technology and the people who do policy. And one of the reasons why it's so interesting to be coordinated, connected now with this India National Laboratory is the cooperative monitoring center. This cooperative monitoring center was set up because the Indians and Pakistanis or the Middle East counterparts we knew in Geneva just couldn't talk to each other. Very often, if you take them off-site in some beautiful place like Albuquerque and Santa Fe, they're able to talk to each other and we would put before them verification technology so they had something to talk about which wasn't political, and they had movement that they could make on the technical front. And very often our scientists, and even to this day, our National Academies of Science are talking to their Russian and their Chinese counterparts. They can always talk science when we get stuck on policy. So I don't think there's a change in the way things are done. I think technology is sort of pulling us to do things in a way that isn't, and maybe the answer is not as human as it used to be. We had no computers when I started it. Everything was physical, pieces of paper. And now, of course, AI, disinformation, saber, cyber, all of this is affecting the communications in your personal life. But everything we do around the world as diplomats is listened to, and um misinterpretation is probably more extreme now than it's ever been. So it's maybe sort of the the world is moving beyond the ancient art of diplomacy. And the question is, isn't truth and these personal connections even more important? And seeing people in person. This is a big crisis, and cutting budgets is that people can't travel. It's I think the problems are becoming more complex for each person to understand. But then the real question is where is the truth?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:59

Well, speaking of the truth, do you think it's actually pragmatic and realistic to be honest? Um, you know, especially when you're dealing with classified information. But beyond that, I mean, uh even in domestic politics, uh, we see you know, time and time again, there's a tendency to not answer the question, uh, to deflect, to delay, uh, or just deny. Um, you know, it it is it really possible? Uh, and then when you're dealing with adversarial nations or governments, to be completely honest.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:40

What's the harm in being honest? The way you become trusted is you don't sugarcoat, you don't hide, you don't deflect. Obviously, with classified, that's what we do at home. But if you're a multilateral negotiator, you know exactly where the line is.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:56

You use classified for teaching yourself what their positions are or what our technologies are and what you're defending. But when you're on the ground, and this doesn't change because we're still humans, I think it's probably appreciated even more and needed even more. I mean, what's interesting about the war that's going on is that more and more drones and AI are being used for military applications, and the human is being taken out of the loop. So that's one of the things we're trying to negotiate are codes of conduct for military use of artificial intelligence. Has there ever been a time when the truth was more important?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:42

Well, uh, one of the things I find interesting in going to you know weapons of mass destruction, especially when it comes to our own presidential elections, uh, that no one's ever asked a presidential candidate, you know, why in your right mind would you want to be the one responsible for pulling the trigger? Because at the end of the day, you know, so whoever's occupying that chair, you know, they will have the capacity, and it's been you know, the policy of the United States actually leans towards a preemptive strike. Who in their right mind would want to occupy a position where one of the work requirements, you know, to put it at a granular level, you know, it's to be responsible for the deaths of millions of people, you know, justified or not, that's a whole other uh discussion. But no one's I've ever found has ever presented this during a present presidential debate. Um I want to go to briefly your your focus on the the work history uh that you're developing about negotiations and uh a couple of observations that you've picked up on that are applicable to today.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:01

Um in negotiations, when you have just a quick clarification, it's called a two-finger intervention. I would recommend people see the Netflix film House of Dynamite that came out last year.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:16

I think it's it's the first mass distributed insider view of how few seconds you have to make that decision on ending humanity and all the fail-says that may not likely won't work. And this is the essence of deterrence to be strong enough that people know that you can deter them and competent enough that they know, like in the case where there have been problems, one person on the Soviet side would say, This doesn't sound right. There's only one incoming missile, that's not how an attack would happen. The human element has kept us alive. The human element is gonna keep us alive, and it also reminds you how critical it is that the advisors to the president have some background in WMD or have legions of we experts there 24-7 to quickly answer the question. You must surround yourself with experts in WMD because one of the things that we were going to touch on, you know, what's the scariest scenario? What's the technology that's coming or that's been here? And it is bioweapons. If COVID didn't wake the world up, the idea of, and at one point the Soviets were working on a combination of smallpox and Ebola without any vaccine, this will be the end of humanity in a way that we may not realize is creeping over us all. It's not nuclear. Nuclear, there could be mistakes, and we're all gone. So you're not gonna notice the difference. With bioweapons, it's insidious. We can share it with each other. And maybe this gets back to your question on sort of how you um look at this period of time, and it's um to be prepared over the horizon, you have to look back. And we are at a really interesting juncture. So those of us who live through for me, I had 10 years of the Soviet Union. Senator Nunn and Senator Luger determined that millions of dollars needed to be spent by the US to help employ the scientists who were suddenly on the streets when the Soviet Union collapsed. Who's doing that with the Iranian scientists who may still be alive? Um who is willing them to come out and share their expertise for good? This is a huge turning point in history. We don't know what's coming, and it's the first time we really haven't known what's coming. My parents were children of the Depression and World War II. They know what it's like not to know if people are coming home. Um the Marshall Plan was also brilliant at the time. Are we looking at anything like that? The biggest worry, I think, is we don't know what's coming, and people who are trying to get jobs now who are young can't plan ahead very well. So I think my solution, the best I can do, and the thing I've decided to devote the next 40 years of my life to, is locking in what we knew of how we did things in the past. Because that's the only thing that's sure. So save your papers, save your memories. This is an unbelievable time, and people are gonna ask, Jesus, what what did it feel like then? Like your memories of COVID.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:21

Well, speaking of locking in the past, uh, and you know, in the the short time that we have left, uh, what struck you the most uh in terms of the individuals that you worked with and that you worked for, um, you know, that that would help others in similar roles, whether it's in the WD program or business or whatnot, uh, what struck you? Because then you could see the end result a year, two, three years later, uh, because sometimes people act or uh move in a certain way, and others think, well, where's the benefit of that? You might not see it for years, but you having worked in a particular field for so long, what did you find to be truly uh quality decision making? And what was the foundation of it?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:15

My favorite boss, Ambassador Bob Nikilek, had on his wall a picture, a black and white picture of the people lying dead after the Halabsha chemical weapons attack. And next to it was a beautiful calligraphy framed document that said patience and fortitude. You don't work on arms control negotiations. Foreign service officers rotate. We were civil servants, we were the bedrock that doesn't change. So U.S. foreign policy on our issues rarely changes, and civil servants were there no matter how hard the waves were, we were the bedrock that never went away that other countries could count on. Consistency, patience, fortitude. But the thing that always really got to me, and and I I try to tell it to everybody I can. We would, I was his deputy for a long time. And he would say, I'd have a huge dilemma, National Security Council meetings coming, some huge something needed a decision. And he would say, Let your conscience be your guide. First time you hear that, you think, I have a meeting in 10 minutes. This is a huge policy decision. Please be my boss and give me guidance. What do you mean, let my conscience be my guide? Please, please give me guidance. And he wouldn't. And the the point of this was always do the right thing. He didn't ask, he would say, How was the meeting afterwards? And you would say, miraculously it worked. And it meant do the right thing in everything in your life, let your conscience be your guide. But make sure that your conscience is developed with people around you who teach you the meaning of life and the essence of our existence here. So I think that's that's my bottom line is let your conscience be your guide. And teach your children what it means to be honest and straightforward and hardworking and all those things generations of humans have built upon, which is how civilization was even developed. Go back to basics.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:50

Any closing thoughts you'd like to share, or maybe a misconception that we haven't addressed during the conversation that you think it's fundamental for audiences to be aware of?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:02

I'd like to thank you. Maurice was in the retirement class with me, and we had to determine what we were going to do next and how to put it down on a resume in an interview, and you gave me the most straightforward, eloquent, well-thought-through guidance of anybody in this senior group of State Department people, and that you have started a law firm to help all those people that were suddenly out on the streets, is the essence of doing the right thing. And the fact that you're doing these podcasts to share with people what all of us have gleaned in all these years is a gift to us that you care enough to ask or that we have something to say, but also this gift of passing on. And this is one of the nice things about technology now is we can do podcasts and YouTube, and people's direct voices can be heard. So my final is just to thank people like you who also need their own oral history to be told, um, for sharing, for taking your time to get back to other people.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:18

Well, I appreciate that. And uh my response to that, and also for the audience, is one of my particular uh mottos has been if I ever have a hint that I think I might be the smartest person in the room, I need to go to another freaking room. Uh uh so I I immediately like to seek out others uh because uh I constantly engage, and perhaps uh it's a fault of mine and self-doubt, uh, but I find one must constantly question, one must constantly pursue and dig. Uh but again, I appreciate the time uh that you've taken. Uh, I know you have a very busy schedule uh because you're also sharing these 40 years of experience with many others. Um and to the audience, thank you for listening to another episode of Brungart Law's Lanyat, where we provide a little extra perspective. Because as I say, the devil's always in the details. Please invite others to listen and let me know what you think via the link. Jenny, again, gratitude.