The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs History Project AMBASSADOR ROBERT L. BARRY Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial Interview date: October 2, 1996 Copyright 2016 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born in Pennsylvania; grew up Army brat Dartmouth College; Oxford University; St. Anthony’s College; Columbia University U.S. Navy Entered Foreign Service - 1962 State Department - FSI - Serbo-Croatian Language Training 1962-1963 Zagreb, Yugoslavia - Rotation Officer 1963-1965 Croatian nationalism Yugoslav Politics Distressed Americans State Department - EUR - Soviet Union Affairs 1965-1967 Croatian nationalism Consular convention Bilateral relations Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany - Russian Language Training 1967-1968 U.S. Army training Moscow, USSR - Consular/Political Officer 1968-1970 Soviet Lay; Prisons Consular Convention in Action Middle East Soviet Internal Affairs U.S. ambassadors New York, New York - USUN 1970-1971 Vice President George H.W. Bush Jewish emigration Middle East 1 Leningrad, USSR - Consular Officer 1971-1973 New Window on USSR Baltics USIA - Voice of America - USSR Division 1973-1974 Russian programs State and USIA issues State Department - EUR - Soviet Affairs - Deputy Director 1974-1976 Detente Kissinger monopoly on Soviet issues SAIT I State Department - UN Political Affairs 1976-1978 Peacekeeping operations Post colonial Africa State Department - Deputy Assistant Secretary for UN Economic Affairs 1979 UN specialized agencies State Department - Deputy Assistant Secretary for USSR and 1979-1981 Eastern Europe Carter-Brezhnev Summit Working with Marshall Shulman and Vance Brzezinski Richard Pipes and Reagan transition Ambassador to Bulgaria 1982-1984 INF Midnight breakin Dartmouth College - Diplomat in Residence 1984-1985 Dickey Fellow Stockholm, Sweden - Stockholm Conference on Confidence Building and Security Measures in Europe - Head of U.S. Delegation 1985-1987 Death of son Onsite inspection issue Soviets Complexities of multilateral negotiations Public Affairs offensive USIA - Voice of America - Chief Operating Officer 1988-1990 Capital investment in transmitters TV Marti and Cuba 2 Prioritizing international broadcasts State Department -Special Assistant to Undersecretary for Management 1990-1991 Processing Jewish refugees from USSR State Department - Special Assistant to Deputy Secretary Eagleburger1991-1992 Coordinating Assistance to Eastern Europe Setting up programs to assist in transition to market economies Nominated Ambassador to Yugoslavia Indonesia - Ambassador 1992-1995 Suharto Conflicts U.S. business interests East Timor Islam Retirement 1995 Head of OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina 1998-2001 Civilian implementation of Dayton Agreement Election monitoring with OSCE 2001-present INTERVIEW Q: Today is October 2, 1996. This is an interview with Ambassador Robert L. Barry done on the behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. Bob and I are old colleagues having worked in Yugoslavia back in the 1960s to put this in context. Bob, could you tell me about first when and where you were born and something about your family? BARRY: Well, I was born in Pittsburgh in 1934 and I spent the first five or six years of my life there, but my father was in the Army Air Corps reserve. He had been a pilot in World War I and was active in flying when he was not doing his regular job. He was called to active duty in 1940 before Pearl Harbor and so I spent the next several years as an army brat traveling around to one military post to another. We finally settled in Philadelphia after the war and that’s where I went to high school. I went to college then at Dartmouth College starting in 1952 graduating with the class of 1956 where I majored in international relations with particular emphasis on the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Eastern European history and all that kind of thing. I had an NROTC Navy scholarship to Dartmouth, which paid my way in return for three years active duty afterwards. I also had the option of staying in the Regular navy after my three years, which I considered at the time. Q: At Dartmouth, did you find was there any, let’s see when did you attend there? 3 BARRY: ‘52 to ‘56. Q: So, the Cold War was really beginning to crank up about that time? BARRY: Yes, and of course, my father was called to active duty again in the Korean War, so between 1950 and 1952 I spent more time on military bases around then and so this was really kind of the height of the Cold War. Q: Was there any thrust to what you were getting at Dartmouth, I’m just trying to figure out how the students and the faculty looked on the international relations front. Because you were still in what was termed in my generation, too. I graduated from Williams in 1950, as sort of the silent generation. I’m not sure that we were that silent. Did you get any? BARRY: Well, the president of Dartmouth at that time was a man named John Sloan Dickey who had been active in foreign affairs in the State Department during the UN formative years. There was a lot of enthusiasm about the UN. There were some very good people on the faculty at Dartmouth at that time who were Soviet experts who were some of the people who worked on centrally planned economies and all that kind of thing. There was a very active program in great issues that everybody had to take so you had to attend as a freshman lectures on the main issues of the day. So, it was a rather internationalist campus. The international relations major was quite small. There were only about seven or eight of us. There was an interdisciplinary major who had a lot of economics and political science, courses in foreign cultures and things like that. So, that was kind of a self-selected group of people that were particularly interested in what was going on in the outside world. Q: Well, were you at all pointing yourself towards the Foreign Service at that time? BARRY: It was something that had entered my mind, but I was part of the Naval ROTC regular program which was a scholarship program which you took an exam for in high school. Basically the navy paid for your full college education with the idea that you would get a regular navy commission when you graduated. The hope was that a lot of people would stay in as a career. I had not ever particularly thought I would, but at least my immediate post college fate was pretty much decided by being in that program. Q: Well, when you graduated in 1956 did you go into the navy? BARRY: No, not right away. I got a scholarship to Oxford, something called the Reynolds Fellowship, which was not as prestigious as the Rhodes, but actually did have more money. I got a leave of absence from the navy to go take that scholarship up. When at Oxford I studied both the field of politics, philosophy and economics, but also, I spent a lot of time at Saint Anthony's College which was the place where they did a lot of graduate work on the Soviet Union, international affairs. The chancellor of the college I was in was Allen Bullock who had done a history of Hitler and the rise of fascism. They 4 were all kinds of fascinating people there who knew a great deal about this part of the world, so I had a fairly enjoyable time there. I traveled in the meantime to Eastern Europe for the first time. In fact, I embarked upon an effort to go to Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Q: October ‘56. BARRY: 1956. Well, it was not October when I left, it was December when I left because of the fact that we had to wait for winter term leave, but the events in Hungary were still taking place in December of 1956. In fact we did get across the border into Hungary. The Soviets had not yet come all the way down to the border and so the Hungarian Resistance still controlled a little bit of the territory across the Austrian border, but the last remnants were coming out, going across the mine fields, getting themselves blown up and things like that. I was always happy to tell the Hungarians in later years that I first came to the country illegally during the period of the Hungarian Revolution. I also got to Yugoslavia at that time, twice as a matter of fact. In fact, that’s where I met my wife who was then studying in France. She joined a couple of us who were in fact on our way to Hungary at that point. As I say, when we got into Hungary we discovered the Soviet tanks were moving toward the border. We kind of gave that project up for the time being and went to Yugoslavia instead. That was kind of an early acquaintance. Q: What was your impression of Yugoslavia? You were there in late ‘56? BARRY: Complete silence. I’ve never seen a place that was as silent as Zagreb. That day we got off the train in Zagreb there was not a car in sight. All you could hear was the sound of people walking up and down the street. It was grim and gloomy and dark. This was December. Poor. I remember how unsmiling the people were. It looked the way you thought a communist country would look when you had read about all the grimness of the communist economic regime. When were you first there? Q: About that time, except I went during the summer and it was a little more pleasant. We went down to Srebrenica and I was in Frankfurt and we took a trip there and we kind of liked it but, of course, I think winter in the city and summer on the coast are two different things.