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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project DAVID T. JONES Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: March 16, 1999 Copyright 2006 ADST TABLE OF CONTENTS Background Born and raised in Pennsylvania University of Pennsylvania Marriage US Army, Korea Entered the Foreign Service in 1968 Further study at University of Pennsylvania Paris, France; Rotation Officer 1969-1971 Environment French establishment Challenging America French sensibilities Local staff Demonstrations Wine industry US Ambassadors 25 th Anniversary of D Day Communist Party University of Pennsylvania; Leave of Absence 1971-1972 State Department, Korea analyst, Intelligence and Research 1972-1974 Park Chung Hee North Korea Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) US economic and military assistance Economy China State Department, NATO Desk Officer, European Bureau 1974-1976 Committee of the Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) 1 Helsinki Accords Political Committee Nuclear weapons Soviets US all-volunteer army French European “Neutralist” elements. Greece-Turkey issue Warsaw Pact threat Brussels, Belgium; US Mission to NATO 1976-1980 Effects of Administration change Neutron bomb Missiles Europe and nuclear weapons deployment SALT II Treaty Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Russian military maneuvers Teheran hostages Intermediate Nuclear Range Force (INF) issue European concerns re INF Special Group and High Level Group Meetings Special Consultative Group European Socialist views on nuclear weapons “Mansfield Amendment reductions” State Department; Cyprus Desk Officer 1980-1982 Turkey-Greece dispute Disputed islands United Nations representative Gobbi Special Representative for Cyprus Congressional interest Student exchange programs Peace negotiation attempts State Department; Greek Base Negotiations Team 1982-1983 Greek President Karamanlis Status of Forces Agreement NATO PASAK Reginald Bartholomew Special Cyprus Coordinator, Chris Chapman US Bases in Greece Negotiating problems Greek press leaks 2 Security US-Greece relations DECA Agreement Pearson Fellow at the United States Senate 1983-1984 Office of Senator Gary Hart of Colorado Foreign Affairs memos Hart’s working style Jerusalem issue Feminist issue Relations with State Department State Department; Greek Desk Officer 1984-1985 Papandreou Relations Status of Forces Agreement Nuclear powered warships Elections Greece Area Handbook State Department; Deputy Director for Theater Military Policy 1985-1987 Greek terrorism Bureau of Political-Military Affairs Work load Arms Control negotiations Special Consultative Group at NATO Nuclear warheads US security considerations Soviet Union Political-Military Bureau operations Geneva nuclear weapons negotiations Geneva, Switzerland; Member, U.S. Delegation on INF Negotiations 1987-1989 US Delegation members Russian delegation SS-20 missiles START SDI Negotiations Senate committee involvement Senator Jesse Helms Office of the Secretary of Defense Una Chapman Cox Fellowship 1989 3 Writings and travels Foreign Affairs Advisor for the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Army 1989-1992 Organization and functions Panama Soviet Union Warsaw Pact Saddam Hussein and Kuwait Iraqi Army Colin Powell Schwarzkopf Desert Shield/Desert Storm China Egypt Israel India/Pakistan Ottawa, Canada; Political Counselor 1992-1996 Relations Government Prime Minister Mulroney Quebec issue Prime Minister Jean Chretien Foreign Policy issues Environment Differences National unity problems Working relationship Canadian military Meech Lake Accord Elections (1994) Political system Cuba Canadian West North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Military Agreements Quebec Referendum NORAD Treaty State Department 1996-1998 Various assignments Retirement 1998 Various projects, private and government 4 INTERVIEW Q: Today is March 16, 1999. This is an interview with David T. Jones. This is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and I’m Charles Stuart Kennedy. Let’s begin at the beginning. Could you tell me when and where you were born and something about your family? JONES: Okay. I was born on December 22, 1941, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. My parents were Scrantonians. My entire background in that regard was Northeast Pennsylvania, the United States, back to colonial times. My father was an architect, and an industrial designer. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. My mother was a dietician and a housewife. She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York City, NY. I was educated in the public school system in Scranton. I went to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1963 with a degree in political science. Q: I’ll move you back a bit. Where did you go to grammar school? JONES: I walked to grammar school. The school was the school that my mother and my uncle had attended: Alexander Hamilton #19 school in Scranton. Scranton, in that era, was a dying anthracite coal town. For a century, they had dug anthracite coal out of the Lackawanna Valley. When they had dug all the coal out of the Lackawanna Valley, Scranton just shriveled up, like most natural resource town. A town that had been 140,000 people in the 1940s when I was born and during World War II steadily went downhill. Right now, they say that the principal industry in Scranton is Social Security. The population is about 80,000. Q: What classes were most interesting to you? JONES: I was really interested in just about everything. I was, however, particularly interested in history. There wasn’t a concept for me of “political science” or “international relations.” These disciplines didn’t exist. On the other hand, the very first thing that I remember being interested in on an international relations format was the Korean War. I was perhaps eight and a half when the war started in 1950. I followed it very closely in the daily newspapers and in Time magazine. One of my father’s little stories about me was that during the Korean War when I was about nine years old, somebody asked, “Well, what do you think should be done about the war?” I piped up and said, “I like MacArthur’s views on the subject!” All of a sudden, that ended the discussion of the Korean War, and it went on from there. I don’t remember this instance, but there were those that thought I was saying too much already. Q: When you got to high school, did you concentrate in certain areas? 5 JONES: At that point, my major interests were science and chemistry. So many of us at that era were particularly focused on what was happening in those fields because of “sputnik” and what this meant for East-West struggles. One of the things that most interested me at that point was science. I was academically equally strong at that point in both sciences and in history and social studies. Actually, I graduated first in both the science and history curriculums at the Central High School, which was the college preparatory high school for the Scranton area. Q: Were you thinking about what you were going to get to? JONES: Yes. My interests at that point were in science. That was the direction in which I was headed academically and personally. This was what I was most interested in studying professionally at the time. At the same time, I read an enormous amount of history – Civil War history, World War II history, a wide range of military history. Q: Did service abroad strike you as being interesting at that time or did that come later? JONES: No, I wouldn’t say I had any special interest in service abroad. Although my parents were really quite educated for the time – at university level – they were not traveled. Neither one of them had been further outside the United States than to Canada. I did not have other relatives who had traveled widely, although this was also a very highly educated family, certainly for the day and the era. I didn’t really think of “Let’s go to Europe or anywhere else.” My personal horizons really until I went to college were pretty limited. I don’t think I had traveled further south than Washington, DC, by the time I was a senior in high school or further north than a brief trip to Canada in the same period of time. I had been as far west as Pittsburgh. This is a pretty limited circumstance geographically. I think of it in comparison to the life that my children have led or for that matter the life that my wife has led. But academically, my interests were almost between pages of books. This was also not even a period when there was a lot of television available – at least in my family which didn’t have television until I was about 12 years old. Q: You were in high school from when to when? JONES: ’55 to ’59. My family came a little bit late to television. We didn’t have a television set until ’54, something like that. I was always sort of dismissive of television except for a handful of shows. Q: Milton Berle, of course. JONES: I never saw Milton Berle. It doesn’t register at all. I saw a little bit of Sid Cesar. I saw a little bit of “This is Your Hit Parade.” I did enjoy almost all of the episodes of “Victory at Sea.” Q: This was the U.S. Navy. 6 JONES: Yes. There were follow-on aspects of U.S. Air Force. It was real footage, something that was very different. That tied in very tightly with my interest in military history. So, I saw a fair amount of that and did that kind of reading and watching. Q: Did you get down to Gettysburg? JONES: Yes. And to Valley Forge as a boy. I had studied the Gettysburg battle as part of my Civil War history reading. I may have seen some of the fortifications around the Philadelphia area. I also was very interested in the Kenneth Roberts books. Rabble in Arms .