(4 of 7)
The Administration has been at odds with itself over compliance since its first days in office. In his initial press conference as President, on Jan. 29, 1981, Reagan said the Soviets "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." Among the newly appointed officials who took that statement very literally was David Sullivan, a former CIA analyst who had made a career of documenting alleged Soviet violations of SALT. He served briefly in the ACDA in the State Department building.
Sullivan was an ally of Perle's in the bureaucratic struggle, but he was on the wrong side of the Potomac. He ran afoul of colleagues in ACDA and State when he tried to get the Administration to sanction what one official recalls as "a laundry list of every Soviet misdeed since the birth of Lenin, all of them branded as arms-control violations." He was fired from ACDA in. March 1981 but has remained an active, though largely invisible, protagonist in the battle over arms control as an adviser to three conservative Republican Senators: James McClure and Steven Symms of Idaho and Jesse Helms of North Carolina.
Last January, largely in response to pressure from that group, the Administration issued a report on Soviet compliance. It detailed seven Soviet "violations and probable violations" but cautioned that in three of the seven cases the evidence was inconclusive.
A variety of outside experts challenged those findings, arguing that the evidence was less than conclusive in all seven cases. But the hard-liners felt that the Administration had let the Soviets off easy. Perle stressed at the time that the report was "illustrative only," suggesting that there were many more charges to come. Sullivan told TIME last week, "We were pleased that for the first time a President formally charged the Soviets with violating a strategic-arms treaty, but we thought the report could have been stronger."
In October, the trio of right-wing Senators engineered the release of a much more hard-hitting report prepared not by the Administration but by a panel of outsiders—the President's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament (GAC), composed of private citizens, most of whom are hawks and arms-control skeptics. Their study, based heavily on data gathered and interpreted by Sullivan, found the Soviets guilty of 17 "material breaches" of nine treaties and four international commitments. The GAC also cited ten "suspected violations."
Reagan had sat on the GAC report for ten months. When he finally forwarded it to Capitol Hill in October, he stopped short of endorsing its conclusions. He said in a covering letter that the report had been neither reviewed nor approved by the Government. "The GAC report was a hot potato," recalls a White House official. "We couldn't embrace the thing even if we believed it, because to do so would be the kiss of death for arms control, to which the President is really committed. How can we continue trying to negotiate with the Soviets if everything that the GAC report says was true?"