47. Memorandum of Conversation1 2
Subject:
- Meeting with The Secretary of State on Law of the Sea Issues.
PARTICIPANTS:
- The Secretary
- The Deputy Secretary of State
- Ambassador Irving
- Mr. Katz Mr. Aldrich
- Mr. Blaney
- Peter Bernhardt (notetaker)
The Secretary: I see the Wall Street Journal took another whack on me in Committee.
The Deputy Secretary: I think you’ll survive it.
Mr. Katz: The journalists are self-perpetuating.
The Secretary: They’re all a bunch of 25-30 year old kids up there.
The Deputy Secretary: They can’t get hold of anything. No one reviews the work of the juniors. None of the editorial staff has time to do it.
Mr. Katz: I wonder if it had an impact on the Hill. I know that Greenwald encountered comments from both Senators Harry Byrd and Thurmond. I worried about the effect. I think we should perhaps touch base with the Senators and Congressmen on the Hill.
The Secretary: There will be pressure for unilateral action.
Mr. Lord: I have prepared a cable for you to send off. As far as I know it looks as though there will be no revision to the revised single negotiating text this session.
The Secretary: The President of the Conference has given up the idea of trying to draft any new consolidated text.
Mr. Blaney: Amerasinghe is under pressure. If he sees the negotiations this session as a total [Page 2] failure he may try to put in final clauses.
Ambassador Irvine: Amerasinghe said when I was in New York he doesn’t have a chance now to amend the text and will have to make a revision later.
The Secretary: I have no idea what is going on up there. I shall never permit the Delegation to conducted again as it is now being conducted. We have reached total incompetence. Tunisia cannot really live a damn about deep seabed mining, and will not oppose the US on this issue. It will never go again like this. It is too late for this session. What has happened after my visit? Is it all in a morass? They didn’t want me to come earlier.
Mr. Katz: Timing was not a factor. You did have a major impact, but it is difficult to sustain after you leave.
The Secretary: Why? Can’t you keep their feet in the fire?
Mr. Lord: If you didn’t go up, it would have ended in a disaster.
The Secretary: The situation is not clear to me at all. For example, what happened to deep seabed rights and the status of the deep seabeds?
Mr. Lord: Here it is (hands a paper to the Secretary - who reads it).
The Secretary: It is great to be tough. Great going. But it will never work.
Mr. Lord: I think DOD will move.
Mr. Katz: I am not sure DOD is wrong. It is better to keep the status quo.
The Deputy Secretary: What effect do you think that will have on on the likelihood of a spring meeting?
[Page 3]Mr. Katz: Ellsworth is not a problem.
Mr. Blaney: I think that’s right.
The Secretary: When I am there, I don’t find the other LDC reps so tough. I think we can make progress. However, that may be because I am the Secretary of State and they may be scared of me. What we should do therefore is to raise it to the political level.
Mr. Blaney: The idea is to get five to seven people together.
The Secretary: But that is Learson’s idea. What happened to the Mexican idea to get a small group together to solve the Committee I problem?
Mr. Aldrich: It apparently failed to develop according to the cable which I just read.
The Secretary: It wouldn’t have failed if we had called Castaneda and followed it up.
Mr. Aldrich: Learson wants to see Castaneda on Monday.
The Secretary: But that will be too late.
Mr. Blaney: The idea now should be to see the Conference President.
Mr. Katz: A small group should be formed to continue negotiating efforts. Transfer of technology depends on the type of financial plan employed. It is available for sale and on that basis will not perhaps create difficulty. The idea was that the Conference President, however, would form a small group.
The Secretary: But that will be Monday and the Conference ends the 17th. That’s too late.
Mr. Lord: Any progress made will be due to your initiative.
The Secretary: I don’t give a damn. I am not interested in gaining any publicity for myself. I am concerned how this whole negotiation has been conducted. What has happened in Committees II and III? I thought Committee was on the verge of a settlement. What the hell is the issue?
[Page 4]The Secretary: In Committee III I thought that all the researching state had to do was notify the coastal state and the coastal state would disavow only in limited circumstances. What happened?
Mr. Katz: I don’t know.
Mr. Blaney: The problem is the delineation of the conditions under which the coastal state has the right to refuse consent. There is not enough time in this session to delimit these conditions.
The Secretary: But what have they done in the last one and one half weeks since I was there?
Mr. Blaney: There have been negotiations but many countries may have been holding out such as the Soviets who don’t want any movement at the present time.
Mr. Aldrich: As for the Soviets not wanting any movement I had the same impression in Committee III.
Ambassador Irving: The Russians floated a proposition that the Conference recess for two years. Now it looks however as though the Africans will propose reconvening in April or May.
Mr. Lord: We have a proposed draft for marching orders to the delegation (hands to Secretary).
The Secretary: What happened to the Nigerian proposal?
Mr. Katz: The joint Enterprise proposal across the board is dead.
The Secretary: What we need is to get in Learson’s head that whatever document sums it up must be presented in the best possible light or else we will encourage unilateralism. I want Jules to give a briefing at the end of this session.
[Page 5]Mr. Lord: Should we not be prepared to brief Congress also at the same time?
The Secretary: Could you and Jules brief Congressional Committees when this is over? We must be careful this doesn’t turn into campaign issue.
Ambassador Irving: Learson is going on vacation to Jamaica on the 17th. Perhaps he should.
The Secretary: I don’t think Learson can explain what’s going on. What you should explain at the briefing is the conceptual framework before giving the specifics. Say we have made concessions but can give no more. We should give a positive briefing and say we can go no further before we hear from the 77 and the 77 realize we have made as many concessions as we can. Could we have a meeting will all the agencies next week to bring the briefing into line?
Mr. Blaney: Interior will be moving towards legislation.
The Deputy Secretary: Greenspan will probably move to support legislation also.
The Secretary: Greenspan has prevented the US getting a great deal of oil. That is his distinction. What does he know about Law of the Sea?
The Deputy Secretary: I don’t know. He has serious concerns about the Enterprise. I told him that that we would give him a full background information and if he had it he would pro probably be able to support the financial system which you had in mind.
The Secretary: Is Ratiner going to blow the Conference up?
[Page 6]Mr. Blaney: Interior wants to get the appropriations for itself and to wont away control from Commerce.
The Deputy Secretary: Richardson ban said we need another inter-agency Law of the Sea Group.
Mr. Blaney: But he supports the Conference.
The Secretary: What happens if we proceed unilaterally?
Mr. Katz: The question is what the LDC’s would do to other sections of the treaty. They can’t do much to the deep seabed negotiations because without the developed countries they have nothing to gain themselves. They would perhaps try to boycott but they would not be effective.
Mr. Aldrich: Miners being miners they want a certain stake in deep seabed mining. If they were to handle deep seabed mining the same way as Ambassador Irving handled fish we would do a lot better. By that I mean not staking out a certain claim to a particular part of the seabed but by treating the resources as a common pool we all could exploit.
Mr. Katz: If we ended up with legislation perhaps we could set aside revenue in a trust fund for the benefit of the developing countries and thereby legislation would be regarded as less undesirable from their point of view.
Mr. Blaney: There are other bills besides the Metcalf. Other bills take different approaches. They do not provide for miners going out there right now. There are many alternatives that would not be so onerous to LDC’s.
The Secretary: Could I get a paper on where we go after this session before the next session and which discusses the pros and cons of unilateral legislation? We have wasted time in the intersessionals and foreign delegations have sons of bitches assembled in New York. They, like Kenyatta whom met in New York, have no idea what’s going on.
[Page 7]Mr. Lord: You’ll be in the United Nations immediately after the Conference and that perhaps would be the best time for you to contact these delegation heads.
The Secretary: I want the strategy worked out before then. I didn’t believe it would be so hard to make progress in these areas.
Mr. Katz: I think we can work it out on the political level. The problem is that many delegations consist of the same personnel and man the permanent delegation of their respective countries in New York and they are flying on their own.
Ambassador Irving: I think a very good idea would be to brief exhaustively all US Ambassadors returning to Washington on their way through on Law of the Sea negotiations.
The Secretary: That’s a damn good idea. We should get them on board and get them personally interested in the negotiations.
Ambassador Irving: We must get them back here.
The Secretary: There is no Ambassador who could discuss Law of the Sea for more than 3 minutes I am sure.
Mr. Aldrich: I have tried this before but the delegation always tries to handle the Embassies itself.
The Secretary: They can’t continue that anymore.
Mr. Katz: The subject matter is not all that bad.
The Secretary: I get the impression that they get together and hack away at the text without knowing what to do. Even with that if we went up there we could do something.
[Page 8]Mr. Katz: It would take two to three weeks of shuttle diplomacy by you. As you said all people on all other delegations are second or third rate people. This type of negotiation needs high level attention.
The Secretary: We could get it across to them. Some such as Sri Lanka were very good. If you could break them away from their groups it would be made manageable. It would require two to three weeks.
The Deputy Secretary: I have been told that there is a cable stating that according to Jagota the US would never proceed unilaterally. They really believe this. We ought to take a look at the legislative alternative.
The Secretary: We should not hardline and at the same time display a puppy dog eagerness to come up with new ideas. Draft a statement to be signed by me which states we will be prepared to go forward with unilateral legislation and that will also help us domestically. Can you redo the cable? The Committee constructions are so waffled.
Mr. Lord: Okay.
END OF MEETING.
- Source: National Archives, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, P860084–2438. Secret; Nodis. The meeting took place in the Secretary’s office. “Jules” refers to Katz.↩
- After Kissinger’s second visit to the August–September 1976 (New York) UNCLOS III session, he discussed Law of the Sea matters with Department of State officials.↩