March 17, 2014

DOD NOM: RUSSIAN INF TREATY ISSUE ‘FLAGGED’ BY INTEL COMMUNITY IN 2010

By ExchangeMonitor

An Obama Administration official said yesterday that the Senate was informed of a possible issue involving Russian compliance with an arms control treaty in the fall of 2010, several months before the Senate cleared the New START Treaty. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Brian McKeon, President Obama’s nominee to be Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, said an “issue” was “flagged” by the intelligence community in mid-September about potential Russian violations of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. He said the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees were notified of the issue a day before the Foreign Relations Committee voted on the New START Treaty.

Republicans on the panel have raised questions about when the Administration knew about the violations, which are believed to have occurred beginning in 2008, especially in the context of debate on the New START Treaty, which the Senate ratified in December of 2010. At the time, McKeon was the top liaison to Vice President Joe Biden on New START. He is currently the chief of staff for the National Security Council. “The IC [intelligence community] and the executive branch were committed to providing timely information about potential concerns,” McKeon said, adding that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also raised the issue during an all-Senators briefing in late September of 2010.

Citing classification concerns, McKeon largely tap-danced around the substance of the alleged violations, which are believed to center on Russian tests of a new land-based cruise missile that violates the treaty. “We are concerned about the Russian activity that appears to be inconsistent with the INF treaty,” McKeon said. “We’ve raised this with the Russians. The Russians have come back to us with an answer which we do not consider to be satisfactory, and we’ve told them that the issue is not closed.”

Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), who outlined their concerns in a letter to McKeon last week, were not satisfied. “I have very serious concerns about this,” said Wicker, who was upset that McKeon’s response letter came late Monday night and was classified. “And I will alert members of the committee and members of the Senate that I do not believe this committee and this body was provided with all of the information that you had and that we needed to know to cast a fully informed vote on the New START Treaty, but we will follow up in the proper context.”

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