ACCESSION NUMBER:366222
FILE ID:EUR303
DATE:11/02/94
TITLE:ODOM SEES EUROPEAN SECURITY ROLE FOR CSCE (11/02/94)
TEXT:*EUR303   11/02/94
ODOM SEES EUROPEAN SECURITY ROLE FOR CSCE
(Former NSA director at Heritage Foundation) (420)
By Jim Shevis
USIA Staff Writer
Washington -- Retired General William Odom, a former director of the
National Security Agency (1985-88), says the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) could play a major role in the continent's
future security.  But it would need a steering committee to do the job, he
said.

"If you need an all-European structure, and I think we do, then the CSCE is
going to have to have an executive structure that can act," Odom said
during a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington
public-policy research organization.

"I think CSCE cannot be dismissed, but organizationally it is like the
United Nations General Assembly: every country is present, every country
has one vote, which insures the body can never act," he said.

Odom, who now directs national-security studies at the Hudson Institute,
proposed an executive council for CSCE that would include the United
States, Britain, France, Germany, France, and Russia.

"If those countries can come to a consensus on dealing with Yugoslavia,
you'll get a solution.  If they don't, then we've got real problems in
Europe," he said.

Other panel participants were Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation's
Russian and Eurasian studies group and Markian Bilynskyj, director of the
Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy, an independent public-policy research
and information center, part of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation.

Both Odom and Cohen agreed that U.S. policy ought to be to speed up the
economic and security integration of Eastern Europe and Western Europe,
bringing in Russia as soon as possible.

"I would argue that it makes sense to extend the NATO roof over Eastern
Europe -- not to keep Russian tank divisions out, because there are no
Russian tank divisions trying to get in -- but for the same reasons we put
a roof over Western Europe with NATO in 1949 and 1950," Odom said.

On Russia's future geopolitical intents, Cohen said that there is "a broad
consensus among the political elite that some kind of greater Russia is
going to emerge.

Odom said that he was "a little more optimistic about Russia not giving way
to its imperial impulse than I was six months ago."

"I think there are forces in Moscow who do not want to go back to the
imperial path," he said, "and there are some forces who definitely want to
go back to pursue the imperial path."

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