Commerce was leaning toward a favorable decision, both because of the merits of Kachajian's case and because a positive decision was important to the credibility of the Office of Foreign Availability. Up to that point, the OFA had not produced one single case leading to the decontrol of any item or technology listed on the CCL. The business community was becoming openly critical. So was Congress, which had ordered the establishment of the office six years earlier. But there was still the problem of the Pentagon's unrelenting opposition. Finally, the standoff between an immovable object and an irresistible force had reached an impasse, and the case of George Kachajian and his little company at the end of Spruce Street in Oakland, N.J., was taken all the way to the White House.
On May 15 at 10:30 a.m., Kachajian was attending a meeting of the Semiconductor Technical Advisory Committee in the huge Commerce building on Pennsylvania Avenue. As Kachajian remembers it, the 20 members of TAC were in their places around a large conference table while assorted guests and observers chatted from their seats around the edges of the room. Suddenly, assistant secretary Freedenberg came in and everyone fell silent as he announced that, earlier that morning, he had recommended to the National Security Council at the White House that wafering saws be decontrolled for reasons of foreign availability. "Everybody turned to look at me," Kachajian says. "Then they got up and started to congratulate me. I just sat there like the cat who swallowed a canary, but I was afraid to smile. I still couldn't believe it. . . . This happened after six years of busting my chops. When I left that place, I thought I was walking on air."
For the next month, Kachajian kept up his pressure with telephone calls, visits, and a letter campaign that involved all 45 employees of his company. Then, in late June, he got a call from a staff person in Representative Roukema's office. The congresswoman had just received a letter, the caller said, from John M. Poindexter, the assistant to the President for national-security affairs, which stated that the council had agreed with the Commerce Department's position that the internal diameter saws should be immediately decontrolled.
Kachajian's first reaction was to shout for joy, but he knew better. Long experience with the government had taught him that seldom were problems that easily dispatched. And he was right. The saws, the letter continued, would, in fact, be decontrolled immediately for sale only to noncommunist countries such as Sweden and South Korea. The letter went on to say that, "Subsequently, we will begin working with our allies to arrive at a mutually agreed upon and orderly removal of COCOM controls on these saws to controlled countries."
In short, Kachajian, who views the reopening of Eastern Bloc markets as the key to the survival of his company, still could not sell his saws to the one market he wanted in the first place. And, at this moment, that is still where he is: one hand clutching the collar of his company to keep it from going under, the other with all its fingers crossed while he waits for COCOM to consider the issue sometime this year.
Yet as painful as it is for him, Kachajian's current limbo is entirely expressive of the lack of consensus that the current Administration brings to the issue of export controls. And it is particularly expressive of a regulatory environment in which the word "resolution" seems oddly to imply a more or less permanent state of contentiousness.
At the Commerce Department, for example, James K. Pont, the director of the OFA, speaks for many of his colleagues when he says that the Kachajian case establishes an important precedent. Claiming that the OFA has finally "found a path through the bureaucratic jungle," he predicts that over the next three to six months there may be several more positive findings.
But at the Defense Department, the feeling is that if there is any kind of precedent involved, it is only of the worst possible kind. Pointing out that the Kachajian case involves "the most sensitive technology that the Bloc can acquire," deputy undersecretary Bryen sees the handling of the issue as an example of "poor leadership" that ignored "the national interest." In his opinion, Commerce should have negotiated aggressively with the Swiss to get them to stop sales in the Eastern Bloc rather than decontrolling U.S. shipments. "There are plenty of things the Swiss want from us," he argues, "and it's outrageous that what we have is the Commerce Department laying back and saying, 'Well, we informally asked them and they said no.' I mean, that's nonsense. They [the Swiss] don't informally ask when they want something."
Bryen also makes it quite clear that George Kachajian's long ordeal is far from over, at least as far as the Pentagon is concerned. "Some of them [the saws] he will be allowed to sell," he says, "but there will be restrictions, at least if we have anything to say about it, on what types of saws he will be able to sell, and for what size ingot, and so on. It won't be any open door."
Thus, while George Kachajian's victory has drawn the attention of the export community, it has not engendered much hope for a significantly more balanced export-control policy. If anything, many of Kachajian's fellow exporters look at his six-year ordeal and wonder if it only confirms their worst fears about controls and the future competitiveness of American manufacturers abroad. Larry L. Hansen, executive vice-president of Varian Associates Inc., manufacturers of such items as ion implanters and chemical vapor deposition reactors, responds to the Kachajian case with a mixture of admiration and horror: "George put in an enormous amount of effort to get that, and that's a very mundane piece of equipment. I mean who in the hell can't make a crystal slicer? For him to have had to put in that much effort, and get that many people involved to get the relief that he got is an incredible thing, absolutely incredible."
"Sometimes there's a little voice inside me," says Kachajian, "that asks: 'What are you so happy about? All this means is that you can do what you should've been able to do all along." Maybe.
