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Liberalization and the Ascendancy of Trade 135

foreign officials, these ally-to-ally restrictions undermined the cred-
ibility of official US statements that such free flow exceptions were
based solely on national security interests. 12
State Department relations with the White House were further
soured during and after the UNESCO withdrawal. Statements by
Gregory Newell - Reagan's appointee for the position of State
Department Assistant Secretary for International Organizations -
that a core motivation for leaving UNESCO was to enable the United
States to free up US $50 million for development projects without UN
'obstruction' or 'administrative waste' produced only more tensions in
US-LDC relations. The limited investments subsequently made as a
result of these 'savings,' and their almost exclusive support for
telecommunication infrastructure projects designed to enhance TNC
communication and market-building capabilities, placed State
Department officials in an increasingly untenable position when
arguing that free flow was primarily a human rights/free speech
issueY
More significant to officials in the State Department, but also to
some in the FCC, Commerce and other agencies (not to mention
AT&T and other telecommunications interests), were White House-
led discussions on the future of the ITU. The option of withdrawing
from the Union was first publicly debated in 1982 following the ITU's
Plenipotentiary Conference in Nairobi. At this conference, delegate
concerns went well beyond subjects such as spectrum allocation and
conflicts concerning international standards. For the first time in its
history, an ITU member country- Algeria- officially raised a 'polit-
ical' issue not primarily concerning telecommunications: Israel's inva-
sion of Lebanon. Much conference time was spent on the question of
whether or not Israel should be expelled from the Union. 14 According
to Michael R. Gardner, the head of the American delegation in
Nairobi, 'Had Israel been thrown out of the ITU ... [w]e would have
been forced ... to find an alternative' to the Union. 15
Also of concern to US interests was the failure to get America's
preferred candidate elected as the new Secretary General of the Union
- apparently another indication of the ITU's 'politicization.' Instead,
Australian Richard Butler won the position largely on the basis of his
extensive lobbying of LDC delegates. As Richard B. Nichols, an
16
AT&T Vice President and a US delegate to Nairobi, explained to a
Congressional hearing, Butler's 'leftist' leanings apparently meant that
'he can be bought [by anti-free-flow interests and] ... you might even
be able to buy some of his staff.' Nichols continued to explain that