K-School to Release Videotape

In the wake of the Ayatollah Khomeini's death, civil war breaks out in Iran. Soviet troops begin to mass in Kurdistan and shoot down an American reconnaissance plane. In response, United States warships race toward the Arabian Sea.

This was the scenario of a simulated crisis acted out last year at the Kennedy School by national security experts and former government officials. Beginning next week, the school will begin filling nearly 300 requests from universities and libraries for videotapes of the event.

Featured players in what Kennedy School officials call "The Crisis Game Video Case" include former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie, who plays the president, former CIA Directory James R. Schlesinger '50, and Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History and a former advisor on Soviet affairs for the National Security Council.

Along with each $70 cassette comes a 65-page guide outlining how to use the videotape to teach students about how government officials make decisions. The guide also explains how students can place themselves within the scenario.

Dillon Professor of International affairs Joseph S. Nye Jr., for instance, will use the cassette in a Kennedy School class on foreign policy, said Jon Marshal, a Kennedy School researcher who worked on the project.

Muskie, Shlesinger and Pipes were joined by seven others for the excercise, and worked through the crisis without a script. "To the participants this experience was more than a game--it had the feel of a real crisis," Muskie states in the guide.

The re-enactment, writes Schlesinger, is "a revealing experience in which the participants' behavior and the decision process mirrors real-life policy making."

In 1983, ABC News' "Nightline" featured many of the same government officials in a similar project and provided the impetus for the K-School's program, said Marshal. Following the broadcasts, Kennedy School Dean Graham T. Allison '62 worked with Leslie Gelb, the newly appointed deputy editor of the New York Times editorial page, to adapt the idea for university teaching, Marshal said.

One of the primary purposes of the game is to highlight the importance of communication between United States and Soviet leaders. Most of the three-hour tape shows the negotiations that precede a hot-line conversation between the president and his Soviet counterpart.

The scenerio ends when the two leaders agree in principle to withdraw troops from the region.