Border patrol: he's the western director of the U.S. Bureau of Export Administration and regulates billions of dollars worth of overseas sales of goods and services.

Border patrol

You can't export just anything out of the United States.

Ask Michael W. Liikala.

The local director of the U.S. Bureau of Export Administration will tell you supercomputers that manage warfare, and even scientists who travel abroad with knowledge of chemical-weapon making in their heads, need advice from his office on export licenses.

Sometimes, the answer is no.

"In the past, if you were sending an engineer to a |baby-milk factory' in Iraq, we just denied the license . . ." says Liikala, referring to the infamous, mysterious Iraqi site we bombed during the Persian Gulf War. Liikala's policy bosses in Washington long knew it was really a chemical-weapons plant. Or so the war lore goes.

Some nuclear technology, destined for a "research institute" in Israel, has been denied an export license. So, what high-tech device can be licensed abroad, to Argentina or China? Liikala's bureau has the answers pertaining to products and countries. The litmus tests concern U.S. national security and foreign policy. And the calls roar in.

When he opened his office's doors in 1988, the six telephone lines became tied up immediately. "It was like the Wild West out here." Little knowledge of official bans and lots of curiosity. "Within two months, we went up to 26 lines: We had 13 staff people and 26 ears," he says with the grin of an assembly-line boss. "I buy a lot of pizza and beer for them. My commitment to the business community was, you'll never get a busy signal."

Last year 140,000 calls were answered, many of them handled by recorded messages and on-line computer aid.

The bureau's rule books govern it all - from Monkey pox virus and thumbcuffs to shotguns with shorter-than-18-inch barrels and Western red-cedar logs. You can't export the cedar, to anywhere. The guns need Department of State approval. "It's considered a personnel weapon," explained a bureau aide.

"We get calls about everything - cadavers, bull semen, hazardous waste (en route) to Mexico," said Liikala (a Finnish name pronounced LEAK-uh-luh).

The Agriculture Department and other agencies control some of these products. The bureau's help is only needed for licenses for sensitive, "dual-use" goods. For instance, machine tools than can fashion car fenders as well as bomb shells.

Sound like a narrow trade? Read on.

Last year the bureau issued licenses for $50 billion of dual-use goods shipped abroad from the 10 western states Liikala governs. Almost $20 billion originated from technology-rich Southern California.

That's why the western headquarters was set up near Newport Beach. It was the choice of Liikala, 38, a Michigan native who first came to California to do a self-guided course in law and public policy at freewheeling University of California at Santa Cruz.

Having wrapped up his military service in 1973 as a medic at Ft. Hood, Texas, Liikala wanted learning.

"Santa Cruz offered the most freedom after the military," letting him simultaneously earn credits for lobbying in Sacramento on behalf of senior citizens.

"Then I went to the other extreme, USC." Liikala garnered a master's degree in finance among more conservative company, then moved east for a second degree and finally mounted Capitol Hill's foreign-policy ladder. By 1985, he was leading the team that struck trade agreements with Japan and Taiwan to limit their machine-tool imports to America, thereby supporting U.S. machine-tool makers for national security reasons.

"It was a 'voluntary-restraint agreement,' another one of those games we played," smiles Liikala, who's rather easy-going and plain-speaking. "If they didn't agree with our position, we'd impose the restraints under the law. So for them, it was negotiating with a gun to your head."

Now Liikala does his talking over a solid-wood desk, in an almost-plush office (by government standards), across the street from the Newport Beach Golf Course. Palm trees dot the upscale, low-rise neighborhood on Irvine Avenue a few miles from Corona del Mar, the priciest neighborhood in Orange County.

An enviable spot for a civil servant.

"In Washington, they get suspicious when they see a golf course and a beach address, or maybe because it's winter back there, but they come to audit," says Liikala, who lets his staff wear jeans and tennis shoes on Fridays. In just three years, he has survived audits by Congress, the Commerce Department (which governs his bureau), the General Accounting Office, the Office of Management and Budget and the Inspector General, he said. (The last faulted him for overworking his staff - 55 hours per week average - and underpaying them.)

Liikala, who does not allow his staff to accept phone calls from lobbyists, says he's careful. "When we get invited to a business' open house, I have to pay back the host for the Ritz crackers I eat."

In fact he might exercise even greater caution towards the Bush administration. His ex-boss, political appointee Dennis E. Kloske, pointed the finger at the White House when asked where ultimate blame lay for the bureau approving $1.5 billion of advanced technology sales to Iraq from 1985 to 1990. He was fired for that last month, according to a New York Times report.

Liikala, who holds a top-secret U.S. security clearance, won't talk about his business clients. Federal law prohibits it.

So who are the 10,000 or so companies that have applied to the bureau since it opened in 1988? "They make computers, chemicals, medical equipment . . . And the rules for them are more liberal now."

Many goods that had been barred from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and other "traditional" enemies were decontrolled in 1990 and 1991: No special license neede. The rub is, however, that companies must pledge the goods won't be resold to blacklisted nations (North Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, etc.) or to Iran or anywhere that Washington says doesn't deserve the goods.

If they screw up: "They will risk criminal and civil penalties. What we've done is delegate authority to the company . . . And we'll ask them, 'Do you want to show up on CNN a year from now as the company that supplied it?'" An obvious reference to the aftermath of the U.S. Treasury Department's April naming of 52 businesses and 37 individuals who operated as alleged front companies for Iraq.

Culling the good guys from the bad frustrates company officials, Liikala concedes. "They ask me, 'If something was in the Israeli Gazette am I supposed to know it?'" Well, the rules are more liberal, he says, "but more trickier."

Liikala brags about putting on a seminar to teach businesses about a watershed deregulation of trade last July between East and West, only 10 days after the new rules were printed in the Federal Register. About $48 billion in exports were freed, according to Washington. His goal was to put local companies through the door to Eastern Europe first.

The ex-Porsche restorer has sold his sports cars and drives a VW van today. The $75,000-a-year official and wife have an 18-month-old baby, another on the way, and are leaving an apartment for a new home in the Lake Forest area of Orange County.