Watkins nodded grimly at my response. “The president said the same thing. He thinks Star Wars is the answer to saving the planet.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
SOVIET REPRESENTATIVES CONTINUED TO walk out on arms control talks. Or Soviet leaders died unexpectedly.
General Secretary Andropov sent Reagan a letter proposing another meeting. He died a week later, on February 9, 1984. Konstantin Chernenko took his place. He died on March 10. Mikhail Gorbachev took his place.
“How am I supposed to get anywhere with the Russians,” Reagan complained to Nancy, “if they keep dying on me?”
Gorbachev insisted the United States halt work on SDI as a prerequisite for future nuclear arms talks. Reagan refused. I recalled a poem JFK was fond of reciting:
Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous plaza full,
But only one in there who knows
And he’s the man who fights the bull.
Ronald Reagan was the man who fought the bull.
In early November 1985, Secretary of State Shultz returned to Washington from a meeting with Gorbachev to talk about talking. From what the CNO passed on to me, Shultz found the Soviet leader intelligent, sure of himself, and fully in charge of the USSR.
“But he’s full of anti-American, anti-capitalist propaganda,” Shultz said. “He thinks arms manufacturers spread anti-Soviet propaganda to keep the arms race alive in order to profit from it.”
Later that month, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva. Reagan offered to share SDI and open the laboratories for Gorbachev’s inspection. Gorbachev was suspicious. He seemed to believe the U.S. was using SDI as subterfuge for an offensive first-strike capability.
Reagan sent Gorbachev a letter a week after he returned from Geneva: “The truth is that the United States has no intention of using its strategic defense program to gain any advantage and there is no development under way to create space-based weapons. Our goal is to eliminate any possibility of a first strike from either side. This being the case, we should be able to find a way, in practical terms, to relieve the concerns you have expressed.”
CIA analysts like my wife Barbara uncovered evidence that the Soviet economy was in dire straits as a result of the arms race. Many of us in the Pentagon as well as at the CIA felt, as Reagan did, that a Soviet economic tailspin would force Gorbachev to come around on an arms reduction agreement.
In the meantime, mayhem kept the rest of the world in a tailspin.
On April 5, 1986, terrorists bombed the LaBelle discotheque in West Berlin, killing three people, one of whom was a U.S. serviceman, and injuring twenty-nine. Intelligence services traced the act to Libya.
Libya in North Africa and its leader Muammar Gaddafi had become a major concern to the U.S. after Gaddafi aligned himself with the Soviet Union and expressed ambitions of establishing a new caliphate of Arab and Muslim states. According to the CIA, the little nation was infested with terrorist training camps.
Not only that, Gaddafi was obsessed with becoming a nuclear power and had moved in on nearby Chad and occupied it. Chad was rich in uranium.
President Reagan had already proved himself a leader not to be trifled with. On April 15, he ordered airstrikes against Libya in retaliation for the nightclub bombing in West Germany. The primary target was Gaddafi’s own palace. A cheer erupted throughout the Pentagon.
The Soviets remained uncharacteristically quiet about it.
Less than two weeks later, an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine spread radiation into the atmosphere and over much of western Russia and Europe. It was the worst nuclear accident in history, killing thirty-one people. Radiation fallout was expected to last into future generations.
The accident brought to front pages around the world the dangers of nuclear power. President Reagan used it as an opportunity to propose to Gorbachev a sweeping new arms summit. The meeting between them occurred in a waterfront home overlooking the Atlantic in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986. Present with the leaders were Secretary of State George Shultz and Gorbachev’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze.
Everything went along fine until, with a smile on his face, Gorbachev said, “This all depends, of course, on your giving up SDI.”
That was when Reagan realized this meeting was all a charade, an attempt to put the U.S. in an awkward position.
He blew up. “I’ve said again and again that SDI wasn’t a bargaining chip. I’ve told you, if we find out the SDI is practical and feasible we’ll make that information known to you and everyone else so that nuclear weapons can be made obsolete. Now, with all we have accomplished here, you do this and throw in this roadblock and everything is out the window. There is no way we are going to give up research to find a defensive weapon against nuclear weapons.”
We in the Pentagon knew from daily intelligence briefings that the Soviets were secretly researching a missile defense system similar to SDI. Their technology was inferior, but if the U.S. halted work on SDI we could all wake up one morning to find the USSR now possessed the defense we had given up on. SDI was an insurance policy to guarantee the Soviets kept their word should Reagan and Gorbachev make commitments.
Angry, the president stood up from the table. “The meeting is over. Let’s go, George. We’re leaving.”
Before, the Soviets had always been the ones to walk out.
Gorbachev’s continued resistance through most of 1987 were busy months—the Iran-Contra affair; conflicts between Israel and her Arab neighbors; the continuing war between Iran and Iraq and their attempts to close the Persian Gulf to shipping; new efforts by Democrats in Congress to cut U.S. military programs essential for continuing Reagan’s policy of peace through strength; a mistaken attack by Iraqi warplanes against the USS Stark patrolling off the coast of Saudi Arabia that claimed the lives of thirty-seven U.S. sailors.
After a year of stubbornness and continued expenditures on weapons his country could ill afford, Gorbachev sent Reagan a letter indicating a desire to work out their differences. Prior to their meeting scheduled for December, wily old Reagan played a little night fighter psyops of his own that would definitely catch the attention of Soviet intelligence groups.
Two articles appeared in the November 23 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology:
(T)he Strategic Defense Initiative is starting final preparations for its most ambitious flight test to date, the $200-million-dollar Delta 181 mission set for launch by NASA in early 1988 to obtain data critical for development of multiple SDI satellites planned for the space-based layered defense system.
The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization plans to test two kinetic energy weapons concepts—the space-based interceptor and exoatmospheric reentry interceptor subsystem … to demonstrate their economic and technical ability to serve as the kill mechanism for a first phase Strategic Defense System.…
On December 7, 1987, the forty-sixth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Each leader made brief remarks. Reagan ended his with an old Russian maxim: “Dovorey no provorey—trust but verify.”
Gorbachev said, “You repeat that at every meeting.”
“I like it.”
Reagan observed later how he considered the most important reasons for the historical breakthrough in nuclear talks with the Soviets was SDI and America’s overall modernization of our military forces. What few of us foresaw was that in trying to keep up with the U.S. in the arms race the USSR had expended its last resources on weapons systems and spent itself into bankruptcy and exhaustion. The Evil Empire was on its last legs.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
TIME. SOMEONE ONCE CALCULATED that God gave a person about twenty-five thousand days to spend if he lived an average life span. Each day spent was like taking a seed out of a jug containing that number and tossing it out the window as you sped down a highway. That seed wa
s gone forever and you seldom knew if it sprouted new seed or if it withered.
Dad used his seed the best he could. He died between my time at the CIA and my return to active naval duty. Died of heart failure at the age of seventy and lay buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Mom stayed on at Virginia Beach and eventually married Dad’s old classmate, Joe Briggs, from the Naval Academy. She too was ailing from a heart problem. I made every effort to see her often. She always welcomed Barbara and me with a warm hug and that big tolerant smile of hers that she wore all her life. With her I always felt the little boy again nibbled by something in the surf, afraid to go back in the ocean until she proved to me it was all right.
“You participate when you are young,” I remember Dad saying. “When you grow old, you step back and watch others participate.”
I was over sixty years old now. I figured I had about four thousand seeds left, more or less. I was weary, had more lines in my face, my height was a bit stooped, my steps were a little more deliberate, but otherwise I was in fair shape. Sometimes I thought I was at that stage Dad talked about, no longer a participant in great events but instead an observer. Perhaps that was part of acquiring wisdom, that you could look back and make some sense of it all.
Former communist Whittaker Chambers in his 1952 autobiography Witness expressed his belief that communism would ultimately triumph because of the “intensity of faith” communists invested in their cause. He wrote that, in order to overcome the dark clouds of socialist collectivism, “the Free World must discover a power of faith which will provide man’s mind at the same intensity, with the same two certainties: a reason to live and a reason to die.”
President Ronald Reagan seemed to possess that certainty. When I shook hands with him that time, it was like shaking the hand of history itself. He had somehow been allotted more than his share of seeds and used them wisely. His bold, straightforward attack against communism shocked Americans as much as it did the Soviets. After all, we had been pussyfooting around the Russian bear and kowtowing to it since World War II and before.
“Russia’s postwar position in Europe will be a dominant one,” predicted Harry Hopkins, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt’s White House. “With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces. The conclusions from the foregoing are obvious. Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war, she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship.”
“They expect us to play doggie, turn over with our paws in the air, whimper, piss on ourselves, and play dead,” I remarked to CNO James Watkins in one of our many discussions during the tense and controversial period of Reagan’s standoff with the Soviets. “Many of us are like an old whore ready to spread our legs for appeasement and peace.”
“This is a high-stakes game,” Watkins said. “The president is one tough old sonofabitch. I’m betting Gorbachev blinks first.”
All these communist leaders, from Josef Stalin right up through Mikhail Gorbachev were the same—bent on dominating the world.
The Soviet Union began aggressively building an empire from 1917 on. Under Lenin, Russia forcibly annexed the Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Stalin added Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, and parts of Bukovina and Finland. As WWII ended, new Soviet seizures were executed in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Opposition leaders and groups were imprisoned, exiled, or executed.
Communist revolutions erupted in China and Indochina. Communist-fomented civil wars broke out in Greece, Malaya, and the Philippines. Reds attempted to stage general strikes in France and Italy, while in the Balkans and other parts of Eastern Europe populations faced a choice of either fascist or communist dictatorships.
There seemed to be no stopping the Red tidal wave. The Korean War ended in a draw, with the Soviets maintaining influence over North Korea. The Red Chinese seized the helm in China, the most populous nation on earth, and promptly murdered as many as sixty million of their own people and one million Tibetans. Ho Chi Minh announced communism in Vietnam.
The United States refused to intervene in the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule. Cuba turned communist under a Castro takeover, the first Soviet-backed regime in the western hemisphere. East Germany erected the Berlin Wall. Communist regimes sprang up in South Yemen and Africa. South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos fell to communism. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fled the country while an equal number ended up executed or in labor and “reeducation” camps.
Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford’s secretary of state, proposed detente with Russia by proclaiming that “we cannot prevent the growth of Soviet power.”
Marxists came to power in Nicaragua, the Seychelles, and Grenada and initiated other “popular front” uprisings all over Latin America. The Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan. Terrorism supported by Soviet Russia as well as Islamic jihad increased dramatically. President Jimmy Carter lifted the ban on travel to Cuba and North Korea.
In a speech of May 22, 1977, Jimmy Carter exhorted Americans to abandon their “inordinate fear of communism.”
Many “progressives” in the West cheered for a world communist victory. Cradling the Marxist agenda under their bonnets, they insinuated themselves into the heart of American democracy, claiming to have glimpsed the future in which, with a few breaking of eggs, an omelet could be made.
Shortly after I went with the CIA, I obtained an FBI memo that listed known contacts between representatives of the Soviet Intelligence Services and members and staff personnel of the U.S. Congress. The list included hundreds of Congressional staff members and at least thirteen senators and representatives.
Disgust for these people filled my throat with bile. We seemed to be on a downward spiral of American susceptibility to communism’s false promises of a collectivist Utopia. It spread moral uncertainty across the heartland while much of the world remained sealed behind an iron curtain of repression, an impenetrable barrier that impounded at least one billion people while untold numbers of others were killed, tortured, or imprisoned with no hope of rescue or outside help. What people seemed not to understand was that communism was the ultimate manifestation of terrorism.
Few U.S. presidents starting with Woodrow Wilson put up any significant resistance to the advance of world communism. Until Reagan, the West seemed to hunker down in fear to accept the inevitable, like Churchill’s story of the monkey who makes a deal with the crocodile on the condition that he be the last one eaten. Reagan posed the world’s first substantial challenge to communism since Lenin was a pup.
It came as no surprise to me that he faced a formidable array of critics as he continued to press the Soviet Union during his presidency’s last months leading up to the 1988 elections. He abandoned completely the “sweet talk” temerity of Cold War presidents before him in his ideological, economic, and geopolitical offensive to draw the Soviets into a battle of systems in which they could not compete and that he predicted would leave them on the “ash heap of history.” No political figure since the American Revolution had so boldly expressed the tone of what freedom meant or entailed.
Reagan was deemed “reckless,” accused of “provoking the Soviets into war.” Media described him as “dangerous … simplistic … crazy … illiberal and provocative.” American Journey, a freshman history textbook, mocked him, saying he “considered the Soviet Union not a coequal nation with legitimate world interests, but an ‘evil empire’”—which, in fact, he did. The Washington Post shouted, “McCarthyism!” The Law Center for Constitutional Rights echoed with, “A move back to the Dark Ages.”
The people who viscerally understood what he was most about were trapped behind the Iron Curtain. His “Evil Empire” speech resonated inside the Soviet gulag. Political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union and emigrated to America, recalled how Reagan’s words were “incredibly popular” among the Soviet
Union’s political prisoners.
Natan Sharansky, a Jewish dissident inmate at Permanent Labor Camp 35, jumped for joy when news of the speech filtered into his cell. He passed it on to other inmates.
“Finally,” he exclaimed, “the leader of the free world had spoken the truth—a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.”
Not even John F. Kennedy understood as well the concept, principles, and practices of waging unconventional warfare as well as Reagan. Reagan was a political night fighter who played for keeps and toward a single purpose. Sovietologist Sewery N. Bialer explained it in this way: “(His) self-righteous and moralistic tone, its reduction of Soviet achievements to crimes by international outlaws … stunned and humiliated the Soviet leaders. … [Reagan seemed] determined to deny the Soviet Union nothing less than legitimacy and status as a global power [which] they thought had been conceded once and for all by Reagan’s predecessors.”
Harvard sovietologist Adam Ulam observed how the only way Soviet expansion could be blocked was to be confronted with a “power strong and determined to make Soviet adventurism too risky and expensive.”
I understood what Reagan was doing. I had practiced it myself in one form or another since the Naval Academy forty years ago. It was war “by other means.” Both clandestine and overt at varying times.
Reagan installed Pershing missiles in Europe to deter further Russian expansion. He pressured the Soviets with a massive military buildup in the United States and introduced “Star Wars,” which threatened to make Soviet nuclear weapons obsolete. He provided military support to anti-communist movements around the world and, as at Grenada, stood ready when necessary to go to war against communist encroachment. He and Pope John Paul II cooperated in destabilizing the communist regime in Poland, which led eventually to the nation’s freedom. On June 12, 1987, he delivered his famous speech at the Berlin Wall.
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