Andropov concluded that all this information could mean only one thing: that his fears and warnings about an American attack were coming true. He placed Soviet forces on the highest level of alert, and warned his Warsaw Pact allies that for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviets would deploy nuclear submarines along the US coastline.
The Americans could not believe the Soviet reaction to a straightforward drill. They assumed it was political posturing. One of the CIA’s most senior Soviet experts, Melvin Goodman, recalls seeing some ‘clandestine reports that suggested great alarm in Moscow. But frankly they weren’t taken seriously by anyone except the analysts.’19 A KGB officer working as a spy for the British, Oleg Gordievsky, urgently warned his controllers in London of the mood at the top in the Soviet Union. He recalled: ‘When I told the British, they simply could not believe that the Soviet leadership was so stupid and narrow-minded as to believe in something so impossible . . . I said to them OK I’ll get the documents.’ His information went direct to Thatcher, who insisted that the Americans be told. ‘Only a tiny handful of people knew the full details of how fearful they were,’ said Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, Charles Powell. ‘We knew then, through some extremely well-placed agents, that the Russians actually feared that the West was preparing for an aggressive nuclear war against them.’20
The CIA, late in the day, accepted that the Soviet fears may have been paranoid and misplaced but were for real. Former Director of Intelligence Robert Gates admitted: ‘I don’t think the Soviets were crying wolf . . . They did seem to believe that the situation was very dangerous. And US intelligence had failed to grasp the true extent of their anxiety.’ When Reagan was finally told, the news had a profound effect. He saw how the superpowers could blunder into a war through a combination of overblown rhetoric, muscle-flexing, misunderstandings, naïvety and accidents. Immediately he made overtures to Moscow to assure them that Able Archer really was an exercise, and he dispatched retired General Brent Scowcroft, a future National Security Advisor, for face-to-face diplomacy ‘to assure that we have no intention to [attack the USSR]’.21 The tension eased slightly, the Soviets stood down from maximum alert, but relations remained deeply sour. In December, the Soviets walked out of talks in Geneva on missile reductions, which were in any case meandering along with no prospect of success and had only been continuing for show. Andropov remained angry, frustrated and bellicose in the few months remaining to him.
The episode radically changed Reagan, who confided in his diary: ‘Three years has taught me something surprising about the Russians. Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.’ The realisation turned him from a harsh Cold Warrior into a far more emollient statesman.22
NINE
AMERICA’S LEADING DOVE
Washington DC , November 1983
AMERICANS DEEPLY MISUNDERSTOOD the man they elected twice as President in the 1980s. Even some of his close advisers did not realise until late into his presidency that Ronald Reagan was a closet nuclear disarmer, a radical heretic. He ceased to believe in the theories of nuclear deterrence which most of the hawkish people around him uttered with such grim certainty. Reagan was an optimist, a dreamer. In private, he called the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, the conventional wisdom on which the defence of both superpowers and their allies rested, ‘irresponsible, totally abhorrent . . . a suicide pact’. He was convinced that he could rid the world of weapons of mass destruction. In public - even to some of his aides - he dared not say it. He was the darling of the right and his supporters would not have understood him. In domestic affairs he acted as a conservative. On the world stage, though he crafted his rhetoric to sound bellicose, he became America’s leading dove. His great contribution to the world was not as the fire-breathing anti-Communist and Cold Warrior that so many of his most zealous admirers portrayed him. It was Reagan the negotiator, the dealmaker, the visionary man of peace who was successful.
At sixty-eight, Reagan was one of the oldest men to achieve supreme office in the US. He was a man who famously did not read a great deal, or deeply. But, equally famously, he was easy to underestimate. He learned a vast amount about the Soviet Union towards the end of his first term though, typically, he wore his learning lightly. He still spoke in simple terms, often in anecdotes and old jokes. But it is clear from his private correspondence and recently declassified papers that while his folksy charm, sense of humour, sunny disposition and immense calm were genuine, his simple, straightforward demeanour was not. He was far more complex, clever and calculating than he seemed. In his first term, Reagan oversaw an immense American arms build-up, in line with his belligerent 1980 campaign rhetoric about ‘peace through strength’. But the massive increase in defence spending was not all the new President’s doing. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had ordered much of it in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The new range of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe had been approved by the Carter administration. Yet in the first four years of Reagan’s presidency, the Americans built and deployed at least 700 new nuclear missiles and placed scores of thousands of additional men and women under arms. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, said defence spending reached US$ 1.46 trillion and ‘they were screaming with delight throughout the military industrial complex’. Reagan was not a details President so he never questioned a cent of the extra expenditure until later. In his first term he spent nearly as much on defence as Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter combined and more than the cost of both the Korean and Vietnam wars.1
After the Able Archer 83 exercise Reagan began a profound re-examination of his entire strategy towards the Soviet Union. A key moment was a week after the drill when he met the ultra-hawkish Defense Secretary Weinberger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General John Vessey in the ‘situation room’ at the White House to review the exercise. Unusually for him, Reagan was deeply gloomy afterwards. He realised, as he said later, that ‘there were some people in the Pentagon who actually thought a nuclear war was winnable. I thought they were crazy.’ Reagan knew that he would run for re-election the following year and was sure he would beat whatever candidate the Democrats chose to oppose him. He now believed that the harsh rhetoric and his tough line against the Soviets were producing few results. They were not making the Russians more responsive and reasonable. They had led to increased paranoia and a more aggressive response. ‘The impact of Reagan’s hard-line policy on the internal debates in the Kremlin . . . was exactly the opposite of the one intended by Washington,’ Anatoli Dobrynin said. ‘It strengthened those in the [leadership] and the security apparatus who had been pressing for a mirror image of Reagan’s policy.’2
Reagan wanted to talk with the Russians leaders, but he had two problems. The first, as he quipped once, was ‘that they kept dying on me’. The second was that highly influential members of his own administration were firmly set against any negotiations with the Soviets. Reagan had to contend with warfare in his own team that was almost as bitter as the Cold War conflict in the world outside the White House. Caspar Weinberger and a group of his brightest and most ideological Pentagon officials, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, continually tried to persuade the President that the Soviets were not serious about talks. Reagan played one group of advisers against another, led by Secretary of State George Shultz, who favoured making renewed contacts with Moscow.
Reagan was veering much closer towards the latter group - ‘some advisors in the Pentagon strongly opposed my ideas on arms control . . . including my hope for eventually eliminating all nuclear weapons,’ he admitted. But he did not wish to antagonise his ‘base’ supporters.3 He appointed as his chief adviser on the Soviet Union a donnish diplomat, Jack Matlock, whose first task was to write twenty-five highly detailed and long briefing documents about Russian history, US/Soviet relations since World War Two and contemporary lifestyles a
nd culture in the USSR. Reagan took the trouble to read them carefully and reached the conclusion that the time had definitely come to make new overtures to the Kremlin. ‘Many in his administration . . . doubted that the Soviet leaders would negotiate in good faith, but Reagan was an optimist. For all his distaste for the Soviet Union he believed that it could change if subjected to . . . his personal negotiating skill.’4
Andropov died on 9 February 1984 and his successor was not a surprise. The geriatrics in the Kremlin were not yet ready to skip a generation and choose a younger man of vigour and energy. They selected one of their own, a man who would not threaten their retirement perks and privileges. Konstantin Chernenko - ‘a walking mummy’, according to one of his own foreign policy aides - was seventy-three. He suffered from severe asthma and lived on tranquillisers. He had been Brezhnev’s crony and everyone knew he would be a stopgap leader. But he proved to be an embarrassment, the personification of the decay in the Soviet Union and its empire. Whereas Andropov, whatever his flaws, had clearly been a man of intelligence, Chernenko was just as clearly not. A CIA briefing paper described him as ‘a weak sister’, which was a kind observation compared to some of the comments from people who worked for him, bright young apparatchiks who in private could barely conceal contempt for their boss.5
Reagan knew that what was happening did not bode well. One of the first things Chernenko did was to readmit Vyacheslav Molotov, for long Stalin’s deputy, into the Communist Party. Molotov was now ninety-three and had been ‘purged’ in the brief period of Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin campaign after 1956. Now there was a barely hidden nostalgia among some of the aged magnates in the Kremlin for the 1940s and 1950s when the Soviet Union was still a fortress country isolated from the rest of the world. Chernenko considered changing the name of Volgograd back to Stalingrad, though he was persuaded otherwise. Nevertheless, President Reagan tried to start talks going with the new boss in the Kremlin. Two days after Chernenko was elected General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Reagan wrote to him. ‘The US firmly intends to defend our interests and those of our allies, but we do not seek to challenge the security of the Soviet Union and its people,’ he said. He received a brusque reply merely thanking him for his letter. Reagan continued to try and remained in closer contact with Konstantin Chernenko than some of his advisers realised. In reply to a letter from the Russian leader in March Reagan said: ‘It was your hope that history would reveal us as leaders known to be good, kind and wise. Nothing is more important to me and we should take steps to bring this about.’ On 16 April he wrote in his own hand a note: ‘I have reflected at some length on the tragedy and scale of Soviet losses in warfare . . . Surely those losses, which are beyond description, must affect your thinking today. I want you to know that neither I nor the American people hold any offensive intention towards you or the Soviet people. Our constant and urgent purpose must be . . . a lasting reduction of tensions between us. I pledge to you my profound commitment towards that end.’6
Reagan was getting nowhere with his overtures to the Soviet Union and he was now sidetracked by his re-election campaign. Yet he was thinking deeply about the arms race and his commitment to nuclear disarmament was growing - dangerously so as far as the hardliners in his own administration were concerned. During the 1980 election Reagan and his campaign manager, Stuart Spencer, had a revealing conversation on the flight from Los Angeles to Detroit that took them to the Republican National Convention where Reagan would be nominated as presidential candidate.
Spencer asked, ‘Why are you doing this, Ron? Why do you want to be President?’
Reagan replied instantly without a moment’s hesitation, ‘To end the Cold War.’
Spencer asked, ‘And how are you going to do it?’
Reagan said: ‘I’m not sure, but there has got to be a way. And it’s time.’
Reagan’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Michael Deaver, a close confidant, knew early on Reagan’s anti-nuclear views: Reagan, he said, ‘believed he was the guy who could get the Soviets to the table and end the nuclear arms race. He was running for President because he believed he was destined to do away with nuclear weapons.’7 Matlock went further. He suspected that if there was a war, Reagan would not retaliate and press the nuclear button. ‘I think deep down he doubted that even if the United States were struck that he could bring himself to strike another country with nuclear weapons. He would never even hint that, but I sensed it . . . He said “how can you tell me, the President of the U S, that the only way I can defend my people is by threatening other people [with destruction] and maybe civilisation itself. That is unacceptable.’”8
Reagan had become excited by a scheme that American scientists from his own state, in California, had dreamed up to place a system of lasers and early-warning detection equipment in space to act as a shield against ballistic missiles. The idea was that, theoretically, missiles could be spotted and destroyed by laser rays the moment they left the earth’s lower atmosphere. Reagan wanted to put the theory into practice and approved enormous expenditure on research into his favoured Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars project. He was totally convinced that if it worked - and he had faith that American know-how could make it work - it would render nuclear weapons redundant and ultimately result in the end of missile arsenals everywhere. He thought it was the ultimate defensive system that could rid humanity of the fear of nuclear obliteration. He genuinely could not understand how the Russians perceived it differently, as a dangerous and threatening new weapon in space aimed at them. He thought that if he could talk to the Soviets and offer to share the Star Wars technology with them, he could persuade them to change their minds. But first he needed a negotiating partner in the Kremlin prepared to deal with him. For that he had to wait.
TEN
A PYRRHIC VICTORY
Warsaw, Saturday 3 December 1983
LECH WAŁESA SPENT only a few days after the martial law declaration under guard in Warsaw. Then he was dispatched 500 kilometres from the capital - and almost as far from Gdansk - to a remote hunting lodge in Arłamówo, in eastern Poland near the border with Ukraine. The house had once belonged to the former Communist Party leader Edward Gierek. Wałesa was kept under strict house arrest, but treated relatively well. He was allowed weekly access to a priest and occasional conjugal visits from his wife, but he was a gregarious man and he was cut off from conversation. He was provided with enormous meals and as many cigarettes as he could manage, but took very little exercise. He emerged after eleven months a great deal heavier, paler, a little greyer and more sombre. He went back to Danuta and his children and returned to work at the Lenin Shipyard, where he became the most celebrated electrician in the world. He waited patiently, convinced that at some point the regime would have to negotiate with him and with Solidarity.
During the ‘period of war’ generals tried to cut Poland off from the rest of the world - and at the same time to ‘modernise the nation’. They found the two impossible to reconcile. The country was run by a Council of National Salvation, known in Poland by the acronym WRONA (meaning Crow). It consisted entirely of soldiers, presided over by Jaruzelski. Around 10,000 people were arrested and detained in jails or in forty-nine hastily built internment camps. Millions of state employees, from train drivers to librarians, were forced to sign pledges of loyalty to the state - or rather, loyalty to the military junta now in power. Phone lines were cut and the use of telex machines was banned. Scores of newspapers were closed down, the secret police seized 370 ‘illegal’ printing presses and 1,200 other pieces of equipment that could be used for samizdat publishing such as photocopying machines. The television news continued to be read by men in uniforms. Yet still martial law was half-hearted, restrained. There was none of the brutality following the crackdown after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. People were not deported en masse or executed.
Wałesa was constantly harassed. But Solidarity was allowed to exist underground, in a bizarre way that suggested uncertainty w
ithin the junta, an awareness they could not return in the 1980s to the barbaric measures of earlier times. There were diehards in the upper ranks of the Communist Party, known as the Cement Group, who wanted a far tougher war against the people, but Jaruzelski seldom took them seriously. Wałesa was investigated for petty tax irregularities, he was routinely detained by the SB for short periods of a few hours and a barrage of propaganda was directed at him in the official media characterising him as ‘the self-appointed American Ambassador to Poland’. But he remained firm. When the stick did not work, the regime tried the carrot. He was repeatedly promised substantial sums of money if he emigrated. He refused. In April 1983 he caused a sensation when - supposedly under twenty-four-hour surveillance - he managed to attend a secret three-day-long meeting with the leaders of ‘underground’ Solidarity. The secret police knew nothing about it. He always managed to maintain contact with members of the illegal organisation.
Around this time Wałesa suggested that he might be willing to be conciliatory if he were granted a TV interview. The generals were delighted and imagined they could use it as a propaganda coup. But when the cameras and microphones arrived, Wałesa used them for an eloquent denunciation of martial law and the regime. The interview was so clearly hostile to Jaruzelski that it could not be aired on state TV, even though the Communist Party’s propaganda team tried to doctor it for public consumption. The government issued instructions that the tape be destroyed. But a copy of the soundtrack came the way of the sound recordist Wojciech Harasiewicz, a Solidarity supporter, who passed it on to the ABC News Warsaw correspondent David Ensor. It was played frequently on the Polish section of Radio Free Europe and the BBC World Service - and bootlegged tapes were made and passed on throughout the country. It was a spectacular mistake by the military regime, which reacted with grim predictability. Harasiewicz was arrested and jailed.
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