Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  When Mrs Thatcher had visited President Carter in Washington before Christmas, he had told her privately that Soviet troop numbers were building up on the Afghan border.40 On 20 December, the Foreign Office had summoned a Soviet diplomat to express British concern, but had been told that no interference was planned. Once the invasion had taken place, Mrs Thatcher wrote a formal letter of protest to Brezhnev, beginning, ‘I have been profoundly disturbed at recent developments in Afghanistan …’41 But although her anger was real enough, ‘disturbed’ was not really the right word. The invasion fitted with her expectations of Soviet behaviour. Robert Conquest wrote to her office: ‘For anyone with an ounce of sense, there is no lesson to be learnt from the Afghan events: they merely confirm, in dramatic fashion, what was known to many and should have been known to all of those concerned with Western policy. For the time being, those who have been dangerously in error about Soviet motivations and intentions have been shocked into facing reality’ (Mrs Thatcher’s underlinings).42 This was her view too. She summoned the Soviet Ambassador and told him that the invasion of Afghanistan was even worse than that of Czechoslovakia in 1968, because Afghanistan had not been a Soviet satellite.43 Michael Alexander, who was with her as the details of the invasion came through, noted her reaction to the news, and recorded that his own was different: ‘she interpreted the invasion as an exercise in Russian expansionism … I must confess that I argued with her that night that the invasion was if anything an act of desperation on the part of the Russians – rather out of keeping with their usual caution. The Russians were going in because they could not control the situation in any other way. That struck me as something over which we should not lose too much sleep.’44

  The disinclination to lose sleep over something always irritated the hyperactive Mrs Thatcher. To her, the enemy was now in plain view. She felt vindicated, and her blood was up. Her arguments were now listened to more carefully, and the case for deploying GLCMs and Pershing IIs in Europe became easier to make. President Carter was one of those whom Conquest described as ‘shocked into facing reality’. He suspended efforts to ratify SALT II, imposed an embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union and used his State of the Union address at the end of January 1980 to say that the Afghan invasion ‘could pose the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War’. Mrs Thatcher was keen to help him wake up the West. When Carrington wrote to her about the Western reaction to the invasion, to say, rather languidly, that ‘It may of course take time to work out the most appropriate positive steps to take, ’ she wrote a wordless ‘!’ on his letter.45 But she herself did not have a very clear idea of how best to react. Her immediate response was to see if the news might enable the West to bring Iran, which, two months earlier, had occupied the US Embassy in Teheran, holding fifty-two diplomats hostage, back into the fold. Partly motivated by the British commercial interest in avoiding the trade sanctions against Iran which President Carter sought, she argued that Afghanistan made the UN sanctions resolution against Iran inappropriate. She told the Foreign Office to make sure that the ‘enormity of the act’ of invasion ‘was not lost to sight’, but without suggesting how.46

  The most obvious way of ostracizing the Soviet Union was to try to boycott the Olympic Games which were due to be held in Moscow that summer, an idea encouraged by the United States. When she and Carrington met to discuss this, Mrs Thatcher urged a boycott, but also said that the government could not forbid athletes to take part if they wanted. With magnificent world-weariness, Carrington commented that ‘perhaps the best outcome would be if the Government recommended against participation but the various committees, and the participants themselves, decided to go to Moscow none the less.’47

  This, in fact, is what happened. Carter forbade American athletes to take part, but was not followed by other countries. Mrs Thatcher lobbied Helmut Schmidt and others to hunt for an alternative Olympic venue, and unsuccessful efforts were made to see if the Games could move to Montreal. Mrs Thatcher was partly motivated by the need to console potential American hurt feelings about Iran. She told OD Committee* that because Britain was opposed to sanctions on Iran it should be extra-supportive of the United States over the Olympic boycott.48† Initially the President was unimpressed by the response in London and elsewhere to the Soviet invasion. ‘UK and other Europeans reaction to SU/Afghan situation are very weak,’ he wrote on a memo from the National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.49 But, as Brzezinski later explained, Carter’s view towards Mrs Thatcher’s government soon shifted: ‘all things considered we were very happy with their actions. Far more so than most European nations.’50 A speech Mrs Thatcher delivered in the Commons at the end of January, condemning Soviet aggression and calling for Europe to stand behind the United States, was particularly welcome in the White House.51 ‘Frankly, I consider it to be the best statement on this subject,’ Brzezinski wrote to the British Ambassador, Nicko Henderson. ‘I say this with heavy heart, having made some myself.’52 While Americans were generally dismayed by the European reaction, Mrs Thatcher, reported Time magazine, was ‘one outstanding exception’.53

  A series of letters were exchanged between the Prime Minister and Sir Denis Follows, the President of the British Olympic Committee. But no amount of rhetoric from Mrs Thatcher about the example of the Berlin Games helping Nazi propaganda in 1936 or the fact that, by going to Moscow, athletes ‘would seem to condone an international crime’54 had any effect. The Olympic Committee ignored the parliamentary vote in favour of a boycott and went ahead with its plans for the Games. Further embarrassment was caused because the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, was president of the International Equestrian Federation, and therefore had originally expected to go to Moscow. At the end of April, he signed a statement by the International Olympic Sports Federation condemning the boycott. It is understood that he wrote privately to Mrs Thatcher to apologize and explain that he had tried to tone down the statement. Mrs Thatcher, who by this time knew the form about writing to royalty (‘With my humble duty, I am, Sir, your Royal Highness’s obedient servant …’), was nevertheless quite tart in her reaction to the idea that politics could be kept out of the matter: ‘Alas, everything in connection with the USSR has a political flavour. That unfortunately is the problem.’55 In the end, the Olympic boycott went off at half-cock. Some British athletes, encouraged by their official bodies, went to Moscow. Others, following Mrs Thatcher’s urging, decided to stay at home. The Games were no great success, but nor was the boycott.

  Much the same no-score draw was achieved by short-term Western reaction to the invasion in general. On the one hand, the Russians had made a mistake, in both propaganda and military terms, from which Soviet Communism never fully recovered. On the other hand, the West’s response was largely ineffective. Certain decisions with huge and controversial consequences were made – the arming of Afghan mujahidin resistance to the Soviets, and a much greater Western support for increasing the military power of President Zia’s Islamist regime in Pakistan (about which Mrs Thatcher professed herself ‘a little unhappy’)56 – but the more immediate acts were inconsequential, and often showed the West divided.

  As she tried to encourage a robust and co-ordinated alliance response, Mrs Thatcher was dismayed by much of what she found. Against her copy of the communiqué on Afghanistan from the Franco-German summit at the beginning of February, she wrote: ‘!!! All words’ (underlined three times). When she met Helmut Schmidt later in the month, she expressed herself ‘bitterly disappointed’ by the failure of the EEC to support Carter and his Olympic boycott. Schmidt told her that he thought ‘There is now a clear and present danger of a Third World War.’57 She failed in her attempt to implement Carter’s request for an emergency NATO summit on Afghanistan, and the truth was that, although she supported Carter’s desire to be strong, she doubted his tactics and skill. When she discussed the proposed NATO meeting with Schmidt, she admitted that she questioned ‘the wisdom of the proposal but felt it necessary to support
President Carter’.58 She feared the summit would highlight disunity. In June, President Giscard decided to take the withdrawal of some Soviet military units from Afghanistan as ‘un element nouveau et positif’, and to make France the intermediary in possible discussions between the West and the Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko. Passing this on to Mrs Thatcher, Michael Alexander wrote: ‘Giscard was very prompt in circulating this message.’ Mrs Thatcher scribbled: ‘Yes – he is – half way to Neville Chamberlain.’59

  She felt quite sure, after Afghanistan, that the argument was coming her way. Addressing her party conference that autumn, she made the point explicitly:

  Long before we came into office, and therefore long before the invasion of Afghanistan, I was pointing to the threat from the East. I was accused of scaremongering. But events have more than justified my words. Soviet Marxism is ideologically, politically and morally bankrupt. But militarily the Soviet Union is a powerful and growing threat … The British Government are not indifferent to the occupation of Afghanistan. We shall not allow it to be forgotten. Unless and until the Soviet troops are withdrawn, other nations are bound to wonder which of them may be next. Of course there are those who say that by speaking out we are complicating East–West relations, that we are endangering détente. But the real danger would lie in keeping silent. Détente is indivisible and it is a two-way process.60

  What she still lacked in her battle with Soviet Marxism was a powerful ally who shared her worldview. This was about to change. As she spoke to her party conference, the American presidential campaign was in full swing, and Jimmy Carter was fighting to survive. That July, on a flight to the Republican convention in Detroit which nominated him as the party’s presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan had chatted with his political guru, Stuart Spencer: ‘Spencer asked the question all political pros learn to ask their candidates early on. “Why are you doing this, Ron? Why do you want to be President?” Without a moment’s hesitation Reagan answered, “To end the Cold War.” ’61

  While Reagan’s election in November thrilled Mrs Thatcher, it alarmed British officials. ‘I think we were concerned’, recalled Christopher Mallaby, ‘that it might turn out to be a very hard-line, perhaps a crude, policy towards the Soviet Union,’62 but it was this ‘crude’ or, as she would have said, principled approach which attracted Mrs Thatcher. Carrington summed it up: ‘I think that in many ways Reagan and Thatcher were exactly the same. She was basically extremely hostile towards the Soviets. Talk about evil empire … she believed it really was an evil empire. They had the same kind of values. The difference between them was that while he had gut feelings, she had an intelligence that he did not have.’63

  The ‘evil empire’ was, of course, Reagan’s own phrase, first used later, in March 1983. The slogan, calculated to make diplomats blanch, reflected the moral tone which both Reagan and Mrs Thatcher employed in describing the Soviet Union. ‘Reagan believed it was essential to take on the Soviets on the moral plane: aggression and oppressing their own people and others was not something that would be countenanced,’ said Edwin Meese,* a Reagan confidant and counsellor to the President.64 In his very first press conference as President, Reagan declared that ‘the only morality [the Soviets] recognise is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat …’65 On the same day, 29 January 1981, in London, Mrs Thatcher attacked the dishonesty with which the Soviets conducted détente, in terms which prompted a personal letter of thanks from Reagan; and in a press conference a couple of weeks later for American journalists in London, she focused on how the lack of genuine détente produced the oppression of the Soviet Union’s own people: ‘You will have seen that Sakharov* was sent to Gorky, you have seen Yuri Orlov,† after all he was there to monitor Helsinki … Détente should be two-way …’66 All this registered strongly with Reagan, who referred to Mrs Thatcher privately at this time as ‘the only European leader I know with balls’.67

  Hoping to capitalize on Reagan’s inexperience, Brezhnev issued a surprise invitation to the President after he had been in office for just a month. He offered to meet him at a superpower summit to discuss whatever he wanted. The idea was to present Moscow as eager to defuse tensions through dialogue. In fact by this stage Brezhnev was no longer well enough to discuss international issues coherently, so the invitation was issued in the knowledge that the meeting would never take place. Publicly, Reagan gave it a cautious welcome, but discussed it with Mrs Thatcher in private, when she paid her first visit to him as president, in Washington three days later.

  Prime Minister Thatcher asked the President if he had considered what kind of fundamental response [was] to be given to Brezhnev’s proposal for a meeting … It is recognized, of course, that one simply cannot say ‘no, we will never talk’. In the back of everyone’s mind there is the idea of ‘yes, of course, we must talk’, but we cannot talk until every problem, every possible pitfall is carefully examined. The Soviets are skilled negotiators. We can expect them to play on the peace-loving sympathies of people. She was struck, for example, by the reference [in Brezhnev’s invitation] to a moratorium on Theatre Nuclear Forces. The Prime Minister said that her attitude is that when you sup with the devil you must have a long spoon. In fact you had better have a whole lot of long spoons.68

  She proposed that the answer should be ‘yes, in due course’. Reagan ‘replied that this is the position we’ve taken; not a no, not a yes – we are considering it very carefully.’69

  Mrs Thatcher developed this line in a speech in New York two days later. Her criticisms of the Soviet Union – ‘what is there in the Soviet system to admire? Material prosperity? It does not produce it. Spiritual satisfaction? It denies it’70 – were so harsh as to drive Carrington out of town to avoid attending. ‘She gave a very very very right-wing address’ he recalled, ‘quite a lot of which I disapproved of.’71 But in fact she restated the position which she and Reagan shared, which was that dialogue should be explored when the time was right: ‘In this perilous world, negotiation between governments must continue, particularly in the field of arms control – or better still of arms reduction. We need to establish a military balance between East and West and to ensure that that balance holds.’72

  Early in March 1981, the Soviet Ambassador in London presented a letter from Brezhnev to her (and to all alliance leaders) offering an international summit and an INF moratorium in the hope of heading off INF deployment. Mrs Thatcher told him that Britain would reduce arms only from a position of security. Détente could be pursued if the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan: otherwise, ‘it gave rise to the question, “Who next?” ’ ‘The conflict seemed to encircle the globe,’ she said, citing the adventurism of Cuba in Africa and the Caribbean (a subject on which Robert Conquest had briefed her). There should be a summit only if it were fully prepared, with ‘genuine’ discussions. She attacked the Ambassador for the treatment of Yuri Orlov, and added, ‘Ours was an open society, while that in the Soviet Union was not.’73

  To her irritation, the Foreign Office was pursuing a rather different line. At the end of January she was informed that Carrington intended to negotiate a new Cultural Agreement with the Soviet Union. ‘I am very sorry that we are negotiating a new cultural agreement,’ she noted. ‘… They will gain from it – we shall lose. So much for Afghanistan.’74 And shortly after her meeting with the Ambassador, Carrington went against her confrontational stance by suggesting he should go to Moscow in person to establish better Soviet contacts. ‘I am very worried indeed,’ she wrote. ‘We should have to consult with the US. Can we not keep contacts to meetings in the margins of international fora.’75* One dark evening, she was standing at the door of No. 10, staring up at the bulk of the Foreign Office opposite. ‘Look at that,’ she said to an official, ‘the place that keeps the light out of Downing Street.’76

  It was to restoring the military balance which she had emphasized in New York that Mrs Thatcher devoted her main energie
s. In her mind, INF deployment was the key. Although she had not liked the idea of negotiations with the Soviets over INF, she had come to the view that the best way of persuading European allies to accept INF missiles was the strategy of ‘dual track’, by which deployment was linked to a US commitment to pursue such negotiations. Mrs Thatcher was convinced that a willingness to negotiate was essential if the allies were to win public support for the arrival of new American missiles. With the arrival of the Reagan administration, she found herself in the surprising situation of having to uphold the plan agreed with Carter in the face of criticism from her new friends in Washington. Those in the administration, such as Al Haig, the new Secretary of State, who knew Europe well, agreed with Mrs Thatcher and argued forcefully in favour of dual track. Other, more hawkish members of the administration resisted the idea of any negotiation with the Soviets. One or two, notably Richard Perle,* then an assistant secretary of defense, were against INF deployment altogether, on the grounds that European public opinion would never allow the American missiles to be moved around the country in a crisis, and so the weapons would prove useless.77 According to Richard Allen, President Reagan himself favoured the dual-track approach,78 but at this stage he made no effort to redress the sceptical tone being set by many in his administration.

  The difference between Mrs Thatcher and the Reaganites really arose from the difference of their respective situations. The new Republican administration, longing to make up for the Carter years of drift, wanted to change the whole approach towards the Soviet Union. So did Mrs Thatcher. But, being, geographically if not mentally, a European, she was very conscious of the danger of the alliance splitting, and the strong desire of the Russians to bring this about. Her experience in the autumn of 1979 of European anxieties over INF, especially those in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, had made her sensitive to the danger of rupture. She could see how Britain, in particular, could be made vulnerable by Continental weakness or American unilateral action, or both. She was playing – and playing surprisingly well – the unaccustomed role of bridge-builder. As a State Department briefing paper put it: