Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Prime Minister Thatcher’s government approaches East–West issues with a combination of vocal anti-communism and a pragmatic desire to harmonize Western interests in responding to Soviet adventurism … the British fear being whipsawed between contradictory US and ‘European’ approaches to the Soviets. Accordingly, while they favour greater linkage† in general, they are conscious of the greater constraints operating on the Europeans (particularly the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany]) and favour examining linkages closely on a case by case basis. This makes the UK a strong proponent of Allied consultation and harmony.79

  Reagan supporter though she was, Mrs Thatcher thus stood in opposition to the administration’s most ardent hawks, who at this moment were making the running. As Al Haig remembered, ‘The Pentagon was, oddly enough, “don’t waste the money.” You can see what kind of trouble that gets you in. Margaret Thatcher was always steady, “Deploy.” There was no question about her position. It was an invaluable help to me within the Administration.’80

  In advance of her visit to Washington in February 1981, British officials lobbied the administration strongly in favour of sticking with dual track. As the State Department briefed:

  The UK will seek reassurance that we are not embarking on a major policy change on TNF and will welcome confirmation of continued US support for NATO’s two track approach … Provided they are persuaded that we do not underestimate the strength of arms control pressures in Europe, the British can also be helpful with other Allies in buying time for us to develop our policies.81

  Haig’s Department duly provided the White House with language reiterating the US commitment to the dual-track approach, which the NSC staff incorporated into a public statement delivered by the President at the conclusion of Mrs Thatcher’s visit.82 Those drafting these remarks considered the language unremarkable, ‘total boilerplate’,83 but the words were significant in that they put the President’s support for dual track on the record.* The hawks, whose opposition to negotiations remained undiminished, refused to accept defeat and now sought to avoid, or at least delay, the policy’s implementation. At the end of April, Haig returned from a visit to Europe and urged Reagan to move ahead with dual track and set a date to begin negotiations. He prayed in aid all the main European players:

  The British remain our most reliable ally, the French by far the most robust. However, both Mrs Thatcher and Giscard are deeply concerned that we take into account the situation in the FRG. Mrs Thatcher almost pleaded with me in London that we take care not to isolate Chancellor Schmidt, whom she described as ‘a really good friend of the US’. As I reported to you, they deeply fear the consequences of misunderstanding between a resurgent US and an exposed FRG.84

  History does not usually write down Mrs Thatcher as a healer of wounds between alliance members but so, at this stage, she was. Reagan decided to proceed with both aspects of dual track.

  If negotiations were to take place, however, what was to be their aim? Against the wishes of Haig’s State Department, Reagan approved a stance, championed by Richard Perle, known as the zero option.* Under this approach, the US would consider only an agreement that led to the complete withdrawal of all existing Soviet intermediate forces from the European theatre in return for NATO agreement not to deploy American INF in Europe. Proposals for lower levels of intermediate missiles on both sides were off the table unless the level in question was zero. Perle explained: ‘I certainly believed that it was a lot less likely that we would get the agreement than the easier-to-reach agreements that would favour the Soviets. But, if we got it, it would be very useful. And since I wasn’t all that eager for an agreement and certainly an agreement for agreement’s sake, it made perfect sense to go for the harder but more useful.’85 When the zero option was publicly announced in November 1981, Mrs Thatcher commended it to the Commons because it proposed ‘not merely a limitation of nuclear arms but an actual reduction both in nuclear arms and conventional forces. I believe that he [Reagan] has seized the initiative.’86 Michael Foot claimed that the zero option was something which Labour would welcome more than she because his party’s defence policy also favoured a zero option. The difference of course was that Reagan was proposing to negotiate zero missiles on both sides, whereas Foot advocated a unilateral Western zero. Mrs Thatcher soon pointed this out: ‘it takes two to agree to a zero option,’ she insisted.87

  It was true, however, that Mrs Thatcher welcomed the zero option only on the calculation that it would not be taken up. ‘I had always disliked the original INF “zero option”,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, ‘because I felt that these weapons made up for Western Europe’s unpreparedness to face a sudden, massive attack by the Warsaw Pact; I had gone along with it in the hope that the Soviets would never accept.’88 She wanted INF deployment not only to counter Soviet SS-20s, but to deter a conventional attack. The zero option, if accepted, would, she believed, leave the Western allies exposed, and risk uncoupling the US strategic nuclear force from Europe’s defence.

  Inside her thinking was a real difference with Reagan, not important at the time but highly significant later on. As Ken Adelman,* who became director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, put it: ‘Thatcher was always very good on zero INF, as long as the zero proposal wasn’t going to go anywhere. She was less excited about it going anywhere than Reagan was. He, however, was thrilled.’89 The truth is that Mrs Thatcher was a firm supporter of nuclear weapons, because she believed in the doctrine of deterrence. She considered that world war was prevented by the capacity of the West to frighten the East with its nuclear arsenal. It was therefore important for world peace that the arsenal be large and credible. Reagan, although he wanted just as much to defeat Soviet totalitarianism and believed in peace through strength, actually wanted to abolish nuclear weapons. He considered them immoral, and a cause of instability more than of peace. He thought the world could be free of them. Like Mrs Thatcher, Reagan wanted to build up Western military strength, but his purpose was different. ‘Reagan’s basic aim, always, was arming in order to disarm,’ said Richard Allen.90 This was to bulk large in his efforts during the Gorbachev era. In his memoirs, Reagan describes the zero option as ‘the first step to the elimination of all nuclear weapons from the earth’.91 He did not say this to Mrs Thatcher at the time, and if he had, she would have been horrified – as she later was. In the early 1980s, however, President and Prime Minister were at one in wishing to reassert the power of the West against the Soviet Union, and the zero option, as a tactic, helped.

  When she came into office in 1979, Mrs Thatcher immediately set about finding a replacement for Britain’s ageing Polaris submarine-based nuclear missiles which the Callaghan government had planned but had not dared to enact. This was to be the third generation of British nuclear weapons. Mrs Thatcher followed up where Callaghan left off by formally requesting President Carter’s permission to procure the US Trident system. Carter, however, dragged his feet well into 1980. Partly, he was obsessed with the Senate ratification of SALT II, but more fundamentally Carter was ‘allergic to a lot of nuclear things’ and viewed the idea of providing missiles to Britain ‘rather sceptically’.92 According to Mrs Thatcher, he even used the excuse that announcing the Trident decision ‘could be seen as an overreaction to events in Afghanistan’93 to delay acceding to the British request. Others, such as Carrington and Michael Palliser,94 denied that this was a serious problem, but there was certainly haggling over price. In the end, and contrary to what Mrs Thatcher states in her memoirs, a deal was struck by which Carter agreed to waive the bulk of pro-rata research and development costs of the missiles in return for Britain allowing greater US use of the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia for military purposes.95 The details of the deal were settled at a meeting between Mrs Thatcher and Harold Brown, Carter’s Defense Secretary, on 2 June 1980, in Downing Street, on terms fairly expensive to Britain.*

  With Reagan’s arrival in the White House, the situation changed. The new adm
inistration was keen to let Britain have Trident, but was considering upgrading the existing C-4 version, which Carter had agreed to supply to Britain, to the more powerful and more expensive D-5 version. In March 1981, Caspar Weinberger,† Reagan’s appointment as Defense Secretary, met the British Defence Secretary John Nott and ‘reaffirmed our commitment’ that the US would provide ‘Whatever TRIDENT missile (C-4 or D-5) that we decided to pursue on completion of our review’.96 In August, he informed Britain that the US had resolved to upgrade to the D-5 and that it would be available to Britain. Nott recalled: ‘I was very much in favour of going to D-5. The difficulty was money.’97

  There was a certain irony in the fact that the US could bestow or withhold what was supposed to be Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent: ‘It wasn’t entirely satisfactory to [Mrs Thatcher] that we had to be so dependent. We were always just a little worried about if we ever actually needed the thing whether the Americans would allow us to make it work. But it was the best we could do.’98 This concern, the significant cost involved and the fear of an escalation in the arms race made the acquisition of Trident controversial, even within Conservative ranks. In early 1981, Nott warned Mrs Thatcher that ‘two-thirds of the Party and two-thirds of the Cabinet were opposed.’99 But for Mrs Thatcher, as for Nott and Carrington, securing the future of Britain’s deterrent was essential. As Carrington noted: ‘Failure to acquire TRIDENT would have left the French as the only nuclear power in Europe. This would be intolerable.’100 With a strong lead from the Prime Minister and her senior colleagues the Cabinet agreed in principle to accept D-5.* The remaining issue was price. Mrs Thatcher wrote to Reagan on 1 February 1982 offering to send officials over to settle the deal. Although she did not know this at the time, the US administration wanted to help as much as possible. In October 1981, Richard Perle and Weinberger had exchanged correspondence about waiving Trident’s R & D costs for Britain.101 The deal, designed to observe the legal requirement that development costs could be waived only if this was in the national interest, agreed that it was in the US national interest for Britain to maintain a stronger naval capability than was proposed by Nott’s forthcoming defence cuts. In exchange for a waiver of the Trident R & D costs, therefore, Britain promised to keep more of its surface ships. ‘So one could say’, recalled Richard Perle, ‘that we ended up subsidizing the Royal Navy.’102

  Reagan wanted agreement, on terms favourable to Britain: ‘The President and I gave the bureaucracy the sense that we wanted the Trident deal to be struck. It was one more arrow in the quiver. Britain was the lynchpin to NATO and more important than any other single power.’103 The deal was pushed through quickly, being formally agreed on 11 March 1982. Mrs Thatcher was delighted by the speed and by the terms, both of which she contrasted favourably with the Carter era.104 In a brief personal note to Reagan she expressed her gratitude for his help: ‘I can think of no way in which our two countries could more powerfully have illustrated our common resolution in defence of freedom and our unique ability to reinforce each others [sic] efforts.’105

  In May 1980, Mrs Thatcher had a frank discussion with the UN Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim. Lord Carrington, she told him, believed that the Russians were looking for a way out of Afghanistan, but ‘She took the more cynical view that the Russians would remain for a very long time.’ The Russians liked to annex states: ‘it was only a matter of time before they marched into another.’106

  In fact, the next Russian aggression did not take the form of actual invasion. It was concentrated on Poland, a country, unlike Afghanistan, internationally recognized as being in the Soviet sphere, but one which was showing stirring signs of change. Ever since the election of Karol Wojtyła* as Pope John Paul II in 1978, any moral authority still clinging to Communism in Eastern Europe had withered away. When the Polish Pope returned to visit his own country the following year, millions of people attended his speeches and Masses, with the authorities powerless to prevent them. The Polish spiritual rebellion also took a more political form. The trade union Solidarity, under the leadership of Lech Wałe˛sa,† organized the mass of industrial (and later agricultural) workers to resist the Communist government, notably through strikes in the Gdan´sk shipyards.

  Mrs Thatcher was naturally thrilled by these developments. At first, the Polish government seemed to respond to them almost sympathetically. In December 1980, she received Henryk Kisiel, the Deputy Prime Minister of Poland. He told her that democratization was ‘the right of the people’, and that a new generation of workers ‘believed that they owned the means of production and they wanted a say in how they were used’. He quoted favourably Wałe˛sa’s dictum that ‘A Pole with a Pole will always find a solution.’ He wanted Solidarity to be confident that there would not be a crackdown. Mrs Thatcher replied warmly and urgently: she had ‘witnessed change of a kind that had not occurred in a socialist state in the last 60 years … the present developments were very exciting for someone who believed, as she did, in liberty.’107‡ Kisiel told her that ‘The fundamental desire was the desire to govern one’s own future.’ He reported that, after the Polish leadership had visited Moscow the previous week, they had returned ‘in a more relaxed frame of mind’. He was not expecting trouble from the Soviets. Mrs Thatcher was less optimistic: ‘The Prime Minister urged Mr Kisiel not to relax and to remember Czechoslovakia.’108 She had a specific reason for her warning. The day before, she had received her second message from President Carter that intelligence showed Soviet military preparations and that the decision had been made to intervene in Poland. She had replied that ‘This goes further than our own judgment,’109 but she was obviously alarmed.

  In the course of 1981, jitters recurred, though the Carter prediction about Poland was proved wrong. The NATO allies made rather ineffective plans for counter-measures. ‘There is precious little in this whole list,’ wrote Mrs Thatcher on one set of ideas. Mrs Thatcher showed some signs of changeability in her own views, as if she were, on this occasion, accepting a Foreign Office line. When she saw Al Haig in April, she told him that ‘There were signs that Solidarity was seeking political power for its own sake,’ and she warned Haig not to go so hard against the Soviet Union as to isolate Germany: ‘Germany was divided and in the front line. This was one of the reasons why the European Community was so important and had to be kept in being.’ As always, her Europeanism depended on her anti-Communism. She worried that NATO was ‘in a very fragile state’.110

  The Polish ‘Renewal’ was not snuffed out, but the atmosphere became more menacing. The Soviet Union launched public attacks on Solidarity and private ones on the weak response of the Polish government. In October, General Jaruzelski, Poland’s Prime Minister since February, also took over as first secretary of the Polish Communist Party. On 13 December 1981, he imposed martial law on Poland, swooping on the Solidarity headquarters and appointing a military council to run the country.

  Even as late as November, the British government had taken a reasonably optimistic view. Carrington wrote to Mrs Thatcher advising that she accept the Polish government’s invitation to visit their country in 1982 because this ‘could be a timely demonstration of our interest in the Polish “Renewal” ’.111 Once martial law had been imposed, she was not exactly surprised but, in common with her European allies, she was not quite sure how to react.

  It was President Reagan who took the most forceful view. ‘Dear Maggie,’* he wrote, on 19 December 1981, in a message warning her of the possibility of direct Soviet intervention, ‘This may well be a watershed in the political history of mankind – a challenge to tyranny from within.’ He wanted a strong, shared allied reaction: ‘The time has come to avert this tragedy.’112 The following morning Mrs Thatcher, who was at Chequers, discussed his message with Carrington over the telephone. The Foreign Secretary was dismissive. He said that Reagan’s message seemed ‘so vague I didn’t think it was worth reading last night’. More surprisingly, Mrs Thatcher was also critical. She said, ‘it’s simply an
internal situation,’ and when Carrington opined that Reagan wanted to take it out on the Russians, she answered, ‘it seems a bit absurd if the Russians aren’t actually in the front line to take it out on them when they’re not,’ though she did attack them for ‘crushing the first signs of freedom’. ‘When one sits down and thinks about it,’ said Carrington, ‘I mean what is there we can do?’113 He was cross with the US administration for announcing publicly a secret meeting of the foreign ministers of the four main NATO powers: ‘The Americans have once again gone and made a mess of it.’ ‘Well this of course’, said Mrs Thatcher, ‘is appalling.’ She replied in uncharacteristically weak terms to Reagan, saying that this was a ‘complex and difficult situation’, avoiding commitments.114

  Before the end of the year, the US administration produced a list of measures against the Soviet Union which were enacted without agreement with NATO allies. These included the suspension of Aeroflot flights, the halting of negotiations on a long-term grain agreement with the Soviets and sanctions preventing the export of oil and gas equipment to the USSR. In this last measure were contained the seeds of a huge controversy.

  There was an important strand within the early Reagan credo that the Soviet Union could and should be beaten into economic submission. The Reaganites had been horrified by President Carter’s acquiescence, in 1978, in the agreement between West Germany and the Soviet Union to build a gas pipeline across western Siberia. The pipeline would supply natural gas to ten European countries, including West Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands. In Reagan’s view, this allowed the Russians to make energy an instrument of their foreign policy. It would also earn them hard currency. In July 1981, the administration decided to do what it could to prevent the construction of the pipeline. ‘The Soviets have spoken as plainly as Hitler did in “Mein Kampf”,’ Reagan told an NSC meeting. ‘They have spoken world domination – at what point do we dig in our heels?’115 Caspar Weinberger led the charge. Weinberger hoped that Britain, which was not buying Soviet gas, would feel free to co-operate; but, as some White House aides warned, Britain did have commercial interests in the pipeline because of contracts to help build it and was unlikely to want to drop them. Hundreds of jobs were at stake with John Brown Engineering, a Scottish company, supplying turbines. Between July and December, American attempts to persuade Europeans, including Britain, got nowhere.