As I look back on my visit with Kuznetsov, the ceremony, and the idea of my standing there proudly in the Kremlin, I’m reminded of my father. He was so proud to attend the first morning reception of King George VI, in 1937. I have to admit that the Watson love of being a celebrity hasn’t entirely passed me by.
There were over one hundred Americans on the embassy staff, and I went to work right away to win their support. They’d all read those newspaper stories about my having to write Toon’s name on my thumb, and I knew they must be wondering what they were getting. I met the issue of my inexperience head on. I called a general meeting and after explaining my work on the GAC that had led to the ambassadorship, I put myself in their hands. “Ambassador Toon made the point many times that this post needs professional leadership,” I said. “Obviously I’m not a professional—and that means I am grateful for your competence.” Adding a little IBM touch, I said that the door to my office would always be open to anyone with problems, suggestions, or new ideas. They seemed to respond to that, and also to my mission of restoring the embassy’s prestige. It helped that there was a big difference between Toon’s style and mine. His was more aloof. I concentrated on the same things I would have at IBM—cultivating loyalty and boosting morale. The following week Olive and I had a reception for all the embassy personnel and their families, and it was the first time many of them had seen the inside of Spaso House.
The Soviets for their part seemed happy to see a new face. My first visit was with foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, whom I originally met in 1959 when Khrushchev toured the IBM plant. In those days Russian officials were known for wearing badly cut suits, and I remembered how Gromyko had stood out because he was well dressed. A man of deep intellect and impeccable manners, he had gradually taught his comrades the way diplomats ought to act. His nickname at the State Department was Old Stoneface but I thought of him as a great actor. He was impassive only when it suited his purpose; at other times he’d become interested in something you said and you could watch a half dozen different expressions cross his face. When I saw him officially in Moscow the routine was always the same. I’d call to make an appointment—one day’s notice was usually enough—and we’d meet at the Foreign Ministry in a little conference room next to his office. He’d come in, we’d each take a glass of mineral water, and we’d talk about arranging exit visas for Jews, getting on with permission to build our new chancellery, speeding up action on SALT II in the U.S. Senate, or whatever our business was that day.
My first hope of a diplomatic success came during a meeting with Brezhnev’s assistant Aleksandrov. He was telling me how fondly they remembered Tommy Thompson, and I took the opportunity to remind him that unlike recent ambassadors, Thompson had been given full access to the Politburo. “That is a goal of mine,” I said. “I’d like to chat with each member of the Politburo. If I succeed in that, I will have done some good for my country and maybe for your country, and I will also be showing my boss Cy Vance that I am active here, not just sitting around reading Tolstoy.”
Aleksandrov was a little man with a loud voice. He laughed and said, “Personally, I think that would be an excellent idea!” It was unclear whether anyone else would, but to Mark Garrison, our embassy’s deputy chief of mission, the fact that I got even that far without a rebuff was intriguing. Garrison was a Sovietologist and career foreign-service officer, a remarkably level-headed man with whom I became good friends. I think he was simultaneously curious and skeptical about my chances, but he coached me patiently in the basics of being an ambassador, and I relied on him heavily, just as I’d depended on Bill Jackson at the GAC. My other coach was Robert German, our political counselor, who was constantly by my side as I moved in official circles. Bob is a soft-spoken Texan, a lawyer by training, and he helped me avoid gaffes. I always asked him for a blunt critique of my performance, but he was too much of a diplomat for that. When he had something to say it would filter back to me through Garrison.
I hadn’t even been on the job a month when we began getting reports of Red Army units building up along the border with Afghanistan. Probably the U.S. should have paid more attention, but the White House and State Department were preoccupied with the hostage crisis in Iran. Even though the Kremlin was known to be irritated with Afghanistan’s president Amin for not suppressing the Islamic rebels in his country, nobody on our side really thought the Soviets would invade. They had never used their own troops anywhere outside the Warsaw Pact countries since World War II. For me an invasion was doubly hard to imagine because, by an odd coincidence, I knew something about Afghanistan. I’d been there with my daughter Jeannette only four years before. We’d stayed in Kabul and then journeyed up into the hills along the ancient trade routes, sleeping in tents and primitive inns. We’d get up at dawn to go to the camel market and haggle for rugs. The trip had given me a sense of the tenacity of the people and the desolate beauty of the land.
It was Christmas, and Spaso House was filled with our children and grandchildren who had come to visit from the United States. The embassy had two days of warnings that the troop movements had accelerated, and then came a call in the evening of December 27 that battalions of paratroopers were landing at Kabul airport. I stayed up all that night reading intelligence reports. Thousands of Russian soldiers were involved, and I felt the weight of the world on my heart: instead of building bridges to the Russians I found myself faced with the most serious crisis since the days of Kennedy and Khrushchev. Before dawn I got orders from Washington to demand an explanation from the Kremlin. We asked for an appointment with Gromyko, but the Foreign Ministry said he was away. The only official available was a deputy foreign minister named Maltsev whom I’d never met. After talking to him that morning I nicknamed him Minister No, because he was a rude and taciturn man, a real throwback to the worst days of the Cold War. He said that there was no point in explaining the invasion because it wasn’t the United States’s affair. Afghanistan was a neighboring country with which the U.S.S.R. had a treaty; Amin had asked for help against rebels who were threatening his government, and Russia had responded. Then Maltsev said, “Anyway, it’s all in this memorandum,” and handed me an envelope.
“Your position sounds hard to believe,” I said, “but thank you very much.”
I started to get up but I heard Bob German say, “I think the ambassador would like to have the memorandum read.” He was saving me from a major error, because if I had left without reading the memo it would have implied that the United States accepted the Soviets’ explanation. The memo was in English, and it simply repeated the poppycock Maltsev had just given me. I told him on behalf of my government that it was unacceptable. The following morning we got word that two entire Red Army divisions had crossed the border, and the grim facts of the invasion soon came out. The Russians had overthrown the government, assassinated President Amin, and put in an Afghan puppet leader who had been hiding in the Soviet Union and who was flown in with Russian airborne troops.
Our embassy became a pressure cooker. Everybody went without sleep for a couple of days. I was a novice, and not a young man, and Garrison and German and the rest of the staff were working on pure adrenaline, exchanging telexes with Washington so fast that I couldn’t keep up. I said, “Look, you guys know all about this, but I’m the fellow who is really responsible here, so if you don’t mind I’d like to follow along.” But they kept hurrying ahead until I got mad. I told Garrison, “I don’t know whether I’m going to be able to get along with you in this embassy.”
Garrison knew I could have him relieved, but that didn’t intimidate him in the slightest. He came right back at me and said, “The point is not whether you and I can get along; the point is what we can do for our country today. Later on there’ll be time to sort out whether we can work together.” I quieted down right away. We finally sent a long advisory to the State Department giving our analysis of the invasion. We called it “a serious and unacceptable change in Soviet policy” and suggested that our g
overnment “make the political cost to them so high that they will find a way to withdraw their troops.” That same day President Carter sent Brezhnev a message on the hot-line telling him to withdraw his forces or jeopardize U.S.-Soviet relations.
The uproar in the Kremlin must have been even worse than on our side. They’d made their biggest foreign-policy mistake in more than a decade. Historians are still debating why they decided to invade, but whatever their motives, they failed completely to anticipate the U.S. response. We saw the invasion as the possible first step of a strategy to expand into the Persian Gulf. That was the logic behind Carter’s hot-line message, and I soon got a call from the Foreign Ministry saying Gromyko was available to see me. We met in that same little conference room next to his office. “I can’t understand what you’ve done,” I said. “I’ve talked to Minister Maltsev, as you know, but I can’t understand the explanation he gave. It just seems impossible to me.”
“Why?” said Gromyko.
“Well, I’m not a professional diplomat. But the fellow who calls for help under your treaty is dead the minute you get there, and the new leader of the country comes in on your military aircraft. That doesn’t sound like a change of government caused by events internal to the country.”
I’d never seen Gromyko with so much as a hair out of place. But now he leaped up and screamed, literally screamed, “Who told you that? Who told you that?” Then he came at me across the floor and said, “Your president is shouting at the clouds, and his voice is coming back as an echo, and he thinks it is the voice of God!”
This was all through an interpreter. I was stunned and said nothing for a few seconds. Then I told him, “I guess that’s all there is to talk about, Mr. Minister.”
And he said, “I guess so, Mr. Ambassador.” I got up and started walking toward the door, but my mind was racing. I thought, “I’ve got to work with this man, I’m on my own here, so do I really want to walk out?” I stopped about three feet short of the door and said to the interpreter, “Tell the minister that when I saw him in the Kremlin a few weeks ago, he asked me if I was starting to learn to swim a little bit as a new ambassador.” The interpreter translated that and Gromyko, looking stormy, said, “Da.”
“Tell him that, after talking with him in this fashion, he makes me think I’m drowning.”
Gromyko burst into the loudest laugh, walked over and put his arm around me, and said, “Don’t drown. Kick your feet, strike out with your arms, this is just a job. You’re doing your job, I’m doing my job, don’t let it get you down!” He laughed again, pumped my hand up and down, and out I went.
A few days later the president called me back to Washington, and I joined the White House consultations about how the United States should respond. Carter was determined to make the Soviets pay for their aggression, but in fact there was very little we could do. This wasn’t a drop-the-bomb situation, or one in which we’d send in troops. The White House and State Department made up a long list of possible anti-Soviet moves—my own embassy contributed a number of suggestions—and in the end the president decided to adopt almost every one. This meant taking apart practically all the cooperative arrangements we had with the Russians under détente, from art exhibitions to new sales of grain, and boycotting the Moscow Olympics. There wasn’t much I could add to the discussion; the only time I spoke up was to object to particular trade sanctions that went too far. For example, American companies had delivered manufacturing equipment to Russia, and now they weren’t even going to be allowed to send spare parts to fix equipment that was still under warranty. I told the president this didn’t make sense: if you want to declare war or have a boycott, fine, but breaking a commitment to a customer is always wrong. President Carter overrode me and I guess that was the point: he wanted to show the Russians that they’d made it impossible for business to continue as usual.
I didn’t know the president very well, and I was a little surprised at how vehemently he reacted. I could understand his anger, because the Afghanistan invasion ruined SALT II, which was so vital to the world’s safety and on which both sides had worked so hard—there was no way the Senate would approve the treaty now. The change in U.S.-Soviet relations really shook me. I was still trying to get the feel of my job, and now people started saying again that the embassy needed a hard-nosed professional to deal with the new cold war. After talking to the president I told my staff, “I feel like a chameleon. I’m going to have to change color.” The first time I saw Gromyko after my return I made a desperate stab at breaking the impasse our countries had reached. It was a personal appeal. I told him, “I don’t have any instructions on this, but it is time to talk about what to do. Why not find some way to put this thing behind us?”
“It’s too bad you don’t have any instructions,” he said. “It’s too bad that your government doesn’t feel the way you do.” I’d never felt so hopeless. Gromyko in this instance was icy, as if to say, “I have better things to do than sit here exchanging unofficial opinions with you.”
I went back to my embassy in the late afternoon darkness. I was deeply depressed because I was going to have to stay in this jail for a year. There was no way to leave gracefully before the end of President Carter’s term. I was sixty-six years old, a hell of a time to be losing a year out of my life. I felt like a rat caught in a trap.
Life at the embassy settled into a dreary routine. Every morning I’d go to my office and find between fifty and two hundred cables waiting on my desk, and dozens more would come in during the day. They covered everything going on all over the world, and I was supposed to read them. Foreign service people learn to skim cables early in the game, but fast reading was not one of my skills, and I could never get through them. From time to time American politicians would visit—congressional delegations, they were called, or Codels. Welcoming them was my job, but sometimes it seemed that all they were interested in was having their pictures taken for the newspapers back home. The first thing every politician would ask to do was talk to the Pentecostals in the embassy basement. These were a handful of religious dissidents who had taken refuge there two years earlier and were trying to pressure the Kremlin into granting them exit visas. I’d explain to the congressmen that the more attention we drew to these people, the less likely the Soviet government would be to budge. But the congressmen couldn’t resist the easy publicity. One guy even had a picture of himself with the Pentecostals put on his Christmas card.
When I got absolutely beside myself with boredom, I’d go out with my camera and take pictures. I walked all over Moscow, sometimes on embassy time and sometimes on my own. Once I stumbled across an outdoor pet market, a free market, which was still pretty unusual in Moscow in those days. They sold hedgehogs and fat guinea pigs, cats, dogs, and even tropical fish, which you’d never think of finding within thousands of miles of Moscow in February. I could speak Russian a little by then, and met a lot of ordinary people in my wanderings. Some of them were pretty feisty—local shopkeepers who’d yell, “Get away from there, you’re second in line,” and old ladies who’d grab my sleeve on the street and say, “Shapka, shapka, kholodno, kholodno!” Meaning, put on your hat, it’s cold. The children always looked extremely happy—I’d always been struck by how kind the Soviets were to their little ones, even during the hardships of World War II. But by age seventeen or eighteen the young people start looking oppressed. You hear about the awful drunkenness in Russia, but you rarely see it in public. The way people drink is to go into a room on a Saturday afternoon with a girlfriend or wife or group of friends and close the door. The vodka bottles don’t have corks—once you tear off the metal cap, you drink till it’s gone. So they empty as many of those bottles as they want, and they do it to achieve oblivion.
Despite the frustrations of the Moscow assignment, there were unexpected personal rewards for Olive and me. Our children were grown, and we were able to spend more time together than we had since our courtship. As I’d expected, Olive made Spaso House a cheerful, ho
spitable place, and we made many friends in the diplomatic community. This was the first time Olive and I had ever worked intensively together, and we found we were a pretty good team. There was a lot to be done to boost the morale of the American community and embassy staff. We brought over a caller for a square dance, arranged lectures on Russian history and art, and hosted visits by Bob Hope and the great radio broadcaster Lowell Thomas, who was an old friend of Dad’s. Olive and I also traveled together, showing the American flag in every corner of the Soviet Union. We went over to Leningrad a couple of times, of course. We flew down to Georgia, and explored the town of Baku, which had been a stop on an ancient caravan route to the Orient. We took a steamer from Odessa along the Black Sea coast, to Yalta and the industrial city of Batumi, right on the Turkish border. Then we went all the way north, to Murmansk, a city of nearly a half million people above the Arctic Circle, and to the arctic seaport Archangel. We traveled to Irkutsk, a city deep in Siberia that was originally settled by Cossacks. The farther we got from Moscow, the friendlier local officials seemed, and the less concerned about the recent disputes between Washington and Moscow. I saw again and again how powerfully World War II still affected their lives. Near Irkutsk, Olive and I met a woman whose father had run the fishery on Lake Baikal that had supplied Stalin’s army with food. That lake is almost four hundred miles long and the deepest in the world, yet between 1941 and 1944 they’d depleted the fish population dangerously to keep the soldiers alive. The fact that I had been in Russia helping the war effort meant a great deal to these people, and I was frustrated not to be able to turn this goodwill to account.
It gnawed at me that I was so much less effective at this job than I had been at the GAC. All I could do was sit back, the pawn of events much bigger than I, and watch as President Carter’s star declined. By the time the election came in November, I wasn’t sure he could beat Ronald Reagan. I was at a conference of ambassadors in Brussels having to do with human rights, and I went to bed on election night thinking it was going to be close. When I woke up Reagan had won by a landslide. I felt frustrated, depressed, disappointed—and relieved. I thought, “Just two months to go and I can get out.”
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