by Oliver Stone
Reagan and Gorbachev met in Iceland in October 1986. Gorbachev brought along a stunningly bold set of disarmament proposals. In the opening session, the sweep of Gorbachev’s vision caught Reagan unprepared, causing the president, as Gorbachev recalled, to fumble clumsily for a response:
Reagan reacted by consulting or reading his notes written on cards. I tried to discuss with him the points I had just outlined, but all my attempts failed. I decided to try specific questions, but still did not get any response. President Reagan was looking through his notes. The cards got mixed up and some of them fell to the floor. He started shuffling them, looking for the right answer to my arguments, but he could not find it. There could be no right answer available—the American President and his aides had been preparing for a completely different conversation.95
Gorbachev offered to cut strategic offensive arms in half, eliminate all U.S. and Soviet IRBMs in Europe while allowing Britain and France to maintain their arsenals, freeze short-range missiles, stop nuclear testing, allow on-site inspections as the Americans demanded, and limit SDI testing to labs for the next ten years. Reagan initially failed to grasp the significance of what Gorbachev had proposed or the fact that he was acceding to long-standing U.S. demands, leaving the Soviet leader frustrated by his response. During the break, Reagan huddled with his advisors back at the U.S. Embassy. Paul Nitze observed that the Soviet proposal was “the best we have received in twenty-five years.”96
The debate continued at the following session. Gorbachev pushed Reagan to seize this extraordinary opportunity. Reagan gave on some points but held tight to his vision of SDI. Gorbachev countered that he wouldn’t be able to convince his people and his allies to make such dramatic reductions in strategic weapons if Reagan insisted on destroying the ABM treaty. Reagan offered to share SDI with the Soviets at some date in the future when it was ready. One of Reagan’s advisors, Jack Matlock, recalled, “Gorbachev finally exploded. ‘Excuse me, Mr. President,’ he said, his voice rising, ‘but I cannot take your idea of sharing SDI seriously. You are not willing to share with us oil well equipment, digitally guided machine tools, or even milking machines. Sharing SDI would provoke a second American revolution! Let’s be realistic and pragmatic.”97
Expert negotiating teams met through the night, hammering out an agreement both sides could live with. Nitze led the U.S. team. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev led the Soviet team. Kenneth Adelman, associate director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, proclaimed, “Defining strategic systems, excluding bomber weapons, and closing on limits is one amazing night’s work, indisputably more progress than we achieved in thousands of hours in hundreds of meetings over the previous five years.”98
But when they met the next morning, negotiations again ran aground. As Gorbachev summarized them, they agreed on reducing strategic weapons and on intermediate-range nuclear weapons but failed on the comprehensive nuclear test ban and on the ABM treaty. “Let’s go home,” the despondent Gorbachev said. “We’ve accomplished nothing.” After discussing other matters, Gorbachev made one last-ditch effort, proposing that Shultz and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze meet over lunch to see if they could resolve the differences.99
Over lunch the Soviet foreign minister, objecting to the fact that the Soviets had thus far made all the concessions, pressed the United States for compromise on SDI. The United States came up with a formulation that would achieve the intended gains while allowing it to keep SDI. At the afternoon session, Gorbachev countered with a proposal that the ABM treaty remain in effect for ten years, with neither party having the right of withdrawal or the right to test any components of an ABM system outside laboratories, and a 50 percent reduction in strategic offensive weapons in five years, with the remainder to be eliminated in the next five years. After further wrangling over the details, each leader met with his close advisors. Reagan asked Perle, the most conservative member of his team, whether the United States could proceed with its SDI research under the constraints placed by the Soviets. Perle, who feared that a sweeping arms control deal would strengthen the Soviet economy and society, replied, “Mr. President, we cannot conduct the research under the terms he’s proposing. It will effectively kill SDI.” Reagan then solicited opinions from Shultz and Nitze, both of whom disagreed with Perle and urged Reagan to accept Gorbachev’s wording.100
When they returned, Gorbachev realized that Reagan had changed the language from eliminating all strategic weapons to eliminating only all offensive ballistic missiles, the area in which the Soviets were strongest. Gorbachev objected. Reagan finally relented and asked, “Do we have in mind . . . that by the end of the two five-year periods all nuclear explosive devices would be eliminated, including bombs, battlefield systems, cruise missiles, submarine weapons, intermediate range systems, and so on?” Gorbachev agreed, “We can say that, list all those weapons.” Shultz responded, “Then let’s do it!” Gorbachev said he was ready to sign the agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons if Reagan restricted SDI testing to the laboratory. Reagan balked, heeding Perle’s advice, and insisted on the right to conduct atmospheric tests. They had reached an impasse. Gorbachev made one last appeal:
If we sign a package containing major concessions by the Soviet Union regarding fundamental problems, you will become, without exaggeration, a great president. You are now literally two steps from that. . . . If not, then let’s part at this point and forget about Reykjavik. But there won’t be another opportunity like this. At any rate, I know I won’t have one.
I firmly believed that we could come to an agreement. Otherwise I would not have raised the question of an immediate meeting with you; otherwise I would not have come here in the name of the Soviet leadership with a solid store of serious, compromising proposals. I hoped they would meet with understanding and support from your side, that we could resolve all issues. If this does happen, if we manage to achieve deep reductions and the destruction of nuclear arms, all of your critics will not dare open their mouths. They would then be going against the opinions of the overwhelming majority of people in the world, who would welcome our success. If, on the other hand, we are not able to come to an agreement, it will obviously become the job of another generation of leaders; you and I have no more time.
The American side has essentially not made any concessions, not a single major step to meet us halfway. It’s hard to do business on that basis.
Gorbachev and Reagan meet during the summit in Reykjavík. Catching Reagan completely off guard, Gorbachev arrived with a strikingly bold set of disarmament proposals.
Disappointed, Reagan and Gorbachev depart from Reykjavík. The two leaders had come remarkably close to completely eliminating nuclear weapons, but Reagan’s refusal to abandon SDI shattered the prospect of total nuclear disarmament.
Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze then interjected “very emotionally” that future generations, reading the minutes of meetings and seeing how close the participants had come to eliminating nuclear weapons, would never forgive them if they didn’t come to an agreement. Reagan said that adding the word “laboratory” would cause him great political damage at home. Gorbachev said that if he allowed the United States to take the arms race to space and deploy SDI after ten years, he would be viewed as foolish and irresponsible. Each asked the other to bend. Neither would.101
The meeting ended. The United States and the Soviet Union had come within a hairsbreadth—one word—of eliminating nuclear weapons. But the scourge of nuclear weaponry would continue to haunt the world. Reagan, egged on by arch-neocon Perle, sacrificed the hopes of humanity for an illusion—a Star Wars fantasy that, as Richard Rhodes wrote, represented little more than “a specious concern for testing outside the ‘laboratory’ systems that had hardly yet even entered the laboratory in 1986.”102
Reagan and Gorbachev left the building. Gorbachev described the scene:
It was already dusk. The mood was downcast. Reagan reproached me: “You planned from the beginning to come here and pu
t me in this position!”
“No. Mr. President,” I replied. “I am prepared to go back inside right now and sign the document concerning the issues we already agreed upon if you will refrain from plans to militarize space.”
“I’m extremely sorry,” Reagan answered.103
Gorbachev expressed optimism in public, highlighting how much progress the two sides had made. “For the first time we looked beyond the horizon,” he declared. But in private he expressed profound disappointment at U.S. obstinancy. He explained to the Politburo that he was dealing not only with the “class enemy”—the capitalist United States—but with President Reagan, “who exhibited extreme primitivism, a caveman outlook, and intellectual impotence.” That, however, was not the main impediment. The first problem, he averred, was tactical: the United States had miscalculated the extent of the Soviet Union’s “internal difficulties” and therefore assumed that Gorbachev would be almost desperate to reach an agreement, even on U.S. terms. The second was strategic: the United States believed it might “exhaust us economically via arms race, create obstacles for Gorbachev and for the entire Soviet leadership, undermine its plans for resolving economic and social problems and thereby provoke popular discontent.” The U.S. leaders, he said, hoped this would rupture Soviet relations with third-world nations and “with the help of SDI . . . achieve military superiority.” In concluding his remarks, Gorbachev expressed his bitterness toward the U.S. negotiators: “representatives of American administration are people without conscience, with no morale. Their line is the one of pressure, deceit, or greedy mercantilism.”104
Reagan with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Nicaraguan contra leader Adolfo Calero in National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane’s office. McFarlane and North, a gung-ho but unstable marine with delusions of grandeur and a knack for embellishment, were the principal plotters in the administration’s illegal scheme to sell weapons to the Iranian government in order to fund the contras.
Both sides hoped to revive the talks. But before that could happen, scandal rocked the Reagan-Bush administration. On October 5, 1986, the Sandinistas downed a plane manned by three Americans carrying supplies to Nicaragua’s contras. The only survivor admitted to working for the CIA. Additional information slowly leaked out as hearings of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Tower Commission lifted the veil from an administration up to its eyeballs in illegality, corruption, blundering, and subterfuge involving American hostages in Lebanon, arms sales to Iran, unsuccessful efforts to halt the torture and prevent the murder of the CIA station chief in Beirut, ill-fated attempts to cultivate nonexistent “moderates” in Tehran, support for Iraq in its war with Iran, and collaboration with a rogues’ gallery of unsavory characters, including Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, as it funneled war materiel to the contras in Nicaragua in flagrant violation of the 1982 Boland Amendment, which outlawed U.S. financial aid to efforts to defeat the ruling Sandinistas.
The principal operatives in the affair, aside from Reagan and Bush, were CIA Director Casey, National Security Advisor McFarlane, and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a decorated Vietnam veteran who had suffered an apparent nervous breakdown upon returning from Vietnam and spent twenty-two days in Bethesda Naval Hospital. North, who was assigned to the NSC in 1981, was a gung-ho marine with a taste for hyperbole and a touch of megalomania, who had, after his return from Vietnam and hospitalization, become a fundamentalist Christian. North ran much of the operation on a day-to-day basis, putting together an unsavory network of right-wing fund-raisers, covert operatives, and conniving arms dealers to carry it out.
The CIA attempted to circumvent the congressional constraints upon its actions but did not do a very good job of hiding its involvement. It made the mistake of bringing in retired Special Forces veterans who had served in Vietnam. In one embarrassing episode, they convinced the Agency to translate into Spanish an old comic book instructing Vietnamese peasants on ways to take over a village by murdering the mayor, chief of police, and militia. The CIA distributed a Spanish-language version of this “Freedom Fighter’s Manual” to the contras. Some ended up in the hands of opponents of the U.S. wars in Central America, who made them public.105 Americans also learned that the CIA had mined Nicaraguan harbors, which provoked conservative icon Barry Goldwater to scold Casey. “I am pissed off,” he wrote. “This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war.106
Congress reacted in October 1984 by strengthening the Boland Amendment and cutting off all aid to the contras. In order to tie Casey’s hands, Congress explicitly prohibited any intelligence agency from soliciting funds from “any nation, group, organization, movement, or individual.” Chief of Staff James Baker feared that administration “crazies” would nonetheless solicit funds from other countries, which Casey, McFarlane, and North proceeded to do. Saudi Arabia provided the lion’s share, but other nations, including South Africa, Israel, and Taiwan, pledged millions of dollars more. Shultz had warned Reagan that approving further assistance would constitute an impeachable offense. But Casey, Bush, and Reagan all pooh-poohed that notion.107
Reagan instructed his top aides to do what they could. He told National Security Advisor McFarlane, “I want you to do whatever you have to do to help these people keep body and soul together.”108 McFarlane soon saw a way to carry that out. In summer 1985, he met with David Kimche, director general of the Israel Foreign Ministry. Kimche convinced him that he was working with Iranian “moderates,” who were poised to take power when the elderly Ayatollah Khomeini passed from the scene. He suggested that in return for arms, the Iranians could help secure the release of U.S. hostages being held in Lebanon by Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian Shiite group. Included among the hostages was CIA Beirut station chief William Francis Buckley, who, unknown to the Americans, had been tortured to death in June. In mid-1985, Reagan, despite his public opposition to negotiating with hostage-takers, authorized Israel to transfer TOW antitank missiles to Iran. Israel continued to serve as the go-between in weapons sales for fourteen months. During that time, Iran released some American hostages but seized more so that it always had a steady supply to barter. Israel had also been secretly sending its own weapons to the ayatollah’s regime.109
The notion of dealing with Iranian “moderates” had gained currency among top administration officials, who began to think about the shape of a post-Khomeini Iran. In June 1985, the CIA produced a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran titled “Iran: Prospects for a Near Term Instability,” which suggested that conditions inside Iran were unstable and Khomeini’s days might be numbered. The NSC picked up on this theme in a National Security Directive suggesting that Iranian “moderates” might be inclined toward the United States. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wrote on his copy of the report, “This is almost too absurd for comment. It’s based on the assumption there’s about to be a major change in Iran and that we can deal with that rationally. It’s like inviting Kadafi over for a cozy lunch.”110
The Iranians demanded and the United States sent HAWK antiaircraft missiles and other weapons. In 1986, the Iranians requested and received battlefield intelligence to assist them in their war with Iraq. They paid exorbitantly for the assistance.
Flush with money from the Iranian arms sales and from the Saudis, the CIA expanded its military support for the contras, with the anti-Castro Cubans Félix Rodríguez and Luis Posada Carriles playing a major part. Rodríguez was a close associate of Vice President Bush’s national security advisor, Donald Gregg, a former CIA official. Posada had escaped incarceration in Venezuela for his role in killing seventy-three people in a Cuban passenger jet bombing in 1976. Congress also authorized $100 million to support Central American operations following the repeal of the Boland Amendment, a move instigated by Cheney.
On October 5, the operation began to come unglued. That day a young Nicaraguan soldier brought down the C-123 cargo plane carrying weapons to the contras. Former marine Eugene Hasenfus, the plane’s only survivor, c
onfessed to his Sandinista captors that he worked for the CIA and was supplying the contras. On election day, November 4, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, went public with the story of U.S.-Iranian dealings. Bush, the following day, recorded in his diary, “This is one operation that had been held very, very tight, and I hope it will not leak.”111
It was much too late for that. Details of the murky, convoluted operation were splashed across the nation’s newspapers and television screens. The White House issued clumsy denials. On November 13, Reagan admitted that “small amounts of defensive weapons” had been transferred but that “we did not—repeat did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages; nor will we.”
The lies continued when Casey and Rear Admiral John Poindexter testified before Congress. Several of those involved, including Poindexter, North, and General Richard Secord, began shredding thousands of pages of incriminating documents in their possession. On November 25, Reagan gave what historian Sean Wilentz described as “the worst performance of his presidency if not his entire career” when he told the press corps that based on the preliminary findings of Attorney General Edwin Meese, he “was not fully informed of the nature of one of the activities undertaken in connection with this initiative.” He announced that Poindexter was stepping down as national security advisor and that North had been relieved of his duties. “As I’ve stated previously,” he added, “I believe our policy goals toward Iran were well founded. However, the information brought to my attention yesterday, convinced me that in one aspect, implementation of that policy was seriously flawed.” After reading this brief statement, he turned the session over to Meese and walked off as reporters kept yelling out questions.112 One week later, Gallup reported that Reagan’s approval ratings had plummeted 21 points to 46 percent in the course of the month.
