by Oliver Stone
Investigations were conducted, all directly implicating Reagan but making it apparent that he had little grasp of and less control over what his underlings were up to. The congressional investigating committee concluded, “If the President did not know what his National Security Advisors were doing, he should have.” Independent counsel Lawrence Walsh declared, “President Reagan created the conditions which made possible the crimes committed by others by his secret deviations from announced national policy as to Iran and hostages and by his own determination to keep the contras together ‘body and soul’ despite a statutory ban on contra aid.”113
Among those convicted of crimes were National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane, after an abortive suicide attempt; his successor, Rear Admiral William Poindexter; Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the mastermind behind the entire operation; and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was indicted but pardoned. CIA Director William Casey died of a brain tumor the day after the congressional hearings began. Vice President George H. W. Bush, though having figured prominently in the foolhardy scheme, managed to avoid prosecution. Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates would barely escape prosecution, though the manipulation and politicization of intelligence on his watch paved the way for Reagan’s disastrous policies.114 McFarlane later regretted not having had the “guts” to warn Reagan. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “probably the reason I didn’t is because if I had done that, Bill Casey, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Cap Weinberger would have said I was some kind of commie.”115
This sordid affair dashed hopes for renewing talks on nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev decided to salvage something by decoupling the intermediate-range ballistic missile issue from other long-term measures. He visited Washington in December 1987 and signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a major milestone in U.S.-Soviet relations. “This was the first agreement in history on the mutually agreed destruction of an entire class of nuclear weapons,” Gorbachev noted.116
Meanwhile, Soviet operations were finally winding down in Afghanistan. Reagan and Casey had transformed Carter’s tentative support for the Afghan insurgents into the CIA’s largest covert operation to date, totaling more than $3 billion. The CIA channeled aid through Pakistan’s President Zia, who funneled U.S. arms and dollars to the most extreme Afghan Islamist faction under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a man of legendary cruelty. According to James Forest, director of terrorism studies at West Point, Hekmatyar “was known . . . to patrol the bazaars of Kabul with vials of acid, which he would throw in the face of any woman who dared to walk outdoors without a full burka covering her face.”117 He was also known for skinning prisoners alive.118 Senior State Department official Stephen Cohen admitted, “The people we did support were the nastier, more fanatic types of mujahdeen.”119 The CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, Howard Hart, recalled, “I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with this wonderful order: ‘Go kill Soviet soldiers.’ Imagine! I loved it.”120 The CIA even provided between 2,000 and 2,500 U.S.-made Stinger missiles, some of which WikiLeaks revealed were used to down NATO helicopters three decades later.
From his early days in office, Gorbachev had made clear his intention to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan and sought U.S. assistance in making that happen. He assured Reagan that his country had “no plan for using Afghanistan to gain access to a warm water port, to extend its influence to the Persian Gulf, or to impinge on U.S. interests in any way.”121
The United States worked with the Saudis and Pakistanis to tie Soviet forces down as long as possible and did what it could to make sure that UN efforts to broker a settlement failed, funneling massive amounts of money and arms to the insurgents, who were also profiting immensely off the suddenly burgeoning opium production and sales. The Chinese, British, and Egyptians contributed millions of dollars’ worth of weapons. The CIA delivered the money and weapons to Pakistani intelligence. After taking their cut, the Pakistanis shipped the remainder to Afghan rebel leaders in Peshawar, who skimmed off their share before shipping the rest on to the front lines. Many of the stockpiled weapons would later be turned against the United States.122
An Afghan fighter demonstrates the positioning of a handheld surface-to-air missile. Reagan and Casey transformed Carter’s tentative support for the mujahideen into the CIA’s largest covert operation to date, totaling more than $3 billion.
Because of the fighting, approximately 3 million Afghans—one-third of the population—fled to Pakistan. In February 1988, Gorbachev announced that Soviet troops would withdraw from the country. The withdrawal began on May 15 and lasted for ten months. The Geneva Accords ending the fighting were signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Only the Soviets adhered to their commitments. Zia promised Reagan that Pakistani supplies to the Afghan rebels would continue to flow unabated. “We’ll just lie about it,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been doing for eight years. . . . Muslims have the right to lie in a good cause.”123
Over a million Afghans were killed in the fighting. The Pakistani dictatorship profited, becoming the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. The United States turned a blind eye toward Pakistan’s progress in developing a nuclear bomb.
Tens of thousands of Arabs flooded into Pakistan to join the jihad against the infidels, including a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden and Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri. They and thousands of other future Islamist terrorists received military training in the Pakistani camps, learning such valuable skills as how to perform assassinations and detonate car bombs. Thousands more flocked to Pakistan’s madrassas, where they were indoctrinated in radical Islam and recruited for jihad. The madrassas were one product of the $75 billion the Saudis spent during the 1980s to spread Wahhabi extremism. Casey ignored repeated warnings that the religious fanaticism he was helping unleash would eventually pose a threat to U.S. interests. He instead persisted in his view that the unholy partnership between Christianity and Islam would endure and could be used to bludgeon the Soviets throughout the region. In fact, in mid-decade, Casey unleashed mujahideen raids across the border into the Soviet Union in the hope of inciting Islamist uprisings by Soviet Muslims.124
Upon withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Soviets sounded out U.S. willingness to collaborate on curbing Islamic extremism in Afghanistan, but the Americans could not be bothered. The die-hard Islamists now in control of Afghanistan worked closely with Pakistani intelligence. Having achieved its goals, the United States washed its hands of the mess it had helped create. Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman complained, “We start wars without figuring out how we would end them. Afghanistan was lurching into civil war, and we basically didn’t care anymore.” He said that he and U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Robert Oakley had tried to get CIA officials from Directors Robert Gates and William Webster on down to think seriously about ending the U.S., Saudi, and Pakistani involvement, but they were dealing with people who reasoned, “Why should we go out there and talk to people with towels on their heads?”125 According to RAND expert Cheryl Benard, whose husband, Zalmay Khalilzad, served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan:
We made a deliberate choice. At first, everyone thought, there’s no way to beat the Soviets. So what we have to do is to throw the worst crazies against them that we can find, and there was a lot of collateral damage. We knew exactly who these people were, and what their organizations were like, and we didn’t care. Then, we allowed them to get rid of, just kill all the moderate leaders. The reason we don’t have moderate leaders in Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all. They killed the leftists, the moderates, the middle-of-the-roaders. They were just eliminated, during the 1980s and afterwards.126
Reagan left office a befuddled old man who claimed little knowledge of things going on under his nose, yet many people lionize him and credit him with having restored the United States’ faith in itself after the failed presidencies of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter
. Even before Reagan’s second term, conservatives had begun anointing him one of the nation’s great presidents. A 1984 Republican campaign memo read, “Paint Reagan as the personification of all that is right with or heroized by America. Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America’s idealized image of itself.”127
But what is Reagan’s real legacy? One of the most poorly informed and least engaged chief executives in U.S. history, he empowered a right-wing resurgence of hard-line anti-Communists who militarized U.S. foreign policy and rekindled the Cold War. He paid lip service to democracy while arming and supporting repressive dictators. He turned local and regional conflicts in the Middle East and Latin America into Cold War battlegrounds, unleashing a reign of terror to suppress popular movements. He spent enormous sums on the military while cutting social programs for the poor. He sharply reduced taxes on the wealthy, tripling the national debt and transforming the United States from the world’s leading creditor in 1981 to its biggest debtor by 1985. In October 1987, he oversaw the worst stock market collapse since the Great Depression. He let the chance to rid the world of offensive nuclear weapons slip through his fingers because he wouldn’t let go of a childish fantasy. And as for his much-vaunted role in ending the Cold War, as we will see, the lion’s share of credit goes instead to his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Chapter 12
THE COLD
WAR ENDS:
Squandered Opportunities
“Suddenly, a season of peace seems to be warming the world,” the New York Times exulted on the last day of July 1988. Protracted, bloody wars were ending in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua, and between Iran and Iraq.1 Later that year, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat, under pressure from Moscow, renounced terrorism and implicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist. But the most dramatic development was still to come. In December 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Cold War over:
the use or threat of force no longer can . . . be an instrument of foreign policy. This applies above all to nuclear arms. . . . let me turn to the main issue—disarmament, without which none of the problems of the coming century can be solved. . . . the Soviet Union has taken a decision to reduce its armed forces . . . by 500,000 men. . . . we have decided to withdraw by 1991 six tank divisions from East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and to disband them. . . . Soviet forces stationed in those countries will be reduced by 50,000 men and their armaments, by 5,000 tanks. All Soviet divisions remaining . . . will become clearly defensive.
He promised to reveal Soviet plans for the “transition from the economy of armaments to an economy of disarmament” and called upon other military powers to do likewise through the United Nations. He proposed a 50 percent reduction in offensive strategic arms, asked for joint action to eliminate “the threat to the world’s environment,” urged banning weapons in outer space, and demanded an end to exploitation of the third world, including a “moratorium of up to 100 years on debt servicing by the least developed countries.”
Still, he was not finished. He called for a UN-brokered cease-fire in Afghanistan as of January 1. In nine years of war, the Soviets had failed to defeat the Afghan insurgents despite deploying 100,000 troops, working closely with local Afghans, and building up the Afghan army and police. He proposed an international conference on Afghan neutrality and demilitarization and held out an olive branch to the incoming administration of George H. W. Bush, offering a “joint effort to put an end to an era of wars, confrontation and regional conflicts, to aggressions against nature, to the terror of hunger and poverty as well as to political terrorism. This is our common goal and we can only reach it together.”2
The New York Times characterized Gorbachev’s riveting hourlong speech as the greatest act of statesmanship since Wilson’s Fourteen Points in 1918 or Roosevelt and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter in 1941—“the basic restructuring of international politics.” And, the Times proclaimed, “he promised to lead the way unilaterally. Breathtaking. Risky. Bold. Naive. Diversionary. Heroic. . . . his ideas merit—indeed, compel—the most serious response from President-elect Bush and other leaders.” The Washington Post called it “a speech as remarkable as any ever delivered at the United Nations.”3
Bush had not yet moved into the White House after trouncing Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the recent election. Trailing by 17 points during the summer, Bush struggled to overcome what was widely being described as the “wimp” factor. For a while, it looked like the election might turn on the issue of whether Bush was too much of a wimp to be president. Some thought it odd that Bush, a recipient of a Distinguished Flying Cross, who had flown fifty-eight combat missions in the Pacific during World War II, would be so derided. Newsweek considered it a “potentially crippling handicap—a perception that he isn’t strong enough or tough enough for the challenges of the Oval Office.”4 Not even the fact that Bush captained Yale’s baseball team earned him a pass. The Washington Post’s Curt Suplee wrote, “Wimp. Wasp. Weenie. Every woman’s first husband. Bland conformist. These now shop-worn pejoratives are the essence of George Bush’s ‘image problem’—the vague but powerful suspicion of many citizens that the vice president may be too feckless and insubstantial to be the leader of the free world.”5 “He’s been reduced to a cartoon,” his second son, Jeb Bush, complained.6
Commentators attributed the image to his wealthy, pampered upbringing and his Ivy League education. Always staid and reserved, he had been nicknamed “Poppy” as a boy. Despite resigning from the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, he couldn’t shake the image of being the ultimate “Establishment” candidate—the man endorsed by David Rockefeller.7 On top of that, most of his political offices had been appointments. None of Reagan’s charisma had rubbed off on him as Reagan’s vice president. It turned out that Reagan didn’t like Bush and hadn’t wanted him on the ticket, but his preferred choices—Senator Paul Laxalt and Representative Jack Kemp—wouldn’t fly. Bush’s kowtowing to Reagan and the right-wing policies he had previously opposed, including what he called “voodoo economics,” made him look weak and unprincipled. “I’m following Mr. Reagan—blindly,” Bush told one reporter upon receiving the nomination.8 He went so far as to call Oliver North, a man he would have once found contemptible, his “hero.” One commentator noted that Bush tried on “the boorish philosophies of the political Right . . . to get closer to the Oval Office.”9 Bush’s initial victory in the New Hampshire primary frustrated his principal opponent, Bob Dole, who fumed, “There’s nothing there.”10
Addressing the United Nations in New York, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Cold War over and announced a series of peaceful reforms and steps toward disarmament in a December 1988 speech that the New York Times called the greatest act of statesmanship since Wilson’s Fourteen Points in 1918 or Roosevelt and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter in 1941.
People thought he lacked a home or community—he officially resided in a Houston hotel—and derided his tendency to end sentences with “muddy” phrases like “whatever it is” and “all that sort of stuff” and mocked his “speech disturbances: sentence incompletion, interruption of word sequences and tongue slips.”11 Feisty Texas Governor Ann Richards quipped at the Democratic National Convention, “Poor George. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”12
When parading his war record, defending gun rights, frequenting barbecues, and shamelessly pandering to the Right did nothing to help Bush change his image, he tried a different strategy. He questioned Dukakis’s patriotism and openly played the race card with a campaign ad about furloughed murderer Willie Horton that appealed to voters’ fear of crime. But the coup de grâce came when CBS news anchor Dan Rather pressed him on his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. Bush was ready to pounce. He challenged the question’s fairness and angrily retorted, “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I
judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?” His strategy worked. Reporters referred to the “Rather Bushwhacking,” calling Bush a “bully.”13 Few noticed that Rather’s questions about Bush’s role were entirely legitimate. During the campaign, Bush insisted that he had been “out of the loop—no operational role” in the illegal operation, but in his taped diary the former CIA director admitted, “I’m one of the few people that know fully the details.”14 Bush would later pardon former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger to avoid testimony about Bush’s role in the scandal.
Bush’s foreign policy team included James A. Baker III at State, Dick Cheney at Defense, and General Brent Scowcroft as his national security advisor. Scowcroft chose Robert Gates as his number two man. Paul Wolfowitz took over as undersecretary of defense for policy.
While in New York to address the United Nations, Gorbachev met with Reagan and Bush, seeking help on arms control and troop withdrawal. But Bush’s advisors remained skeptical and the CIA, whose intelligence capabilities had been degraded by years of unrelenting right-wing assault, completely misread what was occurring. As Gates later admitted in his memoirs, “the American government, including CIA, had no idea in January 1989 that a tidal wave of history was about to break upon us.”15 Gates and Cheney were most skeptical of Gorbachev’s initiatives and sought ways to take advantage of his willingness to reform the Soviet system. For the most part, Cheney’s opposition to working with Gorbachev prevailed. Cheney opposed an early summit, fearing that Gorbachev’s initiatives would weaken Western resolve. Bush decided on a strategy that would further erode Soviet military strength: whereas Gorbachev was calling for eliminating tactical nuclear weapons in Europe—an offer most Europeans applauded—the United States countered that the Soviet Union should remove 325,000 troops in exchange for a U.S. cut of 30,000. Bush and Gorbachev did not meet again for another year.
