Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  For their part, the Russians saw Mrs Thatcher as the most useful ally of the United States with whom they could communicate. Gorbachev also realized the opportunity in an invitation to Britain. It was a ‘dress rehearsal for his future diplomatic role’, recalled Andrei Grachev, who would later become Gorbachev’s spokesman. ‘Gorbachev singled out Thatcher as the shortest way to send a message to Washington. He was well aware of her reputation … as a “hard-liner” vis-à-vis the Soviet Union … and he believed this to be an advantage rather than a handicap.’35 Gorbachev himself met Sir Iain Sutherland,† the British Ambassador in Moscow, and told him that he wanted (Mrs Thatcher’s underlining) ‘frank political discussions with the Prime Minister, with no diplomatic formalities’. He also ‘spoke of his interest in English history and the English legal system, which he had studied’.36 Percy Cradock, who had succeeded Anthony Parsons as Mrs Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, tried to read Russian intentions for her: ‘for the Russians space [that is, SDI] will be the key … In return for assurances on space they may be ready to negotiate on offensive missiles.’37 He counselled against allowing the Soviets to drive a wedge between the British and the Americans: ‘it encourages them to think that they can divide and rule.’

  The British also used their mole, Oleg Gordievsky, to assist. Ever since he had provided important information about ABLE ARCHER (see Chapter 5), Gordievsky had been taken very seriously in Whitehall. This was partly because Mrs Thatcher herself had a great respect for British intelligence, dating back to her time as leader of the Opposition. Airey Neave, her campaign manager in the 1975 leadership election and subsequently her chief of staff, had good intelligence links, deriving from his own work in the Second World War. Neave had arranged for Mrs Thatcher to meet former intelligence officers, including Nicholas Elliott,* an eccentric officer from SIS, who later published books dropping hints about his work with facetious titles like With my Little Eye.38 Elliott and others briefed her about the work of the intelligence services and tended to confirm her fears, which the Foreign Office liked to play down, about the extent of Soviet penetration of the West.

  The Labour government which Mrs Thatcher’s administration replaced had kept intelligence at a distance, particularly because of the paranoid fear of the services harboured by Harold Wilson, Prime Minister until 1976. But for Mrs Thatcher, who combined suspicion of the Soviet Union with a desire to know more about what it was up to, intelligence furnished the sort of information which diplomacy, in the frozen periods of the Cold War, was ill equipped to provide. It also, through MI5 on the home front, kept watch on the Communist subversion which was a significant factor in industrial disruption. She was so concerned about this that, early in her term as prime minister, she called together the heads of the two intelligence services to try to persuade them to amend the 1952 Security Service Directive to allow MI5 to engage in stopping ‘wreckers’ in industry39 as well as those actively engaged in the subversion of the state. When Sir Howard Smith, the Director-General of MI5, refused, Mrs Thatcher and Robert Armstrong pursued the aim by other means, cutting Smith out of the planning, and moving a senior MI5 officer, John Deverell, to the Cabinet Office to keep an eye on industrial subversion.40

  In general, Mrs Thatcher saw the intelligence services as robust and accurate. According to Sir Colin McColl, head of SIS from 1988, ‘She thought of us in the same way as she thought of the armed forces – part of the national defence. That was wonderful for us. We knew we had her support.’41* When McColl first met her in the early 1980s, he noted what he saw as her charming simplicity in preaching to the converted: ‘Here’s this lady, running a very complicated country. She spent a large part of the meeting telling us that Communism was a very bad thing. Lovely.’42 She was also not above being excited by secrecy in itself and by the romance of espionage. So when Gordievsky started to report, his revelations, conveyed ‘for her eyes only’ via her foreign affairs private secretary (first John Coles and then Powell), fell on fertile ground. In the past, British agents recruited from the KGB had been valued chiefly for their counter-intelligence, but what excited Mrs Thatcher even more about Gordievsky was ‘the value of his political information. It was a big event.’43 Gordievsky’s despatches also conveyed to her, as no other information had done, how the Soviet leadership reacted to Western phenomena and, indeed, to her. He reported that the Politburo had been greatly impressed by her demeanour at Andropov’s funeral – ‘smart, serious, dignified, properly dressed, and more than just the Iron Lady’.44 As Gordievsky himself put it, ‘Because she knew of me from an early stage, she started to think of them [the Russians] not as robots but as human beings.’45 The main human being who started to feature in his reports was Mikhail Gorbachev.

  As Gorbachev’s visit approached, Gordievsky was ordered to write a report for Moscow on what the British were likely to raise at the meetings with their visitor. Gordievsky recalled that he ‘had no idea. So I went to the Friends [SIS] and said, “Help!” ’46 Here was an important opportunity to prove his worth to his Soviet superiors. The British decided to furnish Gordievsky with the briefing points which Howe would have in front of him during his meetings with Gorbachev. Gordievsky later came to believe that the high quality of his report aroused the KGB’s first suspicions about him: ‘When I wrote the report, my number one, a very clever counter-intelligence officer, said, “Mmm, very good report about Geoffrey Howe. It sounds like a Foreign Office document.” I felt my heart ache. It was too good. Really too good.’47

  Apart from all the expected anxieties about a meeting which was both so important and unprecedented, there was also a subversive sub-theme. Gorbachev’s visit came some nine months into the miners’ strike. As matters had grown more difficult, legally and financially, for the strikers, Arthur Scargill, the NUM leader, had sought help from foreign countries hostile to the UK government. First, contacts with Libya were exposed. At the same time, Gordievsky was reporting that NUM lines to the Soviet Union had been opened up. MI5 reported that in early November the Soviet Foreign Trade Bank had tried to pay approximately $1.2 million to the NUM via banks in Switzerland and London, but the operation had been abandoned when the Swiss bank had grown suspicious.48 Gorbachev himself had signed off the effort to provide the NUM with $1.4 million back in October (see Chapter 6). Mrs Thatcher wanted advice on how to ‘discourage the Russian Government’s provision of funds indicated in that Report, perhaps by using the evident wish of the Russians to avoid publicity’.49 Should she raise the matter with Gorbachev?*

  Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa arrived for lunch at Chequers on Sunday 16 December 1984. Present were Mrs Thatcher and Denis, and Whitelaw, Howe, Heseltine, Malcolm Rifkind, Paul Channon† and, because Gorbachev had supervised agriculture for much of his career, the Minister of Agriculture, Michael Jopling. At the drinks beforehand, Gorbachev ‘wanted solely to talk about agriculture’ which rather nonplussed the very unagricultural Mrs Thatcher,50 but as soon as they sat down to lunch ‘our conversation’, as Gorbachev remembered it, ‘took a rather polemic tone’.51‡ According to the British interpreter, Tony Bishop, Mrs Thatcher ‘deliberately and breathtakingly … set about serially cross-examining him about the inferiority of the Soviet centralised command system and the merits of free enterprise and competition’.52 The contemporary record bears this out. Mrs Thatcher asked Gorbachev how people could possibly better themselves ‘in a centralised and rigid economy’.53 He replied that, in the Soviet Union, the availability of jobs was ‘already solved’. Mrs Thatcher then attacked Soviet five-year plans: ‘She herself did not wish to have the power to direct everyone where he or she should work and what he or she should receive.’ Gorbachev said he understood that the British system was different, but ‘the Soviet system was superior.’ He invited Mrs Thatcher to come and have a look for herself: ‘She would see how Soviet people lived – joyfully.’ Reading the record later, Mrs Thatcher underlined this last word and wrote ‘!’ beside it.

  Next the Prime Min
ister complained about the Soviet treatment of dissidents like Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Shcharansky and of refusnik* Jews in general. Gorbachev declined to answer, reminding her that ‘they had not completed their discussion of the two economic systems’.54 Mrs Thatcher took this as her cue to start on the miners’ strike. There had been much intimidation and violence, she said, ‘and even recently a murder’.† ‘Communism’, she went on, ‘was synonymous with getting one’s way by violence. Its slogan was: “Brothers – when you are free, you will do as you are told.” ’ She said that people like Scargill, and his Communist vice-president, Mick McGahey,‡ ‘gave Soviet Communism a bad name’.55 She accused Communists in Britain of taking over the trade unions ‘under Labour colours’ and infiltrating the Labour Party because they could not win parliamentary seats under their own banner.

  Gorbachev took this, rightly, as an attack on the Soviet Union: ‘this was the first he had heard of this.’ Did the Prime Minister really think, he asked, that his country could run a miners’ strike or manipulate British public opinion? It was the Soviet Union’s ‘firm policy’ that there should be ‘no export of Revolution and no export of Counter-Revolution’. Mrs Thatcher replied that she didn’t mind foreign propaganda because ‘She could prove that the British system was better. But the Soviet Union’s fellow-Communists who could not get their own way through the ballot box were opting for violence.’ Then she challenged him almost directly: ‘They were also being helped with finance from outside.’56 Gorbachev stoutly and mendaciously denied the accusation: ‘The Soviet Union had transferred no funds to the NUM.’ At this the official record added, ‘(After a sideways glance from Mr Zamyatin [the Central Committee’s chief of international propaganda, who was part of the Soviet delegation], he amended this to “as far as I am aware”)’.57 He went on the offensive: ‘The Prime Minister should blame Britain and not foreign Communists for the situation. Das Kapital had been written in London.’ Mrs Thatcher ‘interjected that in a free society it was entirely possible to do so and get it published’. Gorbachev said that he was aware ‘that the Prime Minister was capable of defending herself. But the Second Congress of the RSDRP* had also been held in London.’ Unquenchable, Mrs Thatcher asked Gorbachev ‘when she might contemplate the holding of British Party Congresses in Moscow. Lenin had set a tragic example of resorting to violence when unable to win through the ballot box.’ Equally defiant, Gorbachev told Mrs Thatcher to ‘deal with realities’: ‘He recalled that Mr Churchill, a “dyed in the wool anti-communist” ’, had wisely joined forces with the Soviets.

  At one point, Gorbachev later recalled, the conversation became so heated that he and Mrs Thatcher turned away from each other: ‘Then I caught Raisa’s eye across the table, and her lips moved to say “It’s over!”, and for a moment I wondered if we should leave.’58 But suddenly Mrs Thatcher changed tone: ‘The Prime Minister said that the difficult part of their discussion was now over.’59 In Tony Bishop’s view, she was signalling to Gorbachev ‘that he’d passed the first audition’.60 He responded in kind, welcoming her remarks and recalling ‘good examples of cooperation between the two countries, including the honouring of contracts in the energy field [a reference to her fight with Reagan over the Siberian gas pipeline]’. He proposed a toast, celebrating the ‘ “domestic ambience” and the good atmosphere prevailing around the table’.61 Lunch ended, the principals adjourned for a smaller and more informal meeting in the main sitting room. Denis left and Raisa enjoyed a tour of the house with officials.†

  The lunchtime conversation between Mrs Thatcher and Gorbachev had been one of the most remarkable ever to have taken place across that dining table. It defied all diplomatic norms. It produced almost nothing but disagreement, and the sharpness of its tone exceeded all the usual Foreign Office euphemisms for rude and quarrelsome meetings, such as ‘frank’ or ‘candid’. Each side appeared to stay inside its ideological trench, firing hard. Yet the occasion was, quite clearly, a success, and was immediately recognized as such by both sides. Gorbachev’s Marxism, thought Mrs Thatcher, was standard stuff. ‘But his personality could not have been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet apparatchik.’62 By his own account, Gorbachev paid a similar compliment to Mrs Thatcher, although the official record does not confirm this:* ‘I told Mrs Thatcher: “I know you are a person of staunch beliefs … This commands respect. But please consider that next to you is a person of your own ilk. And I can assure you that I am not under instructions from the Politburo to persuade you to join the Communist Party.” After that statement she burst into a hearty laugh …’63 Those present on the British side were struck by Gorbachev’s physical vitality. ‘He was so visibly not one of the older men,’ recalled Charles Powell, who noted ‘this short, energetic man bouncing on the balls of his feet’: ‘I think everybody was caught by surprise. She certainly was.’64 Without excessive overconfidence, Gorbachev was acting as if he were all but certain to be the next Soviet leader. He spoke with the ease of the man at the very top.†

  From neighbouring armchairs in the sitting room, and joined only by Howe, Powell and Bishop on the British side, Mrs Thatcher and Gorbachev got down to a less argumentative discussion about arms control. They sat in front of the fire. Occasionally Mrs Thatcher herself would approach the hearth and toss on a new log to revive the flames. Putting aside the polemics of lunch, both sides agreed to discard their briefing papers and talk.65 Mrs Thatcher explained that, following her seminar at Chequers fifteen months earlier, she had decided ‘that she must try to do something’ to engage with the Soviet Union.66 There was no point in one system trying to convert the other, she said: the point was ‘to diminish hostility and the level of armaments’. In making these arguments, she boasted, Britain had a bigger influence with the United States than any other NATO member. When he met Gromyko at Geneva, George Shultz would be looking for balance, not unilateral advantage. She was worried that ‘unless the two sides could agree on how to deal with the problem of weapons in outer space, there would be a new spiral in the arms race.’67 This enabled her to make her point, which she so often put to bridge the gap between Americans and Europeans, that SDI research was fine, but translation into weapons production was another matter altogether.

  Gorbachev replied rather more luridly, speaking of ‘avoiding a holocaust’, and raising the spectre of ‘nuclear winter’ after an exchange of missiles. He produced a diagram from the New York Times illustrating the vast destructive capacities of the world’s nuclear arsenals. It had been difficult for the Russians to contemplate returning to negotiations (at Geneva), he complained, because, in four years of Reagan, ‘not a single step forward had been taken in Soviet/US relations’. He was particularly concerned about ‘the activities of the group round Mr. Weinberger and Mr. Perle’.* How could Mrs Thatcher tell that her assessment of the United States was right? Mrs Thatcher came back with a staunch but nuanced defence of Reagan. The Americans did not want to dominate the world, she said: the freeze in relations had more to do with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan ‘saw the Soviet Union as a country combining immense patriotism with the aim of the world-wide victory of the Communist system’. Naturally, he felt fearful and suspicious, but ‘The last thing he would ever want was a war.’ He had wished only to restore America’s confidence and make her ‘strong enough to defend her way of life’. She said how disappointed Reagan had been by Brezhnev’s lack of friendly response to the handwritten letter he had sent early in his presidency asking for a meeting. Now he was ready ‘to have another go’.

  Then Mrs Thatcher took a risk. Reagan also ‘had a dream’, she said, ‘expressed through the Strategic Defence Initiative, of being able to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Sadly, it was not a viable dream because the process of acquiring a ballistic missile defence would inevitably lead to a fresh twist in the arms race spiral … In any case, the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons could not be disinvented.’68

  Gorbachev replied th
at he disagreed with Mrs Thatcher’s friendly account of US intentions, but agreed with her about the value of talking. Spotting the gap between American views on SDI and her own, he tried to flatter her sense of British independence by quoting Lord Palmerston’s dictum about England having no permanent friends, or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.† He implied that Britain could be friendlier with Russia and less close to the United States. Gorbachev told her he was ‘worried by what the Prime Minister said about President Reagan’s daydreams in connection with space-based systems’. Trying to drive the wedge still deeper, he told her that ‘The United States’ position, vis-a-vis Western Europe, on the Strategic Defence Initiative was an egotistic one.’69 The point had been made and the meeting drew to a close. ‘What we need now is a process,’ said Gorbachev, suggesting that their dialogue should continue. This, according to Tony Bishop, was ‘music to the PM’s ears’.70 Her efforts to engage with the Soviet Union appeared to be bearing fruit.