Their encounter, scheduled for fifteen minutes, lasted nearly an hour. The speaking note for the meeting, prepared by Charles Powell, sought to counter the Soviet belief that she had hardened her support for SDI since the Chequers meeting. The Powell line read, ‘As I said to you at Chequers, it is a dream which he [Reagan] has: and like all dreams no one can know whether it is capable of being realised.’9 She should emphasize that Reagan saw SDI as replacing nuclear weapons in ‘both East and West’ and had promised to negotiate deployment under the ABM Treaty.* On this paper, Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘New occasions teach new duties,’ a quotation from one of her favourite hymns, by James Russell Lowell, which begins ‘Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide / … for the good or evil side.’
Sure enough, Gorbachev brought up SDI almost as soon as their meeting began, complaining of the ‘enormous danger’ of transferring nuclear weapons to space. This was an empty charge as SDI did not envisage such a transfer. But Mrs Thatcher, keen to point to her own pivotal role, ignored this and explained that the Camp David agreement had changed matters; it ‘was the first time that the Americans had been persuaded to put publicly on record that any deployment would require negotiation’.10 Each leader emphasized the importance of future personal dialogue. Mrs Thatcher said that ‘If Mr. Gorbachev ever wished to send a message to her, she would be very ready to receive it.’ Gorbachev acknowledged this invitation and said that ‘the general trend of his discussion with the Prime Minister … was something which he took a liking to.’11 He wanted an ‘expanded dialogue’. Tony Bishop noted that ‘When Gromyko chipped in that this could perhaps best be done by exchange of messages, Gorbachev pointedly went on to say that … he had been impressed by his discussion with the Prime Minister … “We must continue to meet, talk to each other and exchange views.” ’12
Mrs Thatcher turned on all possible charm. The Russian interpreter, Sukhodrev, gave his version of the meeting to Gorbachev’s aide Anatoly Chernyaev:
[she] was all over him, charming him, fascinating him and he responded in kind. That’s evidently the way she ‘does politics’ and with the help of M. S. [Gorbachev] she wants to outflank the likes of Kohl and Mitterrand – even Reagan himself – in world affairs. And she likes to use her woman’s wiles to play games with Gorbachev in particular.13
As an analysis of Mrs Thatcher’s methods and mindset, this was perceptive, but, whatever her search for personal power, she was certainly not so foolish as to try to cut the Americans out of anything. Before seeing Gorbachev, she had met Vice-President George Bush, representing the US at the funeral, to co-ordinate their approaches. Bush had told her in confidence that he would give Gorbachev a letter from Reagan suggesting that the two men meet, his first proposal of a formal summit since he had entered the White House. George Shultz, who was present, had told her that their focus on Gorbachev had originated with her. He had also suggested that, when Gorbachev threw SDI at her in their meeting, she should emphasize the Four Points from Camp David: ‘This was firm ground.’14 She had given her own view of Gorbachev to the Americans. ‘He was formed by the system,’ she had said. ‘… He would probably go the same way as Andropov in trying to make the existing system work better.’ But, she added, he dominated the Politburo: ‘he had the ability, the personality and the will.’15
There is no doubt that, in terms of Anglo-American relations, and of wider prestige among the allies, Gorbachev’s emergence as the Soviet leader greatly helped Mrs Thatcher. Charles Powell believed that ‘The key to understanding Mrs Thatcher and Gorbachev is that she felt, from quite early on, that she was investing hugely in him. She was like a hedge fund manager. She had decided that she was going to buy Gorbachevs and profit from them. She was very keen to keep him in play.’16 Gorbachev seemed equally keen. A couple of months later, the Ambassador, Sutherland, reported a conversation he had had with an official in Gorbachev’s office: ‘Mrs Thatcher had made a great impression on Gorbachev. He was always speaking about her. It was true that there were many problems where Britain and the Soviet Union differed … but this was an instance where a personal relationship could have an effect upon the course of history.’17
It was not necessarily easy, however, for Mrs Thatcher to sustain the personal relationship, or her prominent role, once she returned from Moscow. Although the East–West mood was improved, Britain played no direct part in negotiations over nuclear weapons. The Soviets remained highly suspicious, and the Americans uncertain. No Western power, including Britain, had good lines of communication to the Soviet hierarchy.*
The Soviets, however, recognized that their ties to London were now far stronger than their ties to Washington. Herein lay a significant part of Mrs Thatcher’s appeal. There was a danger that she would either try to exercise a greater influence than she truly possessed, thereby irritating at least one of the two great powers, or, on the other hand, fail to develop her own strengths. After all, if she were successful in persuading Reagan to deal with the Soviets, the logic might be that Britain would be redundant: having effected the introduction, Mrs Thatcher might find herself being asked to leave the party. Although a leader who always sold herself in public as a ‘conviction politician’, Mrs Thatcher was, in her approaches to the Soviet Union and in her role of persuader in Washington, displaying the skills which, in theory, she disparaged – those of a diplomat. These would be tested over the coming months.
It did not help that her own Foreign Secretary broke ranks. On the way home from Moscow, Charles Powell was shown the text of a major speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) which Geoffrey Howe was about to give. Powell’s task was to vet it for No. 10’s approval, but as he put it: ‘I’m ashamed to say that two pages into it I dropped asleep and never read any more.’18 He sent a pro forma letter to Howe saying that the Prime Minister had ‘seen and approved’ the speech. Unfortunately, for Powell, the content was not, in fact, soporific. Howe had decided to attack SDI.
Perhaps irritated by Mrs Thatcher’s tendency to ignore him, Howe warned that, even if SDI worked exactly as planned in stopping all ballistic missiles, it would not deal with the other sorts of nuclear weapons. Howe’s memorable phrase was that ‘there would be no advantage in creating a new Maginot Line* of the 21st century liable to be outflanked by relatively simpler and demonstrably cheaper countermeasures.’19 Howe’s views were not, in themselves, completely at odds with Mrs Thatcher’s, but his decision to express them publicly, after the agreement of the Four Points at Camp David, ‘appeared to undercut her deal with the President’.20 American suspicions of British sincerity were naturally aroused. Richard Perle, attending a conference in London, was furious. ‘It was a kind of furtive undermining’, he recalled, ‘… which struck me as wrong and even cowardly.’21 Without clearing anything with Washington, Perle redrafted his conference speech, adding the memorable riposte that Sir Geoffrey’s speech ‘proved an old axiom of geometry that length is no substitute for depth’.22
Mrs Thatcher, too, was furious with Howe and dressed down Charles Powell so severely that he thought he might be sacked.23 The Times, whose editor Charles Douglas-Home and contributor David Hart knew Mrs Thatcher’s mind, branded Howe’s intervention ‘mealy-mouthed, muddled in conception, negative, Luddite, ill-informed’. So helpful was the speech to the Soviets, the paper continued, that it might best be described as ‘the Gorbachov [sic] amendment’.24 In a letter to Reagan reporting on Chernenko’s funeral, Mrs Thatcher added a final paragraph: ‘I look forward to keeping in the closest touch with you as the talks proceed. I can assure you of our continuing support. Our position has not changed, whatever you may have heard or read.’25 The underlining was in her own hand, a point made very clear to the Americans.26 Reagan obligingly told a press conference that, though surprised by what Howe had said, ‘I do know we have the support of Prime Minister Thatcher and therefore the English [sic] Government in our research for the Strategic Defense Initiative.’27 Only a little damage was done, and the in
cident helped make it clear once again that it was Mrs Thatcher herself, rather than any of her ministers, who was the architect and executor of British policies. It therefore did her no harm in Washington.
In continuing to pursue her search for dialogue with the Soviets, Mrs Thatcher had greater difficulties with the US administration than with her own. Under pressure from those who worried he was going too fast, Reagan looked as if he might slow down moves towards a summit with Gorbachev. He told Shultz he thought November was too early for any summit anywhere. In June 1985, after being urged by the Russian-American oil wheeler-dealer Armand Hammer that he should meet Gorbachev ‘one-to-one’ in Moscow, Reagan noted in his diary: ‘He’s convinced “Gorby” is a different type than past Soviet leaders & that we can get along. I’m too cynical to believe that.’28 There seems little doubt, however, that Reagan did consistently want the meeting to take place. Mrs Thatcher’s role was to push him a bit further in the direction he anyway sought, helping to ease his position with his own conservative backers. As Henry Kissinger put it, ‘Reagan was determined to have a meeting with the Soviet leader. Mrs Thatcher’s views gave him the moral strength, the encouragement to do it. Shultz undoubtedly also wanted a meeting. So you can’t say she shifted the debate from “no” to “yes”. But on a continuum, a swing of the pendulum, she pushed him closer to a meeting.’29 On 3 July, a Reagan–Gorbachev summit was announced for November, in Geneva.
At the same time, Gorbachev was keen to take up Mrs Thatcher’s open invitation to send her messages. On 7 May 1985, the fortieth anniversary of VE Day, he wrote to her recalling the ‘gigantic efforts’ of his own country against ‘fascist tyranny’. The Soviet people, he said, ‘harbour feelings of respect for the gallantry of the British people who made a sizeable contribution to achieving the victory’.30 Now, he went on, it was essential to stop a new war by ‘preventing the militarization of space’ (Soviet parlance for SDI): ‘The Soviet Union is prepared to cooperate with Great Britain – its former ally in the anti-Hitlerite coalition – in achieving these noble goals.’ It was not hard, of course, for Mrs Thatcher to spot – and resist – such a blatant piece of wedge-driving, but the message was evidence of the danger inherent in leading the field for engagement with Gorbachev. There was a thin line between being a pioneer for peace and being a ‘useful idiot’.
In fact, though, Gorbachev’s message coincided with Mrs Thatcher’s growing enthusiasm for SDI, and did nothing to counteract it. The Americans’ policy of flattering her by briefing her on the scientific aspects of the programme was working. So was their offer that British companies might share in the research contracts that would emerge. Her first meeting with General Abrahamson in January had been very successful. In late July, she visited Washington again. She was not able to see Reagan because he was convalescing from a second operation for cancer. This contributed to a sense that his presidency was weakening. The British Ambassador, Sir Oliver Wright, reported on the eve of her visit that ‘There is a curious disparity between the President’s popularity, and the way he discharges with grace and general approval his role as head of state, and his inability as head of government to make his policies prevail.’31 Mrs Thatcher underlined the second half of the sentence. She spoke to Reagan on the telephone while visiting Vice-President Bush. ‘His voice sounded strong, very strong,’ she told the press afterwards.32* But business had to be transacted elsewhere.
She saw Abrahamson and Caspar Weinberger. The meeting with Abrahamson was a ‘highly restricted’ briefing; its effect was to increase Mrs Thatcher’s excitement. Abrahamson remembered it with pleasure:
Mrs Thatcher responded to our meeting both with understanding and great curiosity about where SDI could go and how fast it could go, right from the beginning. Sure, she had some doubts. But she was delightful. She asked very good questions that would range from the deterrence basis to how are we going to get there? She loved the latter. At the end of the briefing she said, ‘I would like for you to plan for us to meet at least three times a year. I want to hear about this.’33
Weinberger and Abrahamson were only too happy to oblige. They could see how it would help:
She set up a paradigm for all our meetings. She let it be known that I was coming with my one CIA guy – that was our whole briefing team – and then she would never invite anybody from the MOD (or elsewhere in the government). You can imagine that afterwards I was the most popular guy in town. She did that deliberately. She never said it, but it was very clear that she understood her own bureaucracy very well.34
Her own bureaucracy could only, ruefully, agree. As John Weston, from the Foreign Office, put it:
The Americans sensed the various attitudes at work in the system. So they decided that the way to do this was to get round the political blockages in the FCO, cut them out and go straight to her. They felt that if they could get Abrahamson (a charming, starry fellow) in with Mrs Thatcher, then he could fill her up with all this stuff until it was coming out of her ears.35
In Mrs Thatcher’s own mind, the briefings also gave her more power behind the scenes with the Americans. ‘She wanted to understand it and shape it,’ Abrahamson recalled. ‘I absolutely valued her input and so did the President. I met with the President quite often. I would always use those occasions to say “… and Mrs Thatcher made these points.” And he would say, “Awww. That’s interesting.” ’36 Probably Mrs Thatcher, always proud of her Oxford science degree, was inclined to exaggerate her own grasp of the technicalities and therefore her effect on the shape of the project. Certainly it served Reagan and his colleagues to say ‘Awww. That’s interesting’ about something she had said, even if they thought it wasn’t. It made it easier for them to bring her with them. But the Abrahamson conversations were part of a wider process by which Mrs Thatcher was placed in a position of trust and knowledge, thereby attaining far more political influence than any other non-US citizen.
At her Washington meeting with Weinberger, the Defense Secretary informed Mrs Thatcher that, in SDI research, ‘The barriers were crumbling.’37 There was a list of areas where Britain could get involved in the research work. Emboldened, perhaps, by her relationship of mutual admiration with Weinberger, Mrs Thatcher adopted an almost peremptory tone. Britain ‘would not be fobbed off with a few small contracts’, she said; ‘… it should be clear that Britain was in a different category to other countries.’ Weinberger answered drily that ‘there might be some unenlightened people in Congress who failed to recognise this. The Prime Minister replied that it was the Administration’s task to tell them.’38* Weinberger also expressed caution and anxiety about the summit. The Soviets, he said, wanted to restrict SDI research solely to ground-held ABM systems, offering reductions in offensive strategic weapons in return. This would be highly disadvantageous, but he was frightened Congress would grab it. He told Mrs Thatcher that he thought the Reagan–Gorbachev summit would have no great developments but would be ‘a “feel” meeting’. Mrs Thatcher thought this inadequate. Problems at the current negotiations made it ‘all the more important to ensure that the summit itself was a success and gave them a fresh impetus’.39
The formal purpose of Mrs Thatcher’s Washington visit was to attend the conference of the International Democrat Union, which she and Reagan had founded ‘to bring together Conservative parties from different parts of the world and to balance the European Democrat Union (EDU) which was mostly Christian Democrats and not – in her view – really Conservative’.40 She used her public speech at the gathering to warn about how the build-up to the summit could go wrong:
Mrs Thatcher noted that Mr Reagan and Mr Gorbachev are to meet in Geneva in November, and she asserted that this fall ‘our peoples will be presented with alluring prospects’ – if the United States will give up President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative … and if the French and British will give up their nuclear deterrents. The Prime Minister drew her loudest applause when she asserted: ‘This we will not do.’41
Fo
r most of 1985, then – especially once the Geneva summit was set for November – Mrs Thatcher saw it as her task to continue to engage with the Soviet Union. During the summer these efforts faced their stiffest test to date as Mrs Thatcher became embroiled in the most important espionage confrontation of her time in office. At the end of April, Oleg Gordievsky was appointed KGB resident-designate in London, but, on 16 May, he was suddenly called to Moscow, ostensibly for high-level briefings, but actually to be interrogated as a suspected British agent.* Despite interrogation by the KGB, assisted by the use of drugs, Gordievsky did not confess, and was told to take some time off (while the KGB kept an eye on him). British intelligence realized this offered the only opportunity. Thanks to a carefully prepared plan, he escaped his KGB minders and was ‘exfiltrated’ over the Finnish border, though without his wife and children. He arrived at Heathrow on 22 July 1985. He then underwent a two-month debriefing session. The news of his defection was not immediately known to the Russians, and the KGB suspected he had committed suicide.42 On 15 August, Moscow was officially informed of Gordievsky’s defection, but it was not publicly announced, in the hope that this would make it possible for the Soviet authorities to allow his wife and children to join him. As was usual KGB policy in such cases, this request was refused.
To date, there had been no communication at all between Mrs Thatcher and Gorbachev on the issue. But in late August, while on holiday in the flat she continued to rent at Scotney Castle in Kent, Mrs Thatcher was informed that the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires had an ‘urgent and personal letter’ for her from Gorbachev, which he wanted to deliver in person.43 The context, of course, heightened the drama. With Gordievsky on British soil, what ‘urgent and personal’ missive did Gorbachev wish to impart? Mrs Thatcher pronounced herself amenable to this meeting and soon afterwards, as was usual practice, she received an advance copy of Gorbachev’s message. She promptly discovered that the letter was neither particularly urgent nor particularly personal. It was a message with intentions similar to those of his letter on VE Day: to drive a wedge between London and Washington. The issue this time was nuclear testing, on which Gorbachev had recently called for a moratorium. He sought a positive response from the US and now appealed for Mrs Thatcher’s help.44 She did not reply to Gorbachev’s message and, hearing that the British Ambassador in Moscow had been told to expect a summons from Gorbachev himself, went back on her original readiness to meet the Chargé. The British came to realize that these manoeuvres were part of a scheme to delay, embarrass and confuse the British government while the Soviets worked out how to handle the Gordievsky defection. Bryan Cartledge, the British Ambassador, was kept waiting for several days for the promised summons from Gorbachev which never came.45
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