The Dead Hand
Page 62
33 Narodnoye Khozyaistvo SSSR v 1983 g. [Agriculture in the USSR in 1983] (Moscow: Finances and Statistics, 1984), p. 269.
34 Henry Kreisler, “Conversation with Alexander Yakovlev,” Nov. 21, 1996, Conversations with History, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Also, English, p. 184.
35 English, p. 190.
36 Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 23, 37.
37 Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 58.
38 Chernyaev diary, Feb. 26 and March 2, 1985.
39 Alexander Yakovlev, Sumerki (Moscow: Materik, 2003), pp. 459–461.
40 Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World, p. 32.
41 March 11 comments from minutes of the Politburo meeting, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Volkogonov Collection, Reel 17, Container 25.
42 Georgi Shakhnazarov, Tsena Svobody: Reformatsiya Gorbacheva Glazami yevo Pomoshnika (Moscow: Rossika-Zevs, 1993), pp. 35–36.
CHAPTER 9: YEAR OF THE SPY
1 Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 329.
2 Reagan diary, April 19, 1985. Reagan acknowledged in his memoir, “I can’t claim that I believed from the start that Mikhail Gorbachev was going to be a different sort of Soviet leader.” Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 614.
3 Reagan, An American Life, pp. 615–616.
4 Reagan diary, March 20, 1985. In his memoir, Reagan said he told aides “we’d have to be as tough as ever in dealing with the Soviets” but “we should work hard to establish channels directly” between himself and Gorbachev, p. 615.
5 According to Matlock, Nicholson had strayed into a restricted area. The United States “was given a version that mixed fact with fiction to place the responsibility on Nicholson, not on the Soviet sentry. The official Soviet explanation was that Nicholson had entered a clearly marked prohibited area, was illegally photographing a Soviet military installation, and when spotted refused the sentry’s order to halt. Instead, he tried to escape and was therefore shot. It was this inaccurate version that convinced Weinberger and Reagan that the shooting had been deliberate.” Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev, pp. 112–113.
6 George Shultz Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 537.
7 Reagan, An American Life, p. 617.
8 In a letter to Gorbachev April 30, 1985, Reagan said the Nicholson incident was clouding efforts to improve relations. Shultz, p. 537.
9 Gates, address to Boston Committee on Foreign Relations, Nov. 28, 1984.
10 Shultz, p. 507.
11 “Gorbachev, the New Broom,” Office of Soviet Analysis, Directorate of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 13 pp., June 1985, released to author under FOIA, partially redacted.
12 Gates, pp. 331–332. Gates said in his memoir that Casey’s cover note went too far, and was “transparent advocacy” added on top of intelligence analysis. Casey “did not offer any balance or pretense of objectivity,” Gates said. But Gates also said that “many of us in CIA” agreed with Casey’s appraisal of Soviet motives and strategy.
13 Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 25.
14 Alexander Yakovlev, “On Reagan,” State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow. Yakovlev Collection. Fond 10063, Opis 1, Delo 379. Translated by Svetlana Savranskaya.
15 Gorbachev, Ponyat’ Perestroiku (Moscow: Alpina Bizness Books, 2006), p. 33.
16 Gates speech, Texas A&M University, Nov. 19, 1999.
17 Except where noted separately, this account of the Ames case is based on “An Assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames Espionage Case and Its Implications for U.S. Intelligence,” Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Nov. 1, 1994, parts 1 and 2.
18 Victor Cherkashin, who was deputy resident then, said the Ames letter offered information on CIA operations and included “a small sheaf” of documents that seemed unremarkable, mostly about U.S. intelligence on Soviet naval forces in the Middle East. Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 16.
19 Except where noted separately, this account of Gordievsky’s actions is based on Next Stop and author’s interview.
20 Barry G. Royden, “Tolkachev, a Worthy Successor to Penkovsky,” Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, Studies in Intelligence, vol. 47, no. 3. Also, James L. Pavitt, deputy CIA director for operations, remarks to Foreign Policy Association, June 21, 2004.
21 Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 37.
22 Bearden and Risen, p. 12.
23 Gordievsky describes the escape in Next Stop. David Wise, in Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), offers a different story of the escape, quoting CIA officials as saying that Gordievsky was secreted inside a specially built Land Rover and driven right out of the British embassy in Moscow all the way to Finland. Gordievsky claims this was a story the KGB leaked to the Western press.
24 Wise, p. 135, raises the possibility that Yurchenko did not know about Ames.
25 Hired by the CIA in 1981, at age twenty-eight, Howard went through training to be a clandestine agent in the Soviet Union and knew much top-secret information. But in the months before his scheduled departure for Moscow, Howard failed a series of CIA polygraph examinations and was fired from the CIA in May 1983. Bitter and furious, he walked out of headquarters with all the agency’s Soviet secrets. In late 1984 and early 1985, apparently out of revenge, Howard began selling his knowledge to the KGB at the meetings in Vienna. He may have told them about a British double agent. He is believed to have told them about other spies, and some of the CIA’s most sophisticated technical means for spying.
26 On Casey, see Gates, p. 363. Howard slipped the FBI and fled the country. See David Wise, The Spy Who Got Away (New York: Random House, 1988), chs. 24–26.
27 Within a KGB residency, Line X referred to scientific and technical intelligence and Line PR to political, economic and military strategic intelligence and active measures. See Appendix E, “The Organization of a KGB Residency,” in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Allan Lane/The Penguin Press, 1999), p. 743.
28 “Affidavit in support of criminal complaint, arrest warrant, and search warrants,” United States of America vs. Robert Philip Hanssen, United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, pp. 20–21. Martynov, a KGB Line X officer assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington from October 1980 to November 1985 was compromised by Ames and later executed. Sergei Motorin, a KGB line PR officer assigned to the embassy in Washington from June 1980 to January 1985, was also compromised by Ames and executed. Boris Yuzhin was a KGB Line PR officer working undercover as a TASS correspondent in San Francisco. He was compromised by both Ames and Hanssen. In December 1986, he was arrested, and later sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1992 he was released under a general amnesty grant and subsequently emigrated to the United States.
29 The woman lived in Montreal, married to a Soviet diplomat. The CIA took Yurchenko there, but she rejected him when he knocked on her door. Bearden recalled she abruptly told Yurchenko she had loved a KGB colonel, not a traitor, and shut the door in his face.
CHAPTER 10: OF SWORDS AND SHIELDS
1 Vladimir Medvedev, Chelovek za Spinoi (Moscow: RUSSLIT, 1994), p. 208.
2 An invaluable window on these early developments is the Chernyaev diary. Chernyaev worked in 1985 as deputy director in the Central Committee’s International Department, and became an assistant to Gorbachev in 1986. Some of the diary entries, edited, appear in the En
glish edition of Chernyaev’s memoir, My Six Years with Gorbachev. English translations of the diary for 1985–1988 have been published by TNSA. Date citations are from the full diary, and page numbers refer to the book. The author is grateful to Svetlana Savranskaya for assistance with the Chernyaev diary.
3 The trip to Leningrad began May 15 and the Smolny speech was two days later. Serge Schmemann, “First 100 Days of Gorbachev: A New Start,” New York Times, June 17, 1985, p. 1.
4 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), p. 201.
5 Chernyaev, p. 33, and diary May 22, 1985.
6 Chernyaev, p. 29, and diary April 11, 1985.
7 The campaign was inspired by Andropov’s similar but ill-fated attempts to impose more discipline on society. Gorbachev’s early economic reforms were relatively meek and ill-fated attempts at “acceleration” of the existing system, compared to the more radical approaches he would attempt later.
8 Chernyaev diary, July 6, 1985.
9 Sergei Akhromeyev and Georgi M. Kornienko, Glazami Marshala i Diplomata [In the Eyes of a Marshal and a Diplomat] (Moscow: International Relations, 1992), in Russian, p. 64.
10 Clifford Gaddy, The Price of the Past (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1996), p. 49.
11 Akhromeyev, pp. 34–35. See Thomas M. Nichols, The Sacred Cause (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 134.
12 Gorbachev, pp. 203–205.
13 Gorbachev, Zhizn i Reformi, vol. 1, p. 207 (Moscow: Novosti, 1995). His use of Moloch is a literary allusion to a symbol of cruel and unusual force demanding human sacrifice.
14 Ksenia Kostrova, interview, August 2007. Ksenia is Katayev’s granddaughter.
15 This account is based on Katayev, Hoover, and materials in author’s possession.
16 A CIA estimate, made in 1986, was 15–17 percent. (This estimate was a revision from 13–14 percent earlier. The reason for the revision was a recalculation of prices made by the Soviets in 1982.)
17 Katayev, “Chto Takoe VPK” [What Was the VPK], undated, author’s possession. This paper is similar to a chapter Katayev contributed to The Anatomy of Russia Defense Conversion, edited by Vlad E. Genin (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Vega Press, 2001), p. 52.
18 Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001), p. 178. Gorbachev nursed a hope to use the defense sector to somehow boost the flagging Soviet economy. Gaddy, pp. 55–56.
19 Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 193–228.
20 See Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), pp. 157–173.
21 Letter to Politburo of November 26, 1985, “On distortion of facts in reports and information coming to the CPSU Central Committee,” State Archive of the Russian Federation, Fond 3, Opis 111, Delo 144, pp. 39–41, courtesy Svetlana Savranskaya.
22 Georgi Shakhnazarov, Tsena Svobody: Reformatsiya Gorbacheva Glazami yevo Pomoshnika (Moscow: Rossika-Zevs, 1993), p. 88.
23 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 127.
24 Chernyaev diary, June 20, 1985.
25 Matlock recalls the Soviets already had in place 414 Pioneers, each with three warheads, while NATO at that point had deployed only 143 warheads on intermediate-range missiles in Europe, made up of 63 Pershing IIs and 80 ground-launched cruise missiles. Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev, p. 116.
26 Reagan letter to Gorbachev, April 30, 1985, RRPL.
27 Chernyaev diary, April 16, 1985.
28 A contentious issue this year was whether Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative would remain within a narrow interpretation of the 1972 treaty on missile defense, or whether the administration was seeking to use a broader interpretation of the treaty to allow research to move ahead. McFarlane suggested October 6 the treaty permitted research, testing and development of new systems—appearing to put the administration on record for using a broader interpretation of the treaty. The Soviets were alarmed at this, as were U.S. allies. George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), pp. 579–582. An account critical of Shultz appears in Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), pp. 290–300.
29 Shultz, pp. 570–571.
30 Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Times Books, 1995), p. 573.
31 Chernyaev diary, July 1, 1985.
32 English, p. 202.
33 Minutes of the Politburo, June 29, 1985. Volkogonov Collection, Library of Congress, Reel 18. TNSA.
34 Chernyaev diary, June 15, 1985.
35 Andrew and Gordievsky, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975–1985 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 107— 115.
36 Unless otherwise specified, this and other comments by Katayev on missile defense are from an undated monograph, “Kakoi byla reaktzia v SSSR na zayavlenia R. Reagana o razvertyvanii rabot v CShA po SOI,” or “What was the reaction of the Soviet Union to the announcement of R. Reagan on the deployment of works in the United States on the SDI,” twelve pages, Katayev, Hoover.
37 Katayev. The author is indebted to Pavel Podvig for identifying and explaining this.
38 Konstantin Lantratov, “The Star Wars Which Never Was,” January 1995. See www.buran.ru/htm/str163.htm.
39 Roald Z. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), p. 273.
40 Velikhov, interviews by author.
41 Called “IS,” this system was developed in the 1960s and tested in the 1970s and early 1980s, but Andropov’s 1983 moratorium seems to have marked the end of active use. See www.russianspaceweb.com/is.html.
42 A ruby laser emits energy in the visible (red) region.
43 P. V. Zarubin, “Academician Basov, high-powered lasers and the anti-missile defence problem,” Quantum Electronics, No. 32, 2002, pp. 1048–1064.
44 Velikhov described a similar project, known as Gamma, which he said never got off the ground.
45 The declaration was Sept. 24, 1982. Velikhov was also editor of The Night After … Climatic and Biological Consequences of a Nuclear War (Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1985).
46 The group was the Soviet Scientists’ Committee for the Defense of Peace Against the Nuclear Threat.
47 Velikhov said the 1983 report remains secret. But some parts are evident in: Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, Andrei Kokoshin, eds., Weaponry in Space: The Dilemma of Security (Moscow: Mir, 1986).
48 The chart showing thirty-eight warheads is from Katayev, Hoover. Other data on the SS-18 is from Podvig, Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 218–219. See “Multiple (as in ‘up top 38’) warheads,” http://russian forces.org. For the U.S. expectations of asymmetric response, see “Possible Soviet Responses to the US Strategic Defense Initiative,” NIC M 83-10017, Sept. 12, 1983, Director of Central Intelligence.
49 Gorbachev interview, June 30, 2006.
50 Nichols, p. 133.
51 Chernyaev diary, Sept. 1, 1985.
52 Reagan diary, Sept. 10, 1985.
53 Reagan diary, Oct. 22, 1985. Shultz said the Soviet offer September 27 was heavily weighted against the United States in the way it was structured. Shultz, pp. 576–577.
54 Soviet Military Power, April 1985, p. 55.
55 Robert C. McFarlane, with Zofia Smardz, Special Trust (New York: Cadell & Davis, 1994), pp. 307–308. Matlock, p. 133.
56 Reagan diary, Sept. 26, 1985.
57 Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 342.
58 Shultz disagreed with this view. Shultz, p. 586.
59 Gates, p. 343. The Soviet outlook wasn’t very ambitious either. Moscow “did not pin great ho
pes on the summit,” Dobrynin said, p. 586. Chernyaev recalls the thrust was not to deviate from existing positions on arms control, “not to get worked up” over regional conflicts, and “in a word, not to provoke Reagan in order not to intensify the threat, not to play up to the hawks.” Chernyaev diary, Nov. 12, 1985. Gorbachev had leeway to go beyond these guidelines, and he did.
60 Gates, p. 343. NIE 11-18-85, Nov. 1, 1985.
61 Reagan diary, Nov. 13, 1985.
62 Suzanne Massie, interview for the television documentary The Cold War, Sept. 2, 1997, Liddell Hart Center for Military Archives, Kings College, London.
63 Matlock, pp. 150–154 and Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Superpower Illusions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) p. 317, note 11.
64 Yegor Gaidar, “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil,” American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, April 2007. Also see Gaidar’s Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2007).
65 Shultz, pp. 589–596. McFarlane, pp. 314–316. Oberdorfer, who covered the trip for the Washington Post, reports that Gorbachev said he would be willing to reduce existing nuclear weapons to zero on condition the two sides stopped the “militarization of space,” Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 137.
66 Reagan diary, Nov. 5, 1985.
67 Reagan diary, Nov. 6, 1985.
68 Reagan, An American Life, p. 632.
69 Sagdeev, pp. 268–269.
70 Gates, p. 358.
71 Matlock, pp. 134–135, 158.
72 Oberdorfer, p. 143.
73 Reagan, An American Life, p. 635.
74 This account of the summit meetings is based on the official U.S. minutes, unless otherwise specified.
75 Gorbachev, p. 406.
76 Reagan diary, Nov. 19, 1985.
77 Reagan, An American Life, p. 636.
78 Gorbachev, p. 408.
79 Dobrynin recalls that this agreement for reciprocal visits was precooked quietly by him, p. 589. Reagan had also envisioned meeting again. Matlock, p. 153.