The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  “I think,” Kay told me, “quite frankly, that it was the international pressure that carried the day. I’ve always credited whatever success we had on this mission to the satellite telephone. It’s an early example of international communications being used in a political situation, before any of us really understood the ground rules.” Gallucci didn’t disagree, but he emphasized what was behind the communications: “There was always the plausible46 prospect of the resumption of hostilities, and I don’t mean tit-for-tat bombing. That’s my conclusion about how we got out of that parking lot.”

  BOB GALLUCCI WOULD say later that the September 1991 inspections “did a lot to energize47 and legitimize an aggressive inspection process, which then continued for some period of time.” A seventh inspection in October finally exposed Iraq’s primary nuclear weapons research site at Al Atheer, east of the Euphrates River forty-two miles southwest of Baghdad near Al Musayyib. A CIA summary describes this site as “Project 6000, also known as Al Atheer48: This factory was designed to fabricate the uranium shells [i.e., pits] for atomic bombs. The two most important buildings at the site … are the materials halls in building 6210 and building 6220. Building 100 at the factory is involved with explosive tests.” Building 100 was a bunker where implosion systems could be detonated indoors, out of sight of satellite imaging. Besides uranium metallurgy, Al Atheer served for hydrodynamic experiments, explosive-lens development, and core assembly. Once the site was exposed, Iraq finally acknowledged that it was working on nuclear weapons.

  In the months to come, U.N. inspectors filled the Al Atheer bunker with tons of concrete to render it useless. Swedish and Swiss engineers called in by the U.N. rigged the buildings at Al Atheer, Tarmiya, and Ash Sharqat with explosives and demolished them. All weapons-usable nuclear material and plutonium-laden spent fuel was flown out of the country. “The proud calutrons,”49 Dimitri Perricos said later, “were also completely destroyed.”

  Iraq learned from its experiences of exposure, however. “Finding this smoking gun,”50 Perricos concluded, referring to the documents uncovered in September, “told the Iraqis that they must protect their sources as much as possible.” Three years would pass before the inspectors found any more important documentation.

  In the meantime, another parking-lot standoff in July 1992 lasted three weeks, was accompanied by an intensive Iraqi challenge to the United Nations, and had destructive long-term consequences for both Iraq and the United States. As the political scientist Christian Alfonsi would recognize, “Saddam had witnessed firsthand51 in 1992 that the White House—any White House—was at its most vulnerable in the months preceding an election. His first ‘across the board’ challenge to the will of the international community in July of that year had been timed to capitalize on a Bush White House distracted by a reelection campaign in free-fall and by the crisis in Bosnia.” George Bush’s son George Walker Bush, the governor of Texas, who was serving as one of his father’s campaign advisers, took note of the threat. So did Dick Cheney.

  PART TWO

  BREAKDOWN AND REFORMATION

  FIVE THE LITTLE SUITCASE

  IN EARLY AUGUST 1991, when David Kay, Bob Gallucci, and their fellow UNSCOM/IAEA inspectors were closing in on the documents that would expose the Iraqi atomic-bomb program, Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, was preparing to leave Moscow with his family for a two-week vacation. Gorbachev had struggled for six years to reform his battered, tragic country, and he was exhausted. “I’m tired as hell,”1 he told his aide Anatoly Chernyaev, who was flying to the Crimea with the Gorbachevs on the presidential plane. “Everything has become so petty, vulgar, provincial. You look at it and think, to hell with it all! But who would I leave it to? I’m so tired.”

  It was a bad time for the president to leave Moscow. His country was in crisis, suspended between retreat and transformation. Everyone else knew, or claims to have known, that a coup attempt was gathering among the venal men Gorbachev had appointed to high positions when he veered to the right the previous winter. Eduard Shevardnadze, his foreign minister since 1985, had resigned in December in protest against Gorbachev’s appointments and the dictatorship he believed they presaged.2 “For those in the know,”3 wrote the journalist and editor David Remnick, an eyewitness that summer, “the clues were unending.”

  Gorbachev had heard the rumors, but he didn’t believe them. Always optimistic, he believed he had at least temporarily restrained the centrifugal forces that were pulling his country apart. He thought his policies had broad support. Just before he left on vacation, Gorbachev had met with Boris Yeltsin, the recently elected president of the Russian Federation, and Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, and finished negotiating a treaty transforming the Soviet republics into sovereign states within a federalized union. The three leaders had discussed throwing the hard-liners out of Gorbachev’s government once the Union treaty was signed. Gorbachev was due to return from the Crimea on 19 August, and they had scheduled the treaty signing for the next day.

  Unknown to its principals, however, the meeting had been bugged. Through that mechanism Vladimir Kryuchkov, the chairman of the KGB and one of the hard-liners they had talked about dismissing, had learned of their discussions.4

  A heavy brown briefcase accompanied Gorbachev on his flight to the Crimea. Code-named Cheget5 after a mountain in the North Caucasus, it contained the communications terminal that the Soviet president needed to convey to the military his authority to retaliate against a nuclear attack—or to start a nuclear war. Gorbachev called this doomsday machine by its insouciant Russian nickname chemodanchik, “little suitcase.” (The United States’s counterpart is nicknamed the football.) Cheget technology for nuclear command and control had been developed during the administration of Gorbachev’s predecessor Yuri Andropov; Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to have access to such a device. To service it around the clock in the Crimea, three teams of military officers traveled with it that August, each team consisting of a communications specialist and two members of the Soviet general staff. The general staff, according to a CIA expert, was “responsible for directing the activities of the Soviet strategic and general purpose forces throughout the world, and for maintaining reliable, secure links with them.… [It had] physical custody of the unlock codes for many nuclear delivery systems.”

  The presidential plane landed at Belbek military air base, near Sebastopol on the southwestern Crimean coast. After conferring for an hour with Ukrainian officials, Gorbachev traveled with his wife, Raisa, their daughter, Irina, her husband, Anatoly, and their two granddaughters, Ksenia and Anastasia, south by limousine another thirty kilometers to a lavish presidential dacha6 near the resort village of Foros. The dacha, called Zarya—“dawn”—had cost the Soviet government twenty million dollars to build; it was sited on a pine-covered bluff overlooking the Black Sea. Outside, barrel-vaulted arches supported its white decks under a peaked pink roof; inside, facings of marble and light wood framed its showy spaces, including a wide front hall, lounges, a billiard room, a theater, an office, and a cantilevered central staircase that wound up through the four interior floors. From the dacha grounds the Gorbachevs could descend on a covered escalator to an Olympic-sized swimming pool at beach level, or walk from there oceanward onto a kilometer-long private beach where the rocky debris that littered this sweep of the Crimean coast had been cleared and replaced with sand.

  It was hot in Foros that August, ninety degrees and hotter in the afternoon. Gorbachev exchanged his suits for shorts and casual shirts, conferred with Moscow by phone, worked with Chernyaev on speeches and a long essay about the future of his country and of perestroika, but made time to sleep in, to enjoy his grandchildren, to walk on the beach in the evening with his wife. An old back injury was bothering him; the two physicians who traveled with him supervised heat treatments and massages. A well-armed thirty-two-man KGB personal bodyguard7—a counterpart to the U.S. Secret Service—protected him and his fa
mily from intrusion.

  In a guesthouse on the grounds some distance from the main house, the Cheget teams had plugged Gorbachev’s chemodanchik into a special national leadership network called Kavkaz, which supported crisis communications among senior government officials. The Kavkaz network, in turn, was plugged into a military network, Kazbek, which allowed the general staff to authenticate senior leadership decisions before passing them through to the strategic nuclear forces. In the United States, where the president has sole authority to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike, only the president has access to the football. The Soviet system, in contrast, divided that authority among three senior government leaders—the president, the minister of defense, and the chief of the general staff—who were required to respond together to authorize action. To make such a coordinated response possible, not only the president but also the other two senior leaders were issued chemodanchiki. During the period of Gorbachev’s 1991 vacation, those two other senior leaders were Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and Chief of the General Staff Mikhail Moiseyev. Each Cheget team on duty at Zarya performed regular checks on the ready status of the chemodanchik terminal and on the telephone link that connected their station with Gorbachev’s office in the main house.

  The essay that Gorbachev was writing with Chernyaev described a Soviet Union in crisis. It was an economic crisis first of all, with food shortages as well as increasing joblessness, but it was also a sharpening political crisis. The hard-liners were urging Gorbachev to proclaim a state of emergency,8 but such a radical retreat would suspend democratic processes and could potentially return the Soviet Union to Communist Party control. The appeals for a state of emergency that Gorbachev recalls most vividly in his memoirs had been shouted during a Central Committee plenum in April; “Let him either introduce a ‘state of emergency,’” Gorbachev paraphrases his critics, “or quit.” He called their bluff and resigned; by the next day they had turned tail and voted not even to discuss his resignation.

  But when the KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov—“a quiet old man9 with a steely gaze,” as Boris Yeltsin described him—called together his fellow conspirators on 17 August at a KGB Moscow safe house, the governing collective he proposed to form named itself the State Committee for the State of Emergency. Kryuchkov had begun plotting the coup as far back as November 1990. He was moving quickly now to beat the 20 August deadline of the Union treaty signing, and by the time his fellow conspirators arrived, late in the afternoon, he had already sent a deputy to Foros to cut Gorbachev’s communications and seal him off from the world. “The situation is catastrophic,”10 Remnick quoted one of the conspirators, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, telling his confederates to justify their treason. “The country is facing famine. It is in total chaos. Nobody wants to carry out orders. The harvest is disorganized. Machines are idle because they have no spare parts, no fuel. The only hope is a state of emergency.” Closer to the truth was the testimony of Dmitri Yazov, the minister of defense, that they all were unhappy with the Union treaty and were sure that “the state would fall apart” if it was implemented—their state, at least, and with it their privileges.

  Others who participated in the coup planning that day included Boris Pugo, the minister of internal affairs, who had sneaked off11 from the very resort in Foros where Chernyaev was staying; Gorbachev’s trusted aide Valery Boldin, the head of his personal staff; the deputy chief of the Defense Council, Oleg Baklanov, who represented the Soviet military-industrial complex; the Central Committee secretary Oleg Shenin, representing the Politburo; Vladimir Ivashko, deputy chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Anatoly Lukyanov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet and a friend of Gorbachev12 since their student days; and the Soviet vice president, Gennady Yanayev. They were all Gorbachev’s men, nearly the entire Soviet leadership. They were nervous, if not afraid. “Yanayev,” testified Yazov, “was already rather drunk,”13 and with bottles of whiskey and vodka set out on the table, Pavlov soon would be. Kryuchkov designated Boldin, Baklanov, Shenin, and the army general in charge of Soviet ground forces, Valentin Varennikov, to fly to the Crimea the next day to present Gorbachev with a fait accompli.

  Before Gorbachev, his family, or Chernyaev in his separate office knew that the delegation had arrived on the afternoon of 18 August, the Cheget team knew; at 4:32 p.m. their Cheget terminal signaled that it had been disconnected14 from its network. They tried to call Moscow headquarters on the military radio but got no further than the regional exchange, which simply confirmed a breakdown. A few minutes later the Cheget watch commander found himself called out to report to Varennikov. “[He] asked me about the condition15 of our communications center,” the officer testified later. “I answered that communications had been cut off. He responded that that’s the way it should be and that our communications center should be switched off.” The watch commander asked Varennikov how long the situation would continue. “‘Twenty-four hours,’” the general said. “He added that the president [i.e., Gorbachev] was aware of it all.” Varennikov went off to join the plotters approaching the main house—“Many cars were piling up16 at the entrance of our official workplace,” Chernyaev said, “all of them with antennas and some with flashing lights … a crowd of chauffeurs and guards”—while the Cheget team, responsible to its own chain of command, went back to trying to reconnect with its headquarters, unsuccessfully.

  Gorbachev was suspicious when a bodyguard told him a delegation had arrived unscheduled; when he discovered that the phones didn’t work he recognized mortal danger. He put off the delegation long enough to call his family together. “Evidently they are going to try17 and blackmail me into something,” he told Raisa, Irina, and Anatoly, “or they will try to arrest me, or kidnap me or something else.” He would stand his ground to the end, he forewarned them. Then so would they: “The whole family said that the decision was up to me: they were ready to share with me whatever might happen.”

  Elsewhere in the dacha the impatient conspirators had already presumed to occupy Gorbachev’s office. He went there and confronted them, heard their demands that he declare a state of emergency or resign the presidency, tried and failed to win them over—“It was a conversation with deaf-mutes”18—insulted Varennikov, told the others they were fools to think their plot could succeed, railed at them, called them criminals, and swore at their backs as they hastily departed.

  The Cheget watch commander saw them leave. By then it was half past five. He had tried to reach Gorbachev on the presidential phone and found the line dead. He sought out the KGB major general in charge of the coup lockdown to ask if he could contact his senior officer at the military vacation facility in Foros where the Cheget teams were bunked. Impossible, the KGB officer snapped.

  In Moscow, at about the same time, the commander of the general staff division that maintained presidential communications with Soviet strategic nuclear forces was informed that the Cheget team was out of contact. “I was told that the cause19 of the breakdown was not known,” he testified, “and was being looked into.” He learned nothing more until the following morning. Soviet strategic nuclear forces were headless that night but not disarmed, since the general staff in an emergency could launch20 a retaliatory attack on its own. In the nuclear era a nation’s sovereignty has come to be invested in its nuclear arsenal, its ultimate defense; with the president of the Soviet Union cut off from nuclear command and control, that sovereignty was temporarily adrift. Who might claim it depended on how the Soviet military—at that point, not itself a unified organization—assessed the authority of the Emergency Committee.

  THE WORLD SHARED the public events of the next two days. The Emergency Committee took over central television and radio on Monday morning, 19 August, and began hourly announcements of its decrees and resolutions, including the mendacious claim that Gorbachev was “no longer capable21 of performing his duties due to the state of his health.” Boris Yeltsin, wearing a bulletproof vest under his shirt and suit jacket, left his dacha out
side Moscow by car early in the morning and arrived undetected at the vast, marble-faced Russian parliament building called the White House, on a bend of the Moscow River a little less than two miles southwest of the Kremlin. At nine a.m. Yeltsin and other Russian government leaders issued a declaration from the White House that the Emergency Committee was illegal and unconstitutional and called for a general strike. Red Army tanks, trucks, and armored personnel carriers began rolling into Moscow on Emergency Committee orders at nine-thirty. By noon, tanks had taken up positions outside the White House, where demonstrators were crowding the streets to protest the coup, but the tank commanders allowed the demonstrators onto the tanks, and within the hour Yeltsin himself emerged.

  The defenders erected barricades of concrete blocks and Dumpsters around the White House even as assault troops and snipers took up positions across the city and the Central Telegraph in Moscow cut off both intercity and international communications. Decrees and counter-decrees flew back and forth between the Kremlin and the White House throughout the gloomy, rain-soaked afternoon. At the end of the day, five of the conspirators, led by a drunken and trembling Vice President Yanayev, now claiming to be the acting president, held a burlesque press conference at the foreign ministry press center that was televised around the world.

  After a tense night when the Russian military backed away from supporting the coup attempt, the plot fell apart. In what came to be called “the race to Foros,”22 Kryuchkov, Yazov, and two other members of the Emergency Committee lit out for Vnukovo Airport the next afternoon with Russian police forces giving chase. The plotters commandeered the presidential plane and skirred off to the Crimea, desperate to persuade Gorbachev to take their side. Yeltsin’s people located another government plane. It departed Vnukovo for Belbek at five that afternoon carrying ten Russian parliamentarians; the Russian vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi; the Soviet Security Council member Yevgeny Primakov; and thirty-six militia officers armed with submachine guns. The presidential plane had reached Belbek by then and limos had rushed the coup leaders to Zarya, but Gorbachev had his bodyguards arrest them. Later that night the presidential plane carried the Gorbachevs out of their exile, landing in Moscow at about two in the morning. The extremity of the experience was evident on their faces.