The Dead Hand (27 page)

In the summer of 1984, the RYAN operation seemed to expire. Gordievsky said anxiety in Moscow about nuclear war “was visibly declining.”
²²
Chernenko didn’t share Andropov’s sense of alarm and paranoia about nuclear attack. Although there were no arms control negotiations that year, Soviet officials protested with increasing frequency about what they called “militarization of space.” Shultz said Dobrynin brought up
kosmos
—the Russian word for outer space—at every meeting.
²³
This was aimed directly at Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, although the actual program was barely getting started. By one account, that summer the program comprised two dozen people working out of a dilapidated office building in Washington.
²⁴

Reagan’s dream got a lucky break that summer. The army, in a program started in the 1970s, was studying rocket interceptors, and created an experiment, using a test interceptor with an infrared homing device and computer. It was called the Homing Overlay Experiment. The first three tests had failed. In the fourth and last test on June 10, 1984, the interceptor was launched from Meck Island in the Kwajalein Islands, and more than one hundred miles high, it locked onto a Minuteman missile carrying a dummy warhead. The interceptor found the Minuteman in part because the dummy warhead was heated up for the test, and the Minuteman turned sideways, to be easier to detect. The missile was destroyed. The Pentagon announced the test was a stunning success. “We do know that we can pick them up and hit them,” a spokesman said. The Kremlin was rattled.
²⁵

Reagan’s reelection campaign aired one commercial that hinted at voter fears about the arms race. It was a thirty-second spot written by the same
team that created “Morning Again in America.” But this commercial had a darker undertone, one that warned of uncertainty. The goal was to acknowledge the danger but also suggest there might be a way out. The ad shows a grizzly bear wandering in the forest. “There is a bear in the woods,” the announcer says in a tone of seriousness and authority. “For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some say the bear is tame. Some say it’s vicious. Since no one knows, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear, if there is a bear?”
²⁶

On November 6, 1984, Reagan was reelected in the largest electoral-vote landslide in U.S. history. He won 59 percent of the popular vote, carried 49 states and received 525 electoral votes to 10 for Walter Mondale.

Between the summer vacation and the election, Shultz had been talking privately to Reagan about the work of a second term. Shultz could not tell if Reagan absorbed what he said, but he kept lecturing. He told Reagan the Soviet Union was caught in an inconclusive leadership struggle, from one generation to another, bound up in a stagnating economy and “extreme distrust verging, in some instances, on paranoia” about the United States. It wasn’t clear how the leadership succession would be resolved, Shultz said, but one of the most promising candidates was a member of the younger generation, a man with a broader view—Mikhail Gorbachev.
²⁷

TWO

F
ive weeks after Reagan was reelected, Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, were driven from London through rolling English farmland to Chequers, the elegant official country residence of the British prime minister. Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis, greeted the Gorbachevs just before lunch on Sunday, December 16, 1984. It was a highly unusual gesture for a Soviet official to take his wife abroad. Gorbachev had asked Chernenko’s approval before doing so. On their arrival, Thatcher noticed Raisa had chosen a well-tailored, Western-style suit, gray with a white stripe, “just the sort I could have worn myself.” After posing at the entrance for the press photographers, with Gorbachev standing at the far left of the group next to Raisa, Thatcher very conspicuously repositioned the group so she would be standing next to Gorbachev. Then she extended a welcoming handshake.
¹

For more than a year, Thatcher had been searching for clues to the next generation of Soviet leaders. Thatcher was intrigued about whether the dour older generation would give way to a new, younger field. She had enormous faith in the power of the individual, and believed that in a dictatorship that repressed individual initiative, some could still make a difference, as had dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and others. Thatcher wondered if one person at the very top could change the Soviet system from within. In her memoir, she recalled that
she was determined to “seek out the most likely person in the rising generation of Soviet leaders and then cultivate and sustain him.” Her foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, said Thatcher carried out a “deliberate campaign to get inside the system.”
²
Thatcher remembered what Professor Archie Brown had told her at the Chequers seminar: Gorbachev was the most open and promising man in the leadership. She invited Brown to come back to No. 10 Downing Street on December 14, just before Gorbachev’s visit, to brief her again.
³

“I spotted him,” Thatcher said of Gorbachev, “because I was searching for someone like him.”

In the KGB residency in London, Oleg Gordievsky worked hard for weeks in advance of Gorbachev’s arrival. So many demands poured in from headquarters in Moscow! Gordievsky realized the KGB chiefs saw Gorbachev as a rising star and wanted to demonstrate they were behind him. “The KGB was backing him because he was a new man, a man for the future, an honest man who would fight corruption and all the other negative features of Soviet society,” Gordievsky recalled. Moscow bombarded the London residency with requests for material that could be useful for the visit: about arms control, NATO, the economy, Britain’s relations with the United States, China and Eastern Europe. Although he had never met Gorbachev, Gordievsky sensed a voracious appetite for new information. “He wanted to be brilliant, know all about Britain, and make an impression, and then come to Moscow and show everybody that after Chernenko he was the best candidate,” Gordievsky said.
⁴

Gordievsky was not only writing reports for Moscow, but also feeding information to his British handlers. They, too, were intensely interested in Gorbachev, the rising star. Gordievsky gave the British valuable early warning about what Gorbachev would ask and what he would say. At the same time, Gordievsky passed back to Moscow the materials he was given by the British. Gordievsky was a channel for both sides at a critical moment in history. He was almost perfect for Thatcher’s mission. The British knew what their agent was doing, but the Soviets did not.

The days of Gorbachev’s visit were frantic for Gordievsky. “Every evening we were under pressure to produce a forecast of the line the next day’s meetings would take, and this of course was impossible to discover
from normal channels. I therefore went to the British and asked urgently for help: could they give me an idea of the subjects Mrs. Thatcher would raise? They produced a few possibilities, from which I managed to concoct a useful-looking memorandum; but the next day’s meeting was much more fruitful. When I asked for a steer on Geoffrey Howe, they let me see the brief which the foreign secretary would be using in his talks with Mr. Gorbachev. My English was still poor, and my ignorance was compounded by nervousness and lack of time, so that I had to concentrate hard to remember all the points.”

“Back at the station, full of excitement at my little
coup
, I sat down at a typewriter … and hacked out a rough draft, allegedly based on my general sources and what I had gleaned from newspapers,” Gordievsky said. He was momentarily deflated when it was rewritten by another KGB man into something much less precise. He appealed to the acting chief, Leonid Nikitenko, who saw Gordievsky’s version and sent it direct to Gorbachev, “verbatim.”

After stepping into the mansion at Chequers, Gorbachev spoke to Thatcher over drinks in the Great Hall. He had risen to become Soviet agriculture chief, and inquired about farms he’d seen on the drive from London. The lunch table was set with Dover sole, roast beef and oranges, but they hardly touched the food. Gorbachev and Thatcher immediately fell into a vigorous debate. Gorbachev claimed the Soviet Union was reforming its economy. Thatcher, skeptical, lectured him about free enterprise and incentives. Gorbachev shot back that the Soviet system was superior to capitalism, and, according to Thatcher’s account, he declared that the Soviet people lived “joyfully.” Thatcher pointedly asked: then why are so many denied permission to leave? Gorbachev replied these people were working on national security matters. Thatcher didn’t believe it.

When they got up and left the dining room, Raisa went with Denis to look at the Chequers library, where she took down a copy of Hobbes’s
Leviathan
. Malcolm Rifkind, who accompanied her to the library, recalled she discussed her favorite contemporary British novelists, including Graham Greene, W. Somerset Maugham and C. P. Snow.
⁵

In the main sitting room, Thatcher and Gorbachev got down to business.
Thatcher recalled that the content of Gorbachev’s remarks was unsurprising. What grabbed her attention was the refreshingly open style. “His personality could not have been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet
apparatchik,”
she said. “He smiled, laughed, used his hands for emphasis, modulated his voice, followed an argument through and was a sharp debater.” They talked for hours. Gorbachev did not consult prepared papers—he referred only to a small notebook of jottings, handwritten in green ink. “As the day wore on,” she added, “I came to understand that it was the style far more than the Marxist rhetoric which expressed the substance of the personality beneath. I found myself liking him.”

Gorbachev was well prepared. He quoted Lord Palmerston’s famous dictum that Britain had no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests. “This was remarkable most of all for the precisely effective way it was deployed—and by this ‘non-expert’ in foreign policy,” said Howe, who attended. He quoted Gorbachev as adding, “It is up to us to identify the interests we have in common.”
⁶
Thatcher steered Gorbachev toward the topic of the arms race. After a year of impasse, the negotiations were to reopen in Geneva in three weeks, the first since the Soviets had walked out during the 1983 war scare.

At this moment, Gorbachev reached into his suit pocket. He unfolded a diagram he had brought with him, the size of a newspaper page. The page was filled with 165 boxes containing five thousand small dots, except for the center box, which had only one. The single dot in the center represented the explosive power of 3 million tons of bombs dropped by the Allies during the six years of World War II. The other dots represented the 15 billion tons of explosive power in the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals.

Gorbachev’s diagram, which had been published in the
New York Times
as an advertisement by antinuclear businessmen the previous February, might have been dismissed as a piece of agitprop, a gimmick.
⁷
What was significant was not so much the dots and squares on the page, but the obvious enthusiasm of the man who was using it to make his point. Gorbachev was knowledgeable, unhesitating and demonstrative.

In Moscow, Gorbachev at this point had participated in the high-level internal discussions of military and foreign policy issues, such as the war in Afghanistan, the deployment of the Pioneer missiles, the shooting
down of KAL 007 and the strategic arms negotiations. But little was known outside the Soviet Union of his views. He had never spoken out so openly on disarmament and foreign affairs as he began to do in Britain. Throughout the visit, he called attention to the dangers of nuclear war and emphasized Soviet fears of an arms race in space. He promised “radical reductions” in nuclear weapons and signaled that the Soviets were serious about returning to the Geneva talks. He confidently parried criticism about human rights and Afghanistan. In substance, Gorbachev did not change Soviet policy, and in the meeting with Thatcher, he went out of his way to cite Chernenko as the source of his authority.
⁸
But his style spoke volumes. He seemed to promise a more flexible approach, a sharp contrast with the rigidity of the past.

Gorbachev felt the conversation with Thatcher was a personal turning point.
⁹
He recalled vividly the diagram he presented at Chequers. He said he told Thatcher that all the weapons in one box on that page would “suffice to blow up the foundation of life on Earth. And it turns out that it can be done another 999 times—and what’s after that? What, blow it up one million times? That is absurd. We were possessed by the absurd.”

“It had been accumulated already, stored already—including inside of me—that something needed to be done,” he said of the threat of nuclear war. “To describe it in one word, or one sentence:
that something needs to be done.”
But Gorbachev acknowledged it was difficult for him, back then, to imagine what that would be. Even as he unfolded the paper with all the squares and dots in front of Thatcher, he had no idea how to reduce the nuclear arsenals. He wondered, “How could all of it be stopped?”

Thatcher wasn’t impressed with the Gorbachev diagram, but remembered he carried off the presentation with “a touch of theatre.” Gorbachev also warned of the dangers of a “nuclear winter” that would follow a war with atomic bombs.
¹⁰
But Thatcher said, “I was not much moved by all this.” She responded with a heartfelt lecture on the virtues of nuclear deterrence: the weapons, she said, had kept the peace. This was one of her core beliefs. Thatcher was “eloquent and emotional,” Gorbachev remembered.

Thatcher also knew Gorbachev might give her a message for Reagan. She listened closely when he spoke about Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Privately, Thatcher had little confidence in Reagan’s dream of
making nuclear weapons obsolete, but kept her counsel. What caught her ear at Chequers was the urgency in Gorbachev’s voice. The Soviets, she concluded, “wanted it stopped at almost any price.” She told Gorbachev there was no way Britain would be split from the United States. Gorbachev was supposed to leave at 4:30 P.M., but remained until 5:50 P.M. As his car pulled away, Thatcher recalled, “I hoped that I had been talking to the next Soviet leader.”