The Dead Hand (60 page)

Matlock sent an urgent message to Washington for Bush, who was to meet with Yeltsin at the White House later that day. Within hours, Matlock was instructed to take a warning to Gorbachev. About 8:20
P.M
.in Moscow, early evening but still broad daylight at this time of year, Matlock arrived at Gorbachev’s office. Chernyaev was present. Gorbachev greeted him as “Comrade Ambassador!” and lavished praise on Matlock, which made him uncomfortable. Matlock sat at the long table in Gorbachev’s office facing the window, with Gorbachev and Chernyaev on the other side.

“Mr. President,” Matlock said, “President Bush has asked me to notify you of a report we have received which we find greatly disturbing, although we cannot confirm it. It is based on more than rumor but less than hard information. It is that there is an effort under way to remove you, and it could happen at any time, even this week.”

Matlock did not name his source. He was trying to convey that the information was not from intelligence sources, but that was just what Chernyaev and Gorbachev assumed he was saying. On his notepad, Chernyaev wrote, “American services” had given the warning the coup would be the next day.
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Both Gorbachev and Chernyaev laughed. Matlock recalled that Gorbachev then grew serious. “Tell President Bush I am touched. I have felt for some time that we are partners, and now he has proved it. Thank him for his concern. He has done just what a friend should do. But tell him not to worry. I have everything well in hand. You’ll see tomorrow.”

According to Chernyaev, Gorbachev also said, “It’s a hundred percent improbable.”
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After Matlock spoke, Gorbachev lapsed into a soliloquy, saying that things were unsettled, Pavlov was inexperienced and had realized the mistake of his power grab earlier in the week, Yeltsin was being more cooperative, a new union treaty would soon be signed and Gorbachev’s visit to the London summit would be a further step into the world economy.

Looking back, Matlock said later that Gorbachev may have wrongly interpreted what he was saying, and assumed he was referring to the reactionary forces in parliament as the source of trouble. Chernyaev’s
notes confirm Gorbachev mistakenly thought Matlock was referring to the parliamentary hard-liners, not Kryuchkov of the KGB and Yazov from the military.

The next day Pavlov’s power-grab proposal was defeated in parliament. Talking to reporters afterward, Gorbachev was flanked by a grim Yazov, Pugo and Kryuchkov, and said, with a large grin, “The ‘coup’ is over.”
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But Matlock was not sanguine about Gorbachev. “He was the one with the most to lose, and yet he was acting like a somnambulist, wandering around oblivious to his surroundings.” In fact, Gorbachev got warnings from other sources, too. Just after Matlock left, Gorbachev told Chernyaev that he’d received a warning the day before from his special envoy, Yevgeny Primakov.

“Beware!” Primakov had insisted. “You’re trusting the KGB and your security service too much. Are you sure you are safe?”

Gorbachev replied, “What a chicken! I told him, ‘Zhenya, calm down. You of all people shouldn’t yield to panic.’”
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Two nights after Matlock’s warning, Bush phoned Gorbachev, who brushed off the chances of a coup.

“A thousand percent impossible,” he said.
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On June 21, Valery Yarynich walked into a small conference room with a single wood table on the upper floors of the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, a prestigious Soviet research institute in Moscow. Yarynich was the expert on communications who had worked many years in the Strategic Rocket Forces. He worked on Perimeter, the semiautomatic system for launching a retaliatory nuclear strike. Perimeter was still ultra-secret. After Perimeter was finally put into operation in 1985, Yarynich served during the Gorbachev years at a think tank inside the military’s General Staff headquarters in Moscow, where he concluded, based on mathematical models, that deterrence could be guaranteed with far fewer nuclear weapons.

Yarynich was invited to the conference room to participate in a meeting between Russian and American civilian experts on the problems of command and control of nuclear forces. Such a meeting would have been unheard of in earlier years, but in the atmosphere of greater openness,
it was possible to talk about subjects that had long been strictly offlimits. Waiting in the conference room was one of the foremost civilian experts in the United States on nuclear command and control, Bruce Blair, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington think tank. Blair came in a coat and tie, and carried a small notebook. He had a lot of questions. During service in the Air Force, he spent two years as a Minuteman missile launch officer in the early 1970s, working shifts in underground silos. Subsequently, he carried out top-secret research on the vulnerability of American command and control of nuclear weapons for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. At Brookings, Blair wrote a book about American nuclear systems,
Strategic Command and Control
. For his next book, Blair had been searching, since 1987, for clues about Soviet command and control. While Blair had valuable sources in the United States, it was excruciatingly difficult to learn the truth in the Soviet Union; anything about nuclear command and control was top secret. Often, Blair gathered fragments of information but could not figure out the larger picture. Day after frustrating day, in countless smoke-filled rooms, he conducted interviews. When he met with Yarynich in the conference room, Blair realized he had finally connected with a real expert, someone who shared Blair’s depth of knowledge about launch systems and procedures. Yarynich emphasized that he was speaking only for himself, not for his superiors. “He’s here on his own, a confidential meeting,” Blair wrote in his notebook. He also noted that Yarynich was from the Center for Operational and Strategic Research in the General Staff, a specialist on command and control. However, Blair didn’t write down Yarynich’s name; in his view it was still too sensitive.

Blair found it took hours and hours of conversation to extract anything useful from Soviet military officers. But Yarynich was surprisingly assertive; he seemed to be “someone who had a lot on his mind.” Yarynich told Blair a Kremlin leader might have only two to four minutes to make a decision about retaliation if warned of a missile attack. The Soviet leader might have to make a decision in the dangerous situation known as “launch on warning,” in other words, firing off nuclear missiles based entirely on a warning. If a false warning, it could be a disastrous decision. Blair took careful notes.

From his American sources, Blair had heard of a Soviet system called
the Dead Hand, a computer-driven machine that would, in the event the Soviet leadership were wiped out, launch a retaliatory attack without human hands on the button. When Blair asked about it, Yarynich responded that there was no Dead Hand in the Russian system. Blair wrote those words in his notebook. But Yarynich was careful to tell Blair something else, too. There was no
automatic
Dead Hand, but there was a
semiautomatic
system of some kind. Blair didn’t fully comprehend that day what Yarynich was telling him, but some details were in his notes. He didn’t connect the dots, at first.
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A year and a half had passed since Pasechnik’s defection. Gorbachev had been the recipient of repeated, specific complaints from the Americans and British about Biopreparat. The latest came in a letter June 19 from Bush to Gorbachev, which once again asserted that the Soviet Union had a large-scale biological weapons program and called for another meeting of experts.
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Gorbachev wrote back to Bush in mid-July. His letter pledged to keep up the spirit of “frank dialogue” between them. But Gorbachev was not forthcoming. He followed the script of the Soviet cover-up—deny the weapons program, proclaim a desire for openness and refer to the narrow line between offensive and defensive biological research.

Soon after sending Bush the letter, Gorbachev joined leaders of the Western industrial democracies in London, as Thatcher had urged. On July 17, Gorbachev met Bush at Winfield House, a mansion in Regent’s Park used as the official American ambassador’s residence. Gorbachev made an appeal to Bush for economic assistance, but Bush felt the Soviet Union was not ready.
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After lunch, Bush and Gorbachev sat alone, with only interpreters and aides, to again take up the thorny issue of biological weapons. “Gorbachev categorically denied all the accusations,” Chernyaev said. According to Chernyaev, an exchange between Bush and Gorbachev followed:

Chernyaev said he, too, was concerned about being misled. “And I broached it in a memo to Gorbachev: Did he know himself exactly where matters stood, was he sure he wasn’t being misled as had happened with the Krasnoyarsk radar station and in some other cases?” Gorbachev replied that he was confident. “I know!”
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Nearly five years after Reykjavik, the United States and the Soviet Union finally agreed on a treaty to reduce the most dangerous strategic nuclear weapons. But the agreement, more than seven hundred pages long, was not as sweeping as Reagan and Gorbachev had envisioned at Reykjavik. Instead of the elimination of all ballistic missiles, or 50 percent fewer nuclear warheads, the treaty left the two superpowers with forces about 30 percent lower. Each had plenty of firepower: even after the treaty, the two countries would be allowed a total of eighteen thousand nuclear warheads. There were some notable gains: the agreement sliced deeply into the largest Soviet missiles. The number of SS-18s would be cut in half, to 154, and stringent new compliance measures would be imposed to prevent cheating—including twelve types of on-site inspections.
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When Bush and Gorbachev signed the agreement in St. Vladimir’s Hall at the Kremlin on the afternoon of July 31, there was almost no trace of the old dispute over the Strategic Defense Initiative, the single issue on which the Reykjavik summit foundered. Gorbachev, who had protested so long and so loudly about weapons in space, did not mention it once. Bush noted it only in passing. Gorbachev had been urged to build a Soviet Star Wars machine by the military-industrial complex. He did not. Gorbachev
had also been urged to build a massive retaliatory missile force—the “asymmetric response”—to overwhelm the American defensive shield. He did not. One of Gorbachev’s greatest accomplishments was in the things he did not do.

An argument was often made in later years that it was the Strategic Defense Initiative that bankrupted the Soviet Union. It is true that Reagan’s vision gave Soviet leaders a fright—it symbolized the unbridled nature of American ambitions and technological superiority. But in the end, Reagan did not build it. The Soviet Union did not build one either. Gorbachev was determined to avoid an arms race in space, and Soviet technology could not possibly have met the challenge. The early plans for a Soviet “Star Wars” never reached fruition. The Soviet system bankrupted itself, and by late 1991, the end was near. When Gorbachev and Bush signed the strategic arms treaty, the Soviet economy was imploding, sucking oxygen out of everything, including the military-industrial complex. The fabled design bureaus and defense factories ran out of cash, and gradually ground to a halt. The powerful riptide of the economy pulled everything down with it.

On August 3, the eve of his annual vacation, Gorbachev offered some private, candid thoughts to Chernyaev. Chernyaev remembers him sitting on the wing of an armchair. “I’m tired as hell, Tolya,” he said. “And tomorrow, right before I leave, I have another government meeting. The harvest, transportation, debts, communications, no money, the market falling apart.” He added, “Everywhere you look, things are in a bad way.” Gorbachev brightened when he remembered the agreement with Yeltsin July 23 on a new union treaty. Gorbachev and Yeltsin had discussed replacing some of the hard-liners, including Yazov, the defense minister, and Kryuchkov, the KGB chief, as they restructured the highest levels of government. Gorbachev planned to formally sign the new union treaty on August 20 at a Kremlin ceremony. “But his overall mood was still dark,” Chernyaev recalled.

“Oh, Tolya,” Gorbachev said, “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.”
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