Billy Graham returned briefly to Hungary and Poland in 1981 to receive honorary doctorates from the Debrecen Theological Academy (the oldest Protestant theological seminary in the world) and the Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw. It was clear, however, that Protestants were not the only ones who approved of him. In Hungary János Kádár gave him the use of his private train, and after the visit to Poland, the cardinal who had been “out of town” in 1978, now His Holiness John Paul II, welcomed him to the Vatican for a half-hour visit, the first time any pope had received him. Noting that they had talked of “inter-church relations, the emergence of Evangelicalism, evangelization, and Christian responsibility towards modern moral issues” (an indication it had been a full half-hour), Graham told a press conference that “we had a spiritual time. He is so down-to-earth and human, I almost forgot he was the pope.”
The next major visit to a Communist land, however, was the one Billy Graham had been seeking for at least twenty-five years. In 1982 he finally gained entrance to Russia as more than a tourist. Preliminary negotations for the visit began during the 1977 Hungarian visit, when Soviet Baptist leader Alexei Bychkov came to the closing service at Tahi and assured Graham he would work to arrange an invitation. Higher-level inquiry began in October 1978, when PepsiCo CEO Don Kendall, a personal friend of Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev’s, arranged a meeting in Washington between Graham and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The appointment came through with only a few hours’ notice, and at Graham’s importunate urging, Haraszti began a scheduled hysterectomy a few minutes early, then left the finishing touches to assistants so he could grab a plane that would get him to Washington in time for a four o’clock meeting. During the ride between the hotel and the embassy, Graham introduced Haraszti to Kendall. “Alex is a very remarkable man,” he said. “I think nobody else understands world politics on a global basis as much as he does. Henry Kissinger may be an exception, but as far as Eastern Europe is concerned, even Henry does not know that much.” Perhaps familiar with Graham’s penchant for overstatement, Kendall asked, “And what does Henry say about this?” Graham did not back off: “I don’t know what Henry says, but he is not my adviser. He never took me to any Communist country, and Alex did. And I think Alex knows things which Henry does not. And I think he has a much [better grasp] of Communist lands, and particularly State-Church relations, than Henry will ever have.”
The compliment pleased Haraszti—“I felt Dr. Graham meant it.” A few minutes later, he received an even greater show of confidence. After an exchange of polite greetings at the embassy, Dobrynin asked Graham point-blank, “Why do you want to come?” Without prior warning, Graham replied, “Mr. Ambassador, I’d like to ask Dr. Haraszti to make a statement on my behalf. He is my adviser in Eastern European matters, and he could put it in words better than I can. With your kind permission, he will express my feelings about a visit to an Eastern European country, and also my policies.”
Haraszti, a man whose deserved self-confidence—“I admit the truth,” he likes to say, “even when it favors me”—and humble deference to Billy Graham ricochet incongruously through every conversation, recalled the occasion with pleasure: “Of course, this is an honor. This means that he somehow remembers me.” He also smiled at the memory of Graham’s ploy. “He is wise. If my answer is good, I did it under his instructions. If it is bad, then I did not actually represent his thoughts.” Haraszti was not tongue-tied by the responsibility. After pointing out that Graham’s calling obliged him to preach the gospel of Christ to the entire world, Communist and non-Communist alike, Haraszti astonished the ambassador by stating that Graham wanted to go to Russia to express his gratitude to Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov Lenin for what he had accomplished in the great Socialist revolution of 1917. By breaking the back of the Orthodox Church, whose intimate ties with the state enabled it to suppress all competitors, the revolution had made possible the development of Evangelical movements throughout the Soviet Union, with the result that Evangelical Christianity had never been stronger, as the existence of perhaps three million Soviet Baptists and other Evangelicals proved. Haraszti admitted this had not been Lenin’s aim, but suggested that if the revolutionary leader were alive today, he would change his opinion. He would see that the problem lay with the political nature of the Church, not with Christians themselves, and that even though the government discriminated against them in many ways, Christians were nevertheless the best workers and citizens, people who gave their testimony not only in words but also in deeds.
Dobrynin gave no response to this remarkable interpretation of history, but Haraszti continued. It was not only Evangelicals who had flourished under communism, he asserted. Throughout the Soviet Union he had found a revitalized Christianity in the Orthodox Church. When revolutionaries murdered priests and stripped the churches of their gold and silver, they had forced Christians to realize they were blind, naked, sick, and weak with nowhere to turn except to Jesus Christ. It was true the Church had shrunk in numbers, but it was also true that it had grown in fidelity to Christ. “Sir,” he said, “you have forty to fifty million dedicated Orthodox Church members today. I have seen them, young and old, people and priests, and I saw Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit beaming in their faces. They are an invincible Church. They are not subject to intimidation, because they are willing to sacrifice their lives. If you put them in concentration camps, you give them an audience. If you execute them, they lift up their hands and eyes to the Lord, who is to receive them into his happiness. In addition to these millions of Evangelicals and Orthodox Christians, you also have other millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, and perhaps fifty million Muslims—over one hundred million believers in God, and only seventeen million Communist party members. You must make peace with them, or one day they will revolt. You know history. They will revolt when they feel strong enough. If you do not make peace with them, sir, you are going to face a very serious problem.” As long as the Communist countries restricted religious freedom, Western countries, and America in particular, would continue to view them with suspicion and resentment. If the atheistic state were to become involved in intense conflict with religious believers, Western powers might well intervene on behalf of the believers. And if that were to happen, not even the unthinkable would be unthinkable. “Sir,” he said, “we know what is the end of it if we do not check this situation. It does not matter then who shall be responsible for what, who is to blame, when both nations are blown up.”
Haraszti moved in for the kill. “We are not begging the Soviet government to invite Dr. Graham,” he told Dobrynin. “We believe it is in the interest of the Soviet government to invite him. Why? Because Billy Graham is not just an evangelist; he is also a news-maker. You have been in this country long enough to know how public opinion works in America. Dr. Graham is a public-opinion maker. People listen to what he says and follow his leadership.” If he found some modicum of religious freedom in the Soviet Union, and a sincere desire for peace on the part of the Soviet people, and if he honestly reported what he had seen to the American public and to the President and Congress and other leaders, he could serve as a tremendous positive force for peace between the two great nations. No other person in the world, Haraszti averred, could have such an effect on public opinion, with the possible exception of the pope. Then, without speaking ill of the pope, he drew a comparison between the two men. Graham was an accomplished statesman—Haraszti told Dobrynin that Nixon had appointed Henry Kissinger to be secretary of state only after Graham turned down the post, an assertion Graham later dismissed as fanciful—with thirty years of quasi-diplomatic experience in the West, extensive political contacts on all the continents, and now, with successful trips to Hungary and Poland in his dossier and negotiations under way for visits to other Eastern bloc nations. The pope, by contrast, had lived in only one Communist land and had no experience in the West. He might develop into a great statesman and world leader, but it was too early to tell. If the pope were to visit the Soviet Union, the result might be good—or it might not be. “We don’t know what the pope will say; we do know what Dr. Graham will say. I think it is in the interest of the Soviet Union to invite Dr. Graham before somebody else is invited.”
Dobrynin finally spoke. “Dr. Haraszti,” he said, “I could not disgree with one word you said. I report this to my government. I am for Dr. Graham’s coming to the Soviet Union. But I’m an ambassador only; I’m not the policy-making body.”
“Mr. Ambassador,” Haraszti reminded him, “you are also a member of the Central Committee.”
“Yes,” Dobrynin acknowledged, “I am.”
Dobrynin stood by his word, and within a few weeks, it became clear that an invitation would eventually be forthcoming. Haraszti let it be known that Graham wanted to preach at as many places as possible, but would adjust to whatever schedule the government approved. Contrary to his 1959 prayer, he would not expect to preach in Red Square or in a stadium. He would want to preach in Orthodox as well as Protestant churches, and he felt it would be crucial to meet with Jewish leaders, as he had done in Hungary and Poland. He would accept appointments with political or religious dissidents but would not embarrass the government by publicizing their cases after his return to the United States. With these tacit understandings in place, preliminary plans were made for a visit during the fall of 1979, then postponed because of Soviet preoccupation with U.S.-Chinese relations, generated by Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the United States that year. The Moscow Olympics and the friction generated by America’s boycott of the games made 1980 seem unpropitious as well.
The coveted invitation, which finally arrived in 1982, involved some of the most delicate, controversial, and peril-fraught negotiations of Graham’s entire ministry. During the summer of 1981, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pimen, announced that key religious leaders from all over the world would convene in Moscow in May 1982 for a World Conference of Religious Workers for Saving the Sacred Gift of Life from Nuclear Catastrophe. Though ostensibly sponsored by the Orthodox Church, the conference was obviously endorsed by the Communist party and was widely viewed in the West as a transparent government-engineered propaganda enterprise. When he first learned of it, Alex Haraszti shared this view and informed Soviet Baptist leaders that Billy Graham would have no part in such a charade. Without denying that the party fully approved of the conference, Baptist leader Alexei Bychkov insisted that the Orthodox Church’s sponsorship was entirely sincere and at least semi-independent. He also revealed that Baptist churches, as well as virtually all other religious groups in the Soviet Union, had contributed generously toward financing the conference. At least partially convinced, Haraszti contacted the Orthodox leaders he and Walter Smyth had been cultivating to devise an invitation Billy Graham would feel able to accept.
Haraszti’s primary contact, Father Vitaly Borovoy, the Orthodox patriarchate’s representative to the World Council of Churches, let it be known that the Orthodox hierarchy was extremely interested in having Graham attend the conference but did not want to risk the embarrassment of offering an invitation that might be rejected. Before an explicit personal invitation could be issued, there would have to be some guarantee that Graham would accept it. Haraszti assured Borovoy that Graham wished to embarrass no one, that he was a strong advocate of peace, and that he was deeply interested in witnessing firsthand the way in which brave Russian Christians had been able to keep faith alive despite repressive government policies. At the same time, he would almost certainly not be interested in coming to Moscow simply to attend a conference that many Westerners would inevitably regard as a Communist-conceived, anti-American event but would also expect to preach in both Baptist and Orthodox churches, and to meet with Jewish leaders.
Borovoy saw no problems with the Baptist and Jewish appointments but observed that canon law forbade having an unconsecrated priest preaching in an Orthodox Church. Haraszti, surprising the priest with a brief recital of serious disputes over small points in canon law, suggested it should be possible to find a way around the law. Borovoy thought for a moment, then brightened. “You are right,” he said. “The patriarch could introduce him to the faithful, and he could extend greetings.” Haraszti was pleased. “And Father Borovoy,” he said, “you know and I know that these ‘greetings’ will be centered around Jesus Christ. You will call it ‘greetings’ and we will call it ‘preaching.’ What is the difference?”
In a subsequent meeting with Metropolitan Filaret, the chair of the conference’s International Preparatory Committee, Haraszti repeated Graham’s “basic wishes,” adding that any invitation to the evangelist should be accompanied by invitations to his key advisers, specifically, Smyth, Akers, and Haraszti. Filaret objected that other participants would be restricted to a single secretary and that bending those restrictions to accommodate Graham would offend participants from other countries, such as the various African nations. Haraszti was not in a yielding mood. Working a bit of diplomatic jujitsu, he informed Filaret that when he had visited the pope, Graham had been accompanied by three advisers. “I do not think,” he said, “that His Holiness, Patriarch Pimen, is so much smaller in stature than the pope that he could not afford having Dr. Graham with three of his closest advisers.” Certainly, if Patriarch Pimen were coming to America, Graham would not cavil over how many metropolitans he brought with him. As for offending Africans, Haraszti countered, “Your Eminence, I see your problem. But I would never have dared to compare the Soviet Union with Chad, or even Sudan, for that matter. I also would not realize that America should be in the same category as Chad.” Then, perhaps piqued by what he regarded as a specious excuse, Haraszti let his unbounded esteem for Graham soar to heights that would have stunned the evangelist. “I don’t compare Dr. Graham with the patriarch or the pope,” he told Filaret, “because Dr. Graham is not the head of a church. He is the head of all Christianity. He actually is the head of the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, the Protestants—everybody—in a spiritual way, because the pope cannot preach to all the Protestants, but Billy Graham can preach to all the Roman Catholics. The patriarch cannot preach to all the Roman Catholics; they will not listen to him. But Billy Graham can preach to all the Orthodox, and they will listen to him, because he is above these religious strifes. He is a man of much higher stature than any of these people. I do not mean any offense to His Holiness, the patriarch, but Billy Graham deserves more than three metropolitans or three cardinals.”
Remarkably, instead of taking umbrage at Haraszti’s demotion of both pope and patriarch, Filaret stepped from the room. When he returned ten minutes later, his face was wreathed in a relaxed smile. “All right,” he said. “He can have his three co-workers.” With these feet in the door, Haraszti then gained permission to enlarge Graham’s entourage to include T. W. Wilson, a secretary, an aide to handle press relations, and a photographer. He reminded Filaret to arrange Graham’s preaching appointments and meetings with one or two high-ranking Soviet officials, and he made it clear Graham would expect to give a major address at the conference. In return, the evangelist would make no statements criticizing Soviet foreign policy or religious or social conditions in the Soviet Union. He would come not as a social critic but as an evangelist, “a man of God, and a gracious guest who would not abuse the friendship of his hosts” or embarrass them in any way.
With this impressive collection of concessions safely tucked into his diplomatic pouch (“He was the world figure whom they wanted to invite to their world conference,” Haraszti explained, “and cost what it may, they were ready to pay the price”) the good doctor raised one last point, almost as if it were an afterthought: If Billy Graham visited the Soviet Union, it would be imperative for him to visit the six Siberian Pentecostals who, claiming to be victims of religious persecution, had sought asylum in the U.S. Embassy in 1978 and had been living in its basement ever since.
Filaret’s face fell. The Siberian Six (“Seven” before one of their number went on a hunger strike and had to be removed to a hospital) had become a vexing source of tension between the Soviet and U.S. governments, and a cause célèbre for champions of religious freedom around the world. Soviet authorities persistently claimed the Pentecostals were not sincere religionists persecuted for their faith but opportunists using religion as a means to force the government to allow them to leave the country, as they had been trying to do for over twenty years. Several Graham associates eventually came to share this view, as did many American reporters assigned to Moscow, but the publicity generated by the group’s virtual imprisonment (they refused to leave and the U.S. government allowed them to remain in the embassy until the Soviet government guaranteed they would be allowed to emigrate unharmed) made them impossible for Graham to ignore. Fully aware of the metropolitan’s chagrin that he had raised the issue, Haraszti explained that if Graham returned to America and said the Soviet government had not allowed him to see the Siberians, it would reflect badly on the government and on the peace conference. If he said he had freely chosen not to see them, he would suffer an enormous loss of respect in America, either because he lacked compassion or commitment to religious freedom or because he was lying. And if he said the Pentecostals had not wanted to receive him, Americans would scoff, charging him with swallowing obvious propaganda. Uncomfortable as it might be for all concerned, Graham had to see the Siberians. Once more, Filaret reluctantly agreed but expressed his fervent hope that by the time of Graham’s visit, there would no longer be a “Pentecostal problem.”
Filaret promised to put his accession to Graham’s basic wishes in writing as part of the official invitation Haraszti would deliver by hand to the evangelist. He insisted, however, that the envoy obtain a verbal guarantee from Graham that if the invitation were tendered, it would be accepted. Haraszti called John Akers that night. Akers relayed the information to Graham, and Graham spoke with the White House and the State Department. When Akers called Haraszti back, he reported that the invitation was acceptable “on the highest level,” and that Graham would accept it. Haraszti relayed that news to Filaret, not failing to mention that high levels had approved the evangelist’s participation in the conference—“I wanted the Soviet government to know that Dr. Graham does not come as a simple American citizen. The message was not missed.” When he returned to New York with a five-page invitation, he discovered, to his considerable agitation, that the assurances conveyed to Metropolitan Filaret were unraveling at the seams. In the brief period since he had signaled his acceptance, Graham had come under strong pressures from within his organization, from various Evangelical leaders, and from the State Department—with U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Arthur Hartman among the most vociferous—to decline the invitation and refuse to add respectability to the so-called Peace Conference. When Haraszti joined Graham and his inner circle of advisers in his suite at the Essex House in New York, he expected to bask in their appreciation. Instead, Graham anxiously asked, “Alex, do you realize I am risking my entire ministry if I accept this invitation?”
Haraszti responded with crystalline logic. “The thirty-five years already behind you,” he said, “is history. You cannot jeopardize it. You cannot risk it. It is historical fact. Now, you must not jeopardize the ten years to come. This is the beginning. For years you have been praying that the Lord may bring the time when this becomes possible. Here is the time. This will be your first coming to the Soviet Union, but not your last one. If you accept this invitation, all the other satellite countries will fall in line. These things are interwoven. No Moscow, no satellite countries. Please, Dr. Graham, don’t let me down. Do not let me down.”
Graham invited Haraszti to play the devil’s advocate. What arguments could be made against his going? Haraszti leapt at the opportunity. The main reason not to go, he said, would be unbelief. “If we don’t believe in the Word of the Lord, and if we don’t believe in our cause, then we must not accept.” As a man of faith, however, he had no choice. “You have no way out if you want to be honest, and I am sure you want to be honest.”
This struck home, but Graham raised again the question of governmental opposition. “If the President should come and tell me [not to go], I will not go.” Haraszti observed that Western Christians sometimes criticize Christians in Communist lands for giving Caesar more than his due. Considering that Stalin murdered tens of thousands of believers, that Khrushchev closed thousands of churches, that Brezhnev demanded that Soviet people deny God, yet more than 100 million refused to do so, what moral right did an American have to charge them with compromise or weak faith, especially when the American was risking nothing more than a few hostile attacks by the press?
“Alex,” Graham said, “do you know that I receive hate letters by the thousands?”
“I expect that you receive them,” Haraszti responded, “but if I may compare my little case with your great case, you don’t know how many hate letters I receive, and how much adverse publicity I receive in the American Hungarian papers, because I opened the way for Billy Graham to go to Communist countries—this poor, naive, good American, and Haraszti the evil spirit. I considered it a privilege not only to trust and believe in Jesus Christ, but also to suffer for him. I think that, spiritually, the same applies to you.”
While they debated, a call came from Vice-President George Bush. Scribbling in one of the black notebooks to which he habitually commits precise details of anything he considers significant, Haraszti recorded the half of the conversation he could hear. “George, I am sorry,” Graham said, “but I have accepted it. It is too late. I had the nod from the highest place. I took it seriously and I accepted it. I cannot do anything now.” He went on to express confidence that his visit to the Soviet Union would not only promote the cause of Christ but would help improve relations between the two great countries. As a loyal American, he felt it was his duty to go.
Graham later reported that Bush had said he was neutral about the visit and was simply conveying the expressions of concern received from others. “I’m reading to you without comment,” the Vice-President had said. “You are preaching the gospel, and I don’t dare tell you what to do.” Graham also received private approval from Ronald Reagan. “The newspapers were saying that the President was opposed,” he recalled, “but the Sunday before I went, George Bush invited me to lunch at his home, and I went with Punch Sulzberger, of the New York Times, and his family. When we got there, George said, ‘I don’t think the Reagans have any plans for lunch. I’ll call them up. I’ll bet they’re lonesome.’ He called them up, and in about half an hour, here they came, with several cars that go with them everywhere. Almost the first thing the President did when he came in was pull me aside and say, ‘Now Billy, don’t you worry about this trip. God works in mysterious ways.’ In fact, he gave me a handwritten note saying, ‘We’ll be praying for you every mile of the way.’” Graham also reported that a White House official had told him, “If you don’t go now, it would look as though we stopped you and it is going to hurt us. You have to go.”
Whatever the President and Vice-President thought, the State Department adamantly opposed Graham’s participation in the conference, fearing his appearance and comments would be used to stir public opinion against American plans for a significant increase in missile deployment, a measure designed to force the Soviets to begin serious disarmament negotiations. Both Arthur Hartman and William Wilson, U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, repeatedly importuned Haraszti to urge Graham to rescind his acceptance. “Whatever he says,” they contended, “will be good for the Russians.” During Haraszti’s repeated visits to the Vatican (“Just about every time I went to Moscow,” he blithely explained, “I also went to Rome”) Wilson “warned me, begged me, cajoled me, in no uncertain terms,” always claiming that the State Department and the President himself opposed Graham’s going to Moscow, but always stopping short of stating, in so many words, that the President had specifically authorized him to tell Graham not to go. Haraszti dutifully reported what both ambassadors had told him, but Graham stood firm. “If the President is so [dead set] against it,” he said, “he’s welcome to tell me. But until and unless I hear it in person from him, I will not accept coded messages.” Unquestionably, the simple desire to preach in the Soviet Union played a role in Graham’s decision to press on. In retrospect, however, he insisted that his controlling motive was to draw attention to his increasing commitment to the avoidance of nuclear war. “I had started speaking out against nuclear weapons and calling for the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction, whether chemical or nuclear, but it was never in the press. So I decided the only way I could make my statement known was to accept the invitation to come to the peace conference in Moscow. ‘Then they will listen to me,’ I thought.”
Whatever other motives may have been operating, Graham’s assertion that he wanted to draw attention to his increased concern for peace was not an ex post facto rewriting of history. At least as early as 1963, he allowed that he would be in favor of universal nuclear disarmament, but that was an occasional and quite lightly sounded note. More typical were his reminders that Christ had described himself as one who brings fire and bears a sword, and that Christians and other freedom-loving people must also stand ready to bear a sword against any who would try to destroy their families or their country. No single event was responsible for what would be a notable shift in tone and emphasis, but several Graham associates observed that he seemed to regard issues of peace and disarmament in a new light after his early visits to Eastern Europe, particularly after his 1978 pilgrimage to Auschwitz, where the meaning of the Holocaust burned itself into his consciousness. In addition, said one man who had accompanied him on the tour of Poland, “He saw that the commitment of [Eastern European] religious leaders for peace and reconciliation was serious.”
A few months after the Polish tour, when the World Council of Churches began to call for approval of the new SALT II accords, Graham added his voice to their chorus. “The people of the U.S. want peace,” he observed, as do the people of China and the Soviet Union. “Why can’t we have peace?” He conceded that defenses were necessary “to keep madmen from taking over the world and robbing the world of its liberties” but noted that he had begun to take a new view of nuclear weapons. Moreover, he observed, it seemed his fellow Evangelicals were beginning to share his concerns—the Southern Baptist Convention had passed resolutions calling for multilateral nuclear disarmament and support of SALT II. Perhaps they had reached the same conclusion he had: “I didn’t really give it the thought that I should have given it in my earlier years, but I have come to the conviction that this is the teaching of the Bible.” While denying he was a pacifist and insisting he did not favor unilateral disarmament, he flatly declared, “I’m in favor of disarmament. I’m in favor of trust. I’m in favor of having agreements, not only to reduce but to eliminate. Why should any nation have atomic bombs? As I look back—I’m sure many people will disagree with me on this—but as I look back, I think Truman made a mistake in dropping that first atomic bomb. I wish we had never developed it.” In short, he seemed to be saying communism might be bad, but not so bad as to risk global annihilation to stop it. “I have seen,” he said, “that we must seek the good of the whole human race, and not just the good of any one nation or race.”
From these beginnings, Graham began to call for “SALT 10,” a leapfrogging over the small incremental gains that might be won in a series of arms-limitation talks to “the bilateral, verifiable eradication of all nuclear, biochemical and laser weapons used for mass destruction.” Noting that “we are spending a million dollars a minute on armaments all over the world” while “people are hungry and starving in Somalia and other places,” he raised reasonable questions: “Have we gone mad? Are we seeking the genocide of the whole human race? . . . Suppose we were spending that much for food?” Such statements began to crop up not only in press interviews but also in crusade sermons, but that was different from voicing them in a setting organized and controlled by America’s most formidable rival, and Graham was hesitant. “Ruth and I prayed about it, of course, and I vacillated quite a bit as to whether or not I should go. I called a number of friends, including Mr. Nixon, Henry Kissinger, people like that, and asked their opinions.” Nixon, who had surprised the world by reestablishing ties with the People’s Republic of China, pondered the matter for several days, then called to tell him, “Billy, you know I believe in taking big risks. This is a big risk, but I believe that in the long run it will be for the benefit of the gospel that you preach. You’ll be criticized, but take the long view.” Kissinger also approved and even helped with the speech he eventually delivered at the conference. “But the thing that finally turned it for me,” Graham said, “was the Bible.” Getting up to select a Phillips translation of Paul’s epistles from a row of Bibles on a bookshelf, he turned to the ninth chapter of I Corinthians. “The Apostle Paul’s experience has been a key to my decisions on this sort of thing,” he explained. “When he had a doubt as to where he should go and how he should handle himself, he said, ‘I have, in short, been all things to all sorts of men that by every possible means I might win some to God. I do all this for the sake of the Gospel; I want to play my part in it properly.’” He closed the book and said with utter conviction, “Those verses have been the key to a great deal of what I have done in my life. I decided I was going to do my very best to preach the gospel in Eastern Europe or China or wherever else, whatever government they have. I never had a doubt from the moment I made the decision that the Lord was with me in this.”
The decision made, Graham and his colleagues carefully drafted a letter of acceptance, which Haraszti delivered to Filaret and the Soviet Baptist leaders with strict instructions that it not be announced until Graham had a chance to prepare his supporters and the public for the news, and to work out several tricky scheduling problems. One such problem was extricating himself from a series of addresses at college campuses in New England. He managed that by postponing part of the appearances until after the conference and by using the rest to draw wide public attention to his still-developing views, with the result that his trip to Moscow would not be a complete surprise to either his supporters or his critics. His announced topic for full-house appearances at Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Northeastern, the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and Yale was “Peace in a Nuclear Age,” and at some campuses his appearance coincided with an antinuclear effort known as Ground Zero Week. Students at some gatherings were disappointed that he seemed to use nuclear issues simply as a ploy for segueing into a standard crusade address. (At UMass, he received a standing ovation at the beginning but not at the end, and some students walked out when he shifted into evangelistic gear, and at MIT, students were stunned when he proclaimed that lasting peace could never be achieved until Christ returned to inaugurate the millennium.) Still, he made an impression. To be sure, his message was far from radical, but it was equally far from the hawkish sentiments with which he had long been associated. He plumped repeatedly for “SALT 10,” and, at Yale, even endorsed Ground Zero. “You and I,” he told the Elis, “have a responsibility to work for the poor, the needy, the starving of the world. And also for peace now.” At Harvard he not only denounced the arms race but called for an end to South African apartheid, racial discrimination anywhere in the world, and “American exploitation of a disproportionate share of the world’s resources.” The response was gratifying. An unlikely ally, the Christian Century, observed that Graham “has used his prestige to announce his opposition to the arms race. He obviously does this out of conviction, not for ego enhancement, as some of his secular critics assume.” Other socially liberal churchmen who remembered his reluctance to criticize the war policies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon praised his new stance. Harvard theologian Harvey Cox gave him credit for having the courage to take a position sure to be unpopular with many of his conservative supporters, and Will Campbell declared, “I once accused him of being the court prophet to Richard Nixon, but I have to say, he’s God’s prophet now.”
A second scheduling problem gave Graham another opportunity to score important points before leaving for Moscow. He had been named recipient of the prestigious Templeton Award, given to persons who had made outstanding contributions to religion—other winners have included Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Mother Teresa—and was slated to receive the award from Prince Philip in London on May 9, the same date he was scheduled to preach in the Orthodox and Baptist churches in Moscow. He was able to get the date of the award presentation shifted, a circumstance Haraszti used to good advantage in his conversation with the Russians. He told them Billy Graham was a man of his word who would stick by his commitment to come to Moscow, even if it meant giving up the $200,000 that came with the prize, a revelation that stunned the Russians, particularly after Haraszti informed them Graham would donate the money to charity and various evangelistic efforts. But also, he noted, the evangelist had been received at Buckingham Palace and had visited with the Queen of England many times, whereas he had not yet met President Brezhnev even once. Did Graham expect to see Brezhnev, the Russians asked? That, Haraszti replied, would be up to Soviet authorities; as a guest, Graham would not dream of making any demands. Still, Brezhnev had received Muhammad Ali, and it did seem that Billy Graham represented far more people than Ali, whether one used American citizens or world Christians as the relevant constituency.
In late March Filaret’s office and BGEA released news of Graham’s intention to participate in the peace conference. Against Haraszti’s strong pleadings, the BGEA release, picked up and relayed to the Soviet Union by the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, announced that Graham would preach in the patriarchal Cathedral of the Epiphany at eleven o’clock on May 9, the Sunday morning prior to the conference, and in the Baptist church at six o’clock that evening. The Soviets had strongly urged that the dates and times not be publicized lest the crowds be so large as to be either dangerous or simply embarrassing to the state, and thus ultimately troublesome for the churches. But Graham, revealing an apparent belief that believers can bombard heaven with pinpoint precision, insisted that “I just cannot tell the American public that I will preach in Moscow and not tell them when, because they won’t know when to pray for me.” Not surprisingly, the Russian announcement contained no mention of appearances outside the conference, and when a wire-service reporter in Moscow checked with both churches, he received the same response: “We know nothing about it.” In both cases, Haraszti explained, church leaders had routed the calls to low-ranking members who could honestly profess ignorance of the entire matter. Embarrassed, Graham wanted to release the text of the invitation to the press, but Haraszti prevailed against that notion, convincing him that publicizing the confidential document would result in withdrawal of the invitation and would destroy his credibility with both church and government leaders in the Soviet orbit. Eventually, Graham agreed to a brief statement that simply reaffirmed the truth of the first release and indicated no further comment would be forthcoming.
The gaffe left its mark. When Graham’s party arrived at the Moscow airport on Friday afternoon, a troubled Alexei Bychkov, the Baptist leader, explained to Haraszti that the plans had changed. Instead of preaching at the Baptist church on Sunday evening, as part of a scheduled five-hour visit, Graham would preach at the 8:00 A.M. service. He would then rush to the Orthodox church, whose service would already be in progress, and deliver a brief message. The evening period would be devoted to a visit to the publishing department of the Orthodox Church, to allow the American evangelist to see for himself that Bibles and other religious materials could be printed in the Soviet Union. Haraszti protested vigorously, but to no avail. The new schedule would stand.
Graham’s insistence on announcing his preaching schedule had offended the government. On the day after his arrival, he gave equal offense to the Orthodox Church, though he did not realize it until after he left Russia. The evangelist was informed on Saturday morning that he was to go immediately to a meeting with Georgi Arbatov, director of the U.S. Canada Institute, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist party and a confidant of Yuri Andropov, who had succeeded Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet government. Graham and his colleagues thought it awkward that his first official visit would be with a secular leader, since he was a guest of the Orthodox Church, but the Arbatov contact was a good one and they decided not to question the instruction. In fact, Orthodox leaders viewed Arbatov’s first-strike offensive as a blatant attempt to upstage the Church, and they fumed quietly throughout the week at what they took to be a callously opportunistic slight on Graham’s part.
After preliminary pleasantries, Arbatov gave a long presentation about the need and the prospects for world peace, and particularly about Soviet concern over America’s continuing buildup and deployment of missiles. Graham countered with his own concern for peace and his now-standard SALT 10 proposal. Then, as he did in all his meetings with Eastern bloc leaders, the Christian diplomat shared his belief that the only true peace was peace with God and bore witness to his own belief in the transforming power of Jesus Christ. Arbatov, an intelligent and sophisticated internationalist, listened attentively, with no hint of how he felt about what he was hearing. When the three-hour visit ended, he told Graham he hoped they would visit again. Graham leapt at the bait: “Now that we know each other and have become friends, why don’t you call me Billy?” Not overly eager to lose control of the situation, Arbatov responded, “Of course, my name would be George. But why don’t we wait till next time?” Graham had no choice but to accede, which he did with grace; he also promised that when he returned to the United States, he would give a thorough report of their conversation to the President.
Throughout the rest of the visit, a deputy of Arbatov’s stuck so close by Graham’s side that he became a source of considerable irritation to Billy and his associates, as well as to a Baptist official who jockeyed with him constantly to see who could stand closer whenever a camera pointed in the evangelist’s direction. At times Graham grew almost desperate to rid himself of his uninvited companions, but lack of certainty over exactly whom they represented and what authority they possessed left him with little alternative but to follow the example of the Apostle Paul and regard them as thorns in the flesh which he must bear for the gospel’s sake. Despite this irritation, he felt confident the meeting with Arbatov had opened a wide door for his ministry. Unable to sleep that night, he called Haraszti to his room at 2:00 A.M. “Alex,” he said, “I feel that I’m in the will of God. I feel that my present visit will have an effect upon the fate of our two nations, and also upon the fate of mankind.” Haraszti readily agreed. This was the beginning, he felt, of Evangelicalism’s penetration of the Soviet Union. “Other people write history,” he said. “We are making history.”
Despite such high expectations, the long-awaited day of triumph, when Billy Graham would finally preach Christ in the capital of communism, was, quite simply, a fizzle. Exhausted and still suffering from jet lag, he was pulled out of bed early Sunday morning and trundled over to the Baptist church. The unannounced change and the early hour, when public transportation was limited, short-circuited the development of an unwieldy crowd. As a further control, entrance to the service was by government-approved passes dispensed by Baptist leaders, with at least some direction from state officials. Of nearly 1,000 people present for the service, only about one third were from the church; another third were reporters and delegates from the peace conference, and the remainder were “outsiders,” generally conceded to contain an undetermined but probably substantial contingent of KGB security personnel. (Questioned later about the presence of KGB agents at the service, Graham said he hoped that was true: “Those are the kinds of people I’ve been trying to reach for a long time.”) Several hundred Soviet Evangelicals arrived late, but instead of being allowed to sit in normally open overflow rooms, they were kept behind barricades a block away, where they sang hymns to signal their presence, a bold gesture that could have led to their arrest under normal circumstances.
When Bychkov introduced Graham to the congregation, he asked how many had read his book, Peace with God. Though most could have had access only to hand-copied or other duplicated versions, nearly half the people in the audience raised their hands. Graham preached a rousing hour-long sermon on the healing of the paralytic man described in the fifth chapter of John, likening the man’s change to religious conversion. Ticking off the marks of a convert’s life, he mentioned that believers should be diligent workers and loyal citizens, “because in the thirteenth [chapter] of Romans, we’re told to obey the authorities.” A wire-service reporter erroneously converted that sentence into Graham’s text, and newspaper accounts all over America subsequently indicated that Graham had preached a sermon on the thirteenth chapter of Romans urging Christians to be submissive to authorities.
Bychkov called Graham’s visit “a great event in the history of our church,” but not all Baptists agreed. At least three people brandished signs or banners protesting the persecution and imprisonment of religious workers in the Soviet Union. A plainclothesman ripped a sign away from one woman, and another was detained briefly by authorities after the service. When told of this, Graham once again showed his attachment to decency and order by responding blandly, “We detain people in the United States if we catch them doing something wrong. I have had people coming to my services in the United States and causing disturbances and they have been taken out by the police.” He could not be prodded into a more provocative comment. “In a host country like this,” he said, “it’s been my practice through the years never to take political sides and get involved in local problems.” In a subsequent discussion of the same incident, he explained that, if he were to follow any other policy, “then it means that my own ministry is limited.” One disappointed Baptist commented, “I don’t see any difference between Dr. Billy Graham and our own timid churchmen, who are scared to death to offend the authorities. We hoped for better things from him. He could be very helpful if he wanted to be.” And a disillusioned woman said, “I’m sure our authorities are very reassured by what they heard today. If they could trust him to be so uncontroversial every time, they’d probably let him have his crusade and then use it to prove that there is freedom of religion in our country.”
Graham’s behavior was not a bold public stand for freedom, to be sure, but neither was it the sycophant self-aggrandizement some thought. The detained woman, for example, had held up a banner reading, “We have more than 150 prisoners for the work of the gospel,” apparently referring to a well-known aggregation of imprisoned pastors. Because he felt a public statement would be less effective than private diplomacy, Graham did not reveal that he had the names, addresses, pictures, and other relevant information on 147 of these prisoners and that he was in serious conversation with Soviet authorities about them.
As soon as he ended his sermon at the Baptist church, Graham was whisked back into a car for a dash to the patriarchal cathedral. There Father Borovoy introduced him to a crowd of approximately 5,000 and allowed him to speak for a few minutes to worshipers who had stood throughout the three-hour liturgy. He attempted a condensed version of the same sermon he had just given, but whatever effect it might have had was diminished by the lack of a microphone and his interpreter’s soft voice, a combination that led a sizable segment at the rear of the church to shout repeatedly, “We can’t hear! Louder! Louder!” Graham was able to declare, however, that he had experienced three conversions in his lifetime: his first acknowledgment of Christ as his Lord and Savior, his determination to work for a racially just society, and more recently, his commitment to work for world peace for the rest of his life. After a quick lunch with the patriarch in a private room on the third floor, he was treated to a four-hour tour of the publishing facility. “Who wanted ever to see the publishing department of the Orthodox Church?” Haraszti later fumed, barely able to control his frustration at the still-fresh memory. “It was a made-up meeting. It had no real meaning or significance. All the good time was taken up, just to be sure there would be no opportunity for anything.” Some blamed the Russians for the fiasco. Haraszti saw it otherwise. “We blew it! It is we who blew our chances. Moscow could have been a world affair—all splendor, Billy Graham with the patriarch in the cathedral, with the patriarch of Alexandria, the patriarch of Romania, the metropolitan of Poland, the metropolitan of Finland all present, and the great evangelist talking to the people.” Failure to understand the Soviet situation and an unbridled penchant for publicity that led to announcement of the visit had tarnished a golden opportunity. “I will control my expressions,” Haraszti said, but “this is the lack of wisdom of American Evangelical people to the capital of the atheistic world. You see? A lack of wisdom. . . . We misused, abused, and breached the verbal contract. I actually am unhappy.”
The early sessions of the peace conference, held at the International Trade Center rather than at a religious site, immediately confirmed the suspicion of critics. Patriarch Pimen opened the proceedings with an assault on the West for “blackening the honest and openly peace-loving policy of our fatherland.” That theme continued as speakers from Soviet-influenced nations praised President Brezhnev and Soviet policies and laid the blame for the arms race squarely at the feet of Western warmongers. Graham had said beforehand that he would walk out if the proceedings grew too one sided. That threshold was apparently not crossed, but when a Syrian delegate scheduled to give a three-minute greeting launched into a slashing half-hour diatribe against the United States, Graham, who was sitting on the platform and visible to all, removed his headphones to signal his unwillingness to listen further to attacks on his country. In response to these broadsides, Arie Brouwer, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, and David Preus, presiding bishop of the American Lutheran Church, warned that if such unproductive harangues continued, the American contingent would walk out. Either by coincidence or, more likely, at explicit instructions from Soviet authorities—-shortly after Graham removed his headphones, Metropolitan Filaret and other Orthodox leaders began passing slips of paper back and forth—the attacks on the United States abruptly ceased.
When Graham’s turn came to speak late Tuesday morning, he acquitted himself admirably. Other speakers had run over their allotted time so much that speakers were being urged to cut nonessential remarks in the interest of time. Always unusually conscious of time, Graham fretted and tried to decide on what he might omit until Filaret came to him privately and said, “Regardless of everything else, don’t curtail your message. Say everything that is on your heart.” Whether or not he said everything, he said a great deal. After making the expected statements of appreciation to Pimen and Filaret, he summoned an image Billy Sunday or Mordecai Ham would have appreciated. The United States and Russia, he said, reminded him of two boys, their hands filled with lighted matches, standing in a room knee-deep with gasoline. Though they might argue immaturely over who had the most matches and how they could arrive at an equal distribution, both knew full well that if either dropped just one match, mutual destruction was certain. While disclaiming technical expertise that would enable him to set forth a comprehensive plan for disarmament, and reasserting his conviction that no lasting peace could come until the advent of Christ, Graham insisted nonetheless that Christian leaders had a solemn obligation to call the nations to repentance—all nations. “No nation, large or small,” he stressed, “is exempt from blame for the present state of international affairs.” The “unchecked production of weapons of mass destruction,” he charged, “is a mindless fever which threatens to consume much of our world and destroy the sacred gift of life,” but even if nuclear war never comes, “the nuclear arms race has already indirectly caused a hidden holocaust of unimaginable proportions in our world. Every day, millions upon millions of people live on the knife-edge of survival because of starvation, poverty, and disease. At the same time, we are told the nations of the world are spending an estimated $600 billion per year on weapons. If even one-tenth of that amount were diverted to long-range development programs that would help the world’s poor and starving, millions of lives could be saved each year. The standard of living in underdeveloped countries would be raised significantly. If we do not see our moral and spiritual responsibility concerning this life-and-death matter, I firmly believe the living God will judge us for our blindness and lack of compassion.”
In his specific recommendations, Graham called on world leaders to turn down the volume on hostile rhetoric and listen carefully and emphatically to what those on the other side were saying. Reflecting his own convictions regarding the importance of personal relationships, he recommended an increase in every sort of cultural interchange between Eastern and Western nations. Then, in the only mention of the topic by any speaker, he called on all nations to respect “the rights of religious believers as outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and agreed to by those who signed the Final Act at Helsinki, to “recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.” After renewing his call for a SALT 10 elimination of weapons, Graham closed by recalling that thirty-seven years earlier, almost to the day, the Nazi forces had surrendered in Berlin, bringing to an end a devastating war in which the United States and the Soviet Union had fought side by side against a common enemy. Today, he said, these two, and all other nations on earth, again faced a common enemy: the threat of impending nuclear destruction. “May all of us,” he pleaded, “whether we are from large nations or small nations, do all we can to remove this deadly blight from our midst and save the sacred gift of life from nuclear catastrophe.”
Graham’s address met with three minutes of sustained applause and Cossack-style foot stamping, but he was not permitted to savor that moment long. Violating a trust, however unwittingly, by publicizing his schedule had caused him one set of problems. Keeping a trust created another set of at least equal magnitude. Metropolitan Filaret’s hope that the Pentecostal problem would be resolved before Graham arrived in Moscow had not been realized. The dissidents were still in the embassy basement and the United States was still trying to embarrass the Soviet government into guaranteeing them the right to emigrate if they emerged. Ambassador Hartman, irked that Graham had agreed to participate in the peace conference, refused to meet him at the airport or to hear him preach at the patriarchal cathedral lest he seem to be approving his visit, but he did invite the evangelist to dinner at the ambassadorial residence and seemed determined to use him as a weapon in the struggle over the Pentecostals.
In deference to the strong anxieties of both the Soviet government and the Orthodox Church, Graham had given his assurance that any visit with the dissidents would be private and pastoral, not public and political, and that he would make every effort to keep the visit low-key and confidential, with no reporters, photographers, or television cameras present. That assurance, accepted by the Russians “with grinding teeth,” proved hard to uphold. As Graham headed for his car after a brief press conference on his arrival at the airport, a reporter from a Charlotte television station, with cameras whirring behind him, pushed toward him with a thick packet, calling out, “Dr. Graham! Dr. Graham! These are letters from the Pentecostals.” Graham was taken aback and instructed Haraszti to take the letters, in which the Pentecostals urged Graham either not to visit them at all, or if he did visit, to demand first that the Soviet government agree to their emigration. Neither option seemed viable, but Graham and his colleagues saw immediately that press determination to give full publicity to any contact with the Pentecostals put him in an extremely delicate position.
Alerted that the press planned to be present for Graham’s scheduled visit to the embassy, Akers complained to Ambassador Hartman, then said that Graham would not visit the Pentecostals if the media were involved. Hartman reluctantly agreed to keep the press away from the evangelist during his visit and provided aides who helped Graham and his party push through a swarm of at least fifty reporters who met them when they arrived at the embassy on Tuesday evening. After keeping Graham’s party waiting for a long period in a bare room outside his ninth-floor office—Haraszti felt it was a deliberate “royal waiting time” designed to establish rank—Hartman informed Graham that the Pentecostals insisted on television and photographic coverage of the visit. While Akers and Smyth went downstairs to talk with the Pentecostals, Hartman pressed Graham to accept their demand. In an adjoining room, the deputy chief of mission, Warren Zimmerman, urged Haraszti to convince Graham that he had a responsibility to take a bold stand for religious freedom. Hartman’s pressure weighed heavily on Graham’s shoulders. When the ambassador and his deputy left the two men alone, Graham said, “Alex, I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m letting the Pentecostals down.”
Haraszti called on his experience as a physician to give an answer. Medical disaster plans, he explained, include a system known as triage. Of three categories of casualties, those who will survive without attention and those who will perish no matter how much attention they receive are ignored. The responsible physician makes his decision, then gives his attention to those who truly need his help to survive. “You are in a similar situation,” he said. The Soviet Union and its satellite nations contained 400 million people; the U.S. embassy contained six Pentecostals. Based on his extensive negotiations over this matter, Haraszti felt certain the Soviet government was willing to allow the dissidents to leave the country but had made it a matter of honor not to give in to U.S. pressure and would let them go only when it could be accomplished in a nonsensational way that would preserve Soviet dignity. Even if Graham were somehow to create a stir sufficient to embarrass the government into releasing the Pentecostals, he would immediately and forever end any chance of a further ministry in Eastern Europe. “Which is more important,” Haraszti asked, “six or four hundred million? To do what the Pentecostals want or to come back to Russia on a greater scale?” Haraszti enjoyed telling the story. “I will never forget,” he said. “He stuck out his chin—you know, he has a strong chin—and he said, ‘I have made my decision. If they insist on cameras, I will not visit them.’”
At that point, Akers and Smyth returned to confirm that the Pentecostals were insisting on photographic coverage. Graham stood firm, and after two more visits by Akers and Smyth the dissidents agreed to an unrecorded visit. A consul took them downstairs, through an inner courtyard where photographers had been allowed to congregate, and into the basement rooms where the Pentecostals were living. Once inside, Haraszti and Akers both immediately noticed that a curtain over the basement window had been pulled open to permit photographers standing outside to take pictures of the gathering. While Akers waved his hands to spoil the cameramen’s view, Haraszti pulled the curtain to close the gap. “I looked around,” he recalled. “If they could have killed me by looks, they would have. I would not be here.”
The Pentecostals seemed obviously dejected and resentful, but Graham greeted each one warmly, “with a hug and a kiss. All of them. Very nice.” But as soon as he sat down at a table to talk with them, Lyubov Vaschenko, a girl of seventeen or eighteen, opened a spiral notebook and began to read questions from it. Haraszti could not believe it. “There was no Thank you for coming. . . . We have heard of you. . . . No appreciation. Nothing.” The questions, which he felt certain had been prepared by American reporters, were sharp and accusing. Why had Graham refused to have their meeting photographed? Why had he come? What would we tell the American President? Why was he not interested in helping them gain release? Graham explained that his visit was pastoral and that he never televised a pastoral visit. He did not yet know what he would tell the President. He was working to help them, but privately, and felt that a public furor would not be in their interest.
After further sparring, the highlight of which was an unsuccessful attempt to get Graham to identify the red horse in the book of Revelation as communism, Graham interrupted Lyubov Vaschenko’s questions by reading from Psalm 37: “Wait for the Lord and be patient, and He will bring up your sun.” He counseled the Pentecostals to be patient, expressing his sympathy for their situation and his hope that it would soon be resolved. Then, using a classic Evangelical technique for escaping from a tense encounter, he suggested they pray together. When Graham finished his own prayer, in which he asked God to give the Pentecostals wisdom to understand and accept the present situation, he fell silent, expecting other members of the group to offer their own prayers. When a long period of utter silence made it clear no one else would speak, Graham and his colleagues, and then the Pentecostals, stood up. The visit was over.
“They were just full of rage,” Haraszti recalled. “Two thirds of the questions had not been read. Billy would not say the red horse was the Communist government. They were just outraged.” In a last attempt to snatch some victory, Vaschenko asked Graham “in a very nice way” if she might take a picture of him, “just for our family album. We would like to have a memory that we were with you.” Graham, congenitally unable to say no easily, looked at his associates for help, murmuring that he had no objection as long as they promised not to use it to publicize his visit. Akers stepped in quickly and reminded him that they had agreed no photographs would be taken and that agreement must be kept. Relieved to let someone else don the black hat, Graham agreed, and after awkwardly stiff good-byes, he and his party adjourned to the ambassador’s residence for dinner. The next morning, the American press reported that the Pentecostals had been not at all impressed with Billy Graham—“He was like all the other religious figures who have visited us, nothing special”—and had been disappointed with the visit and with his failure to offer any help other than prayer.
Though it was a public relations fiasco and seemed, on the surface, to lend credence to the charge that Graham was more concerned with chalking up new preaching victories than with standing up for oppressed people, the eventual resolution of the Pentecostal problem proved to be a singular example of the Graham team’s diplomatic skill and the evangelist’s unique influence in Soviet circles. During a return visit to Moscow in the summer of that year, Haraszti spoke about the Pentecostals with Metropolitan Filaret and with Georgi Arbatov; with ministers of the Soviet State Council for Religious Affairs; and with the first deputy to Boris Ponomarev, chief of the party’s International Affairs Department and the highest-ranking Soviet official Graham had met during his visit. He also discussed the situation thoroughly with the State Department and with staff members at the Soviet embassy in Washington. His message was simple and straightforward: The Pentecostal situation is a problem for both the United States and the Soviet Union. Neither side invited it, neither side wants it, but both sides have it, and negotiation through regular diplomatic channels has failed to resolve the problem. Billy Graham realizes this is not a simple case of religious persecution, but the American public does not, and public opinion is such that it will be extremely difficult for the President to start arms-reduction negotiations with the Soviets until this matter is resolved. Graham also understands that neither party can appear to yield on this issue without losing face. Therefore, as a private citizen, he offers his personal guarantee, backed by his own person as a hostage to the Soviets, if necessary—in fact, Haraszti made this offer without Graham’s knowledge or agreement—that if the Soviet Union will guarantee to allow the Pentecostals to leave the country, the United States will not use the issue for propaganda against the Soviet government.
When Haraszti carried this message to Arthur Hartman, the ambassador laughed in derision. Who does Billy Graham think he is, that the Pentecostals would believe he could persuade the Soviets to guarantee their freedom? And if Soviet authorities gave him such a promise, what reason was there to believe they would not lie to him? Haraszti went back to Ponomarev’s deputy, who told him that Soviet dignity demanded that the Pentecostals not leave the country as a result of pressure from the U.S. government. Soviet law would not allow them to apply for a visa from the U.S. embassy, because the embassy is a foreign territory. If they wanted an exit visa, they had to leave the embassy, return to their homes in Siberia and apply for a permit there. If they did that, the Deputy promised, “They will leave the Soviet Union without any delay. They must trust the Soviet government that we keep our word.” Haraszti stressed the risk to Billy Graham if he used his reputation and influence to assure both the Pentecostals and the U.S. government that the Soviet government could be trusted.
The deputy looked Haraszti squarely in the eye. “The Soviet Union,” he said, “will not lie to Billy Graham.”
“This is what we believe,” Haraszti responded. “We are sure about this. Billy Graham trusts the Soviet government. So, we have an agreement.”
“You do and we do,” the deputy said, “because we have no interest in keeping the Pentecostals if they leave the U.S. embassy. Our interest is to get rid of this issue. Our interest is to forget it and never remember it.”
This, unfortunately, did not convince Hartman, who dismissed Haraszti’s report as wishful thinking and counseled the Pentecostals to remain in the embassy. Metropolitan Filaret tried to help by writing a letter to Graham, stating that it was the conviction of the Orthodox Church that if the Pentecostals left the embassy on their own and returned to Siberia, they would be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Still, Hartman would not budge. Haraszti felt he knew the reason: “The ambassador obviously was jealous. . . . [He] did not want the Pentecostals to leave under Billy Graham’s negotiations.” Whatever Hartman’s motives—and wariness toward Soviet promises could hardly be considered a diplomatic weakness—Graham and his associates continued to press their case. Finally, during the spring of 1983, Graham wrote a letter to the Pentecostals outlining the steps he felt they should take. A few days later, on the evening of April 13, a consul from the U.S. embassy called on Alexander Haraszti in his Moscow hotel room to inform him that the Pentecostals had left the embassy and were at that moment on a plane to Siberia. Not long afterward, the two families, together with several relatives who had not been with them in the embassy, were allowed to emigrate, one group to Israel and the other to St. Louis. Billy Graham and Alexander Haraszti never received any further word of explanation from the Soviets or appreciation from the Pentecostals. John Akers claimed that Soviet church leaders informed him that Graham’s influence had been decisive but acknowledged that other groups had also claimed an influence and added, “We have to be very careful about what we claim. We’re not trying to get onto that bandwagon.” Asked in 1989 to assess his role in the incident, Graham smiled faintly and wrapped himself in the familiar and becoming old cloak of astute humility. “I think [the Soviets] eventually did what we asked them to,” he said, as if he could barely remember. “I have no way of knowing whether [what we did] was a factor or not. But I think it was.”