CHAPTER 20

The Soviet Solstice

FOR MILLENNIA, MAN HAS NOTICED that one day in December things finally take a turn for the better. On that day the sun rises a little earlier than it did the day before. Winter still lies ahead, but that earlier sunrise on December 22 of every year gives proof that spring is on its way, that glorious summer surely will follow.

So it was in Moscow in December 1991. For seventy-four years the icy ghost of Vladimir Lenin crushed the soul and froze the hearts of most Russians. Then, during the winter solstice, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union stepped to a microphone to announce the end of that union, his job, and that seemingly endless political winter.

Some Russians thought that day would be the end of their world, but most realized it would not. While the darkness of a lawless winter would hover for a decade, while the economic freeze brought on by the Marxist experiment would be hard to endure, most citizens felt the glory that once was theirs would one day return. Late December of 1991 was the winter solstice for twentieth century Russia. The buildup to that incredible week was spread throughout an incredible year. Events in the Pentagon, the Iraqi desert, the bunkers of Omaha, and even in the halls of the Kremlin itself, were hard to believe. But when the year was over, the winter solstice celebrations in those Kremlin halls and beyond will never be forgotten.

RINGING OUT THE OLD, RINGING IN THE NEW

George Sheldon and Gavril Popov first met in the early autumn of 1991. Sheldon was president of the World Presidents Organization, a group of semiretired, very successful, mostly American, independent business executives. They liked to travel, but at the highest levels. Sheldon was in charge of planning their 1991 winter outing.

Popov was the mayor of Moscow. He began his career at Moscow State University, where he was active in politics, as a hard-line communist. He joined the Soviet bureaucracy, where he proved to be adaptable. His friends now refer to him as a “Russian Greek.” When the tide began to turn, with Gorbachev’s ascension to power, Popov became an equally ardent democrat. In the spring of 1991 he was appointed to the largely ceremonial post of Moscow’s mayor. Economic change was in the air, and Mayor Popov was in the forefront. He was a deal-making hustler, a man who would have felt right at home in the council chambers of most big U.S. cities. He was looking for investment in Moscow’s new economy. Sheldon’s coterie of successful entrepreneurs were prime targets.

The two men met at a World Presidents conference in Brussels during the summer of 1991. They fell to talking about the ferment cooking in Russia. “How about a New Year’s celebration in Moscow?” Popov asked. He was proposing a four day round of private dinners, business meetings, and opulent parties to be held in the new Moscow. A hundred business executives and their spouses were to be invited. The festivities would be capped by a grand ball at the Kremlin on New Year’s Eve. The men shook hands on the deal. Sheldon was to line up one hundred prosperous businessmen with an interest in Russian investment and to deposit $100,000 with a “travel agent” in New York. Popov was to organize the festivities. They would next meet at Moscow’s Octoberskaya Hotel three months later.

Boris Yeltsin, the new kingpin of Russia, took control of the Kremlin on December 25, 1991. Gorbachev’s former office was immediately put to a more functional use. Having dumped the Communist party into the dustbin of history, Yeltsin and his buddies decided it was time for a drink. What better place to celebrate than on the green baize conference tables so often photographed with dour General Secretaries glowering across at visiting Western supplicants? Yeltsin’s big problem was neither security nor visitor control—it was finding the Kremlin’s stash of vodka and caviar. Into that vacuum rode Sheldon’s hundred businessmen and their spouses. There was vodka to the left of them, caviar to the right of them. They landed at Sheremetyevo on the morning of December 29, four days after Gorbachev had been driven from the Kremlin. Popov’s man was there at the airport to meet them.

They rode into town past toppled statues and empty pedestals. The guests could not read the Cyrillic inscriptions, but the words might well have been written by Shelley: “ ‘Look on my works ye mighty and despair!’ Round the decay of [this] colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level [snows] stretch far away.” The two hundred were taken to the Octoberskaya Hotel, a former haven for Soviet bigwigs in the Arbat section of Moscow. The rooms were huge; every one had a TV, although the movie offerings were a little unique. They included An Englishman Abroad, the story of Guy Burgess’s life in Russia, ⁷² or Riley,Ace of Spies,a story of the KGB’s brightest and best at work.

During the two days that followed, Sheldon’s one hundred business people and their spouses were treated to a fashion show at the huge Rossiya Hotel, across Red Square from the Kremlin. The models were awash in furs, sable, and mink from all over Russia. They were gorgeous, both furs and girls. There was a reception at the residence of the Russian foreign minister, rides on Russian troikas (traditional Russian three-horse sleighs) through the cold and snowy Moscow night air, and private dinners for each of the visiting couples, hosted by scientists and “bizessmen” trying for a new start.

And then it was time for the grand ball. At 8:00 P.M. on December 31, a flotilla of black Zil limousines arrived at the Octoberskaya to ferry the two hundred across Moscow and through the Kremlin’s historic Spassky Gate. Once inside, cautious optimism was everywhere. This new nation was celebrating its rebirth, arm in arm with its former adversary. The people were looking forward to the sunny days that peace and a free economy would bring. “Moscow could be like Los Angeles,” the mayor whispered to Sheldon. The crowd circulated freely through the great halls of the Kremlin, from St. George’s to St. Catherine’s. Sheldon had his picture taken at the dais of the Supreme Soviet. The Americans drank toasts to their Russian hosts in the quarters of Ivan the Terrible.

At 10:30 P.M. the crowd moved into the Congress Hall for dinner. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church said the blessing, in rooms he had never before entered. The food, wine, and vodka were magnificent and in unending supply, but that was only the beginning. At 11:00 P.M. the Moscow Symphony Orchestra began to play Tchaikovsky. Then, at 11:30, the Red Army Band and Chorus took the stage. After a few introductory Russian folk tunes they turned their attention to an American repertoire. The band played “Stars and Stripes Forever”; the marble walls shook. To close out the show, the evening, and the year of 1991, the Red Army Chorus broke into a stunning rendition of “God Bless America.” It was a shocker; there was not a single, solitary dry eye in the house. As the two hundred headed for home, fireworks and happy crowds filled Red Square.

THE MEN FROM THE SECRET CITIES

I came to celebrate the Soviet solstice with two Russians named Vladimir. The date was February 9, 1992, six weeks after Gorbachev’s departure from power. The place was the Wente winery in Livermore. That town hosts an American nuclear weapons laboratory as well as some lovely vineyards. Vladimir Belugin was head of Arzamas-16, the senior Soviet nuclear weapons design institute. ⁷³ Vladimir Nechai ran Chelyabinsk-70, the junior Soviet lab. We all came to be there because, as the winter solstice came and went, the directors of the Soviet and American nuclear weapons institutes felt the need to reach out and touch one another.

It all started when early travelers Danny Stillman and Nerses Krikorian, of Los Alamos, first connected with their Russian peers. Soviet nuclear scientists had never been allowed to publish their work in the open literature, yet they were intellectual giants. They wanted to join E. O. Lawrence, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Edward Teller in the pantheon of physics history. They were also concerned about the safety and security of their handiwork—the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union—and about their economic survival as their empire collapsed.

Jim Watkins, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, had been thinking about how to connect with those secret labs. Here was his chance. With the connections established by the Los Alamos travelers, Watkins made arrangements for the leaders of Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70 to visit their American counterparts at Los Alamos and Livermore. In late 1991 the crumbling Soviet government did not know how to say no to this proposal, and in January 1992 the new Russian government, awash in euphoria, wanted to open its archives to public view. Within a month of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Belugin and one of his brightest research deputies, Alexander Pavlovski, along with Vladimir Nechai and his deputy scientific director, Boris Litvinov, all came to small, candlelit tables in the Wente winery.

Their host was John Nuckolls, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, along with a few of his associates, including myself. Words cannot do justice to that evening and the meetings that followed. There was an atmosphere of elation, of quiet celebration. Everyone in that room, except the interpreters, had seen megaton-scale nuclear explosions. They understood the scale of the disaster we had avoided. The atmosphere was too heavy with history to allow a celebration that opening night, but the air of thankful relief was thick enough to cut with a knife.

That Sunday evening marked the beginning of an historic week. On the morrow, the group would visit the Livermore Laboratory for two days. Then there would be a day of travel, by special aircraft directly to the mesa at Los Alamos. Once there, Sig Hecker, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, would host the same group for two more days. On Saturday the visitors would return home, to prepare for a return engagement by the Americans one week later.

On February 22 the American lab directors and two of their associates headed out for Russia. They were accorded reciprocal hospitality, two days each at Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70, that again defied description. First of all, there were welcoming discussions with Yuli Khariton, the J. Robert Oppenheimer of the Soviet nuclear program. Khariton, eighty-eight years old at the time, has since passed away. But during the visit, his English was fluent, his mind clear, his manners impeccable.

Khariton was open about the early Soviet weapons program. He was unequivocal in stating that Klaus Fuchs, a British scientist working at Los Alamos, was of enormous technical help in developing the first Soviet A-bomb. The Rosenbergs and their associates were his couriers, and the first Soviet bomb, detonated on August 29, 1949, was an exact copy of the Nagasaki Fat Man. He said it would have been foolish to improvise when the plans for a known success were available and the penalty for failure in Stalin’s Soviet Union was death. Khariton’s guests were flabbergasted at this sudden confirmation of all we had suspected.

Khariton was proud of his scientific staff. He assured his guests they would see virtually everything in his domain, but that there were problems. Clouds of uncertainty now hung over both Russian scientific centers. When the visitors toured Arzamas-16, they found a completely closed city. The same was true of Chelyabinsk-70. The institutes were responsible for the development of nuclear weapons, but they also had to run the schools and hospitals, plow and maintain the roads, keep everyone fed, and secure the perimeter. No one was allowed into either town without a pass. With the collapse of the empire where was the money to come from? The institutes were “borrowing” hundreds of millions of rubles from the central bank every month just to keep people fed. How long could they keep that up?

The American visitors listened to a recitation of nifty technologic achievements, some truly spectacular. But they also found a lot of sandboxes—pet projects of distinguished academicians that were never turned off—for there was no Congressional committee, no peer reviewers, to ask, “What are you doing and why?” This explained a lot of intelligence mysteries from the Cold War. In days gone by we saw, from satellite photography, bizarre excavations or pieces of equipment which made no sense but whose ongoing construction worried us for years. It turns out these projects did not make any sense, but in the Soviet Union there was no way to kill them off.

The Soviets were well aware of nuclear weapon safety issues. Even though that subject touches on the internals of weapon design, they were willing to talk and seek advice. They discussed the merits of their transportation containers, which they felt to be superior to U.S. models, and they confirmed that their weapons were “disabled” when in storage, whatever that meant. On the other hand, security (preventing theft or misuse) was a new subject to them. Throughout the Soviet system nuclear weapons had been secured by operational means: people watching people who watched still other people. The Soviets confirmed that there were no electronic or mechanical locking devices on their weapons (as there are in the U.S.), a subject that grew to be of enormous concern as the KGB disappeared, the army disintegrated, and well-financed terrorists infiltrated the country.

Underlying all of this technology was a deep concern about the future. The closed cities were disintegrating too. Those scientific temples and their cousins with other numbers—Tomsk-7, Krasnoyarsk-26, etc.— were on a death spiral. What were they to do? The Soviet hosts implored their new American friends for help; not with handouts, but with cooperative ventures that would utilize the talent, keep it at home, and give it the recognition it deserved.

It was a tall order. The American government devised a series of slow-moving programs that immediately fell afoul of jurisdictional disputes within Russia. Who controlled the money? The Academy of Science or the Ministry of Atomic Energy? Within a few years, Vladimir Nechai, the director of Chelyabinsk-70 and one of our guests at Livermore, would give up. He took his own life in despair.

In time some American-funded programs would be created to pay for Soviet weapons dismantlement, help safeguard Russian nuclear materials, provide pure-science work for some of those Russians, open parts of the secret cities to joint industrial ventures, and grant academic recognition to those who labored in the Soviet darkness for so long. A decade later these programs are beginning to pay off, but it has been a long, dark winter for the nuclear community of Russia.

BOB GATES RETURNS AN OVERDUE VIDEO

In the autumn of 1973 a couple of well-dressed civilians came to my office in the Pentagon to tell me a story. Known as the Office of the Special Assistant, it was directly across the hall from the office of the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense. Martin Hoffmann and I tended to the odd jobs: politics (which we fought to keep out of the Pentagon), executive recruiting (it was the beginning of the second Nixon term, and there were a lot of vacancies in the presidentially appointed ranks), and sensitive intelligence. It was this last that brought those two gentlemen to see me. The Secretary of Defense wanted us to keep track of Project Jennifer. The tale that unfolded still boggles my mind.

In April 1968 the Soviet diesel-powered, ballistic-missile-firing submarine Red Star left its home port of Vladivostok to go on patrol. This was a Golf II class boat, an interim response to the American fleet of nuclear-powered Polaris submarines that first went operational in 1960. Diesel submarines run underwater on battery power. They must surface daily, or at least come to snorkel depth, to run their diesels and recharge those batteries.

In April 1968, Red Star apparently suffered an explosion while recharging its batteries, probably from the hydrogen gas given off in the process. The explosion tore a ten-foot hole in the hull, flooded the ship, and sent it to the bottom. There was no time to send off a distress message to fleet headquarters. Within days the Soviet Pacific fleet was going bonkers looking for Red Star, just as they were said to do in The Hunt for Red October. The U.S. Navy took note of all this activity, and while the Soviets never were able to find Red Star,by midsummer the U.S. Navy’s technology had given it a pretty good idea of where to look: 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii.

In August 1968 our Navy found it, under 16,580 feet of water, and started taking pictures by means of a remote submersible. On September 9 those photos made their way back to Washington. Naval Intelligence was intrigued. If they could reach down those three miles into the dark and rushing currents of the north Pacific, they might be able to recover a Soviet nuclear warhead, cryptographic equipment, and some mysterious radio transmitters that had defied all U.S. efforts at decoding.

The White House was interested too, but a presidential election was under way, and transition was in the air. When the new Nixon team took over, Henry Kissinger’s military assistant, Al Haig, was fascinated by the intelligence possibilities. He showed the photos to his bosses, and they authorized an attempt at recovery. The new Deputy at OMB for National Security, James Schlesinger, was told to find the funds and to assure the continued support of the project, code name Jennifer.

There ensued a bureaucratic struggle between the Navy and the CIA, with the latter winning control of the project and probably making the recovery more complicated than it needed to be. In any event, Schlesinger moved from OMB to become Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, then Director of Central Intelligence. In both jobs, he continued to be godfather to the program. The CIA hit upon the idea of recruiting Howard Hughes to front the construction of a new, mammoth ship that nominally was to mine for manganese nodules on the ocean floor. Hughes’s well-known eccentricity, secrecy, and wealth made all this credible.

In February 1973, Schlesinger moved again, this time to become Secretary of Defense. He wanted to keep an eye on Jennifer, which is why Hoffmann and I heard this tale. At the time of those conversations, the Hughes ship had a name, the Glomar Explorer. It was being outfitted with lifting rigs, a recovery bay, and even a morgue for the remains of any Soviet seamen who might be found in the Red Star’s hull. I thanked my visitors for the briefing. They reminded me of the absolute secrecy required, for the Glomar Explorer would put to sea within a few months and any leakage of information would be disastrous. The Soviet Union might still claim legal ownership of the wreck.

The Glomar Explorer started its sea trials in early 1974, and by March it was making serious but random-looking runs all over the North Pacific. By August it was on station and the recovery attempt began. Claws and a steel net went over the Red Star, and the ascent began at the rate of 300 feet per hour. But then, about a third of the way up, the old hull just fell apart. Most of the Red Star settled back to its permanent resting place on the ocean floor. The Glomar Explorer recovered only a quarter of the Red Star’s hull—no nukes, crypto gear, or transmitters. When pieces of the hull were hauled into the recovery bay of the mother ship, however, the remains of six Soviet sailors were aboard.

On September 4, 1974, after getting more urgent matters settled, these remains were given a proper burial at sea. The full-honors ceremony took place in the hold of the Glomar Explorer, with American and Soviet flags on display. Traditional services were conducted in both English and Russian. The Soviet anthem was played, the caskets were closed, then lifted to deck level. After further appropriate words about honorable men who served their country well, the caskets were lowered over the side and the men were returned to their watery graves.

All of this was videotaped. The records and souvenirs of that episode were brought home and shown to the appropriate CIA officials. Then they were consigned to the vaults, just as if they had been recovered by the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Fast forward to 1992. The Cold War was over. Boris Yeltsin and George Bush were presidents of their countries. Robert Gates was the latter’s Director of Central Intelligence. His counterpart in Russia, Yevgeny Primakov, decided to invite Gates to Moscow for a visit—not just to the city, but to the headquarters of the once-arch enemy, the KGB, and to the Kremlin. No CIA director had ever done any of that.

The visit took place in October 1992, a mind-boggling event for both sides. Gates was accorded full honors everywhere he went. He was driven in a Zil limousine that had once ferried the Moscow party boss about town. They went to KGB headquarters, where every window had a head protruding, all watching Gates’s arrival with stunned disbelief. Then the delegation moved on to the Kremlin. In planning the trip, Gates told his Russian hosts that he would be bringing a gift for President Yeltsin, one of “historic significance.” Gates was accompanied to the meeting by U.S. Ambassador Strauss, two CIA officials, and their interpreter. They were escorted through Moscow and into the Kremlin by efficient Russian police.

The Americans were welcomed to the president’s office by Yeltsin, Foreign Minister Kozyrev, and the heads of the two successor organizations to the KGB, Yevgeny Primakov of the FSB and Viktor Barannikov of the FSS. The meeting started with a discussion of the new age then dawning. The Soviet solstice had come and gone. There was great opportunity for cooperation. Yeltsin talked about history. Gates then said, “We are here to write finis to all that.” To the astonishment of all, he unfurled a Soviet flag that had covered one of the sailors’ caskets at the time of the funeral services aboard the Glomar Explorer eighteen years before. He then handed Yeltsin a videotape of those services. Gates repeated his point: even at the height of the Cold War, America respected the courage of, and accorded full honors to, the men who did their duty and gave their all for the Soviet Union. The video was only fifteen minutes long, but Yeltsin wept. So did every one of us who have seen it.

WHEN WORLD WARS END

The last time a global conflict ended, in 1945, the losers enjoyed nothing but the hatred and scorn of world opinion. Not only were they brutal warriors, they had inflicted unspeakable atrocities on helpless prisoners and innocent civilians from Auschwitz to Nanking. The losers of World War II pulled down the pillars of their own temples, leaving their national capitals in fiery ruin. Their once-elite armaments industries were gutted shells. The corpses of defeated leaders were burned by their aides or vilified by angry mobs.

In 1991 it was different. Communist governments were unconcerned about human life, but for the most part it was their own people who suffered in the Gulags and dungeons. When defeat was clearly written on the wind, most communist leaders went away quietly, into peaceful retirement. When the end came, Moscow was not aflame, like Berlin or Tokyo. The city was alight with parties as its citizens welcomed the victors in hopes of replicating their success. The nuclear weapons laboratories at Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70 were not empty halls. They were crowded but confused cities, welcoming their American peers to a quiet celebration of the fact that their ghastly products had never been used. The men in Moscow were alive to welcome those from Washington. Both sides shed a tear in memory of the fallen heroes on both sides, for there had been such heroes, and we both knew it.