INTRODUCTION

George H.W. Bush,

41ST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

THE COLD WAR WAS A STRUGGLE for the very soul of mankind. It was a struggle for a way of life defined by freedom on one side and repression on the other. Already I think we have forgotten what a long and arduous struggle it was, and how close to nuclear disaster we came a number of times. The fact that it did not happen is a testimony to the honorable men and women on both sides who kept their cool and did what was right—as they saw it—in times of crisis.

This conflict between the surviving superpowers of World War II began as I came home from that war. In 1948, the year of my graduation from Yale, the Soviets tried to cut off Western access to Berlin. That blockade led to the formation of NATO, was followed by the first Soviet A-bomb test, and turned bloody with the invasion of South Korea. Four decades of nuclear confrontation, proxy wars, and economic privation followed.

I was privileged to be President of the United States when it all came to an end. In the fall of 1989 the satellite states of Eastern Europe began to break free, and mostly peaceful revolutions swept through Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. When the Berlin wall fell, we knew the end was near.

It took another two years to close down the empire of Lenin and Stalin. I received that good news in two telephone calls. The first came on December 8, 1991, when Boris Yeltsin called me from a hunting lodge near Brest, in Belarus. Only recently elected President of the Russian Republic, Yeltsin had been meeting with Leonid Kravchuk, President of Ukraine, and Stanislav Shushchevik, President of Belarus. “Today avery important event took place in our country,” Yeltsin said. “I wanted to inform you myself before you learned about it from the press.” Then he told me the news: the Presidents of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine had decided to dissolve the Soviet Union.

Two weeks later a second call confirmed that the former Soviet Union would disappear. Mikhail Gorbachev contacted me at Camp David on Christmas morning of 1991. He wished Barbara and me a Merry Christmas, and then he went on to sum up what had happened in his country: the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. He had just been on national TV to confirm the fact, and he had transferred control of Soviet nuclear weapons to the President of Russia. “You can have a very quiet Christmas evening,” he said. And so it was over.

It was a very quiet and civilized ending to a tumultuous time in our history.

In the pages that follow, Tom Reed tells the story of the heroic men and women on both sides of the Iron Curtain who fought that Cold War and kept us from plunging into the abyss of nuclear disaster along the way. It is a remarkable story, some details of which I did not know until I first read Tom’s manuscript. Some of the stories you will read and some of the people you’ll meet will remind you of fictional tales and characters in spy novels. But they are real people, and real happenings, brought out in the open for the first time through Tom’s often compelling storytelling. I think you will be surprised to learn about the behind-the-scenes spy games and chessboard diplomacy that made the Cold War an even more dangerous era than most of us realized.

Although I occasionally disagreed with Tom’s interpretation of events or judgment of people, I found his view of how the events unfolded fascinating. Through his numerous and diverse jobs in both government and the private sector, Tom enjoyed a unique catbird seat to history and has done us all a great favor by taking the time to record what he saw and heard. I commend what follows to your attention, for it is a remarkable tale of courage, determination, and yes, sometimes luck.