“THE MARCH OF FREEDOM AND Democracy . . . will leave Marxist-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” With those words, addressed to the parliament of the United Kingdom, Ronald Reagan pivoted toward a radical new approach to deal with the challenges posed by the Soviet Union. He had decided on this approach six months earlier, in the middle of his frustrations over the Siberian pipeline sanctions. There could never be a return to détente. The free world was good, it had the better ideas, and it would take the offense against the forces of evil when it needed to. If the language seemed awkward and moralistic to observers, it was natural to Reagan.
President Reagan and the KGB spy Oleg Gordievsky both set foot in London for the first time that month. Their first memories of the city were probably similar: a tangy concatenation of fumes from unfiltered jet fuel, at Heathrow, and then from the tailpipes of cars that clogged the motorways on the way, for Gordievsky, to Kensington High Street, where he and his family were to live.
For security reasons, Air Force One taxied to a deserted series of hangars at Heathrow where the smell was so overwhelming that security agents covered their faces as they waited for the president to disembark. London was a friendly city, but the Secret Service was nervous. Scotland Yard insisted that they carry no weapons. The Secret Service advance teams ignored them, and brought rifles, grenade launchers, and pistols. These were confiscated. Eventually, an agreement was sketched out. Two members of the Service could be armed, but their guns could only carry six bullets each. The US got around this prohibition by smuggling heavy weapons in the trunk of the presidential limo.1
Reagan was impatient with Europe’s dithering on economic sanctions, and Prime Minister Thatcher, though not amused by the enormous, royal-like entourage that Reagan brought, found his speech at Westminster Abbey magnanimous.2 Thatcher might have wished that Reagan had given more attention to her own political problems, and she was not favorably disposed to the United States at the moment, given its floundering approach to the Falklands. Like many, she wondered what policies would give life to Reagan’s grand ideas.3 His speech, widely covered in Europe, received little attention back home.
Gordievsky went to work in the KGB rezidentura, which occupied its own floor of the Soviet embassy in Kensington. A locked, guarded door opened up to a wide expanse, where junior officers had their desks. The head of the rezidentura, Arkady Guk, had his own office, as did a few of the senior officers. The cipher room, which contained communications equipment and safes for highly classified documents, was protected by another lock. There were no windows; the rezidentura was encased in steel to protect it from eavesdropping.4
He first noticed the paranoia. Gordievsky’s superior, Guk, a corpulent vodka drinker given to conspiracies, was an inveterate gossip and saw himself as a rival to the Soviet ambassador, Viktor Popov, whom he accused of being a British agent.5 To keep Moscow placated, Guk insisted that his officers send a stream of reports back, even if they had nothing to say. Gordievsky watched his colleagues send to Moscow rewritten versions of political gossip items they’d find in specialty British newspapers. Guk bragged to Gordievsky about a CND antinuclear march that had shut down central London a few days earlier, taking credit for organizing it. Gordievsky knew it was nonsense.6
The night after his second full day of work, Gordievsky slipped out of the embassy and walked a short while, wondering if anyone was watching him. He dialed a phone number that his handler had given him years ago, in Copenhagen. To his relief and delight, the handler answered. Or—wait—no—it was a voice recording. “Hello Oleg! Welcome to London. Thank you so very much for calling. We look forward to seeing you. Meanwhile, take a few days to relax and settle in. Let’s be in touch at the beginning of July.”7
A week later, Gordievsky followed instructions, and met his new handler, Jack, for the first time. Jack’s real name, Gordievsky later learned, was John Scarlett. The two men bonded. They walked to a safe house nearby, in Bayswater, where the Russian was given the keys to a home that would be his to hideout in if he ever decided that his life was in danger. The initial plan was to meet once a month.8
On Friday, June 26, 1982, George Shultz, an executive at the Bechtel energy company, was in the middle of an important presentation, in London, a few miles away from the KGB residency. His secretary slipped him a note: George Clark from the White House was on the line. Shultz ignored it; he did not know a George Clark. After the meeting, his secretary corrected herself: it was Bill Clark, Reagan’s National Security Advisor. The president wanted to speak confidentially with Shultz.
Shultz surmised it might have something to do with Haig’s resignation, but he was not sure. When, at the American embassy, he got the president on the line, it took all of five minutes for him to accept Reagan’s request.9 Shultz would of course serve his president as Secretary of State. The next day, he and his wife O’Bie flew the Concorde to Washington, where his Diplomatic Security Service detail and official motorcade waited.
Where Clark was aloof to concerns that the economic policy directives were hurting US businesses, Shultz felt them paramount. Since he had done business overseas with Bechtel, he knew how allies felt about being led around by the nose, and wondered why the US had decided to take direct action without cooperating with Europe. Unless these impulses, fed by hardliners on the NSC and elsewhere, were harnessed, negotiations with the Soviets on everything would be hindered. He did not know what Reagan believed about all of this. But 1983 would be critical for NATO; so long as the pipeline dispute remained front of mind, NATO would be “impossible to manage.”10 As Shultz briefed himself by calling world leaders, he learned how desiccated the state of negotiations between the USSR and the US really were. “The Soviets can’t read you,” West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt had said to him. “The superpowers are not in touch with each other’s reality.”
Shultz found a White House preoccupied by who reported to whom, less engaged on core policy questions and more engaged on how they would be carried out and how they would be seen domestically.
Shultz thought back to a speech Reagan had given at Stanford as a candidate; the best way forward would require “time and will to hold off the Soviet military threat long enough for America to regain its resolve . . . to demonstrate how to use freedom and open markets as the organizing principles for political development, and to do so long enough to allow communism’s failures to be fully recognized and play themselves out.”11 Shultz was on board with these principles. He did not think they were sufficient.
In July, the Democrats decided that they would run on the nuclear freeze. In August, a nonbinding resolution urging a nuclear freeze failed by one vote in Congress. The Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, had warned about the “50,000” nuclear weapons in the world, and instead of decelerating the arms race, “the foot is on the accelerator, and it is getting heavier, and heavier.”12 In November, voters in eight states from Oregon to Michigan gave the freeze a thumbs-up in referenda. The economy was the top issue in the election, but supporters of the freeze picked up more than a dozen votes.13 The New York Times called it the “largest single referendum on a single issue in the nation’s history.”14
A few weeks later, a freeze resolution passed the house. Reagan seethed. But the resolution had no teeth to it. Democrats mustered little in the way of opposition to Reagan’s actual defense policies. They gave him almost everything he asked for that year. It was an impressive display of symbolic protest, but ultimately, it was a paper tiger. Plenty in Congress, such as Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts and Senator Mark Hatfield from Oregon, were true believers. They saw parity between the superpowers and a chance to make progress toward peace. Reagan saw a strategic imbalance, the prospect of revenge from frustrated American liberals, and the hidden hand of Brezhnev, and then, when he died, Andropov.15
Officially, the president had a vision that went beyond the freeze movement.16 But if there was to be a peace movement, Reagan wanted to lead it his own way. In Europe, where the Soviet Union had influence (and agents in place), the freeze movement threatened to derail the deployment of the GLCMs and the Pershings. His advisors, looking ahead to the reelection in 1984, worried that it had crystalized concern among some voters about his apocalyptic rhetoric. Fifty-one million American Catholics had gotten a pro-freeze pastoral letter from Catholic bishops before the midterm elections.17 The largest congregations of American Jews and mainline Protestants favored a freeze.
Reagan was frustrated that negotiations with the Soviets had not borne fruit. But he was still trapped by his obligations to the Single Integrated Operational Plan and the pressure to adjust his policy to fit its constraints. One example: if the Soviets knew that the US would have the ability to degrade its first-strike capacity significantly, “we would greatly reduce the nightmare paralyzing our people,” said Arms Control Disarmament Agency chief Eugene Rostow.18 Rostow knew his audience. Reagan himself was paralyzed by fear of a first strike. He was arguing that the best way to reduce the threat to the US would be to increase the threat to the Soviet Union—the old zero-sum logic that Reagan wrestled with. Reagan felt SALT II was flawed because it allowed the Soviets to build up their ICBM force very quickly.
Reagan’s advisors were talking him into endorsing an agreement that would “restore the balance” before agreeing to reductions. By the middle of 1982, Reagan was on track to increase the number of nuclear weapons the United States produced. And Leonid Brezhnev was on his deathbed. The Soviets were nervous and provocative. They held aggressive military exercises in June that included live missile launches. The exercises lasted seven days. The DIA’s conclusion: the Soviets wanted to send the message that they, too, could ride out a nuclear war.19