IT WAS CRISP AND COMFORTABLE on January 1, 1983, and for once, the president could afford to sleep a little late. He was in Rancho Mirage, California, about as far away as he could get from the White House, which suited him just fine. Three years earlier, in Palos Verdes, just a few days before military movers would arrive to take his belongings to Washington, Nancy Reagan noticed that the boxes she gave him were empty. Reagan would not pack. Why, Ronnie? The president-elect teared up and told her: “I don’t want to go.”1 He would spend as much time away from the White House as possible. California was his island away from the world.
The annual New Year’s trip west brought the Reagan presidency to the 200-acre estate in Rancho Mirage, California, that Leonore and Walter Annenberg turned into an amalgam of Shangri-La and Camp David. For twenty years it had been a magnet for men of power and influence, a retreat close to everywhere but in the middle of nowhere. When the Reagans were not in residence, queens, prime ministers, actors, and singers might be. But Annenberg prized the White House visits, even as they transformed his oasis into an armed camp.2
So regularly did the Reagans visit that the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) had set up a permanent node, a secure switch that connected the mansion and one of its outbuildings to a microwave site at March Air Force Base, and by buried wire to a satellite transmission facility in Northern California. It was a wise but expensive precaution: when Richard Nixon first stayed at Sunnyvale more than a decade earlier, the phone company was not able to install a temporary circuit in time. For several hours, Nixon’s WHCA team waited, with crypto gear and coding materials and no lines to connect them to. Had a war broken out, Nixon would have been useless. In 1983, the WHCA setup was more modern. Digital bits generated from wherever the president happened to be would zip up to an orbiting military satellite, and then from there, pulse down to ground facilities about a dozen miles south of the Pentagon. A hardened cable formed the last leg of the link to the National Military Command Center, where an Emergency Actions controller waited at all times to transmit an emergency war order. The military aides who traveled with Reagan had at least two other means to reach the Pentagon in the event that Reagan needed to start, end, or modify a war, although the communications pathways they had set up were more convoluted, involving contingency microwave towers, airborne command posts, and high-frequency networks that the Soviets always monitored. A satellite phone was never more than twenty feet from Reagan. Even when he rode horseback, his military aide would tuck the nuclear decision handbook into a saddlebag.3
On New Year’s Eve, Reagan, wearing a festive red sweater vest, had been entertained along with a hundred other guests by a Rancho Mirage neighbor, Bob Hope. Before a lavish meal, the Reagans danced on a floor made of imported Italian marble and posed for a picture with guests in front of one of the Annenberg’s paintings, a Picasso or a Van Gogh.4 He managed an off-the-record stop at the nearby Marriott, where the White House press corps was camping out. They asked about his golf game. “Three pars that day,” Reagan told them.
The Secret Service was on alert. The CIA had sent along warnings that Libyans might try to kill Reagan in California. (This threat was perennial, if unrealized.) The budget was coming up, and House Democrats had momentum. Someone had leaked an internal analysis forecasting slower growth in 1983, something Reagan felt obligated to deflect with humor.
“We are always trying to be more conservative,” he joked.5 His own staff was prodding him to make decisions against his own wishes on the economy, and to give in to Democratic desires to cut back on defense, but Reagan resisted, growing more impatient as he read about leaks emanating, he was certain, from liberals burrowed in the Treasury Department and budget office. Unemployment rates had begun to fall, and Reagan’s poll numbers had begun to rise again.
“Are you optimistic about a return to arms negotiations?” a reporter had asked him.
“A little,” Reagan had said.
Leonid Brezhnev had died two months earlier. Some in Reagan’s inner circle believed he had been helped to the grave by the KGB, which was eager to install Yuri Andropov into power. At Brezhnev’s funeral, Vice President George H. W. Bush found Andropov, who was shorter in person than he looked on television, willing to talk. As an icebreaker, the former CIA director joked to the former KGB chairman that they shared a background in common.6 (They had both been their respective country’s top spy.) Bush did not pick up on the Soviet paranoia about nuclear decapitation. He did note that Andropov seemed to be in less than optimal health. The CIA reported that Andropov had a heart condition, and perhaps, kidney troubles. But the agency predicted that Andropov “would prove to be a formidable adversary.”7 At his predecessor’s funeral, Andropov had pulled aside Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the president of Pakistan, and threatened to crush him unless he cut off support to the Afghan mujahedeen.8
Any public optimism ended on New Year’s Day, when the Soviet news agency, Tass, published a broadside against the White House, saying that Reagan alone was responsible for the deadlock in arms negotiations, having adopted a policy that “by hook or by crook” would result in a “unilateral weakening” of Soviet defenses. 9
On January 17, 1983, Reagan approved a formal strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. National Security Decision Directive 75 was the product of nearly two years of work by Richard Pipes. Pipes’s initial draft called for economic warfare against the Soviet Union. Reagan stripped those provisions out, wary that the document could leak and confirm Soviet perceptions of US imperialism.10
Pipes found working with Reagan frustrating. He believed the president shared his basic views of the Soviet system, but he found Reagan often unwilling to endorse them in public or follow through on policies that would put them into place. Reagan would always say that he would not reward Soviet intransigence, but he was given to gestural politics that seemed always to give the Soviets a way to save face.
Pipes blamed Nancy Reagan and the more liberal Michael Deaver for keeping Reagan away from his national security counselors. Pipes had little face time with the president. It did not occur to Pipes that a policy of pushing the Soviet Union to the brink of its own self-destruction was not Reagan’s aim. Pipes believed that the mercurial Secretary of State George Shultz was pulling the president too far in the direction of compromise, and that the strong differences of opinion Reagan was subjected to in National Security Council meetings had worn the president out.
Shultz also found Reagan exasperating at times. He had come to see Reagan as a chameleon, often reflecting back the views of the person he had just heard or spent time with. To Shultz, it meant that the process for getting information to the president had a direct effect on what policies the president would endorse.11 At the same time, Shultz appreciated that Reagan had never told him to stop and had never turned down a chance to make an explicit overture to the Soviets. The end game was the same: direct, face-to-face talks. Sometimes, Reagan seemed too impulsive, even too confident in his own abilities just to talk the Soviets down; at other points, he wondered whether there was anyone over there who would listen. Shultz understood the outcome Reagan wanted and pledged to make sure that when Reagan did talk, the atmosphere would reflect the strengths that Reagan brought to them.
At the end of the month, Reagan made a dramatic proposal to sit down with Andropov, wherever and whenever, to sign an agreement to get rid of all intermediate-range nuclear missiles. That meant the Soviet SS-20s and all the Pershings and GLCMs. Zero-zero was still the policy, so in inviting Andropov “to sign something he rejected,” the Washington Post noted, Reagan was making a play for public opinion in Europe.12
Andropov refused the invitation. The US, he grumbled, barely concealed that its weapons were no longer used for deterrence but were in fact “realistically designed for a future war.”13 From the East German’s spies in NATO, he was swimming in assessments showing how, even without the Pershings and GLCMs, even with the Warsaw Pact’s bigger army, the West, through technology and gamesmanship, had altered the balance of forces there. He was worried about news from Britain, which had decided to upgrade its four Polaris submarines with new Trident II missiles. France’s eighteen land-based missiles were in the middle of getting MIRVed—their destructive power would quadruple.14 Furthermore, Andropov was developing a style of leadership that alienated the military, which had been used to coercing Brezhnev into making decisions. Andropov liked to be left alone. He did not spend New Year’s with Gromyko or Ustinov, as was his custom before he became the head of state. The old spymaster wanted to see every paper, every intelligence report. He delegated nothing.15
After Shultz returned to a snowy Washington from a well-received trip to China in early February, Reagan tried again to open a line of communication with the Soviet Union. He wanted to talk. He wanted to know if he, too, could make a trip like that, but to Moscow. Shultz thought for a moment and then told Reagan that, while plausible, even the possibility of a summit would have to be explored gingerly.
Every time he had brought it up before, Reagan replied, somewhat piqued, his own national security cabinet would shut down the idea. (He allowed that he had not helped matters by allowing himself to indulge in rhetoric that was so archly anti-Soviet.)16
Shultz said he would shop the idea around and promised to bring Reagan back a plan. He took a few days and then circulated a memo through the National Security Council listing four ideas for direct engagement. The feedback was entirely negative.17 He found that Reagan “was much more willing to move forward . . . than I had earlier believed.” And Reagan was the boss.
Shultz had plans to meet a few days later with the long-serving Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. Reagan should drop by the meeting, Shultz suggested, and open a personal connection with a man who had Andropov’s ear. Knowing that Reagan’s aides would go ballistic if they found out, he kept the meeting secret until hours beforehand, when he informed Clark, who was angry, and Deaver, who was ecstatic.18 Shultz knew well that back channels that went around cabinet agencies were out of fashion, but here, the ends justified the means.
Sneaking the Soviet ambassador into the East Wing would not produce anything like a breakthrough, and was likely to confuse Reagan, Clark thought.19 Shultz was aware that a number of Reagan’s staff forthrightly believed that their boss would be steamrolled in any discussions with the Soviet Union and wanted to keep him at a remove from actual discourse solely for his own protection, a notion Shultz found offensive. He knew that Reagan had special requirements, just like other political principals, but if he was well-briefed and well-stewarded, he was confident that Reagan could function quite well in the room.20
Even Dobrynin did not know of Reagan’s plans in advance. He and Shultz had been meeting, in private, in a conference room off Shultz’s offices in the State Department, for several months. Reagan was lightly aware of these contacts. Judge Clark was initially kept out of the loop, until Weinberger had mentioned them in a late December cabinet meeting. The Defense Department read into the meetings the intrigue that Shultz and Dobrynin were conspiring against them, working to bring an approach for enhanced diplomacy to Reagan. Clark again saw the hands of Deaver and Nancy Reagan, both of whom were getting worried about the 1984 election and knew that Reagan had to be seen to at least try to settle down the world.21
Dobrynin had met Shultz less than a year earlier. Initially, the discussions were light and feathery. The two men felt each other out. The Soviet ambassador was not impressed with the former Marine, who did not have a firm grasp on his own administration’s arms control policies and did not seem equipped with the nerve to fight against the heavyweights who were always pushing Reagan further away from the table. By early 1983, Dobrynin had come to respect Shultz more, but the American was still a “functionary,” a technocrat, who was too “deliberate” and unwilling to push his boss. If America was going to engage with the Soviets on a deeper level, the impetus would not come from Shultz or anyone else; it would have to come from the president.22
On February 15, over coffee in a private study on the second floor of the White House residence, Reagan took Dobrynin’s measure. Dobrynin, then sixty-three, was a large man, with a prominent, shiny forehead that made his facial features seem smaller. His hair was white, betraying the decades of labor that his ambassadorial charm covered well. He listened with widened eyes, betraying nothing. New acquaintances mistook his meditative calm and slow head nods for agreement.
Reagan was direct. He wanted to establish a confidential channel to convey important messages to Andropov, a channel that would function as a valve to release built-up tension. The president said he was mystified that the Soviets assumed that he was a “crazy warmonger.”
“But I don’t want war between us. That would bring countless disasters,” he said. Do you—meaning Soviet leaders—really believe this about me? Twice Reagan asked this question of Dobrynin.
When the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and a much more prosperous economy after World War II, nuclear war with the Soviet Union was unthinkable; so why would the Soviets believe that the US would want to strike now?23
Surely, the American people don’t want war, and neither do the Soviets, Dobrynin replied. How would Reagan feel if he were a Soviet leader and had to contend with a huge rearmament, the expansion of the opposing country’s military across the globe, defense spending, and nuclear modernization? “Let me put it bluntly,” he said. “We regard the rearmament program now in the United States under way amidst political tension between the two countries as a real threat to our country’s security.”
Reagan replied that the United States believed that communist ideology was the main threat. He described to Dobrynin the way he saw the Russian system: “It was self-justifying and saw itself as the only viable way. Countries that adopted it would survive; others wouldn’t. The US didn’t have a legitimate future because it would never embrace the inexorable march toward Marxist-Leninism. The Soviets, meanwhile, could legitimate any military action in any country they wanted, because their view of history was linear and deterministic,” he wrote.
The Americans, Reagan said, “believe in our future, and we will fight for it.”
To the Russian, the American president seemed well briefed, but not well informed. When Dobrynin took his opportunity to lay out in detail the Soviet position on intermediate nuclear forces, Reagan responded with a sound-bite answer about the threat to NATO countries from Soviet missiles in Europe.
“So, let the delegations keep working,” Reagan said.
Dobrynin recalls quoting Yuri Andropov in response: “More deeds, less words.” He told Reagan that it would be easier for him as a “newcomer, one who is not burdened with the load of the past, to make a first step, even if it is a symbolic one.”
Reagan had just such a gesture in mind.
A number of American Pentecostal Christians had been holed up in the basement of the American embassy in Moscow for six years, unable to leave because of Soviet exit restrictions. For years, Reagan had followed their plight, five members of one family, two members of another. In March 1979, when the eighth member of their group found that his own visa was denied, he threatened to detonate a bomb. Soviet security forces killed him. Reagan found inspiration in his story. The Pentecostals, who belonged to the largest religious group in the Soviet Union, had braved a freezing winter to make their way from Siberia to Moscow to plead for their exit visas to the United States. “Détente is supposed to be a two-way street,” he said. “Our wheat and technology can get into Russia, so why can’t the Vashchenko and Chernogorsk families get out?”24
Even though their situation was trivial in the grand scheme of nuclear diplomacy, its resolution would be meaningful to the American public, if not merely to Reagan, the second consecutive evangelical American president. “If you can do something about the Pentecostals or another human rights issue,” the president told Dobrynin, “we will simply be delighted and will not embarrass you by undue publicity, by claims of credit for ourselves, or by crowing.”25 Make this accommodation in the name of decency, Reagan was saying, and we’ll give you the credit. Dobrynin promised to take the proposal to Moscow.
At the time, though, it was not clear whether anyone was around to receive the message. Less than six months into his tenure as General Secretary, Yuri Andropov had fallen ill. His absence at two Politburo meetings in March was noticed worldwide. The CIA started another Soviet leader deathwatch.26 The agency had one good source—a friend of a nurse who worked in the clinic that treated Soviet leaders. His kidneys were failing.27 Kremlinologists kept busy. While Andropov was recuperating, Gromyko, the Foreign Minister, got promoted to a new political post. His main rival, Konstantin Chernenko, a favorite of Brezhnev, was maneuvering for power. But then he disappeared, too, apparently suffering from pneumonia. To the intelligence community, the domestic instability and secrecy left basic questions unanswered: who made decisions about war and peace? Who controlled the nuclear weapons? Was the military orchestrating it all from behind the curtain?28
On February 27, Margaret Thatcher traveled the short distance from 10 Downing Street to give a talk to her party’s youth leadership—the Young Conservatives. Entering the ballroom at the Highcliff Hotel, she was introduced to a number of visitors from the diplomatic core. One of the first hands she grasped belonged to a man with close cropped blond hair and a thin smile—Oleg Gordievsky.29
Thatcher knew that Gordievsky was a KGB officer serving under official cover. She did not know, for certain, that he was her most valuable source of intelligence on the Soviet Union. She had been kept in the dark by choice, even though she was an avid consumer of spy novels and curious about the techniques used by Her Majesty’s secret services.30 There might have been a glint of recognition in her eye, perhaps an inchoate sense that Gordievsky was the one; after all, she had read hundreds of pages of transcripts taken from his tape-recorded sessions. She was one of the few to see his reporting in the raw. It would come to her in the form of transcripts slid into red-jacketed folders. Her red box was for regular secret intelligence. The red jackets full of Gordievsky’s information were kept in a special blue briefcase.
Gordievsky’s reporting instilled in Thatcher a confidence in her dealings with the United States and the Soviet Union. She knew the Soviet leadership trigger points, because Gordievsky had provided a detailed map of them. Her advisors, who read tear-lined reporting that took out the clues identifying Gordievsky as a member of the KGB rezidentura, were skeptical, but Thatcher, from the beginning, had faith that the essence of Gordievsky’s take was true: Moscow was afraid of a decapitation attack. It truly was a caged bear.31
The day Thatcher met Gordievsky, though, she held nothing in reserve. Domestic political pressures trumped, for the moment, concerns about a gathering storm.
Thatcher’s relationship with Reagan at that point was ambiguous and occasionally tense. She needed the US to keep a low profile. Like the American public, the British people seemed to be of two minds: they would vote for leaders who promised to take the fight to the Soviet Union, but they would send messages insisting that their leaders support a peace movement, supporting disarmament in the polls, protesting by the hundreds of thousands, reviving the nascent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Half the public feared nuclear war. Seventy percent of Brits blamed US policies for bringing it closer.32
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a formidable political enemy. Its public narrative portrayed Thatcher as a sycophant of Reagan’s; one CND poster had them “embracing like Rhett and Scarlett” in Gone with the Wind.33
Thatcher’s government had agreed to buy new Trident II D-5 missiles from the United States in 1982 and fit them aboard the Polaris submarines that served as the UK’s nuclear deterrent. That arrangement was not popular. But her leadership in the Falklands War gave her political cover. The upcoming deployments of the GLCMs threatened to upset this favorable balance, especially if the Labour Party’s strong antinuclear stance served as an acceptable outlet for their fears.34
So, her speech that day tried to buck up Young Conservatives in terms that the British people would find acceptable and did so by using historical analogies that shocked liberal sensibilities. She compared the threat posed by the Soviet Union to the existential destruction that Hitler’s Germany had wrought about the UK. “If, in the nineteen-thirties, the Allies had been faced by Nazi SS-20s and Backfire bombers, would it then have been morally right to have handed to Hitler total control of the most terrible weapons which man has ever made?”35
“The so-called balance of terror keeps the peace,” Thatcher said. “The deterrent has worked—it would be madness to throw it away.”36
“Many of the one-sided disarmers, don’t face up to the logic of their case,” she thundered. “They don’t suggest that America should give up its bomb. They don’t think that’s realistic. They suggest instead that Britain should make an individual moral gesture. They want us to disengage from what they call the confrontation of the superpowers and set a moral example.”
“Mind you, it’s an odd kind of morality which allows you to renounce your own nuclear weapons, secure in the belief that you are protected by someone else’s. Evidently the nuclear bomb is too horrific for the British to own, but not too horrific for the Americans to protect us with. So long as they do it from their soil and not from ours. We are to be protected by our allies, but contribute nothing toward that protection. That, a moral gesture? ‘Some morality—some gesture.’ Some alliance—some friendship.”
A Reagan aide thought it was the toughest speech against the Soviets that Thatcher ever made. Shultz, for one, believed it was the strongest argument against a nuclear freeze that he ever heard.37
Gordievsky might have appreciated the moral case, but he no doubt felt discomfort. Comparing the Soviets to Hitler was not the way to reduce the tensions he knew were real.
Gordievsky was spending long hours at the residency. The KGB had just updated its list of intelligence requirements to detect NATO preparations for a first nuclear strike, sending a long list of wants and asking the resident, Arkady Guk, to respond by the end of March with a detailed plan to collect them.38 The deliverables were due in November, before NATO went ahead with the Pershing deployments. The warheads on those missiles could reach Moscow within five minutes, or so the Soviets believed, and the KGB had to have a plan in place to detect the secret preparations that might go into a bolt-from-the-blue attack.
The USSR knew that every American ICBM could be launched within ten minutes of a presidential decision; 70 percent of all US Navy nuclear missiles were on permanent war footing, as were 30 percent of American bombers. These forces did not need to prepare for war. But NATO was different. NATO had to reach a consensus before deciding to use nuclear weapons. Countries would have to agree on an attack. That meant that dozens, if not hundreds, of potential agents would know at least a week in advance about the hour of execution.39
According to the new RYAN project’s dictates, Guk’s thirteen officers had to:
• collect data on where government officials would be taken during a nuclear emergency;
• identify the location of major fallout shelters;
• monitor blood banks to see whether prices paid per pint were rising—a sign (to the KGB) that the UK might be preparing for mass burn casualties;
• keep key government officials under constant surveillance;
• recruit new agents in NATO who would steal war plans for them;
• map the pre-crisis communication system that the British leadership would use in the days leading up to a sudden war;
• identify and target technical personnel who would have to be read in to secret nuclear war plans;
• determine whether churches and banks would be notified in advance, too.
Gordievsky found these micro-assignments absurd. Guk assigned most junior officers in the residency the task of monitoring the movements of every senior British official and had to borrow a colleague’s car to begin the assignment.40
Every bit of information, no matter how trivial, would be passed on to Moscow, feeding the RYAN computer. “We would report that a new motorway was about to be built, leading from such a place in Bristol to some other place, connecting two ports, places in the sea. And obviously it has a very high strategic significance. To Moscow, it could be one of many first signs for the preparation of a sudden nuclear attack,” Gordievsky would recall.
He passed the RYAN requirements memo to SIS’s John Scarlett. The SIS updated the CIA in their weekly meeting, though they refused to give the Americans a copy of the document. Protecting Gordievsky was paramount, even if it meant the intelligence the CIA would see was watered down.
At Langley, the CIA’s Robert Gates remembers, the early reports given to them by the British about this perfidious Soviet project called RYAN, were anodyne. They were just the lists of war warning requirements. The US had similar lists, too.41 “No one really paid much attention,” he said.