The Dead Hand

————— 8 ————— “WE CAN’T GO ON LIVING LIKE THIS”

Five weeks after Reagan was reelected, Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, were driven from London through rolling English farmland to Chequers, the elegant official country residence of the British prime minister. Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Denis, greeted the Gorbachevs just before lunch on Sunday, December 16, 1984. It was a highly unusual gesture for a Soviet official to take his wife abroad. Gorbachev had asked Chernenko’s approval before doing so. On their arrival, Thatcher noticed Raisa had chosen a well-tailored, Western-style suit, gray with a white stripe, “just the sort I could have worn myself.” After posing at the entrance for the press photographers, with Gorbachev standing at the far left of the group next to Raisa, Thatcher very conspicuously repositioned the group so she would be standing next to Gorbachev. Then she extended a welcoming handshake.¹

For more than a year, Thatcher had been searching for clues to the next generation of Soviet leaders. Thatcher was intrigued about whether the dour older generation would give way to a new, younger field. She had enormous faith in the power of the individual, and believed that in a dictatorship that repressed individual initiative, some could still make a difference, as had dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and others. Thatcher wondered if one person at the very top could change the Soviet system from within. In her memoir, she recalled that she was determined to “seek out the most likely person in the rising generation of Soviet leaders and then cultivate and sustain him.” Her foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, said Thatcher carried out a “deliberate campaign to get inside the system.”² Thatcher remembered what Professor Archie Brown had told her at the Chequers seminar: Gorbachev was the most open and promising man in the leadership. She invited Brown to come back to No. 10 Downing Street on December 14, just before Gorbachev’s visit, to brief her again.³

“I spotted him,” Thatcher said of Gorbachev, “because I was searching for someone like him.”

In the KGB residency in London, Oleg Gordievsky worked hard for weeks in advance of Gorbachev’s arrival. So many demands poured in from headquarters in Moscow! Gordievsky realized the KGB chiefs saw Gorbachev as a rising star and wanted to demonstrate they were behind him. “The KGB was backing him because he was a new man, a man for the future, an honest man who would fight corruption and all the other negative features of Soviet society,” Gordievsky recalled. Moscow bombarded the London residency with requests for material that could be useful for the visit: about arms control, NATO, the economy, Britain’s relations with the United States, China and Eastern Europe. Although he had never met Gorbachev, Gordievsky sensed a voracious appetite for new information. “He wanted to be brilliant, know all about Britain, and make an impression, and then come to Moscow and show everybody that after Chernenko he was the best candidate,” Gordievsky said.⁴

Gordievsky was not only writing reports for Moscow, but also feeding information to his British handlers. They, too, were intensely interested in Gorbachev, the rising star. Gordievsky gave the British valuable early warning about what Gorbachev would ask and what he would say. At the same time, Gordievsky passed back to Moscow the materials he was given by the British. Gordievsky was a channel for both sides at a critical moment in history. He was almost perfect for Thatcher’s mission. The British knew what their agent was doing, but the Soviets did not.

The days of Gorbachev’s visit were frantic for Gordievsky. “Every evening we were under pressure to produce a forecast of the line the next day’s meetings would take, and this of course was impossible to discover from normal channels. I therefore went to the British and asked urgently for help: could they give me an idea of the subjects Mrs. Thatcher would raise? They produced a few possibilities, from which I managed to concoct a useful-looking memorandum; but the next day’s meeting was much more fruitful. When I asked for a steer on Geoffrey Howe, they let me see the brief which the foreign secretary would be using in his talks with Mr. Gorbachev. My English was still poor, and my ignorance was compounded by nervousness and lack of time, so that I had to concentrate hard to remember all the points.”

“Back at the station, full of excitement at my little coup, I sat down at a typewriter… and hacked out a rough draft, allegedly based on my general sources and what I had gleaned from newspapers,” Gordievsky said. He was momentarily deflated when it was rewritten by another KGB man into something much less precise. He appealed to the acting chief, Leonid Nikitenko, who saw Gordievsky’s version and sent it direct to Gorbachev, “verbatim.”

After stepping into the mansion at Chequers, Gorbachev spoke to Thatcher over drinks in the Great Hall. He had risen to become Soviet agriculture chief, and inquired about farms he’d seen on the drive from London. The lunch table was set with Dover sole, roast beef and oranges, but they hardly touched the food. Gorbachev and Thatcher immediately fell into a vigorous debate. Gorbachev claimed the Soviet Union was reforming its economy. Thatcher, skeptical, lectured him about free enterprise and incentives. Gorbachev shot back that the Soviet system was superior to capitalism, and, according to Thatcher’s account, he declared that the Soviet people lived “joyfully.” Thatcher pointedly asked: then why are so many denied permission to leave? Gorbachev replied these people were working on national security matters. Thatcher didn’t believe it.

When they got up and left the dining room, Raisa went with Denis to look at the Chequers library, where she took down a copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Malcolm Rifkind, who accompanied her to the library, recalled she discussed her favorite contemporary British novelists, including Graham Greene, W. Somerset Maugham and C. P. Snow.⁵

In the main sitting room, Thatcher and Gorbachev got down to business. Thatcher recalled that the content of Gorbachev’s remarks was unsurprising. What grabbed her attention was the refreshingly open style. “His personality could not have been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet apparatchik,” she said. “He smiled, laughed, used his hands for emphasis, modulated his voice, followed an argument through and was a sharp debater.” They talked for hours. Gorbachev did not consult prepared papers—he referred only to a small notebook of jottings, handwritten in green ink. “As the day wore on,” she added, “I came to understand that it was the style far more than the Marxist rhetoric which expressed the substance of the personality beneath. I found myself liking him.”

Gorbachev was well prepared. He quoted Lord Palmerston’s famous dictum that Britain had no permanent allies or enemies, only permanent interests. “This was remarkable most of all for the precisely effective way it was deployed—and by this ‘non-expert’ in foreign policy,” said Howe, who attended. He quoted Gorbachev as adding, “It is up to us to identify the interests we have in common.”⁶ Thatcher steered Gorbachev toward the topic of the arms race. After a year of impasse, the negotiations were to reopen in Geneva in three weeks, the first since the Soviets had walked out during the 1983 war scare.

At this moment, Gorbachev reached into his suit pocket. He unfolded a diagram he had brought with him, the size of a newspaper page. The page was filled with 165 boxes containing five thousand small dots, except for the center box, which had only one. The single dot in the center represented the explosive power of 3 million tons of bombs dropped by the Allies during the six years of World War II. The other dots represented the 15 billion tons of explosive power in the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals.

Gorbachev’s diagram, which had been published in the New York Times as an advertisement by antinuclear businessmen the previous February, might have been dismissed as a piece of agitprop, a gimmick.⁷What was significant was not so much the dots and squares on the page, but the obvious enthusiasm of the man who was using it to make his point. Gorbachev was knowledgeable, unhesitating and demonstrative.

In Moscow, Gorbachev at this point had participated in the high-level internal discussions of military and foreign policy issues, such as the war in Afghanistan, the deployment of the Pioneer missiles, the shooting down of KAL 007 and the strategic arms negotiations. But little was known outside the Soviet Union of his views. He had never spoken out so openly on disarmament and foreign affairs as he began to do in Britain. Throughout the visit, he called attention to the dangers of nuclear war and emphasized Soviet fears of an arms race in space. He promised “radical reductions” in nuclear weapons and signaled that the Soviets were serious about returning to the Geneva talks. He confidently parried criticism about human rights and Afghanistan. In substance, Gorbachev did not change Soviet policy, and in the meeting with Thatcher, he went out of his way to cite Chernenko as the source of his authority.⁸ But his style spoke volumes. He seemed to promise a more flexible approach, a sharp contrast with the rigidity of the past.

Gorbachev felt the conversation with Thatcher was a personal turning point.⁹ He recalled vividly the diagram he presented at Chequers. He said he told Thatcher that all the weapons in one box on that page would “suffice to blow up the foundation of life on Earth. And it turns out that it can be done another 999 times—and what’s after that? What, blow it up one million times? That is absurd. We were possessed by the absurd.”

“It had been accumulated already, stored already—including inside of me—that something needed to be done,” he said of the threat of nuclear war. “To describe it in one word, or one sentence: that something needs to be done.” But Gorbachev acknowledged it was difficult for him, back then, to imagine what that would be. Even as he unfolded the paper with all the squares and dots in front of Thatcher, he had no idea how to reduce the nuclear arsenals. He wondered, “How could all of it be stopped?”

Thatcher wasn’t impressed with the Gorbachev diagram, but remembered he carried off the presentation with “a touch of theatre.” Gorbachev also warned of the dangers of a “nuclear winter” that would follow a war with atomic bombs.¹⁰ But Thatcher said, “I was not much moved by all this.” She responded with a heartfelt lecture on the virtues of nuclear deterrence: the weapons, she said, had kept the peace. This was one of her core beliefs. Thatcher was “eloquent and emotional,” Gorbachev remembered.

Thatcher also knew Gorbachev might give her a message for Reagan. She listened closely when he spoke about Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Privately, Thatcher had little confidence in Reagan’s dream of making nuclear weapons obsolete, but kept her counsel. What caught her ear at Chequers was the urgency in Gorbachev’s voice. The Soviets, she concluded, “wanted it stopped at almost any price.” She told Gorbachev there was no way Britain would be split from the United States. Gorbachev was supposed to leave at 4:30 P.M., but remained until 5:50 P.M. As his car pulled away, Thatcher recalled, “I hoped that I had been talking to the next Soviet leader.”

Officially, Gorbachev came to London as head of a Supreme Soviet delegation, but his reception and performance were anything but low-key. He charmed his hosts and captured the imagination of Britain. Television had never looked kindly on any Soviet leader, but Gorbachev thrived on the attention. “Red Star is born,” the Daily Mail said of Raisa. The Gorbachevs stopped in the cavernous reading room of the British Museum to see the place where Karl Marx had written Das Kapital, and they toured Westminster Abbey, seeing the graves of medieval kings, memorials to national poets, taking interest in the stained glass windows and the architecture.

On Monday, Thatcher gave an interview to the BBC. In her first answer to a question, she declared:

“I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.”¹¹

Gorbachev’s visit was interrupted by news of the sudden death in Moscow of Dmitri Ustinov, the defense minister. Gorbachev flew home. Without Ustinov, there would be a new leadership vacuum. Chernenko was so ill he could not attend Ustinov’s funeral, and Gorbachev faced still more uncertainty in the Kremlin. “The leadership of the country was in a deplorable state,” he said.

Thatcher visited Reagan at Camp David on December 22, 1984. In preparation for the visit, the president had in his pocket seven note cards of talking points. The second card said, “Understand Gorbachev was impressive.” And, “What are your impressions?”¹² Thatcher delivered a detailed report on the lunch at Chequers: human rights, economics, arms control. Thatcher said Gorbachev was more charming and more open to discussion and debate than his predecessors. She recounted how Gorbachev had zeroed in on the Strategic Defense Initiative. In response, Reagan opened up with a fulsome description of his great dream as both a technological quest and a moral imperative, with an ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons. It was the first time Thatcher had heard Reagan talk about it directly, and she later confessed she was “horrified.” But she listened.

She also relayed to Reagan what Gorbachev had said to her: “Tell your friend President Reagan not to go ahead with space weapons.”¹³

To understand the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, who, with Reagan, would change the world in the years ahead, we must first reach back a half century into the tumultuous events that confronted his people and his country, from Stalin’s terror and the unimaginable losses of World War II, through the hardships, thaws, triumphs and stagnation of the postwar years. All of these directly touched Gorbachev. In his early life, there are few clues he would later become a catalyst of immense change. He was a child of the Soviet system, hardly a radical. But one thread is visible through it all. Gorbachev, over a long period of time, saw a reality that was strikingly different from the artificial world portrayed by the party and the leadership. As he rose through the ranks, he accumulated insights and revelations about the huge chasm between how people actually lived and the stuffy slogans of those who ruled. Raisa, too, grasped the depth of this chasm, and reinforced Gorbachev’s determination to change it.

Gorbachev’s doubts were sown incrementally, over a generation, and for many years kept to himself. His first reaction to a disappointment or failure was always to strive to improve the system. He was never in a frame of mind to tear it down. By the time he became Soviet leader, he had fully absorbed the abysmal reality, but had limited understanding of how to fix it. His greatest skill was in political maneuvering to achieve his goals. He tried to rescue the system by unleashing forces of openness and political pluralism, hoping that these would heal the other maladies. They could not.

Gorbachev’s achievements in ending the Cold War—braking what he called the speeding locomotive of the nuclear arms race, allowing a revolution in Europe to unfold peacefully, ending the confrontation in the Third World—were not his first objectives. They grew out of his desire for radical change at home, rooted in his experience as a peasant son, a young witness to war, a university student during the thaw, a party official in the stagnation years and, most importantly, out of his own deep impressions about what had gone wrong.

Gorbachev did not set out to change the world, but rather to save his country. In the end, he did not save the country but may have saved the world.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born March 2, 1931, in the small village of Privolnoye, in the black earth region of Stavropol in southern Russia. His parents, Sergei and Maria, worked the land; life in his village was little changed over centuries. From childhood, Gorbachev remembered “adobe huts with an earthen floor, and no beds at all”—people slept near the oven for warmth.¹⁴ Gorbachev spent much of his childhood as the favorite of his mother’s parents; he often lived with them. They kept books of Marx, Engels and Lenin on a shelf, but also a Russian Orthodox religious icon. His maternal grandfather, Pantelei, was remembered by Gorbachev as a tolerant man, and immensely respected in the village. In those years, Gorbachev was the only son; a brother was born after the war, when he was seventeen years old. He seems to have had a happy childhood. “I enjoyed absolute freedom,” he recalled. “My grandparents made me feel like the most important member of the family.”

The country was soon plunged into suffering and tragedy. Famine struck the Stavropol region in 1933, when Gorbachev was just two years old. Stalin had launched the mass collectivization of agriculture, a brutal process of forcing the peasants into collective farms and punishing those known as kulaks, who were somewhat better off. A third to half of the population of Privolnoye died of hunger. “Entire families were dying, and the half-ruined ownerless huts would remain deserted for years,” Gorbachev remembered. Stalin’s purges took millions of lives among the peasantry in the 1930s.

Gorbachev’s family was touched by the purges, too. His grandfather on his father’s side, Andrei, rejected collectivization and tried to make it on his own. In the spring of 1934, Andrei was arrested and accused of failing to fulfill the sowing plan set by the government for individual peasants. “But no seeds were available to fulfill the plan,” Gorbachev recalled of the absurdity of the charge. Andrei was declared a “saboteur” and sent to a prison camp for two years, but released early, in 1935. On his return, he became a leader of the collective farm.

Two years later, grandfather Pantelei was also arrested. The charges were similarly absurd, that he had been a member of a counterrevolutionary organization and sabotaged the collective farm’s work. The arrest was “my first real trauma,” Gorbachev recalled. “They took him away in the middle of the night.” His grandfather was treated badly. Pantelei was finally released one winter evening in 1938, and returned to Privolnoye. Sitting at a hand-planed rustic table, he told the family how he had been beaten and tortured. Pantelei said he was convinced that Stalin did not know of the misdeeds of the secret police, and he did not blame the Soviet regime for his misfortunes. Pantelei never discussed it again. Gorbachev was only seven years old at the time, but later said the events left a deep, lasting impression on him. He held the secret of Pantelei’s ordeal privately, and only discussed it in the open a half century later.

By the late 1930s, both grandfathers were back at home, and village life seemed to be on an upswing. The families spent Sunday picnics in the woods. Then, on one of these Sundays, June 22, 1941, came terrifying news. A radio announced: the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s father was soon off to the front. He bought his ten-year-old son an ice cream, and a balalaika for a keepsake. Women, children and old men sobbed as the soldiers left. A massive snowfall that first winter put Privolnoye into deep isolation. There were no radios and newspapers seldom arrived. Gorbachev remembered that he “skipped from childhood directly into adulthood.” In the summer of 1942, the village fell under German occupation for four and a half months. The war devastated the countryside; they had no seed, no machines, no cattle. Famine spread in the winter and spring of 1944. The family was saved when Gorbachev’s mother, then thirty-three years old, sold his father’s last belongings, two pairs of boots and a suit, in a neighboring town for a 109-pound sack of corn.

In the summer of 1944, the family received a letter from the front. It contained family photographs and an announcement that Sergei Gorbachev had been killed in battle in the Carpathians. “The family cried for three days,” Gorbachev recalled. Then another letter came from his father saying he was alive. Both letters were dated August 27, 1944. Four days later, yet another letter—Sergei was indeed alive! How did it happen? His father later told Gorbachev that after an ambush, his unit had found his bag alone. He was missing and assumed dead. They sent the first letter to the family. Only days later did they discover him alive, but seriously wounded. Sergei told his son this confusion was typical of the chaos of war. “I have remembered this all my life,” Gorbachev later wrote.

In the early spring of 1943, Gorbachev was with other children, roaming the countryside, when they came to a remote stretch of forest between Privolnoye and a neighboring village. “There we stumbled upon the remains of Red Army soldiers, who had fought their last battle there in summer 1942. It was an unspeakable horror: decaying corpses, partly devoured by animals, skulls in rusted helmets, bleached bones, rifles protruding from the sleeves of rotting jackets. There was a light machine gun, some hand grenades, heaps of empty cartridges. There they lay, in the thick mud of the trenches and craters, unburied, staring at us out of black, gaping eye-sockets. We came home in a state of shock.”

Gorbachev was fourteen years old when the war ended. “Our generation is the generation of wartime children,” he said. “It has burned us, leaving its mark both on our characters and on our view of the world.”

After the war, Gorbachev worked in the fields each summer, “back-breaking labor twenty hours a day.” In high school, he was a good student and threw himself into the drama club and sports. School records showed Gorbachev had received top grades in Russian literature, trigonometry, history of the Soviet Union, the Soviet constitution, astronomy. He graduated in 1950 with a silver medal.¹⁵ For those long summers in the fields, he had also won an award, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. This was a rare award for a schoolboy and most certainly helped Gorbachev win a place at Moscow State University, the most prestigious in the country, in the law department.¹⁶

Arriving in the capital in September 1950, at nineteen years old, the peasant boy was disoriented for the first few months in the bustling metropolis. Freshmen students lived twenty-two to a dorm room; for a few kopeks they could buy tea in the cafeteria, with unlimited free bread on the tables.

Gorbachev joined the Communist Party in 1952. To be a Communist then was to be a Stalinist. The first two years of his university life coincided with Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign, aimed at Jewish scholars and writers. This was an eye-opener for Gorbachev. He recalled that one morning, a friend, a Jew, had been confronted by a shouting, taunting mob and then crudely shoved off a tram. “I was shocked.”

By his own account, Gorbachev was taken with Soviet ideology, like many of his generation. “Communist ideology was very attractive for young people then,” he recalled. “The front-line soldiers came back from the war, most of them young people, filled with the pride of victory.” The younger generation hoped that war, famine and the Great Terror were things of the past, and believed they were building a new society of social justice and people power.¹⁷

Stalin was part of this fabric of belief. Stalin’s “Short Course” of the history of the party was held up to students as “a model of scientific thought,” Gorbachev recalled.¹⁸ The students “took many of the professed theses for granted, sincerely convinced of their truth.” Gorbachev was a leader of the Communist Youth League, known as the Komsomol. In high school he had written a final exam paper in which the title was borrowed from a song, “Stalin—our combat glory.”

But Gorbachev also was restive, and twice caused a stir by mildly speaking out against authority at the university. Once he wrote an anonymous note to a lecturer who mechanically droned on by reading Stalin’s work verbatim to the class. This was disrespectful to the students, Gorbachev said, since they had already read the book. Gorbachev admitted to writing the note, which touched off an investigation, but no action was taken.

When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, Gorbachev joined the huge mourning crowds in Moscow’s streets. He was “deeply and sincerely moved by Stalin’s death.” But in the years that followed, Gorbachev came to see Stalin differently. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress denouncing Stalin’s personality cult and use of violence and persecution. Only after the speech, Gorbachev recalled, “did I begin to understand the inner connection between what had happened in our country and what had happened to my family.” His grandfather Pantelei had said that Stalin didn’t know of his torture. But maybe Stalin was the one responsible for the family’s pain.

“The document containing Khrushchev’s denunciations circulated briefly within the party, and then it was withdrawn. But I managed to get my hands on it. I was shocked, bewildered and lost. It wasn’t an analysis, just facts, deadly facts. Many of us simply could not believe that such things could be true. For me it was easier. My family had itself been one of the victims of the repression of the 1930s.”¹⁹ Gorbachev later frequently called Khrushchev’s speech “courageous.” It was not a total break with the past, but it was a break nonetheless. He felt once again as if illusions about the system were falling away. Gorbachev saw this as a reason to be hopeful, but he was also aware that many people, especially those in an older generation, were skeptical and downright confused. Not everything was clear for Gorbachev, either. How could everything they had believed in be wrong?

While at the university, Gorbachev met and married Raisa Titorenko, a bright philosophy student. In the two years after Stalin’s death, Moscow began to open up to new ideas, often expressed in literature. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw, a title that came to define the era, was published in 1954. Gorbachev met a young Czech student at the university, Zdeněk Mlynáář, who became Gorbachev’s best friend in those years, and they enjoyed stormy debates late into the night in their dormitory room. The university experience began to open Gorbachev’s eyes, but at the same time, “for me and others of my generation the question of changing the system in which we lived did not arise.”

Upon graduation in the summer of 1955, Gorbachev returned to Stavropol, where he found new evidence of the gap between rhetoric and reality. Many saw this but did nothing; what was different about Gorbachev was his capacity to be shocked by it. During his university days he held a summer job in a local procuracy in Stavropol, but was appalled by the arrogant behavior of the apparatchiks.²⁰ In a letter to Raisa written then, he described them as “disgusting.” He added, “Especially the manner of life of the local bosses. The acceptance of convention, subordination, with everything predetermined, the open impudence of officials and the arrogance. When you look at one of the local leaders you see nothing outstanding apart from his belly.”

Gorbachev decided on a career with the Komsomol, the party’s youth division, as deputy head of the “agitation and propaganda department.” This was a conformist career path. Gorbachev threw himself into the work, honing his speaking skills, often making trips around the region to exhort young people to believe in the party.²¹ The job brought him face-to-face with the bleakness of daily life, especially in the backwater rural corners of the Soviet Union. On one trip, he went to the most remote cattle farm in the region. After hiking through thick mud, Gorbachev arrived at a village of low, smoke-belching huts and blackened fences along the River Gorkaya Balka, and was shocked at what lay before him: poverty and desolation. “On the hillside, I wondered: ‘How is it possible, how can anyone live like that?’” Gorbachev’s impressions were shaped and deeply reinforced by his strong-willed wife, Raisa, who researched and wrote a thesis on peasant life in these years. She may have seen more of these desolate villages than he did. She trudged in boots and rode by motorcycle and cart through the bleak Russian countryside to carry out her research.²²

Gorbachev moved up in Stavropol, first through the city organization and then to become the highest-ranking party official in the region. In these years, in the 1960s and 1970s, he again felt the disparity between the way people lived and the empty party slogans and rhetoric. In farming and industry, the heavy hand of the state stifled individual initiative. Theft, toadying, incompetence and malaise were everywhere. Central planning was both intrusive and woefully inefficient. Once, he toured a collective farm in Stavropol. There were “magnificent crops of both grain and fodder.” Gorbachev was pleased, but asked the chairman of the collective farm, “Where did you get the pipe to do the irrigation?” The man just smiled. He had diverted the pipe from somewhere, on his own, and Gorbachev knew that his success had nothing to do with socialism.²³

It is important to recall that the most daring changes in the centrally controlled Soviet economic system at the time were extremely modest, such as demonstrations of self-financing, or khozraschyot, the idea that a factory or farm could retain its own profits. Sweeping challenges to the system were just not possible; even minor experiments in individual initiative were snuffed out. This is the world Gorbachev knew. The bureaucrats at central planning in Moscow arrogantly issued orders to do this and that, and on the ground in farms and cities, the orders often made no sense. The demands were ignored, statistics faked, budgets swallowed up with no result, and anyone who deviated was punished. From 1970 to 1978, Gorbachev was first secretary of the Communist Party in Stavropol, the highest-ranking official in the region, an expanse between the Black and Caspian Seas with the most fertile lands in all of Russia. Gorbachev was essentially the governor, but wielded much more power than an American governor. Regional party bosses were a key power bloc in the Soviet system and could affect how Moscow decisions were implemented. As first secretary, Gorbachev joined an elite group at the pinnacle of Soviet society. He was eligible for special privileges—good housing, food, transport—and was a full member of the Central Committee in Moscow. In the Brezhnev years, a party first secretary was “a prince in his own domain,” as Robert G. Kaiser of the Washington Post described it.²⁴But Gorbachev was something of a populist. By one account, he often walked to his office and informally listened to people on the streets. He was a regular at theater performances and encouraged the local press to be less driven by party ideology.²⁵ Gorbachev was “as pragmatic an innovator as the conservative temper of the times allowed.”²⁶ For example, he supported a farming plan to give autonomy to groups or teams of workers, including families, even though it was viewed with suspicion by the Moscow bureaucrats. In 1978 Gorbachev wrote a lengthy memo on the problems of agriculture that called for giving “more independence to enterprises and associations” in deciding key production and money issues. But there is no evidence that these ideas ever took root very widely, and Gorbachev was definitely not a radical. He joined other party bosses in lavishing obsequious praise on the 1978 volume of Brezhnev’s ghostwritten memoirs of war, Malaya Zemlya, a blatant effort at self-glorification. Words of the state and party lost their meaning, but it was mandatory for Gorbachev and others to keep repeating them.

Gorbachev realized as regional party boss that something much more serious was wrong with the Soviet system than just inefficiency, theft and poor planning. The deeper flaw was that no one could break out with new ideas. Gorbachev bridled at being “bound hand and foot by orders from the center.”²⁷ He concluded that a “hierarchy of vassals and chiefs of principalities was in fact the way the country was run.” In a reflection many years later, he said bluntly, “It was a caste system based on mutual protection.”

The outside world, too, offered Gorbachev fresh evidence of the contrast between reality and the party line. When his university friend MlynááY visited Stavropol in 1967, he surprised Gorbachev with a warning that Czechoslovakia was “on the verge of a major upheaval.” In the year that followed, MlynááY became a figure in the liberalizing movement in Czechoslovakia, headed by Alexander Dubček, which led to the Prague Spring and the drive to create “socialism with a human face.” This fling with democracy was crushed by Soviet tanks and Warsaw Pact troops on the night of August 20–21, 1968. Gorbachev has acknowledged that in 1968 he supported the invasion as a party official in Stavropol. But Gorbachev saw a different reality a year later when he visited Prague. On this trip, he did not see MlynááY, but he realized people sincerely believed in the liberalization and hated the Soviet leadership in Moscow. While the KGB line was that external factors were at work, Gorbachev saw that the impetus was internal. On a factory tour in Brno, workers refused to even talk to Gorbachev. “This was a shock to me,” Gorbachev said. “This visit overturned all my conceptions.” In Bratislava, he saw walls densely covered with anti-Soviet slogans. “From that time on, I began to think more and more about what was going on in our country, and I came to an unconsoling conclusion: there was something wrong…” But he kept these thoughts to himself, and Raisa.²⁸ Throughout the 1970s, Gorbachev traveled several times to the West, including Italy, France, Belgium and West Germany. What he saw in these relatively prosperous democracies was far different from what he had been shown in Soviet propaganda books, films and radio broadcasts. “People there lived in better conditions, and were better off than in our country. The question haunted me: why was the standard of living in our country lower than in other developed countries?”

The Stavropol town of Kislovodsk was favored by the Soviet elite for its soothing spas and mineral springs. The Soviet KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, who suffered kidney ailments, often retreated to a KGB lodge there. He and Gorbachev shared a holiday at the mineral springs in August 1978. Andropov had taken notice of Gorbachev as a potential future leader. They climbed in the nearby mountains, and spent many hours sitting around an open bonfire, cooking shashlik under the star-studded skies. Andropov, who had wide-ranging interests, often talked to Gorbachev about affairs of state, and they listened to tape recordings of Vladimir Vysotsky and Yuri Vizbor, who strummed a seven-string guitar and sang of people’s everyday problems. This must have been an amazing scene: two party bosses enjoying the music of bards whose works were largely distributed on bootleg tapes. Andropov, head of the secret police since 1967, became one of Gorbachev’s mentors and tutors.

In Moscow, Gorbachev was elected a secretary of the Central Committee and put in charge of agriculture.²⁹ Full of enthusiasm, he went to see Brezhnev about farm policy. But Gorbachev, forty-eight years old, found the Soviet leader, then seventy-one, almost lifeless in his Kremlin office. “Not only did he not take up the conversation, but he showed no response at all, neither to my words nor to myself,” Gorbachev recalled.

As a junior member of the Soviet ruling elite, Gorbachev soon discovered that the final years of Brezhnev’s rule were filled with such scenes. Some Politburo meetings lasted no longer than fifteen or twenty minutes, so as not to tire the chairman. “It was a sad sight,” recalled Gorbachev. The country was in serious trouble economically as the oil boost of the late 1970s began to give out. The war in Afghanistan, launched by a coterie around Brezhnev, turned into a quagmire. The hopes of détente in the 1970s evaporated, and the superpower tension escalated. Food shortages grew at home. During the first four years that Gorbachev was secretary for agriculture in Moscow, there were four successive bad harvests and massive Soviet grain purchases abroad.³⁰

From the time Gorbachev arrived in Moscow in November 1978, through the early 1980s, a simmering power struggle unfolded between an old guard, bastions of the party and military, and a handful of reformers, most of whom were academics with fresh ideas but no power base. When Brezhnev died, Andropov promoted a group of younger officials, including Gorbachev and Nikolai Ryzhkov, an experienced factory manager from Sverdlovsk. Andropov put Gorbachev in charge of economic policy for the whole country. Gorbachev solicited ideas from the academic reformers. Now, at least the reformers had an umbrella—Gorbachev would listen to them.³¹

True to his background in the KGB, Andropov tried to rejuvenate the country with police-state methods, such as arresting people seen as loafers on the street during working hours. Gorbachev told him this was a dubious practice, that people were making jokes about it, but Andropov wouldn’t listen. He brushed Gorbachev off, saying, “When you get to my age, you’ll understand.”

What brought these two men together was a shared understanding of the plight of the system. Gorbachev recalled that Andropov was determined to root out the ills of the Brezhnev era, including “protectionism, in-fighting and intrigues, corruption, moral turpitude, bureaucracy, disorganization and laxity.” But as historian Robert English pointed out, it was extraordinarily hard to make change “in an ossified, militarized Party-state system,” especially given the latent power of the hard-liners.³²In the end, Andropov ran out of time. Gorbachev wrote later that Andropov could not have really carried out drastic change; the years with the KGB left him unable to break out. “He was too deeply entrenched in his own past experience; it held him firmly in its grasp,” Gorbachev said.

It fell to Gorbachev to become the agent of change, and his time was coming.

A turning point came in May 1983, when Gorbachev went to Canada for a seven-day visit as head of a parliamentary delegation. Alexander Yakovlev, the Soviet ambassador there, saw an opportunity to show Gorbachev how the West worked, and to offer his own deep concerns about the direction of the Soviet Union. In Alberta, Gorbachev was fascinated by a discussion with a wealthy farmer who had a 4,942-acre spread. Gorbachev quickly got to talking and discovered the farmer’s herd produced a milk yield of 4,700 kilograms each cow per year. The yield of Soviet cows was 2,258 kilograms.³³ The farmer had two homes, cars and aluminum grain towers, and told Gorbachev he worked a long, hard year without vacations. Canada offered Gorbachev a prosperous counterpoint to Soviet agricultural failure.

The key moment of the visit was out of public view, on the evening of May 19, at the Ontario farm of Eugene Whelan, the Canadian agriculture minister. Whelan had invited Gorbachev for dinner, but was delayed in arriving. His wife, Elizabeth, greeted the Soviet guests after they drove in on a long, bumpy dirt road. Waiting around, Gorbachev and Yakovlev decided to take a private stroll, alone, in a nearby orchard. Yakovlev had been the Central Committee propaganda chief in the early 1970s, but had written an article with radical ideas for a newspaper—and was sent to diplomatic exile in Canada. He was a reformist whose enthusiasm for change only deepened as he witnessed the collapse of détente and the stagnation of the late Brezhnev years. Yakovlev, then fifty-nine years old, was angered by the over-militarization of Soviet society, and he believed markets could offer improvements to socialism. Most of all, he later recalled, he had made freedom his “religion.” In the walk in the orchard, it all spilled out.

“We had a lot of time together,” Yakovlev recalled. “So we took a long walk on that minister’s farm and, as it often happens, both of us were just kind of flooded, and let go. I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs, especially about those SS-20 missiles that were being stationed in Europe and a lot of other things. And he did the same thing. We were completely frank. He frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia. He was saying that under these conditions, the conditions of dictatorship and absence of freedom, the country would simply perish. So it was at that time, during our three-hour conversation, almost as if our heads were knocked together, that we poured it all out.”³⁴

Two weeks later, Yakovlev was asked to return to Moscow to head up a prestigious think tank, the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, where he would become a pioneer of the new thinking.

The Kremlin paralysis under Chernenko was grave. Politburo meetings were difficult to convene. Fifteen or twenty minutes before the start time, 11 A.M., a phone call came and Gorbachev was told that Chernenko was so sick he could not attend. Would Gorbachev take the chair? This left Gorbachev little time to prepare, and it was awkward in front of the other, more senior members. By the end of 1984, “Chernenko had dropped out altogether,” Gorbachev recalled. With no one in charge, the suspicions and infighting worsened. According to Yakovlev, hard-liners launched an offensive against some of the liberal think tanks, threatening a purge that would have silenced them.³⁵

Gorbachev’s sense of gloom was reinforced at a December soul-searching talk with Eduard Shevardnadze, who was the first secretary of the party in the republic of Georgia, just to the south of the Stavropol region. Like Gorbachev, Shevardnadze was a high-ranking official and a man with clear vision about the country’s problems. They met at a barren park on the deserted shore near the Black Sea’s Cape Pitsunda. Strolling down a path beneath the trees, they talked openly, holding nothing back. “Everything’s rotten,” Shevardnadze said. “It has to be changed.”³⁶

That winter was terrible. Yegor Ligachev recalled that because of massive snows and bitter cold, industry in the country began to break down. Fifty-four of the largest electric plants were on the verge of shutdown because 22,000 freight cars carrying coal were stopped dead on the tracks, their cargo frozen solid.³⁷

In early December 1984, Gorbachev prepared to give a critical speech at a party conference on ideology. The Soviet elite was dejected and Gorbachev wanted to offer badly needed new ideas. Months of work had gone into refining his speech, with help from Yakovlev. The participants had already arrived in Moscow. Then Gorbachev got a call from the ailing, cautious Chernenko at 4 P.M. Alarmed at the new ideas Gorbachev planned to offer in the speech, Chernenko insisted the conference should be postponed for some vague reason about not being fully prepared. Gorbachev was indignant. The participants had already arrived! What was Chernenko thinking? “OK,” the Soviet leader backed down. “Have it, but don’t make too much noise.” In fact, Gorbachev’s December 10 address offered hints of dramatic change to come. He talked about restructuring—perestroika.

On February 24, 1985, Chernenko was shown voting on television in an election. Chernenko was seen accepting his ballot, voting, accepting flowers from a well-wisher and shaking hands. He raised his hand up to his brow and said “Good.” End of broadcast. Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy of the International Department at the Central Committee, watched with disgust. “A man half-dead. A mummy,” Chernyaev wrote in his diary. Two days later, Chernenko was shown on television again. This time he appeared wan and held on to a chair for support as an election official handed him a document. He was wheezing. “It was a terrible show,” Chernyaev wrote.³⁸ The only other official in the room in both broadcasts was Viktor Grishin, seventy, the Moscow party chief, a member of the Politburo’s old guard who seemed to be making a bid for power, positioning himself standing next to Chernenko. But Grishin’s move swiftly backfired. The sight of the ill Chernenko was a reminder, if one was needed, that it was time for change.

On the evening of Sunday, March 10, Gorbachev returned home from work and took a call from the Kremlin doctor, Yevgeny Chazov. Chernenko had died of heart failure and complications from emphysema at 7:20 P.M. Gorbachev, who had been passed over in the transition after Andropov, wasted little time. A Politburo meeting was called at the Kremlin for 11 P.M. Three voting members, including two old Brezhnevites, were out of the country and would not make it back.

About twenty minutes before the meeting started, Gorbachev met Gromyko, the foreign minister, lion of the old guard, in the Walnut Room, where full voting members of the Politburo often gathered before formal sessions. Gromyko was the key figure in deciding who would be the next general secretary. Earlier, Gromyko had sent a private emissary to Gorbachev with the message that he would back him in the succession struggle, in exchange for being allowed to retire as foreign minister and take up a sinecure position as chairman of the Supreme Soviet. The back channel was through Gromyko’s son, Anatoly, and Gorbachev’s reformist adviser, Yakovlev.³⁹

When Gorbachev and Gromyko met in the Walnut Room, they reconfirmed the understanding reached earlier.

“Andrei Andreyevich, we have to consolidate our effort, the moment is crucial,” Gorbachev recalled saying to Gromyko.

“I believe everything is clear,” Gromyko replied.

When they had all assembled, Gorbachev informed the Politburo of Chernenko’s death. Usually, the person chosen to head up the funeral commission was the one who would be the next general secretary. The question of the funeral commission arose. There was momentary hesitation in the room: Would Grishin make a play for it?

In fact, before the meeting, Gorbachev had already made a gesture to Grishin, who declined to head the commission.

“Why the hesitation about the chairman?” Grishin said now, in front of the Politburo members. “Everything is clear. Let’s appoint Mikhail Sergeyevich.”

The old guard had died. Gorbachev became head of the commission and the next day would become the new general secretary. Precisely why Grishin did not fight is not known, but he may well have realized, or sensed, that he had no chance, that Gromyko would support Gorbachev.

Gorbachev was a shining light in a dusky hall. Five of the ten voting members of the Politburo that day were over seventy, three in their sixties and only two in their fifties. Not only was Gorbachev, at fifty-four, the youngest member of the Politburo by a full five years, he was thirteen years younger than the average age of the voting membership.⁴⁰ Plans were hurriedly made through the night for the transition, which would include a Politburo meeting and then a Central Committee plenum March 11 to ratify the choice.

Gorbachev went home at 4 A.M. He was then living at a large dacha outside of Moscow. Raisa was waiting up. Suspicious of KGB listening bugs, they went out in the garden, as they did almost every day. They strolled the paths for a long time just before dawn. Spring had not yet come, there was snow on the ground. Raisa recalled the air felt very heavy. They talked about the events and the implications. Gorbachev told her he had been frustrated all the years in Moscow, having not accomplished as much as he wanted, always hitting a wall. To really get things done, he would have to accept the job.

“We can’t go on living like this,” he said.

At the next day’s session, Gromyko delivered a strong testament to Gorbachev, speaking in a way that was not customary on such occasions, without notes and without hesitation. “I shall be straight,” Gromyko began. Gorbachev is the “absolutely right choice.” Gorbachev had “indomitable creative energy, striving to do more and do it better.” Gorbachev respected “the interests of the party, the interests of the society, the interests of the people” above his own, he said. Gorbachev would bring experience of work in the regions and the center, and ran the Politburo while Chernenko was ill. This required knowledge and stamina. “We won’t make a mistake if we choose him,” Gromyko said.

After the agonizing years of stagnation, death and disappointment, Gorbachev was chosen first and foremost as the best hope to get the country moving.⁴¹ Georgi Shakhnazarov, who had served Andropov and would later advise Gorbachev, recalled that Gorbachev’s rise was not a certainty. Gorbachev did not have a sterling biography that made him the natural choice, and the Politburo might have chosen another, such as Grishin, to muddle through. But Shakhnazarov felt there was one factor that, while not official, could not be ignored. “People were desperately tired of participating in a disgraceful farce… They were tired of seeing leaders with shaking heads and faded eyes, knowing the fate of the country and half the world was entrusted to the care of these miserable semiparalytics.”⁴²

————— 9 ————— YEAR OF THE SPY

When Reagan was awakened March 11, 1985, at 4 A.M., with word that Chernenko had died, he asked Nancy, “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?” Four leaders—Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev—had guided the Soviet Union over its first six decades. Now it had the third new leader in three years. Perhaps no one really knew at this early point that Gorbachev would become a revolutionary. But at first, Reagan missed the signs. He was blinkered by his own deep anti-communism and his own long-held ideas about the Soviet system, and hampered by lack of good intelligence. To the United States, the Kremlin remained a black box. Reagan and many of those around him could not imagine a Soviet leader carrying out radical reform from above. Shultz saw promise in Gorbachev, as had Thatcher in Britain, but Reagan’s circle was riven by disagreement, and there was no consensus that this was a man they could do business with.

Among the hard-liners, Robert Gates, then the deputy CIA director for intelligence, felt that Gorbachev was a tough guy wearing a well-tailored suit. Underneath, he saw trouble, and did not want to be fooled. In the weeks before Gorbachev took power, in February 1985, Gates wrote a memo to one of the CIA’s leading Soviet experts. “I don’t much care for the way we are writing about Gorbachev,” Gates said. “We are losing the thread of what toughness and skill brought him to where he is. This is not some Gary Hart or even Lee Iacocca. We have to give the policy-makers a clearer view of the kind of person they may be facing.” Gates said he felt that Gorbachev was the heir to Andropov, the former KGB chief, and to Suslov, the onetime orthodox ideology chief. Thus, Gates said, Gorbachev “could not be all sweetness and light. These had been two of the hardest cases in recent Soviet history. They would not take a wimp under their wing.”¹

Reagan found this analysis very appealing. The assumption was based on years of imagining a Soviet monolith—that all leaders were alike, that the system could not change. Reagan met with U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Arthur Hartman. “He confirms what I believe that Gorbachev will be tough as any of their leaders,” Reagan recalled. “If he wasn’t a confirmed ideologue he never would have been chosen… by the Politburo.”²

Yet Reagan was capable of holding multiple views at the same time. He still dreamed of eliminating nuclear weapons, even if he had doubts about the new Soviet leader. He mentioned elimination of nuclear weapons as “our common goal” in one of his first letters to Gorbachev.³Reagan also listened to Shultz, who urged him to use “quiet diplomacy” with the new Soviet leader. As Reagan recalled it, this meant “the need to lean on the Soviets but to do so one on one—not in the papers.”⁴

Five years into his presidency, Reagan was still surrounded by intense feuds and conflicts among those who served him. Tempers were raw over a Soviet blunder in East Germany. On March 24, an American army officer, Major Arthur D. Nicholson Jr., was shot by a panicky Soviet sentry while in a restricted area. As with the Korean airliner, the clumsy Soviet response to the incident made it even worse. The shooting “has to be called murder,” Reagan wrote in his diary.⁵

At a White House breakfast April 27, Reagan’s top cabinet members argued over whether to allow the secretary of commerce to visit Moscow on a trade mission. Casey and Weinberger were opposed. Shultz wanted to engage Moscow, and thought Reagan did too. “The scene was bizarre,” Shultz said. “Here was the president ready to lead the charge to engage with the Soviets. At the same time, his secretary of defense and director of central intelligence were leading their own charge in exactly the opposite direction.”⁶ Tired of the disputes, Shultz told Reagan he wanted to resign by summer. Reagan talked him out of it, saying he needed Shultz to deal with the Soviets.⁷ Reagan decided to let the trade mission go ahead, but sent a tough, private message to Gorbachev.⁸

The Central Intelligence Agency devoted about 45 percent of its analytical manpower to the Soviet Union.⁹ But for all the attention to weapons and research programs, the agency had little understanding of the new man in the Kremlin. Shultz later recalled that “our knowledge of the Kremlin was thin, and the CIA, I found, was usually wrong about it.”¹⁰ Gates acknowledged that the CIA had scant inside knowledge. “We were embarrassingly hungry for details” from the British and Canadians who had met Gorbachev on his visits, and others who knew him, Gates said. These sources described Gorbachev as stylistically more open than Soviet leaders had been, but “unyielding” on the issues. Gorbachev was “an innovative, dynamic communist, not a revolutionary,” Gates concluded. The CIA’s first assessment of Gorbachev, titled “Gorbachev, the New Broom,” was sent to Reagan on June 27. The study portrayed Gorbachev as gambling on a campaign against corruption and inefficiency, but “not radical reform,” at home. The study said Gorbachev had already demonstrated that he was “the most aggressive and activist Soviet leader since Khrushchev.”¹¹ When this paper went to Reagan, however, Casey attached a cover note that was far more skeptical. Casey wrote that Gorbachev and those around him “are not reformers and liberalizers either in Soviet domestic or foreign policy.”¹²

He could not have been more wrong.

Inside the Kremlin, the tune was changing. Gorbachev demanded a rewrite of a Communist Party program. “It must not be propagandistic babble about endless achievements,” Gorbachev wrote on the document, “the kind of stuff that you used to write for Brezhnev and Chernenko, but rather include specific proposals for a truly radical transformation of the economy.”¹³ This was just the beginning. Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy head of the International Department of the Central Committee, who received this note, wondered, “Is this really happening? It’s too good to be true.”

The day after Gorbachev became general secretary, on March 12, he received an important memorandum from Alexander Yakovlev, the reformist thinker who had the soul-searching talk with Gorbachev in the orchard in Canada. The title was simply “On Reagan.”¹⁴ In tone and substance, Yakovlev offered a stark contrast to the Soviet rhetoric of the past. Yakovlev’s analysis of Reagan, while imperfect, was pragmatic, not ideological. He described Reagan as striving to grasp the initiative in international affairs, to go down in history as a peacemaking president. He said Reagan had fulfilled his promises to rebuild the American military; Reagan “practically gave to the military business everything he promised.” This reflected an early misconception of Yakovlev and Gorbachev about the power of the defense industry in the United States. But Yakovlev did not make Reagan out to be a reckless cowboy, as Soviet propaganda had done so often. Rather, he said, the president was seeking to improve his political standing, facing off against many different forces, including global competition from Japan, domestic budget pressure and restive European allies. Reagan had invited Gorbachev to a summit, and Yakovlev told Gorbachev, “…from Reagan’s point of view, his proposition is thoughtful, precisely calculated, and contains no political risk.” There had not been a superpower summit in six years. Yakovlev’s advice to Gorbachev was: go to a summit, but not hastily. Make it clear to Reagan, he said, that the world does not spin every time he pushes a button.

This was a moment when Reagan could have used fresh and penetrating insights into Gorbachev’s thinking and life experiences. If he had seen Gorbachev’s notes about radical economic reform, if he had read Yakovlev’s memo, he might have realized immediately that Gorbachev had people around him who were thinking in new ways. The United States deployed remarkably accurate satellites to collect technical data on missiles, but it lacked the textured and revealing intelligence on the new leader that came only from human sources. Reagan would have benefited from knowing that Gorbachev nurtured a lifetime of lessons and convictions about the gap between the Soviet party-state and society. Reagan would have found fascinating Gorbachev’s comment to Raisa that “we can’t go on living like this.” Reagan would have been surprised to know of Gorbachev’s reluctance to use force, and his determination there would not be another Prague Spring.¹⁵ But Reagan did not know these things. The United States had never recruited a spy who provided political information at a high level inside the Kremlin.¹⁶ And just when the United States could have used some good human intelligence about the new leader in Moscow, the CIA suffered a series of blinding catastrophes.

A month after Gorbachev took office, on April 16, 1985, a man with a mustache and heavy eyeglasses waited at the bar of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington for a meeting with a Soviet diplomat. The man was Aldrich Ames, a forty-four-year-old CIA counterintelligence official who was supposed to be keeping track of, and looking for, Soviet spies working in the United States. Ames often met Soviet officials at downtown restaurants to talk about arms control and U.S.-Soviet relations. This was part of his job in the hunt for spies. Ames was permitted by the CIA to have these contacts, as long as he reported them afterward.

Ames was waiting for Sergei Chuvakhin, a specialist on arms control, who failed to show up. Ames walked two blocks to the ornate Soviet Embassy on 16th Street N.W. and entered. The building was constantly being monitored by the FBI, which Ames knew, but he may have assumed that he would not raise suspicions because he was known to meet with Soviet officials for his work. Inside, Ames went to the reception desk and asked for Chuvakhin. At the same time, he silently handed an envelope to the duty officer at the desk.

The envelope was addressed to Stanislav Androsov, the KGB resident, the most senior KGB man in the embassy. Ames didn’t say so specifically, but motioned to the duty officer that he wanted the envelope given to the KGB boss. Chuvakhin then showed up briefly, apologized for the no-show at the hotel, and Ames departed.¹⁷

Ames was a spy hunter, but in the envelope he offered to become a spy himself for the Soviet Union. Inside, he left a note that described two or three cases involving Soviets who had approached the CIA to offer their services. These were double agents. He thought that by identifying them, he would establish his own credentials as a CIA insider who had something to offer. He also included a page from a CIA phone directory of the Soviet and Eastern Europe division that identified him as the chief counterintelligence official in the division. For the KGB, this was a potential gold mine—a person in this position would know the names of all the CIA spies inside the Soviet Union. Ames asked for $50,000, and said nothing more.¹⁸

A few weeks later, Chuvakhin called and scheduled another meeting with Ames. On May 15, Ames entered the Soviet Embassy and asked for Chuvakhin, but was escorted instead to another, soundproofed room. There, a KGB officer passed him a note saying they had agreed to pay him $50,000.

The very next day in London, May 16, a cipher clerk walked into the office of Oleg Gordievsky and handed him a handwritten telegram from Moscow headquarters.

Gordievsky had done much to help the West: revealing Andropov’s paranoia about nuclear war with the RYAN operation, and paving the way for Gorbachev’s successful visit to Britain. In April, Gordievsky moved up to become KGB chief in London, in position to do even more for the West. But the message from Moscow hit him like a “thunderbolt,” he recalled. The telegram was a summons for him to come back to Moscow right away “in order to confirm your appointment as resident,” and to meet top officials of the KGB. It was strange—he had already done that a few months earlier.¹⁹ He was terrified. He went to his British handlers and told them of the request. They were relaxed and urged him to go ahead with the trip. But just to be sure, Gordievsky rehearsed a plan the British had developed for him to escape if he felt in danger. He left his family behind in London.

On May 17 in Washington, Ames met in a restaurant with Chuvakhin, who handed him $50,000 in cash, in $100 bills.

When Gordievsky arrived in Moscow May 19, he grew even more worried. At passport control, the border guard scrutinized his documents for a long time, made a phone call and examined some papers before letting him pass. When he reached his apartment, a third lock on the door, for which he long ago had lost the key, was turned shut. The apartment had been searched.

On Sunday, May 20, late in the evening in a wooded area of Montgomery County, Maryland, John Walker stopped his van and left an empty 7-Up can by the side of the road, then drove away. At another spot, he left a brown paper bag. For a decade, Walker had run a navy spy ring for the Soviets, feeding them top-secret communications documents stolen from American warships. Walker’s partners in espionage included Jerry Whitworth, who had served on the U.S.S. Enterprise and leaked classified communications from the Pacific Ocean exercises in 1983. Walker did not realize it on this night, but the FBI, after months of investigation, was closing in on him and watching his every move in the woods. When Walker drove away, an FBI agent picked up the 7-Up can, intended as a signal to the Soviets that Walker had left them something and wanted to pick up money. Then the FBI found the brown paper bag, and in the bottom of it was an inch-thick package, wrapped in a white plastic garbage sack. The corners were neatly folded over and taped. Inside were 129 secret documents stolen from the U.S.S. Nimitz and a letter, “Dear Friend,” outlining the activities of others in his spy ring, including Whitworth, using coded letters of the alphabet to disguise their identities.

Walker expected a payment that night, and was puzzled when his Soviet contact did not leave it. The Soviet man with the money had been in the vicinity, looking for the 7-Up can—when he did not find it, he left without dropping the cash. Walker drove back to the woods later that evening, apparently realizing his brown bag had disappeared. Did the Soviets pick it up? Where was his money? It was late, so he went to the nearby suburb of Rockville and checked into a Ramada Inn. At 3:30 A.M., he was awakened by an apologetic clerk at the front desk of the hotel, saying someone had accidentally smashed into his van in the parking lot. Could he come down with his insurance forms? It was a ruse. At the elevator, Walker was arrested by the FBI. Soon, U.S. intelligence and military officials began to unravel the incredible story of how Walker had given away some of the deepest secrets of the Cold War.

On May 28, in Moscow, Gordievsky took some pep pills the British had given him in London to fight fatigue. At the office, he was summoned to meet agents from KGB counterintelligence who wanted to talk about possible penetration of the KGB in London. Gordievsky was driven several miles from headquarters to a small bungalow, where he met the agents. They had lunch, and a servant poured them all a brandy. Gordievsky took his and passed out. He had been drugged. When he awoke, Gordievsky realized what had happened. He had been interrogated while in a drugged stupor. He was “more depressed than ever before in my life. I kept thinking, ‘they know,’ I’m finished.’ How they had found out, I could not tell. But there was not the slightest doubt that they knew I was a British agent.”

It was not clear how much the KGB knew, or from what source. Gordievsky had no idea how he was betrayed. He recalled in his memoir that during the drugged interrogation he had given no ground, and strenuously denied working for the British. Gordievsky did not know if they had any proof, but the interrogators clearly had some information to start with. The KGB “hounds were hot on my scent,” Gordievsky said.

One of the most valuable human sources the CIA had ever tapped in the secretive Soviet military-industrial complex was Adolf Tolkachev, a quiet, stooped man in his fifties. He was a senior research scientist in a Russian military aerospace program at a Moscow institute, helping design radars, air defenses and new jet fighters. The CIA had given him the code name GTVANQUISH. Tolkachev quietly worshipped America from afar, although he had never left Russia. For seven years, Tolkachev had provided the CIA a huge volume of sensitive and valuable intelligence on military research and development, including plans for the next generation of Soviet fighter aircraft. The information saved the United States billions of dollars and allowed the air force to develop planes that would prevail in any military confrontation with the Soviets.

In April 1984, meeting his handler in Moscow, Tolkachev turned over schematics of Soviet radar systems, rolls of film containing ninety-six frames of secret documents and thirty-nine pages of handwritten notes. He sometimes made the photos of documents in the bathroom at the institute. In October 1984, Tolkachev gave his CIA handler two miniature cameras containing ninety frames and twenty-two pages of written notes.²⁰ For his meetings with the Americans, Tolkachev had worked out a system in which he would signal whether he was ready by opening one of the fortochkas, small ventilation windows above the main window in his apartment, between 12:15 and 12:30 P.M. He lived on the ninth floor of a tall wedding-cake tower that had long housed the Soviet aviation elite, among others.²¹ The distinctive building was also just down the street from the American Embassy, and CIA officers could check the window on a walk by the building.

On June 5, 1985, the window was open. But when the CIA officer came by, he grew uneasy at what seemed to be heavy surveillance, often a problem for the agents in Moscow, who were constantly being watched. The next date planned for a rendezvous was June 13. Again, the window was open. The CIA case officer didn’t see any surveillance—the only thing he noticed was a woman talking loudly on a pay phone. According to CIA veteran Milt Bearden, the case officer was carrying two plastic shopping bags. One contained 125,000 rubles in small notes, the equivalent of $150,000, as well as five new compact subminiature cameras concealed in key chain fobs, preloaded with microfilm. The other had books with concealed messages giving Tolkachev instructions for communications and secrets the CIA wanted him to steal.²²

At the exact time of the planned meeting, 9:40 P.M., the CIA case officer was jumped and seized by more than a dozen KGB personnel in military camouflage uniforms, who had been hiding in nearby bushes. The case officer, Paul M. “Skip” Stombaugh Jr., was taken off to Lubyanka, the hulking prison and KGB headquarters. Once there, in front of him, the packages that he was planning to deliver to Tolkachev were opened piece by piece, with a video camera rolling. A note in the package thanked Tolkachev for the “very important written information” he had provided earlier, but added that due to low light, some of the photographs he had made could not be read. The note suggested that the CIA could get Tolkachev a new security badge, fabricating it “as we did in 1980.” That was the end.

Tolkachev had already been arrested. He was later executed.

On the same day Stombaugh was seized outside of Tolkachev’s apartment in Moscow, the CIA’s Soviet operations suffered another devastating setback in Washington. Ames arrived at a small restaurant, Chadwicks, located on the Georgetown waterfront. Ames had wrapped up five to seven pounds of classified messages in his CIA office and carried them out of the headquarters building in Langley without being stopped.

Ames carried the documents into the restaurant in a plastic bag. He was met there by Chuvakhin from the Soviet Embassy, and Ames gave him the bag. It held the largest batch of sensitive documents and critical information ever turned over to the KGB in a single meeting. Ames identified more than ten top-level CIA and FBI sources who were then reporting on Soviet activities. Among them were Gordievsky and Tolkachev. If the KGB had earlier been suspicious about them, they now had proof.

Two days after Ames gave away the bag filled with secrets, Gordievsky, still fearful and uncertain, went to a KGB sanatorium outside of Moscow. He was told to wait there while the KGB decided his fate. Gordievsky’s family was safely headed to their summer vacation in Azerbaijan. Despite the risks, Gordievsky decided to escape. He returned to his apartment in Moscow and retrieved from his bookshelf an English novel that had his exfiltration instructions on a cellophane sheet under the flyleaf.

The instructions were: signal to the British that he had a message, and then meet a British agent in a “brush by” encounter that would be unobtrusive. Frantic, Gordievsky gave the signal that he had a message. Then he went to Red Square, crowded with tourists. He went into the men’s room at Lenin’s tomb, closed the door to the stall and wrote a note to the British. “AM UNDER STRONG SUSPICION AND IN BAD TROUBLE. NEED EXFILTRATION SOONEST. BEWARE OF RADIOACTIVE DUST AND CAR ACCIDENTS.” The last line referred to common KGB methods for following people or eliminating them. Gordievsky failed to deliver the note—he couldn’t find the agent.

At the next assigned meeting, he was looking for someone who would have an unmistakable British look, and would acknowledge having spotted Gordievsky by chewing something. After twenty-four minutes of waiting on a designated street corner, Gordievsky noticed a man with a British appearance carrying a dark-green Harrods bag and eating a Mars candy bar. “I gazed into his eyes shouting silently, ‘Yes! It’s me! I need urgent help!’”

Gordievsky then took a train to Leningrad and a bus almost all the way to the border with Finland. Thatcher approved a daring plan to whisk him away from the Soviet Union. Gordievsky said he was picked up by British agents in a forested area near the border and driven out in the trunk of a car. Passing through checkpoints, he cowered inside the trunk, but it was not opened by Soviet guards. When the lid finally popped open once safely in Finland, Gordievsky recalled, “I saw blue sky, white clouds and pine trees above me.” Thanks to his British handlers, he had escaped. “I had outwitted the entire might of the KGB! I was out! I was safe! I was free!”²³ For a while, however, the British kept to themselves the news of their triumph.

On August 1, in Rome, Vitaly Yurchenko, forty-nine, a beefy KGB official who had recently been named deputy director of the department that ran spies in the United States and Canada, went for a walk and never came back. He called the U.S. Embassy, said he wanted to defect to the United States and in a matter of days was flown back to Andrews Air Force Base, in suburban Maryland, outside of Washington. Yurchenko had previously spent five years in KGB counterintelligence.

To meet Yurchenko at the airport, the CIA assigned several people, among them its own top Soviet counterintelligence expert, Ames. However, Ames was late arriving at Andrews, and his behavior was odd. When he saw Yurchenko, in a crowd of CIA and FBI officials, Ames went right up to him and delivered a pompous greeting: “Colonel Yurchenko, I welcome you to the United States on behalf of the President of the United States.” Bearden speculates that Ames did this because he was afraid Yurchenko might already know he was working for the KGB. Ames then sat in the car with Yurchenko as the defector was driven to a townhouse in Oakton, in the northern Virginia suburbs, for debriefing.²⁴

The debriefings were, in retrospect, one of the most bizarre chapters in the Cold War. Ames had just recently given the KGB the largest dump of secrets in the CIA’s history. He was sitting across the table and debriefing one of the most significant defectors ever to come offering the KGB’s secrets to the United States. The details Yurchenko told them were then being transmitted by Ames back to the KGB, and the CIA didn’t know it.

Yurchenko made two stunning disclosures. The first was that a former CIA trainee was selling secrets to the Soviets. Yurchenko said he knew the contact only by his KGB code name, “Robert,” and one identifying characteristic: he had been slated to go to Moscow but did not. A thunderbolt hit the CIA. The description could only fit a disgruntled trainee they had fired in 1983, Edward Lee Howard.²⁵ Then came a second bombshell. The KGB, he recalled, harvested a rich crop of secrets from a walk-in to the Soviet Embassy in 1980, an employee of the National Security Agency, which ran American global electronic eavesdropping. Yurchenko said he only knew of this agent as “Mr. Long,” and gave his debriefers some details. He said Mr. Long sold to the Soviets the details of the U.S. operation to tap the Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk. This was the monitoring operation known as Ivy Bells, which had been discovered and removed by the Soviets in 1981. (A second undersea cable-tapping operation in the Barents Sea had not been compromised.) The FBI launched a manhunt for Mr. Long, and four months later arrested Ronald Pelton, a communications specialist with the NSA who sold the classified data to the Soviets for $35,000.

Casey, the CIA director, took huge delight in the Yurchenko defection. “Casey was like a child with a new toy with Yurchenko,” Gates said. “Not only was he eager to hear, virtually on a daily basis, about the debriefings: he also could not help bragging about this great CIA coup. He met with Yurchenko, had dinner with him, couldn’t get enough of him.”²⁶

On October 1, 1985, Robert Hanssen, an FBI analyst on Soviet intelligence, dropped a letter into a mailbox in Prince George’s County, outside of Washington. Hanssen was based in the New York office but was working that day in the capital. The letter was addressed to the home of a KGB operative, Viktor Degtyar, who lived in Alexandria, Virginia. The letter arrived October 4. Inside an outer envelope was a second envelope that Hanssen marked “DO NOT OPEN. TAKE THIS ENVELOPE UNOPENED TO VICTOR I. CHERKASHIN.” The KGB man took the letter to Cherkashin, the second-ranking KGB official in Washington at the time, who was already running Ames.

When Cherkashin opened it, he found a second letter:

DEAR MR. CHERKASHIN,

SOON, I WILL SEND A BOX OF DOCUMENTS TO MR. DEGTYAR.

THEY ARE FROM CERTAIN OF THE MOST SENSITIVE AND HIGHLY COMPARTMENTED PROJECTS OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY. ALL ARE ORIGINALS TO AID IN VERIFYING THEIR AUTHENTICITY. PLEASE RECOGNIZE FOR OUR LONG-TERM INTERESTS THAT THERE ARE A LIMITED NUMBER OF PERSONS WITH THIS ARRAY OF CLEARANCES. AS A COLLECTION THEY POINT TO ME. I TRUST THAT AN OFFICER OF YOUR EXPERIENCE WILL HANDLE THEM APPROPRIATELY. I BELIEVE THEY ARE SUFFICIENT TO JUSTIFY A $100,000 PAYMENT TO ME.

I MUST WARN YOU OF CERTAIN RISKS TO MY SECURITY OF WHICH YOU MAY NOT BE AWARE. YOUR SERVICE HAS RECENTLY SUFFERED SOME SETBACKS. I WARN THAT MR. BORIS YUSHIN (LINE PR, SF), MR. SERGEY MOTORIN (LINE PR, WASH.) AND MR. VALERIY MARTYNOV (LINE X, WASH.) HAVE BEEN RECRUITED BY OUR “SPECIAL SERVICES.”²⁷

Hanssen then described a sensitive intelligence collection technique used by the United States. He told the Soviets that he would be in touch. He didn’t sign the letter. On October 15, Degtyar received in the mail, at his home, a package from Hanssen containing a large number of classified documents. The next morning, Degtyar was seen by FBI agents carrying into the Soviet Embassy a large black canvas bag that he did not usually carry. About ten days later, Degtyar received another letter from the agent, whom the KGB was calling “B,” in an envelope postmarked New York City. This letter proposed a dead drop site under a wooden footbridge in Nottoway Park in northern Virginia, near where Hanssen had earlier lived. On Saturday, November 2, the KGB put $50,000 for Hanssen under the bridge.²⁸

The CIA moved Yurchenko to a new, larger safe house on a piece of wooded lakefront near Fredericksburg, Virginia. But Yurchenko was increasingly disillusioned. Word of his defection had leaked to the press, even though he asked the CIA to keep it secret. And his hopes to be reunited with a Russian woman he had known years earlier were dashed.²⁹ When he defected in August, Yurchenko thought he might have been suffering from stomach cancer, although later tests in the United States showed he was not. On November 2, while at Au Pied de Cochon, a restaurant in Georgetown, Yurchenko simply walked away from his inexperienced CIA handler. When the CIA man realized what had happened, the agency and the FBI launched a manhunt all over Georgetown. They didn’t find Yurchenko. On Monday, November 3, he showed up at the Soviet Embassy, where he held a strange press conference in which he claimed he had been abducted in Rome, drugged and held against his will. “Something smells fishy,” Reagan observed in his diary on November 4.

Yurchenko boarded a flight back to Moscow on November 6. His defection and return have long been one of the unsolved puzzles of the Cold War. Was he a deliberate plant by the KGB? For what purpose? Or did he just grow disillusioned with his treatment by the CIA? The truth is unknown. His return to Moscow brought with it one grim footnote. On the plane escorting Yurchenko home was KGB agent Valery Martynov, the officer in the Soviet Embassy working on Line X, stealing Western technology. Both Ames and Hanssen had, by this time, identified Martynov as a spy for the United States. Martynov was arrested the day he arrived in Moscow, and later executed.

American intelligence operations in the Soviet Union were collapsing, but the CIA was not aware of the enormous damage it had suffered in 1985. Ames and Hanssen had only just begun their espionage, which went on for years. Later investigations showed how severely the American intelligence operations in Moscow had been compromised. Gates said that Howard was the “CIA’s most devastating counterintelligence setback up to that point,” and “many of our Soviet operations were compromised and either rolled up by the KGB or shut down by us.” According to a damage assessment by the CIA, nine of the agents whom Ames identified on June 13 were executed. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence later found that more than twenty operations were compromised, a “virtual collapse of the CIA’s Soviet operations.” John Deutch, the CIA director, told Congress that Ames not only caused the execution of agents who worked for the United States but “made it much more difficult to understand what was going on in the Soviet Union at a crucial time in its history.”

The year of the spy, as 1985 became known, blinded American intelligence operations against the Soviet Union just as Gorbachev was coming to power. Reagan simply did not have the assets to help him understand what was happening behind the Kremlin walls. In the end, there were more powerful agents of change than the agents of espionage. Those forces—rooted in Gorbachev’s convictions about what his country needed, in the overpowering burden of the arms race, in Reagan’s desire to eliminate nuclear weapons—were about to unleash a momentous revolution.

————— 10 ————— OF SWORDS AND SHIELDS

In his early days in office in the spring of 1985, Gorbachev worked feverishly. Vladimir Medvedev, the Kremlin security director who had served since Brezhnev, watched in amazement. “After Brezhnev’s many years of illness and lethargy,” he recalled, “there was suddenly a volcano of energy near you.” Gorbachev worked until 1 or 2 A.M. and got up the next morning at 7 A.M. He was on his way to the Kremlin at 9:15 in the ZIL limousine. Gorbachev sat in the backseat, closing the glass sliding partition behind Medvedev and the driver, making notes, and placing calls on the two phones in the car. “Over this short period of time he managed to talk to 3 or 4 people,” Medvedev recalled. “Walking from the car to the office, he gave several orders, advice, promises—not a moment to catch his breath. Still walking, he gave concrete advice to the military, to civilians—whom to talk to, what to say, what to pay attention to, what to insist on, what to ignore. He spoke in short, precise sentences.”¹

Gorbachev sent a shock wave of excitement through a moribund society. At a time when people were accustomed to flowery but empty official pronouncements, when portraits of leaders were dutifully hung from every wall, when conformity suffocated public discussion, Gorbachev’s style was refreshingly direct.² Often he talked too much, wavered on important decisions and was slow to break out of the old Soviet mind-set. Yet the absolute core of his early drive was to halt the decay in Soviet living standards and rejuvenate society. He believed that open discussion was essential to the survival of socialism. He didn’t fear what people had to say. He believed in Lenin’s ideals, but concluded that leaders after Lenin had gone off track, and he wanted to set things right. It would have been so much easier to fall back into the old habits, to take the well-worn old pathways, but Gorbachev did not.

On a visit to Leningrad in May, he bantered with a large, jostling crowd on the street. It was an extraordinary sight to see a Soviet leader talking spontaneously with people. “I’m listening to you,” he told them. “What do you want to say?”

Someone shouted back, “Continue as you began!”

A woman’s voice broke in, “Just get close to the people, and we’ll not let you down.” Gorbachev, hemmed in tightly, responded with a smile. “Can I be any closer?” The crowd loved it.

In a combative speech to Leningrad Communists at Smolny Institute on the same visit, Gorbachev spoke largely without notes, insisting that the economy be reenergized, demanding that people who could not accept change must step aside. “Get out of the way. Don’t be a hindrance,” he declared.³ Gorbachev was skilled at manipulating the elders of the Politburo; he didn’t tell them in advance about the speech, in which he spilled out some of their closed deliberations in March and April. He was thrilled with the enthusiastic response, and took a video home from Leningrad. The following weekend he watched it with his family at the dacha. Then he ordered it to be shown on national television.⁴ Crowds lined up to get a pamphlet of the text at newsstands. Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy chief of the International Department of the Central Committee, who played a key role in the great Gorbachev drama, recalled that in the past such texts would lie on the floor of the newsstands until the leader died. “The people are flabbergasted at the TV coverage of Gorbachev’s meetings and speeches in Leningrad,” Chernyaev wrote. “The question of the day is: Did you see it? At last we have a leader who knows what he is doing and enjoys it, who can relate to the people, speak in his own words, who doesn’t avoid contact and doesn’t worry about appearing magisterial. He really wants to get our wheels out of the rut, wake the people up, get them to be themselves, to use their common sense, to think and act.”⁵

At a Politburo meeting April 11, Gorbachev’s impatience was on full display. He was furious at the dreadful state of Soviet farming and at the food supply, which often spoiled in storage and transport. There were only enough warehouses for 26 percent of the fruit, vegetables and potatoes, and they were rotting; only a third of the storage facilities for produce had refrigeration. The loss of agricultural raw materials was running at 25 percent. As Chernyaev later lamented, any leader would see “the country was on the verge of collapse.” Gorbachev threatened the ministers that he would take away Kremlin privileges—an eatery and special food store—which allowed them to avoid exposure to the misery in most food shops.⁶

Even in his first blunder, a campaign against alcohol abuse, Gorbachev showed his determination to save the country from itself.⁷ The campaign was widely ridiculed and eventually dropped, but Gorbachev knew, correctly, that alcoholism had become a scourge. Per capita, the amount of alcohol consumed was two and a half times greater than it had been under the tsars. Gorbachev recalled that the saddest part was that vodka helped fill the consumer goods deficit; there was nothing else for people to buy with their rubles. Chernyaev sensed right away the campaign was doomed. One day he stopped by a grocery. “Everyone there from the manager to the saleswoman is drunk. The anti-alcoholism law is nothing for them. Try to fire them. Who are you going to find to replace them?”⁸

Less than two weeks after Gorbachev took power, two military men came to his office. Both held the rank of Marshal, the highest in the Soviet military. One was the unremarkable new defense minister, Sergei Sokolov, who had been appointed after Ustinov’s death. The other was Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of the General Staff. Lean and muscular, not very tall, with a strong chest like an athlete and a thin face, Akhromeyev carried himself very straight, was known as an exacting commander and rarely smiled. He had joined the Red Army at age seventeen, just before the outbreak of World War II, fought to lift the siege of Leningrad and later commanded a tank battalion in Ukraine. He ended the war as a major. His generation went into the war surprised and outgunned, fighting the Nazi tanks with only rifles and Molotov cocktails. After the war, they graduated from the military academies and devoted their lives to the belief, as Akhromeyev put it, that “everything the Soviet Union achieved in the post-war organization of Europe and the world must be protected.”⁹ Their determination was only strengthened by the development of nuclear weapons.

By contrast, Gorbachev was a boy when the Germans invaded. He never served as a soldier, nor in the military-industrial complex or the defense establishment. Nor was Gorbachev in thrall to the great designers and scientists who had built the missiles and warheads that turned the Soviet Union into a nuclear superpower. Gorbachev simply did not share the worldview that the generals so deeply cherished and fervently protected. He did not see military power as decisive in global competition; he realized economic power was more potent. “We are encircled not by invincible armies,” he later concluded, “but by superior economies.”¹⁰

In the meeting with Sokolov and Akhromeyev, Gorbachev got his first look at the true size and scope of the Soviet defense machine, and it was enormous. As they finished, Gorbachev turned to Akhromeyev. “We begin to work together in difficult times,” he said. “I speak to you as a Communist. I know what I must do in the area of economics to correct the situation. I know where and what to do. But the area of defense is new for me. I count on your help.” Akhromeyev, who had been chief of the General Staff for only six months, and before that deputy chief, held sway over military policy and planning. He promised to give Gorbachev his help.¹¹

Gorbachev realized that the sprawling defense establishment—the Army, Navy, Air Force, Strategic Rocket Forces, Air Defense Forces and all the institutes, design bureaus and factories that supported them—were a monumental burden on the country. How the military-industrial complex functioned, how far it ranged and how much it cost were concealed by deep secrecy, what Gorbachev called the “closed zones.”¹² But Gorbachev’s travels around the country had provided him with hints. “Defense spending was bleeding the other branches of the economy dry,” he recalled. “When I visited defense plants and agricultural production complexes, I was always struck by the same picture. The defense production workshop making modern tanks, for example, had the newest equipment. The one working for agriculture was making obsolete models of tractors on old-time conveyor belts.”

“Over the previous five-year plans, military spending had been growing twice as fast as national income. This Moloch was devouring everything that hard labor and strain produced… What made matters worse was the fact that it was impossible to analyze the problem. All the figures related to the military-industrial complex were classified. Even Politburo members didn’t have access to them.”¹³

On the staff of the Central Committee, one man knew the secret inner workings of the military-industrial complex. Vitaly Katayev had the appearance of a thoughtful scientist or professor, with a long, angular face and wavy hair brushed straight back. As a teenager he loved to design model airplanes and ships. He spent two decades in aircraft and missile design and construction bureaus in Omsk and Ukraine, and took part in some of the largest missile projects of the Cold War before coming to the Central Committee headquarters in Moscow in 1974 to work on defense issues. In private, Katayev was a funny, quirky man who loved to sing and play musical instruments.¹⁴ But in his work at the Central Committee, he was very serious and precise. The Central Committee position was located in the heart of power, perhaps roughly equivalent to serving at the White House National Security Council. Katayev worked in the Defense Industry Department, later renamed just the Defense Department, which oversaw the military-industrial complex. Over many years, Katayev kept detailed records in large bound notebooks, often jotting down rows of numbers, drawing schematics of weapons systems, recording major decisions and debates. His notebooks and writings, revealed here for the first time, offer an unparalleled window on the inner workings of the Soviet military-industrial colossus.¹⁵Katayev described it once as “a sort of Soviet Texas—everything existed on a grand scale.” But Katayev knew it was not as fearsome as often portrayed. The defense establishment was run in a way that was extremely random, ad hoc, and subjective. Katayev knew that Soviet central planning did not work. Weapons were not built because they were needed, but rather because of the power of vested interests, of prominent designers, generals and Politburo members. To meet the artificial benchmarks of progress, everything had to increase every year, so the military was often saturated with weapons it did not need. The factories often lacked the necessary precision and reliability to produce high-technology weapons. Katayev recalled that while the Soviet Union had advanced science and a high level of design expertise, many projects were wrecked by miserable materials and sloppy production, for which no one was ever fired. Even such a simple ingredient as metals were often of unpredictable quality, so designers had to allow for wide margins. And it was not possible to fix the problems in electronics and high technology by design alone. A circuit board couldn’t be made more reliable by making it twice as large. There was a “permanent gap,” he said, between the drawing boards and the factories. This was the underside of the Soviet military machine.

Katayev’s notes show that the military-industrial complex was indeed as large as Gorbachev feared. In 1985, Katayev estimated, defense took up 20 percent of the Soviet economy.¹⁶ Of the 135 million adults working in the Soviet Union, Katayev said, 10.4 million worked directly in the military-industrial complex at 1,770 enterprises. Nine ministries served the military, although in a clumsy effort to mask its purpose, the nuclear ministry was given the name “Ministry of Medium Machine Building,” and others were similarly disguised. More than fifty cities were almost totally engaged in the defense effort, and hundreds less so. Defense factories were called upon to make the more advanced civilian products, too, including 100 percent of all Soviet televisions, tape recorders, movie and still cameras and sewing machines.¹⁷ Taking into account all the ways the Soviet military-industrial complex functioned and all the raw materials it consumed and all the tentacles that spread into civilian life, the true size of the defense burden on the economy may well have been even greater than Katayev estimated.

Gorbachev would need deep reserves of strength and cunning to challenge this leviathan. At one Politburo meeting, he lamented, “This country produced more tanks than people.” The military-industrial complex was its own army of vested interests: generals and officers in the services, designers and builders of weapons, ministers and planners in the government, propaganda organs, and party bosses everywhere, all united by the need, unquestioned, to meet the invisible Cold War threat. For decades, the threat had been the overriding reason to divert resources to defense and impose hardship on the Soviet people.¹⁸

In title, Gorbachev was the top man in this system: general secretary of the party, supreme commander and chairman of the defense council. But when he came to power in 1985, he was not really in control. The military-industrial complex was in the hands of Akhromeyev’s generation.

Gorbachev’s thinking about security was influenced by a group of progressives, outsiders to the military-industrial complex. They were academics from the institutes, people who, like Gorbachev, had been excited by the Khrushchev secret speech, but had grown fatigued by the stagnation in the Brezhnev years.¹⁹ They did not trust the military but knew of its immense power. Now they hoped to see reform rise again, and Gorbachev listened to them.

An important figure in this inner circle was Yevgeny Velikhov, an avuncular and open-minded physicist who was then deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. As a child, Velikhov had devoured books about science. He entered Moscow State University just after Stalin died in 1953. After graduation, he joined the institute, headed by Igor Kurchatov, leader of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Velikhov was lucky to be assigned to a famous physicist, Mikhail Leontovich, who supervised theoretical research on controlled nuclear fusion and plasma physics. “The atmosphere was wonderful,” Velikhov recalled. “Plasma physics was just emerging, and we felt that we had very few rivals anywhere in the world.” Velikhov was allowed to travel, and in the summer of 1962, he visited universities in New York, Boston and Chicago, and stopped at Los Alamos. He built his own network of contacts with American scientists.²⁰

When Velikhov became a vice president of the Academy of Sciences in 1977, he was the youngest to hold the position. His first assignment was to focus on cybernetics and computer technology in the Soviet Union, and he found they were in “very bad shape.” One day in the early 1980s, Velikhov invited Gorbachev, then a Politburo member, to his office at the academy. He recalled telling Gorbachev about the Apple computer on his desk, which he had brought from overseas. “I showed him and I said, ‘Look, this is a revolution.’” Once in power, Gorbachev continued to listen to Velikhov.

Others in Gorbachev’s circle were Yakovlev, the reformist thinker who walked with Gorbachev in the orchard in Canada in 1983 and was now at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, and Georgi Arbatov, director of the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, who was a critical channel of ideas and information for Gorbachev in the early years.

Gorbachev was desperate for real information, cutting through the mountains of artificial data. “We especially need objective information, showing not what we would like to see but what really is,” Gorbachev appealed to the Politburo.²¹ Georgi Shakhnazarov said the military tried to manipulate the leadership. “They reported to the leadership one thing, while thinking and doing something totally different,” he said. “It was a cat and mouse game.”²²

In Afghanistan, the military was sinking deeper and deeper into a losing quagmire. In Gorbachev’s first months, angry letters flooded into the Central Committee from around the country decrying the war. In April 1985, Reagan wrote to Gorbachev, “Isn’t it long overdue to reach a political resolution of this tragic affair?” Just weeks before he wrote this, Reagan signed a classified order, National Security Decision Directive 166, which provided the legal basis for a massive escalation of the CIA’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, setting a new and more ambitious goal. Instead of just supporting resistance to the Red Army, now the CIA decided to push the Soviets out.²³ Arbatov gave Gorbachev a memo that included far-reaching ideas, including that “we must cease with Afghanistan.” On June 19, 1985, Gorbachev called Arbatov to the Kremlin and told him Afghanistan was a “paramount issue” for him.²⁴ In August, Soviet soldiers revolted on a train headed to Afghanistan; they did not want to be shipped off to a war where ten soldiers were killed every day. Gorbachev began planning a retreat, but it took years.

Looking back, Gorbachev recalled that he had to “clear up the ‘snow drifts’ left over from Cold War times.” Afghanistan was just one. In foreign policy, he said, what he had in mind were “not simply cosmetic changes, but practically a U-turn.”

Yet the outside world did not see this right away. Gorbachev’s early overtures to Reagan were given the brush-off. When Gorbachev proposed April 7 to freeze the Pioneer missiles in Europe that had stirred the West to deploy the Pershing IIs and cruise missiles, Reagan and Thatcher immediately refused, saying it was a propaganda gambit. Their deployments were only getting started, so a freeze would leave the two sides unequal.²⁵ “Unhelpful,” Reagan wrote to Gorbachev on April 30. “I cannot help but wonder what the purpose could have been in presenting a proposal which is, in its essence, not only an old one, but one which was known to provide no basis for serious negotiation.”²⁶ What Reagan may not have known was that, in the Kremlin, the Pioneer missiles, also known as the SS-20s, were already viewed as a mistake. “Why do we need these SS-20s?” Chernyaev asked in his diary two weeks before Reagan’s letter. “Their installation was as foolish as Khrushchev’s missiles in Cuba in 1962.”²⁷

On April 17, Gorbachev proposed a moratorium on nuclear tests. The United States again said no. The arms control negotiations in Geneva, which resumed in early 1985, soon stalled.²⁸ Out of frustration, Shultz quietly put together a secret overture to Moscow. With Reagan’s approval, he met with Dobrynin in Washington in June and offered a trade-off: if both sides made deep cuts in offensive nuclear weapons, perhaps Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could be slowed down. Shultz also proposed that negotiations be started through a confidential back channel, bypassing the deadlocked Geneva talks. In two weeks, the answer came back from Moscow: unequivocally no. “The Soviets wanted to stop SDI in its tracks, not just moderate it,” Shultz recalled.²⁹ Dobrynin later said there was another reason: Gromyko had killed the idea because he feared the back channel would bypass him.³⁰

It was Gromyko’s last chance to say “nyet.” On June 29, Gorbachev replaced Gromyko as foreign minister, moving him to be chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Gromyko, who held the post twenty-eight years, was a custodian of the old thinking—the world as a collision of two opposing camps—which Gorbachev was about to demolish. Gorbachev then stunned everyone by naming Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgia party leader, as foreign minister. “This was like a bolt from the blue,” recalled Chernyaev.³¹ Shevardnadze, who had spent his entire career in Georgia, shared Gorbachev’s understanding of the poverty of the Russian heartland. They stood out from others in the leadership—they did not have experience in heavy industry or the military-industrial complex.³² Shevardnadze had little familiarity with diplomacy, but he was a politician, and he had Gorbachev’s trust. He was promoted immediately to a full Politburo member. In the same session, Gorbachev appointed Lev Zaikov, a Leningrad party official, to oversee the military-industrial complex. Katayev would be one of Zaikov’s key staffers at the Central Committee. “There are many obstacles in this area of our work,” Gorbachev said. “We need to fix things here.”³³

Chernyaev said Soviet propaganda was so stale, no one believed it, “and the root of the Geneva deadlock is this. Revolutionary approaches to talks are needed, identical to the one Gorbachev demonstrated in Leningrad.”

“The question is about the fact that we must stop treading water,” Chernyaev concluded, “as the arms race is about to shoot out of control.”³⁴

Just after Gorbachev took office, in the spring and early summer of 1985, the directors, designers and constructors of satellites, space boosters, radars and lasers produced a colossal new plan for Gorbachev’s approval. Unknown to the outside world, the Soviet military-industrial complex laid on Gorbachev’s desk a plea for their own “Star Wars.” It came two years after Reagan had announced his Strategic Defense Initiative. It would propel the Soviet Union on the path of previous decades, faithful to the Cold War trajectory of two worlds in collision and ceaseless competition.

Since 1984, the Soviet leadership had been increasingly anxious about Reagan’s dream, and Reagan gave them plenty to worry about. In his second inaugural speech in early 1985, Reagan offered a high-flying description of his program, calling it a global shield to make nuclear weapons obsolete. “I have approved a research program to find, if we can, a security shield that will destroy nuclear missiles before they reach their target,” he said. “It wouldn’t kill people. It would destroy weapons. It wouldn’t militarize space, it would help demilitarize the arsenals of the Earth. It would render nuclear weapons obsolete.”

In Moscow, the KGB made its highest priority gathering intelligence about “American policy on the militarization of space.” That was the title of a ten-page directive issued three and a half weeks after Reagan’s inaugural speech. Soviet spies were ordered to gather intelligence on all the American programs that might deploy systems in space for nuclear and conventional war. They were asked to watch the use of the American space shuttle for deploying weapons in space, the U.S. effort to build an anti-satellite weapon; and they were given extensive tasks to spy on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Woven into the KGB’s instructions were details already plucked from newspapers about Reagan’s program, such as the budget sums and the broad direction, along with ample doses of fear and skepticism about the unknowns. Perhaps Reagan’s program would never work? Perhaps there was a hidden purpose? The KGB was “very anxious to know,” the instruction said, precisely what were the Reagan administration’s plans, how they were evolving, and the “targets, dates and expected financial outlay.” The KGB wanted to know what technical results were achieved in tests, whether it was possible to shoot down a missile using “kinetic weapons,” such as hitting it with another missile or solid object. And what were Reagan’s intentions for negotiating? Was Star Wars really a “large-scale disinformation operation” designed to force the Soviet negotiators into making concessions?³⁵

An avalanche of intelligence reporting began to flow to Moscow, and stacks of it crossed Katayev’s desk. He observed that the spies were lazy and passive; they often simply sent along press clippings as intelligence. What the agents and Soviet military analysts feared the most, Katayev realized, was to underestimate the seriousness of the threat, so they overestimated it. No one could honestly declare that Star Wars would not work, so they reported that it might. The spies flooded the system with reports of the threat; before long, the military-industrial complex geared up to counter the threat. Starting in 1985 and continuing through the decade, Katayev recalled that about ten cables a day came through his offices in the Central Committee on political-military and technical issues. Of them, 30–40 percent dealt with Star Wars and missile defense. Katayev wondered if the Americans were deliberately trying to choke Moscow with fear by leaking a flood of information.³⁶ In the two years since Reagan’s announcement, the Strategic Defense Initiative was not even close to blueprints—it was still little more than a dream—but it had grabbed the attention of the Soviet leadership.

To build a Soviet Star Wars would mean enormous, lucrative new subsidies for work at the design bureaus, institutes and defense factories. Many of these designers and workers already enjoyed better living conditions than the general population. It was, Katayev recalled, like a hunting dog sensing a new quarry. By summer of 1985, the weapons chiefs pulled together a comprehensive plan for a Soviet missile defense system. According to Katayev’s notebooks and papers, there were two major umbrella programs, each of which included a sprawling array of separate projects ranging from fundamental exploratory research to building equipment ready for flight tests. The two umbrella programs had code names. The first was “D-20,” which included research on ground-based missile defenses and was assigned to the Ministry of Radio Industry, which traditionally had worked on early warning, command and control and the Moscow anti-ballistic missile system. The second was “SK-1000,” a product of the design bureaus of the Ministry of General Machine Building, which oversaw missile and space-related research, development and production. Katayev calculated that altogether the programs would have involved 137 projects in the opytno-konstruktorskie raboty phase, or design and testing; 34 projects in nauchno-issledovatelskiye raboty, or scientific research; and 115 in fundamental science. The estimates of the costs ran into the tens of billions of rubles, enough to keep the design bureaus working full tilt into the late 1980s. Given obscure code names such as Fundament-4 and Integral-3, Onega E, Spiral, Saturn, Kontakt, Echelon and Skif, the programs went on for pages and pages in Katayev’s notebooks. Most of the proposals brought to the Kremlin that summer were intended to produce initial results in 1987–1988; Katayev kept track of goals and targets through 1990.³⁷

For all the imposing scope and cost, the grand package concealed deep cracks in the system. Some of the programs, started years earlier, lacked results or purpose, or were starved for resources. Some of them were nearly abandoned or obsolete, hoping for a rebirth. SK-1000 included virtually all the space launcher and satellite programs that were underway in the Soviet Union at that time.

One program that illustrated the ambitions, haste and deficiencies that plagued Soviet space weapons builders was an anti-satellite craft known as Skif. The goal of Skif, started in 1976, was to carry a laser in space that could shoot down enemy satellites. The original idea was to build nothing less than a space battle station. It would be hoisted into orbit by the Energia, an enormous booster then under development, and perhaps serviced by the Buran, the planned Soviet space shuttle. By 1984, the Skif program had yet to produce any hardware because there was no laser that would be suitable for space weaponry. The Soviets were shaken that June by news of the successful American missile interception over the Pacific, the lucky single hit, known as the Homing Overlay Experiment, described earlier. Even without a space laser, the government in August ordered creation of a “demonstration” spacecraft, the Skif-D, which would carry a smaller, substitute laser, one that could not shoot down satellites but would at least replicate the original idea. Then, in 1985, came the renewed planning for a Soviet Star Wars. The Skif-D was modified once again. This time it was to be put on an accelerated schedule to fly by the following year. However, the designers still lacked a laser. So they decided to create a mock-up with no functioning laser equipment on board, and called it “Skif-DM.” The vessel was to be 36.9 meters long and weigh 77 tons. The Skif mock-up demonstrator was among those programs offered to Gorbachev for accelerated work in the summer of 1985.³⁸

Roald Sagdeev, a physicist and director of the Space Research Institute, a leader in the Soviet deep-space exploration effort, recalled attending a small meeting in Gorbachev’s office. Gorbachev was still on a learning curve, asking questions and absorbing details about complicated arms control issues. According to Sagdeev, a top official of the Soviet space industry appealed to Gorbachev to build his own Star Wars. “Trust me,” the official said. “We are losing time while doing nothing to build our own counterpart to the American SDI program.”

“I almost died from suppressing my laughter,” Sagdeev recalled. He realized that the Soviet Union could not afford billions of rubles to do it and lacked critical technology, especially high-speed computers and precision optics.³⁹

These were still early days for Gorbachev, and he was clearly not yet fully in control. The list of D-20 and SK-1000 could only have added to his fears about the military-industrial complex. On July 15, 1985, the Central Committee approved the huge list of proposals for a Soviet missile defense. What is significant here is not so much the approval—most of the programs were years away from materializing—but the unbridled ambitions of the designers and builders. They wanted to construct a massive and expensive response to Reagan’s dream. In the past, they had been the driving force behind Soviet weapons systems. Gorbachev would have to outfox them.

Velikhov, by his own experience and outlook, was ready to help navigate the forbidding obstacle course Gorbachev faced. Both open-minded and entrepreneurial, Velikhov was the right man at the right time. His specialty was nuclear and plasma physics. When the Soviet weapons designers gave Gorbachev their grand plan, he spotted the faults. Velikhov knew the top-secret history of Soviet efforts to build missile defenses, dating back to the 1960s, because he had participated in it. Certainly, they had achieved scientific and engineering breakthroughs against great odds, but the Soviet Union fell short of building next-generation weapons in space.⁴⁰

The most concrete achievement was completion of a ground-based missile defense system around Moscow, as permitted by the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty. In the event of an attack, interceptor rockets were poised to shoot up from locations around the city and knock out the incoming warheads. The Soviets had also launched a relatively primitive anti-satellite weapon, first designed in the 1960s, which would position itself into the same orbit as a target satellite and shoot conventional weapons at it. The system had largely ceased to work by 1983.⁴¹

But there were also many setbacks, especially in the quest for exotic laser and space weapons, which consumed huge expenditures in the 1960s and 1970s. A testing ground was constructed for this work at Sary Shagan, near the eastern shores of Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan. Scientists, designers and their military patrons dreamed of building powerful beams capable of striking satellites from space battle stations or stopping missiles in flight. They drew designs of lasers in space and on the ground, long before Reagan’s dream was unveiled. But they never knocked anything out of the sky.

One of the legendary Cold War designers was Vladimir Chelomei, architect of the SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile, the Proton launcher, the Soviet cruise missile and the early anti-satellite weapon. In 1978, near the end of his career, he proposed to build and launch “baby” space shuttles carrying anti-satellite weapons. Velikhov, a rising star in a younger generation, served on a commission to examine Chelomei’s baby shuttle. The commission rejected it, and in the process Velikhov gained a much deeper appreciation of the difficulty of missile defense. “The Chelomei affair was killed,” Velikhov said. “And this was a very good inoculation for Russia against the Star Wars proposal by Reagan, because five years before, we had already had all these internal discussions, with a very detailed analysis on the technical engineering level.”

The challenges of stopping a missile in flight were a technical nightmare. Scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union struggled from 1962 to 1978 to build super-powerful lasers that could knock out satellites and missiles. The first major project, known as LE-1, was a ruby laser, built at Sary Shagan, that eventually proved capable of tracking airplanes about one hundred kilometers away, but not in space, and the laser was not capable of shooting down objects.⁴² A more advanced laser, code-named Terra-3, was also on the drawing boards for a decade, and the plan was to test it at Sary Shagan, where a structure was built for the power source and laser-beam-pointing system. Although Soviet scientists made advances in laser technology during Terra-3, it never worked as a weapon. The reentry vehicles that the system was supposed to shoot down are very difficult targets. The project was abandoned by 1978.⁴³ A follow-up called Terra-3K was also planned, with a goal of using a high-power laser to attack low-orbit satellites, but it never worked.⁴⁴

Despite the Herculean efforts, the designers ran into difficulty when they reached the limits of Soviet technology and innovation and the vexing physics of missile defense. Laser weapons demanded enormous energy sources, superb optics and precision targeting. The designers and scientists struggled with the tendency of a beam to dissipate as it shot into space. Velikhov, as a physicist and vice president of the academy, knew the designers and their troubles. In his own research, he had helped build a magneto hydrodynamic generator, which created huge amounts of electricity in a short burst, a potential laser power supply. Velikhov knew as well that an almost insurmountable roadblock for Soviet designers was the primitive state of their computers. Massive amounts of fast calculations would be necessary to hit a bullet shooting through space. Velikhov was in charge of the academy’s department for computer science. He knew the Soviet Union was a decade or more behind in computer technology.

While many Soviet weapons scientists worked in secrecy and isolation, Velikhov benefited from much broader horizons. When Pope John Paul II called for an examination of the dangers of nuclear war by scientists from around the world, Velikhov was chosen by the authorities to represent the Soviet Union. At the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the autumn of 1982, Velikhov had extensive contacts with scientists in debates over nuclear war and weapons in space. The Vatican declaration called on global powers never to use nuclear weapons in war. “The catastrophe of nuclear war can and must be prevented,” the declaration said.⁴⁵This was consistent with Soviet disarmament propaganda, but the experience in Rome and other meetings gave Velikhov a better understanding of the West that would help him guide Gorbachev. Also, in May 1983, two months after Reagan’s speech on missile defense, Velikhov was named head of a group of twenty-five Soviet scientists intended to warn of the dangers of nuclear war.⁴⁶ Again, promoting Soviet disarmament propaganda may have been the intent, but Velikhov and the scientists steered their own course.

Velikhov was asked by the Kremlin in late 1983 to once again evaluate the Reagan missile defense proposal from a technical standpoint. The conclusion was that Reagan’s dream would not work. The Soviet scientists knew this from their own hard labor and failures. When Gorbachev came to power two years later, Velikhov dusted off the same document. He had accumulated all the knowledge and experience necessary to give an honest and cold-eyed appraisal of the reality of missile defense.⁴⁷

He used that experience at a key turning point in the summer and early autumn of 1985. Velikhov urged Gorbachev not to build a Soviet version of Star Wars. He suggested they abandon the Cold War approach of toe-to-toe competition. Gorbachev was naturally open to this argument; he also wanted, in principle, to move away from the zero-sum game. But it was Velikhov who helped lead Gorbachev to something different.

The Soviet weapons designers wanted to match what Reagan was doing, a symmetrical response. By contrast, Velikhov argued for an “asymmetrical response,” one that would answer Reagan but not be the same. To stop ballistic missiles in flight, an American defense system would have to target and destroy a thousand speeding points in space almost perfectly and simultaneously. To counter it, one idea for “asymmetrical response” was to unleash so many speeding points—warheads, either real or fake—that the American defense system would be overwhelmed. Some of the Soviet missiles would penetrate and get through to their targets.

There were different ideas among Soviet experts about the hardware for “asymmetrical response.” According to Katayev’s records, Soviet engineers came up with technological tricks to fool the anti-missile system. For example, they could launch decoys or chaff, to imitate the warheads and deceive the defenses. They could spin and maneuver warheads to avoid detection, or blind the American satellites and command centers, knocking out the eyes of the defensive system.

Another method was more ominous: build more missiles and an avalanche of additional nuclear warheads. The Soviet Union was good at missiles, and it would be easier and cheaper to double or triple the missile warheads than to build an entirely new defense against them. This approach was hypothetical, but not entirely. Katayev recalled that the latest version of the SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile carried ten warheads each. This was the biggest, most feared, multiple-warhead weapon in the Soviet arsenal. But if the missile’s range was shortened somewhat, and the warheads made smaller, he wrote, the SS-18 could actually be modified to carry “up to 40 nuclear warheads. And this one missile alone!” In a separate, more precise chart in his files, Katayev noted the modified SS-18 could carry thirty-eight warheads. At the time, the Soviet Union deployed 308 of these missiles. If they were modified, the fleet would go from 2,464 warheads to a total of 12,084. It would be much more difficult for American defenses to stop. This was only a concept that had been discussed in earlier years by missile designers, but it illustrated what could become a potent Soviet response to Reagan’s Star Wars.⁴⁸

Gorbachev would most certainly not favor this version of “asymmetrical response.” He wanted to eliminate weapons, not propagate them. In his memoir, he avoided talking about the details of this option. When the author questioned Gorbachev in an interview in 2006, he was still uneasy about discussing it. “We did have a project,” he said. “There was one. It existed. But it is closed down. And destroyed. It’s only tens of billions” of rubles. “But it’s a horrible project, it’s a horrible response.” He added, “What is one missile, SS-18? It’s a hundred Chernobyls. In one missile.”⁴⁹

More weapons were not the only answer. There was a third approach to “asymmetrical response.” Words were Gorbachev’s stock-in-trade, and his best weapon. He was a robust if long-winded orator. Could he simply say “no” to the Reagan dream, persuade Reagan of his folly and talk it into oblivion? Perhaps he could strike a deal to cancel a giant weapons machine that the United States did not yet possess, that the Soviet Union would have great trouble matching, and exchange it all for something they both wanted: deep reductions in existing nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev realized this was his best answer. If he could talk Reagan out of his dream of missile defense, it would prevent stiff competition on a field—high technology—where the Soviet Union lagged years behind. There was an important domestic component too. The military-industrial complex constantly pressed for more resources, saying the United States was a threat. If Gorbachev could persuade Reagan not to build “Star Wars,” he would find it easier to resist the generals and the missile designers at home. By slowing the arms race, Gorbachev might find time and resources to begin modernizing the country.

Yet in the summer of 1985, the military and defense industries were powerful forces. Velikhov saw Gorbachev was buffeted by crosscurrents. He was a man of the party who depended on the Central Committee bureaucracy; he had no choice but to listen to the generals, the ministers and the KGB; and the military establishment distrusted Velikhov, Yakovlev and other progressive thinkers around the general secretary. Gorbachev was personally wary of the military and defense industry, and surrounded himself with advisers who shared his caution, but he did not, and could not, move overtly or swiftly against them.⁵⁰

Behind the scenes, however, Gorbachev was starting to lead the country in a radical new direction. A leader’s courage is often defined by building something, by positive action, but in this case, Gorbachev’s great contribution was in deciding what not to do. He would not build a Soviet Star Wars. He averted another massive weapons competition.

Gorbachev didn’t show his hand right away. The full dimensions of this change in direction took time to appear. If anything, Gorbachev was good at tactics.

In late July, he announced the Soviet Union, by itself, would stop nuclear testing, and invited the United States to follow suit. Reagan did not.

To Velikhov’s confident assertion that the Strategic Defense Initiative would not work, his Soviet colleagues often posed a difficult question: if it was not possible to create an effective missile shield with America’s best technology, if Reagan was utterly dreaming when he talked about making nuclear weapons obsolete, then why was the United States devoting so much money to it, year after year? As Katayev recalled it, the Soviet analysts saw “a clear discrepancy between the goals and the means” of Reagan’s announced intentions. “What is it being done for?” the Soviet specialists asked themselves, according to Katayev. “In the name of what are the Americans, famous for their pragmatism, opening their wallet for the most grandiose project in the history of the United States when the technical and economic risks of a crash exceed all thinkable limits?”

“Or,” Katayev wrote, “is there still something different behind this curtain?” To the Soviet specialists on strategic weapons, Katayev said, Reagan’s zeal for his dream led them “from the very beginning to think about the possibility of political bluff and hoax.” They pondered whether it was a “Hollywood village of veneer and cardboard.” The question went unanswered.

According to Katayev, a few Soviet experts—he doesn’t say exactly who—held an even darker view of Reagan’s goals. They concluded that the Americans were always distinguished by their systematic approach to problems, that they “do nothing in vain.” Rather than a hoax or bluff, they decided the Strategic Defense Initiative was a cover story for a gigantic, hidden effort to subsidize American defense contractors, save them from “bankruptcy” and produce a fresh surge of superior military high technology. Perhaps, Katayev said, this “was the major underwater part of the SDI iceberg.” This analysis was woefully misguided. While Reagan did fatten the defense contractors with record military budgets in the early 1980s, defense spending was a relatively small slice of the overall American economy. While there was a fresh surge of high technology, much of it was sprouting in the private sector, in the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. And in the United States, defense contractors simply did not play the same role as the outsized military-industrial complex in the Soviet Union. The Soviet analysts were mistakenly applying their own experience—in which the military-industrial complex was at the center of decisions—to what they could not explain in the United States. Each side in the Cold War remained a mysterious black box to the other. The Americans could not see Gorbachev’s radical intentions. The Soviets could not understand Reagan’s dream.

In late August 1985, Gorbachev gave an interview to Time magazine, his rhetoric offering a refreshing change from the decades of Cold War confrontation. When asked about the Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev said Soviet experts believed it was “sheer fantasy and a pipe dream.” His progressive brain trust had helped prepare his remarks.⁵¹Two weeks later, Reagan wrote in his diary, “I made a decision we would not trade away our program of research—S.D.I. for a promise of Soviet reduction in nuclear arms.”⁵² Arriving in Washington for the first time on September 27, Shevardnadze gave Reagan a letter from Gorbachev offering to cut long-range nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers by 50 percent in exchange for “a complete ban on space attack weapons.” The offer didn’t fly; Reagan could not accept the limits on Star Wars. But he was ready for deep cuts in existing nuclear arsenals.⁵³

In Washington, both the Defense Department under Weinberger and the CIA under Casey and Gates were deeply skeptical of Gorbachev. The Pentagon published a glossy annual booklet, Soviet Military Power, a propaganda piece designed to help boost congressional support for Reagan’s military spending. The fourth edition, published in April 1985, contained the claim that the Soviets had “two ground-based lasers that are capable of attacking satellites in various orbits.”⁵⁴ This was a gross exaggeration; neither the LE-1 nor the Terra-3 lasers could attack anything. An artist’s conception, a black-and-white pencil sketch, appeared across the top, showing what purported to be the Sary Shagan proving ground. A building with a dome on top was shown firing a white laser beam into the heavens. The caption said, “The directed-energy R&D site at the Sary Shagan proving ground includes ground-based lasers that could be used in an anti-satellite role today and possibly a BMD role in the future.” The key words were “could” and “possibly.” In fact, the long, expensive search to build laser weapons against targets in space had, up to this point, totally fizzled. The Soviets had not given up hope, but the glossy Pentagon booklet took old failures and hyped them into new threats.

In October, the State and Defense departments published a new report titled “Soviet Strategic Defensive Programs.” The pencil sketch of Sary Shagan appeared again. The text claimed that Soviet achievements in laser weapons “have been impressive.” It was true the Soviet scientists had scored advances in lasers, but they had not created an exotic weapon that worked. The text said that the Soviets “may also have the capability to develop the optical systems necessary for laser weapons to track and attack their targets.” In fact, they could track, but not attack.

Reagan picked up the theme in a radio speech October 12. “The Soviets have for a long time been doing advanced research on their version of SDI,” the president said. “They’re doing so well, our experts say they may be able to put an advanced technology defensive system in space by the end of the century.” One might dismiss this as just standard rhetoric, but Reagan’s words suggest that he never really grasped the impact on the military of the economic decay and stifling leadership in the Soviet system. Through superhuman striving, against all odds, the Soviet Union managed to reach superpower status, and yet there were massive internal stresses and agonizing fissures. The Soviet Union was not ready to put a missile defense system in space as Reagan claimed. They were not ready to knock out a satellite with lasers—and would never do so. It was a tragedy that a country that had spawned some of the great minds in mathematics and physics, that had produced chess champions and launched Sputnik, was by the 1980s behind in the computer revolution, sinking in economic backwardness and totally unprepared for the next century. But Reagan saw weakness only on the domestic side of the Soviet Union. He saw the military as ten feet tall.

In one of the more notable errors of judgment, the October report on Soviet strategic defenses accused leading Soviet scientists, including Velikhov, of being hypocrites. In one passage, the document noted that many of them had signed a letter published in the New York Times in opposition to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. Velikhov was named and singled out with a photo. It was noted accurately that Velikhov had been head of the Institute of Atomic Energy at Troitsk, a branch of the Kurchatov Institute, located outside of Moscow, “where lasers for strategic and tactical applications are being developed.” The connotation was that Velikhov was a mindless propaganda puppet of the regime and a secret weaponeer. The Americans missed the point. While Velikhov had worked on laser weapons, that was precisely the reason he could tell Gorbachev the unvarnished truth about missile defense.

Reagan was eager to meet Gorbachev and try out his one-on-one persuasive powers as a November summit in Geneva drew near. No summit had been held since 1979; Reagan had only three years of his presidency remaining. He did not want to lose time. “Starting with Brezhnev, I’d dreamed of personally going one-on-one with a Soviet leader,” Reagan later wrote in his memoirs, saying he believed if the leaders agreed on something, all else would fall into place. Now, he was at last going to get his chance.

Reagan, who liked one-page briefing papers, was buried under a mountain of information in preparation for the summit. McFarlane and Matlock assembled two dozen briefing papers from the CIA and State Department, about eight to ten pages each, single spaced. McFarlane said Reagan received them eagerly, jotting notes in the margins.⁵⁵ But Reagan privately complained, “I’m getting d–n sick of cramming like a school kid.”⁵⁶ The experts told the president that Gorbachev represented a fresh style of Soviet leader, that dramatic changes were underway, but none threatening the system itself.⁵⁷ Shultz recalled that “word from the intelligence community and other Soviet specialists around the government was that the Soviet Union would never, indeed could never, change no matter how bad their internal economic and social problems were.”⁵⁸ The CIA briefing paper given to Reagan, titled “Gorbachev’s Personal Agenda for the November Meeting,” said Gorbachev had “little expectation of any major substantive breakthrough on arms control or regional issues.” Gates, a longtime Soviet specialist, who also briefed the president, predicted that Gorbachev wasn’t going to be pushed around. His conclusion: “Gorbachev simply intended to outwait Reagan.”⁵⁹

For Reagan, one CIA briefing proved riveting, by specialist Kay Oliver, who had just drafted a National Intelligence Estimate titled “Domestic Stress on the Soviet System.” She told Reagan of the decay in everyday life in the Soviet Union—alcoholism, alienation, drug abuse, economic decline—and explained how the “ruling elite had become stagnant, cynical, outrageously corrupt and ineffective” in the 1970s and early 1980s.⁶⁰ These themes reinforced Reagan’s lifelong assumptions. He wrote approvingly in his diary that Oliver “confirmed things I had heard from unconfirmed sources. The Soviet U. is an ec. basket case & among other things there is a rapidly spreading turn by the people to religion.”⁶¹

Reagan was attentive to Suzanne Massie, the author and Soviet culture expert, and read her book Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia. Massie recalled that when she met Reagan, he seemed hungry to learn more about the Russians as people than he was getting from the briefing papers. “He was an actor: actors like to absorb from feeling, and he just wasn’t getting that…kind of juice, if you want, that helped him make sense of affairs, from his official sources.” In her briefing, Massie tried to counter the Hollywood stereotypes of the Russians. She told him Gorbachev had been called to rule a country that was unruly and fractious, “not a whole lot of Communists marching in locked step, that it was far from that.” Massie also told Reagan not to worry about the contrasts being made between himself and the younger Gorbachev—that in fact Reagan was in a stronger position.⁶²

Summing up his impressions, Reagan wrote by hand on a yellow pad a four-and-a-half page memo. The note, which was typed up and then corrected by Reagan in ballpoint pen, offers a valuable snapshot of his thinking before the meeting. Reagan accepted the cautious view that Gorbachev would not bring radical change.

“I believe,” he wrote, “Gorbachev is a highly intelligent leader totally dedicated to traditional Soviet goals.”

Reagan added, “He will be a formidable negotiator and will try to make Soviet foreign and military policy more effective. He is (as are all Soviet General Secretaries) dependent on the Soviet-Communist hierarchy and will be out to prove to them his strength and dedication to Soviet traditional goals.” On arms control, Reagan wrote that Gorbachev wished to “reduce the burden of defense spending that is stagnating the Soviet economy,” and that “could contribute to his opposition to SDI” since “he doesn’t want to face the cost of competing with us.”⁶³

The economic pressures on the Soviet system had gravely worsened that autumn. Saudi Arabia increased oil production in a radical change in policy that was undertaken to boost its market share. A glut of crude hit world oil markets, prices collapsed and so did Soviet foreign currency earnings. By one estimate, Moscow had just lost $20 billion a year. Gorbachev’s backward country suddenly became a lot poorer.⁶⁴

Reagan’s memo also included a curious statement about the Soviet military. In the original memo, he wrote that an internal study “makes it plain the Soviets are planning a war. They would like to win without it and their chances of doing that depend on being so prepared we could be faced with a surrender or die ultimatum.” The surrender-or-die ultimatum was one of Reagan’s old chestnuts from his anti-communism speeches. Reagan’s comment seemed to be lifted right out of his late-1970s slogans warning of a “window of vulnerability.”

According to Matlock, Reagan “had not been advised that the Soviets were planning to start a war, but that they were planning so that they could fight one and prevail.”

When he read what he had written, Reagan felt misgivings, and crossed out the part about the Soviets planning a war. He substituted instead: “They would like to win by being so much better prepared we could be faced with a surrender or die ultimatum.” It was still a skeptical, fearsome, dark view of the other side.

To prepare for the summit, Shultz and McFarlane went to Moscow and met Gorbachev on November 5. They found Gorbachev in a feisty, uncompromising mood. Gorbachev’s remarks followed the broad outline of the “asymmetrical response,” but he was clumsy. He attacked Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, saying at one point the purpose was to bail out the military-industrial complex in the United States, which Gorbachev claimed employed 18 million Americans. Shultz, an economist and former labor secretary, was surprised at Gorbachev’s bad information, and responded that defense was only a small part of the American economy. He delivered a mini-lecture to Gorbachev—which he had composed in his mind before the trip—about how the global economy was turning to a new information age. Gorbachev was stubborn and unmoved. “We know what’s going on,” he insisted. “We know why you’re doing this. You’re inspired by illusions. You think you’re ahead of us in information. You think you’re ahead of us in technology and that you can use these things to gain superiority over the Soviet Union. But this is an illusion.” If Reagan went ahead with the plan for Star Wars, Gorbachev warned, “We will let you bankrupt yourselves.”

Then he added, “We will engage in a buildup that will break your shield.”⁶⁵

Shultz called Reagan afterward. Reagan wrote in his journal that night, “Gorbachev is adamant we must cave in our S.D.I.—well, this will be a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.”⁶⁶

After Shultz flew back and briefed Reagan, the president added, “It seems Mr. G. is filled with a lot of false info about the U.S. & believes it all. For example, Americans hate the Russians because our arms manufacturers stir them up with propaganda so they can keep selling us weapons.”⁶⁷ Reagan vowed, “In Geneva I’ll have to get him in a room alone and set him straight.”⁶⁸

In the weeks before the summit, Roald Sagdeev, the space institute director who had been skeptical about a Soviet Star Wars, was invited to a meeting at the Central Committee with others from the academic and arts elite. They were told that, from now on, they were totally free to meet foreigners without asking permission. “It was a thrilling sensation,” Sagdeev recalled. “In a society where everything was under strict control and tight regulation, even phone numbers could not be given to foreigners.” He was ordered to join Velikhov and other leading advisers to Gorbachev on a plane to Geneva one week before the summit. The instructions: be open, give press interviews.⁶⁹ Hundreds of reporters called, and the group kept busy. A total of 3,614 journalists, including television technicians, registered for the summit. They were drawn by the sense of unpredictability—rarely in the history of superpower summits had there been a meeting without a prearranged script and treaty to be signed; adding to the uncertainty was Reagan’s long history of anti-communism and the curiosity stirred by Gorbachev’s first months in power. The CIA was there, too. The agency “pulled out all the stops to make Gorbachev feel unwelcome in Geneva,” Gates recalled. The CIA sponsored anti-Soviet demonstrations, meetings and exhibits.⁷⁰

When he arrived in Geneva November 16, Reagan, then seventy-four years old, was full of anticipation. “Lord I hope I am ready and not overtrained,” he wrote. The first meeting was to be held at Maison Fleur d’Eau, a twenty-room, nineteenth-century villa on the western shore of Lake Geneva. He and Nancy Reagan toured it in advance, spotting a cozy pool house on the lakeshore. Reagan made sure the White House advance team knew he wanted to steer Gorbachev there for a private chat, with a fire blazing. In the preparations, Reagan held a mock summit session, with Matlock playing Gorbachev, speaking in Russian and trying to mimic Gorbachev’s gestures.⁷¹ In another briefing, Reagan seemed to glaze over. There was a long silence. “I’m in the year 1830,” the president suddenly said, startling his aides. “What happened to all these small shopkeepers in St. Petersburg in the year 1830 and to all that entrepreneurial talent in Russia? How can it have just disappeared?” The aides realized he was absorbed in thought about Massie’s book.⁷²

Cold winds blew off Lake Geneva as Reagan bounded down the steps to greet Gorbachev without an overcoat just after 10 A.M. on November 19. Gorbachev, then fifty-four years old, in office less than a year, stepped out of his black ZIL limousine, bundled up in a blue patterned scarf and overcoat, and took off his fedora, asking Reagan: “Where is your coat?” “It’s inside,” Reagan replied as he motioned toward the glass doors and the warmth of the chateau, guiding Gorbachev by the elbow. As they shook hands for the photographers, Reagan later recalled, “I had to admit…that there was something likeable about Gorbachev. There was a warmth in his face and his style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I’d seen in most senior Soviet officials I’d met until then.”⁷³

Once inside, the original plan called for a short tête-à-tête, fifteen minutes, then a larger session, but Reagan and Gorbachev spent an hour with just interpreters in their first encounter. Reagan declared right away he wanted to ease mistrust between them. They held the fate of the world in their hands, he said. He offered bromides and aphorisms collected from a lifetime of speeches. Countries do not mistrust each other because of arms, but arm each other because of mistrust, he said. People do not get into trouble when they talk to each other, but when they talk about each other. Gorbachev responded with an unemotional, reasoned appeal. The two superpowers could not ignore each other, he said. They were too interrelated. Gorbachev said he had come to improve their relations despite the differences of the past. They needed to create a concrete “impetus,” he said, to show the world they were serious about ending the arms race. Gorbachev, in a preplanned gesture to Reagan, told the president that Soviet scientists had recently calculated there was a high probability of a big earthquake within the next three years in California. Reagan said he realized a quake was overdue. The two leaders had broken the ice.

In the formal meeting that followed, flanked by aides, they turned to the arms race. In both countries, “the military is devouring huge resources,” Gorbachev said. The “central question is how to halt the arms race and disarm.” Reagan brought up Eisenhower’s speech “Atoms for Peace,” offering to internationalize the atom. The United States was always giving, and the Soviet Union rejecting, Reagan complained. While earlier the superpowers reached agreements to slow the growth in weapons, Reagan said, now he wanted to actually reduce the “mountains of weapons.” Reagan then launched into an exposition of his dream of “an antimissile shield which would destroy missiles before they hit the target.” Reagan said he didn’t want to call it a weapon, but a defensive system, and if it worked, he would share it with the Soviet Union. This was a small preplanned surprise Reagan had decided to offer Gorbachev. The Soviet leader did not have time to respond before they broke for lunch, but he was downbeat as he went back to his residence.⁷⁴

“Reagan appeared to me not simply a conservative, but a political ‘dinosaur,’” he recalled of his first impressions.⁷⁵

But the president was chipper. “Our gang told me I’d done good.”⁷⁶

In the afternoon, Gorbachev came roaring back, this time deploying the “asymmetrical response” with energy and verve. Gorbachev fired volley after volley of arguments against the Strategic Defense Initiative. It would lead to an arms race in space, not just a defensive one, but an offensive one, he said. Scholars say any shield can be pierced, he added, so why create it? He threatened retaliation; if Reagan went ahead, there could be no reduction of existing offensive weapons. The Soviet response “would not be a mirror,” Gorbachev added, but “a simpler, more effective system.”

“We will build up to smash your shield,” he said.

If there were “seven layers” of space defenses, Gorbachev added, it would require automation, putting important decisions in the hands of computers. Political leaders would just be hiding in bunkers with computers making the decisions. “This could unleash an uncontrollable process. You haven’t thought this through, it will be a waste of money, and also will cause more distrust and more weapons,” he told Reagan.

Reagan responded the best way he knew how, by articulating his visions and his dream. “There is something uncivilized” about the idea of mutual assured destruction, he said. He told Gorbachev a story. The American ambassador to the United Nations had met some Chinese. They had asked him: what happens when a man with a spear that can penetrate anything meets a man with a shield that is impenetrable? The ambassador said he didn’t know, but he did know what happens when a man with no shield meets that same opponent who has the spear. Neither wants to be in the position of having no shield, Reagan insisted.

At this point, Reagan invited Gorbachev to get some fresh air and go down to the pool house. Gorbachev “leaped out of his chair,” eager to go, Reagan remembered.⁷⁷ When they reached the small room in the pool house, a fire was already roaring. They sat in easy chairs, only interpreters present.

Immediately, Reagan took papers out of a manila folder and handed them to Gorbachev. These are goals for arms control talks, Reagan said, which could be the seeds of a future agreement. Gorbachev started to read and the room was quiet for a few minutes. Soon they had resumed the most difficult disagreement—missile defense, weapons in space. Gorbachev demanded to know: why was there nothing on Reagan’s list about that? Reagan repeated his dream was defensive and would not aggravate the arms race. Back and forth they went—Gorbachev seeking to talk Reagan out of his dream, Reagan striving to get Gorbachev to feel the magic. The dialogue was captured in the interpreter’s notes:

Gorbachev: If the goal was to get rid of nuclear weapons, why start an arms race in another sphere?

Reagan: These are not weapons that kill people or destroy cities, these are weapons that destroy nuclear missiles.

Gorbachev: Let’s ban research, development, testing and deployment of space weapons, then cut offensive arms by 50 percent.

Reagan: Why do you keep speaking about space weapons? We certainly have no intention of putting something into space that would threaten people on Earth.

Gorbachev: A defense against one level of missiles is one thing, but a defense against a much larger number would not be reliable at all.

Reagan: Our people overwhelmingly want this defense. They look at the sky and think what might happen if missiles suddenly appear and blow up everything in our country.

Gorbachev: The missiles are not yet flying. If S.D.I. is actually implemented, then layer after layer of offensive weapons, Soviet and American, would appear in outer space and only God himself would know what they were. And God provides information only very selectively and rarely. Please understand the signal we are giving you—we now have a chance which we must not miss!

They walked back to the main house, having settled nothing. But something had happened to both of them. They had finally taken the measure of the other. “He’s adamant but so am I,” Reagan wrote that night in his diary. “The ‘human factor’ had quietly come into action,” Gorbachev recalled. “We both sensed that we must maintain contact and try to avoid a break.”⁷⁸

Gorbachev was chilled suddenly in the air on the walk back. But he told Reagan this would not be their last meeting. Reagan suggested they visit each other’s country. Gorbachev agreed before they got to the door.⁷⁹

On the second day, tempers rose even higher. Gorbachev said a Soviet scientist had done research and found out the explanation for Reagan’s determination to build the Strategic Defense Initiative was that it would add $600 billion to $1 trillion in new military expenditures. Reagan said the scientist was dealing in fantasy. If a defensive system could be found, it would be available to all. This would end the nuclear nightmare for the people of the United States, the Soviet Union, indeed for “all people.”

Gorbachev started to interrupt Reagan. Why wouldn’t Reagan believe him when he said the Soviet Union would never attack? Before Reagan could answer, Gorbachev repeated the question. He again interrupted Reagan’s answer to insist on a response. Gorbachev questioned Reagan’s sincerity in offering to share research, saying the United States did not even share advanced technology with its allies.

Reagan tried to overcome the interruptions, and in exasperation at one point spilled out one of his deepest hopes—nuclear weapons could be eliminated altogether. At another point, he asked Gorbachev whether he believed in reincarnation and then speculated that perhaps he, Reagan, had invented the shield in an earlier life.

Listening to one of Reagan’s pitches for cooperation on Star Wars, Gorbachev lost his cool. Don’t treat us as simple people! Reagan said he did not see how he had shown disrespect in any way. It was an open debate.

Reagan captured the spirit of the day in his diary that night: “… the stuff really hit the fan. He was really belligerent & d–n it I stood firm.”

That evening, after dinner, Reagan and Gorbachev met in the study over coffee to consider how they would present the summit to the world the next morning. Shultz complained angrily to Gorbachev, his voice rising, finger pointing, that Soviet negotiators—especially the deputy foreign minister Georgi Korniyenko—were backpedaling on agreements. Shultz said the negotiators should stay up all night, if necessary, to hammer it out.

At this point, Reagan and Gorbachev, listening while sitting side by side on a red silk couch, decided to intervene. Reagan insisted they should take matters into their own hands and order the negotiators to go back to the table and work out their differences. Gorbachev agreed. The next morning, November 21, the joint statement was ready. When Reagan and Gorbachev came to the international press center to read their statements, Reagan turned to Gorbachev and whispered, “I bet the hardliners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.” Gorbachev nodded in agreement.⁸⁰

The headline from the summit was that Reagan and Gorbachev would meet again. But in retrospect, it was not the most important news. Much more significant was a short, innocuous phrase in the joint statement. The two superpowers agreed, the statement said, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

These words could be dismissed as nothing more than a feel-good slogan, and Reagan had spoken them before.⁸¹ Not a single nuclear warhead was eliminated at Geneva; Reagan was not any closer to his cherished goal of building a missile defense system; Gorbachev was no closer to stopping it. But in so openly announcing that a nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought, the radical reformer from Stavropol and the dreamer from Hollywood had called a halt to years of extraordinary tension and fright. They had put behind them the terrible worries of the RYAN operation and Andropov’s fears of imminent attack. They had buried the idea that the Soviets were planning to fight and win a nuclear war. Both of them wanted a world with fewer nuclear weapons, and they had jointly made Geneva their first waypoint on that path. Words had power, and they had found the words. Now they had to find the deeds.

On New Year’s Day, Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged simultaneous televised greetings to people in each other’s countries, an historic first. Reagan’s address appeared at the opening of the main evening news program, and many people in the Soviet Union saw Reagan directly for the first time. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” Reagan said.⁸²

————— 11 ————— THE ROAD TO REYKJAVIK

On Sunday, January 5, 1986, very late in the evening, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of the Soviet military’s General Staff, telephoned one of his deputies, Colonel General Nikolai Chervov, head of the legal department, which handled arms control negotiations. Both men were products of the World War II generation who rose to the General Staff in the Cold War years. Akhromeyev, the ramrod-straight commander who had promised to help Gorbachev, asked Chervov to report to headquarters at 6 A.M. the next morning. “You will fly to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev,” Akhromeyev said. The Soviet leader was vacationing on the Black Sea coast.

“What must I have with me and what uniform must I wear?” Chervov asked.

“Have your wits about you,” Akhromeyev said. “And wear your military uniform.”

The next morning, Akhromeyev gave Chervov an envelope for Gorbachev, ordered his personal driver to take him to the airport and said Gorbachev would be expecting him at 10 A.M.

“Can I ask a question?” Chervov said, nervously. “What’s inside the envelope?”

Akhromeyev told him it was the draft of the program on global disarmament. “Report all details to the General Secretary.”¹

After the Geneva summit with Reagan, Gorbachev was searching for something new. When Chervov arrived with the envelope, Gorbachev greeted him warmly. Gorbachev was vacationing in a house on the coast at Pitsunda, in the republic of Georgia, set in a pine grove, with woodpaneled interiors, spacious rooms and an office. It was a restful place in the solitude of a nature reserve; outside, waves swept across a fine pebble beach. Without wasting words, Gorbachev asked right away, “What have you brought?”²

The envelope contained a written proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons—all, including those of the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries—by the year 2000, in three stages, with specific deadlines. Akhromeyev had been working on the idea ever since the Soviets walked out of the Geneva talks in late 1983. He brought in weapons scientists and the staff of different branches of the military, who debated in secret. Once the proposal was drafted, Akhromeyev put it in his desk drawer. In Gorbachev’s first year, Akhromeyev kept it to himself, thinking the time was not right to bring it out. By the end of 1985, when Gorbachev was searching for new initiatives, Akhromeyev opened the drawer. The file was titled “Proposal of the USSR for a Program of Full Liquidation of Nuclear Weapons in the Whole World by the Year 2000.” It was a sweeping proposal that could grab headlines and win sympathy from antinuclear forces around the world. After a year as chief of the General Staff and eight months working with Gorbachev, Akhromeyev could see pressures were building to reduce nuclear arsenals. He personally wanted to scale back the huge stockpiles of warheads, and he felt that Gorbachev’s proposal might at least bring about significant cuts, if not lead all the way to total elimination. He could see, too, that Gorbachev was a man of action. The Soviet Union had been calling for general disarmament for decades. But what was new in Akhromeyev’s plan was a certain date—the turn of the century.³

When Chervov took out the papers, Gorbachev expressed skepticism at first. “What can there be that’s new in your initiative?” he asked. “We have been harping on this since 1945. Gromyko has been constantly talking about this at the United Nations. Should the General Secretary repeat this all over again?”

“Mikhail Sergeyevich, everything that you say is correct,” Chervov replied. “However, in the past there were only general declarations and wishes to liquidate nuclear weapons. There was nothing concrete. We only came out with a general idea, like ‘We are for the liquidation.’… This is a completely new program that gives a detailed description of all the possible problems. The nuclear issue is becoming a more burning problem by the day. I ask you to have a look at the document.” Gorbachev was in no hurry to take the papers. As if he were talking to himself, he asked Chervov, “And should we liquidate all the nuclear weapons? In the West they keep saying that the more nuclear weapons there are, the stronger a country’s security is. Should we accept such a concept? What do you think?”

“Mikhail Sergeyevich, everyone has heard the Western leaders’ statements to this effect, such as Thatcher, for example. I believe these are dangerous statements. There is a saying, when there are too many guns, they begin to shoot by themselves. Today, so many nuclear weapons have been stockpiled in the world, they can explode by themselves… the nuclear danger is growing in proportion to the stockpiles.” The proverb was familiar; Gorbachev had recalled a similar one to make the same point to British Foreign Minister Geoffrey Howe in late 1984. Gorbachev listened, asked a few more questions and took the envelope. He read the documents in silence. Chervov thought Gorbachev fell into deep thought. Then he said, “This is it. This is what’s needed.” But Gorbachev wanted to add more. Why not add something about stopping nuclear tests? Banning chemical weapons? Gorbachev took a blank sheet of paper and began writing instructions. When he was finished, Chervov gathered up the papers and flew back to Akhromeyev in Moscow.⁴

Gorbachev’s grand plan was visionary, dramatic and dreamy. He proposed in the first phase, five to eight years, to halt all nuclear testing, cut the superpower strategic arsenals by 50 percent, to no more than 6,000 warheads each, and eliminate U.S. and Soviet medium-range missiles in the European zone, including the Pioneers, the Pershing IIs and the ground-launched cruise missiles. He also demanded that the United States and Soviet Union mutually renounce “space strike weapons,” a reference to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. In the second stage, to begin in 1990 and last five to seven years, the United States and Soviet Union would continue to reduce their arsenals, joined by the other nuclear powers, France, Britain and China, and the United States and Soviet Union would also eliminate the small battlefield, or tactical, nuclear weapons. Finally, in the third stage, by 2000, all nations would get rid of nuclear weapons and sign a universal pact that nuclear weapons would never return again.⁵

For all its sweeping ambition, the plan was unveiled January 15, 1986, in an oblique Soviet fashion. On the regular Soviet evening news program Vremya, an expressionless announcer picked up a sheaf of papers and began droning through a statement on disarmament by the general secretary. Gorbachev was nowhere to be seen. TASS distributed the 4,879-word text. The next morning, the full statement was printed in the official newspapers, Izvestia and Pravda. The declarations were grand: “The Soviet Union proposes at the beginning of 1986 the implementation of a program for freeing mankind from the fear of nuclear catastrophe.” A reader or television viewer might have been excused for asking: so what? Disarmament had been a time-worn Soviet slogan for decades, while the arms race zoomed ahead, ever faster.⁶

Yet this time it was different. Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy director of the International Department at the Central Committee, writing in his diary after the statement was announced, could sense that Gorbachev was reaching for the stars. “My impression is that he’s really decided to end the arms race no matter what. He is taking this ‘risk’ because, as he understands, it’s no risk at all—because nobody would attack us even if we disarmed completely. And in order to get the country on solid ground, we have to relieve it of the burden of the arms race, which is a drain on more than just the economy.”

“My God!” Chernyaev wrote. “What luck that there was a man in the Politburo [Andropov] who showed the wisdom of a true ‘tsar,’ finding Gorbachev and dragging him out of the provinces—and in a country which has 95 such regions! And now we have a real find of a leader: intelligent, well-educated, dynamic, honest, with ideas and imagination. And bold. Myths and taboos (including ideological ones) are nothing for him. He could flatten any of them.”⁷

When the television announcer began reading Gorbachev’s statement on Vremya on January 15, 1986, it was still early in the day in Washington. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, called Shultz in the morning to alert him that an important announcement was about to be made in Moscow. Shortly before the call, a letter from Gorbachev to Reagan arrived, accompanying the new proposal. Shultz and his advisers puzzled over the text, which had both new ideas, such as tackling some disputes one by one rather than all together, and some old roadblocks, such as Soviet demands to stop Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Paul Nitze was fascinated. “I wonder whose work of art on the Soviet side this is,” he said.⁸

Weeks earlier, Reagan had appointed a new national security adviser, John M. Poindexter, a retired admiral, to replace McFarlane, who resigned. On the day of the Gorbachev proposal, Poindexter telephoned Matlock, the Soviet expert on the National Security Council, who was across town at that moment. Matlock rushed to the White House, where Poindexter showed him the text and asked whether he thought Gorbachev was serious. “Have they put it on TASS yet?” Matlock asked. Poindexter called the duty officer in the Situation Room and was told the text was coming over the wires at that moment. Matlock said that making the initiative public so quickly “raised the suspicion” that Gorbachev “had nothing more than propaganda in mind.” Most government agencies who looked at the proposal, Matlock recalled, thought it was “nothing more than smoke and mirrors and advised a flat rejection.” A White House official told reporters, “The language is eerie; it’s so extremely flexible that it may look better than it really is.” Doubts were everywhere in Washington that day. “A clever propaganda move,” said Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia.⁹

Shultz went to see Reagan at 2 P.M., and found the president already liked what he had been told about Gorbachev’s statement. “Why wait until the end of the century for a world without nuclear weapons?” Reagan asked.

That night, Reagan wrote in his diary that Gorbachev “surprisingly is calling for an arms reduction plan which will rid the world of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Of course he has a couple of zingers in there which we’ll have to work around. But at the very least it is a h–l of a propaganda move. We’d be hard put to explain how we could turn it down.” At a White House photo session the next day, Reagan told reporters, “It is just about the first time that anyone has ever proposed actually eliminating nuclear weapons.”¹⁰

But once again, in official Washington, the president was largely alone. Nuclear deterrence had sunk its roots deep into American strategic thinking for four decades. “The naysayers were hard at work, even in my own building…” Shultz said. “No one could accept the thought of a world moving toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.” Richard N. Perle, an assistant secretary of defense and relentless critic of détente, told the White House Senior Arms Control Group that “the president’s dream of a world without nuclear weapons—which Gorbachev had picked up—was a disaster, a total delusion,” Shultz recalled. “Perle said the National Security Council should not meet on the idea, because then the president would direct his arms controllers to come up with a program to achieve that result. The Joint Chiefs’ representative agreed with Perle. They feared the institutionalization and acceptance of the idea as policy.”

Two days after Gorbachev’s proposal, Shultz told his staff to face facts; yes, they were all skeptical about elimination of nuclear weapons, but “the president of the United States doesn’t agree with you.” In fact, Shultz said, “he thinks it’s a hell of a good idea.”

Shultz set up a small steering group of insiders, starting January 25, in a deliberate effort to bypass the rigid interagency process for making policy in Washington. They met every Saturday morning. Shultz and Gates faced off in these sessions. Shultz thought Gorbachev was for real, “bold and agile.” Gates, deputy CIA director, thought Gorbachev was cut from the old Soviet mold. Gates wrote to Shultz at the time, saying “all we have seen since Gorbachev took over leads us to believe that on fundamental objectives and policies he so far remains generally as inflexible as his predecessors.” Gorbachev’s new proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons, Gates said, was “tactically a clever stroke” but “did not change any basic Soviet position.”¹¹

On Monday, February 3, Reagan met in the White House Situation Room with his top advisers to discuss a response to Gorbachev’s proposal. “Some wanted to tag it a publicity stunt,” Reagan wrote afterward. “I said no. Let’s say we share their overall goals & now want to work out the details. If it is a publicity stunt this will be revealed by them. I also propose to announce we are going forward with SDI but if research reveals a defense against missiles is possible we’ll work out how it can be used to protect the whole world not just us.”¹²

Gorbachev hurtled forward. He telephoned Chernyaev, the deputy director of the International Department at the Central Committee, and asked him to become his adviser on national security. Chernyaev was a liberal but not yet part of Gorbachev’s inner circle. He was known for an encyclopedic mind. He was intensely curious, outspoken and fearless. He loved drama, memorized poetry and read Western literature, even when prohibited. Chernyaev had been schooled in Russian culture and had the best schools and teachers. He went to the front as a volunteer at the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, fought and was seriously wounded. After the war he graduated from and taught at Moscow State University. In the 1950s, Chernyaev had served in Prague on the staff of a new party journal, Problemy mira i sotsializma, or Problems of Peace and Socialism, where the environment was relatively open, compared to Moscow. This left an enduring impression on Chernyaev, who returned to Moscow to spend two decades in the Central Committee apparat, harboring hopes for liberal reform despite the deep disappointments of the era, including Moscow’s crushing of the Prague Spring and the invasion of Afghanistan.

When Gorbachev called, Chernyaev hesitated at first, because it seemed an almost overwhelming responsibility. He was sixty-five years old, and feared he would disappoint Gorbachev. He wanted more time for reading, theater, exhibitions, the conservatory, a steady and quiet life.

“What do you say?” insisted Gorbachev.

“One does not refuse such offers, Mikhail Sergeyevich,” Chernyaev replied.¹³

In the critical years that followed, Chernyaev remained at Gorbachev’s elbow, a key member of the reformist brain trust who offered candid advice to Gorbachev as well as unblemished loyalty. He joined the other intellectuals who generated the ideas and firepower behind glasnost and perestroika. Chernyaev’s diary, detailed and revealing, is perhaps the single most important contemporaneous account of Gorbachev’s decision making and thinking.¹⁴

Change was coming fast in 1986. Boris Yeltsin, the party chief in Sverdlovsk, was brought to the capital, and soon plunged into a populist drive to improve living standards. Alexander Yakovlev, a strong proponent of democratization, was brought from his think tank to head the Central Committee department on ideology, becoming another preeminent adviser to Gorbachev and the heart and soul of “new thinking.” Chernyaev began to take notes at meetings with Gorbachev. Later, other Gorbachev advisers, including Yakovlev, Shakhnazarov and Vadim Medvedev, contributed their notes, making up another valuable contemporaneous account.¹⁵

Soon after Chernyaev was appointed came the 27th Party Congress, a mammoth affair in which 4,993 delegates from across the country packed into Moscow hotels and assembled in the scarlet-bedecked hall of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses from February 25 to March 6, 1986. Held every five years to approve the membership of the three-hundred-member Central Committee and ratify the next five-year program, the congress was Gorbachev’s stage for a premiere of “new thinking” and perestroika. In his speeches, Gorbachev referred to the war in Afghanistan as a “bleeding wound,” and described a Soviet foreign policy based on living with the non-Communist world rather than endless confrontation of military blocs. Gorbachev’s words were spoken in billowing paragraphs, wrapped in old rhetoric about American imperialism, and he still attempted to give socialism a boost rather than destroy it. But “new thinking” was on display nonetheless.¹⁶

Chernyaev recalled that Gorbachev was in a state of “extreme enthusiasm” when the party congress ended. But just as he savored this success, a chill wind blew in from Reagan. In the wake of the Walker spy ring discovery the year before, Reagan had signed a secret directive in late 1985 to curb Soviet espionage activity, but action had been delayed. On March 7, the day after the party congress ended, the United States ordered the Soviet Union to sharply reduce its diplomatic mission to the United Nations in New York, from about 270 diplomats to 170. Gorbachev took this as an unexpected jab from Reagan. The Soviet mission at the United Nations was believed by U.S. officials to be a headquarters for KGB spies.¹⁷ In fact, two of the most devastating spies of all time were not at the Soviet mission but deep within the U.S. government—Ames and Hanssen.

In another setback for Gorbachev, on March 13, U.S. warships carrying sophisticated electronic gear sailed six miles inside the Soviet Union’s twelve-mile territorial limit in the Black Sea, a clear provocation, which the Soviets protested. On March 20, Gorbachev was exasperated when he met aides to plan a speech in the Volga River manufacturing city of Togliatti. According to Chernyaev’s notes, Gorbachev said he hoped to give the Americans a good swift kick. He could not understand European or American indifference to his initiatives and speeches. “What do we see on the part of Europe and the United States?” he asked. “Excuses, evasiveness, attempts to get away with half-measures and promises.”¹⁸

Gorbachev had prolonged the Soviet self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing by three months, but Reagan refused to go along. On March 22, the United States set off a twenty-nine-kiloton underground nuclear explosion, code-named Glencoe, two thousand feet below the Nevada desert.¹⁹ Gorbachev continued to hold off on Soviet tests, but bitterly complained to his inner circle on March 24 that the moratorium showed the Americans “have no intentions to disarm.” Gorbachev asked that day, “What does America want?” Chernyaev recalled, “It seemed we were sliding back toward confrontation.”

Gorbachev turned again to Reagan’s stubborn Star Wars dream. He vowed that the Soviet asymmetrical response could nullify it for just 10 percent of the cost. “Maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid of SDI?” he asked. This was a change in tune from his vigorous campaign against missile defense at the Geneva summit just months earlier. “Of course we cannot just disregard this dangerous program,” Gorbachev said. “But we should overcome our obsession with it. They’re banking on the USSR’s fear of SDI—in moral, economic, political and military terms. Therefore they’re pursuing this program in order to wear us out.”²⁰

Speaking just among his top aides, Gorbachev said: “We should do everything not to impoverish our country further through defense spending.”

Gorbachev could not grasp why the spirit of the Geneva summit was fading. He wrote to Reagan on April 2, saying, “More than four months have passed since the Geneva meeting. We ask ourselves: what is the reason for things not going the way they, it would seem, should have gone? Where is the real turn for the better?” He complained “we hear increasingly vehement philippics addressed to the USSR.” On April 3, he lamented to the Politburo: “The whole world sees that Gorbachev makes a suggestion in the evening and the next morning the Americans quickly say ‘no.’” On April 4, he had a long talk with two influential congressional leaders—Dante Fascell, Democrat of Florida, and William Broomfield, Republican of Michigan—who were visiting Moscow. “Disarmament issues cannot be postponed,” Gorbachev said.

“The locomotive is rushing forward at great speed. Today there is still a chance to stop it, but tomorrow it might be too late.”

In the marshy flatlands and forests of the Ukraine, spring breezes arrived early that April, carrying scents of cherry blossoms. A giant nuclear electricity-generating plant with a red-and-white candy-striped smokestack stood astride the Pripyat River, ten miles north of the town of Chernobyl and nestled next to a small town, Pripyat. The station housed four 1,000-megawatt reactors, and two more reactors were under construction that, when finished, would make it the largest nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union. In the early-morning hours of Saturday, April 26, a test was getting underway at Reactor No. 4.²¹

The reactor core was a mammoth block of graphite 23 feet high and 38 feet in diameter, weighing 1,700 tons, honeycombed with 1,661 holes for rods filled with uranium fuel. When lowered by a crane into the holes, the fuel rods set off nuclear fission, which gave off heat, turning water into steam to power turbines generating electricity. Another 211 holes in the graphite were drilled for control rods. When lowered into the reactor, the control rods absorbed neutrons and slowed or stopped the nuclear fission. Six pumps, capable of moving up to 18.6 million gallons an hour, forced coolant water through the reactor, with two pumps in reserve. Seventeen of the Soviet RBMK-1000 reactors were built in the Soviet Union between 1973 and 1990; the RBMK acronym stood for Reaktor Bolshoi Moshchnosti Kanalnyi, or High-Power Channel Reactor. Unlike reactors in the West, such as the one at Three Mile Island, where an accident occurred in 1979, the Soviet RBMK-1000 design lacked a containment shelter, the overarching, concrete shell to hold radioactivity inside in the event of a disaster.

The rods, pumps and gears used to control and moderate the nuclear fission inside the Chernobyl reactor were dependent on electricity. If outside power were suddenly cut off, it would take forty seconds to kickstart auxiliary diesel engines. Without power for forty seconds, however, the pumps would not force water through the reactor, which would quickly overheat. This forty-second gap was something that Soviet designers knew about and worried over; they were still trying to fix it. On the night of April 26, an improvised work-around was being tested. The operators knew that after a power outage, the spinning turbine blades would keep rotating under their own momentum. So they reasoned: why not use the still-spinning blades to generate enough power to keep the water pumps going for forty seconds? The goal of the test was to see how much power the rotating blades could generate, but the duty operators were ill prepared and the reactor design badly flawed.

One operator, arriving at his station, was confused by the logbook. He called someone else to inquire.

“What shall I do?” he asked. “In the program there are instructions of what to do, and then a lot of things crossed out.”

The other person thought for a minute, then replied, “Follow the crossed out instructions.”²²

After midnight Saturday, the reactor was powered down to very low levels for the test. Then, apparently because power was too low, the operators tried to power it up again, perhaps too quickly. Nuclear fission creates by-products that must be allowed to dissipate before the reactor is powered up again, but this danger was ignored.

As they powered up the reactor, a chain reaction began to spin out of control.

A foreman who entered the reactor hall at about 1:23 A.M. saw an unforgettable sight. The reactor had a massive lid. It was the “upper biological shield,” intended to prevent radiation exposure to workers during routine operations. The lid was a circle forty-nine feet in diameter, consisting of cubes, each sitting on top of a channel. When the foreman looked down, he saw the 770-pound cubes start to rumble and dance on top of the channels, “as if one thousand seven hundred people were tossing their hats into the air.”²³

The operators hit the red panic button, marked “AZ,” for the emergency power reduction system. But it was too late. They desperately tried to lower the control rods to stop the fission, but the rods, by some accounts, got stuck, perhaps because the holes in the core had warped. Also, there was a design flaw in the rods, which had a section of water and graphite at each end known as the displacer, while the absorber was in the middle. When the rods got stuck, the absorber didn’t make it far enough down into the core to be useful in moderating the fission. Moreover, the rods also may have forced water out from the channels, increasing the heat and steam. In the RBMK-1000 reactor design, excessive steam caused the nuclear chain reaction to accelerate. As the heat inside the graphite core skyrocketed, more of the water then turned to steam, which caused the reactor to get even hotter. More steam, more heat, and the reactor went out of control.

At 1:23 A.M., two explosions rocked Chernobyl. These were extremely powerful, caused by the chain reaction generating huge amounts of heat and pressure. The reactor blew apart, and the explosions were followed by fire. The blast blew a hole straight upward through the roof of Reactor No. 4. The weighty lid was tossed aside like a cocked hat, and radioactive materials—gases, graphite and bits of broken fuel rods—were thrust into the atmosphere. Some debris fell down near the site. Radioactive elements were carried by the winds across Europe. The initial contamination was one nightmare, then came another: the graphite core was on fire and burned for ten days, spewing more dangerous materials into the air.

Hours after the disaster, with the graphite core burning, an “urgent report” arrived at the Central Committee in Moscow from Deputy Energy Minister Alexei Makukhin, who had once been minister of energy in the Ukraine when Chernobyl was first being built. The report said that at 1:21 A.M. on April 26 an explosion occurred in the upper part of the reactor, causing fire damage and destroying part of the roof. “At 3:30, the fire was extinguished.” Personnel at the plant were taking “measures to cool the active zone of the reactor.” No evacuation of the population was necessary, the report said.

Almost everything in Makukhin’s report was wrong. The reactor was still burning and was not being cooled, and the population should have been evacuated immediately. What the report did not say was even worse: at the scene, radiation detectors failed, firefighters and others were sent in without adequate protection and officials were debating—but not deciding—about evacuation.²⁴

Gorbachev recalled many years later that he first heard of the disaster in a phone call at 5 A.M., but he insisted he did not learn until the evening of April 26 that the reactor had actually exploded and there had been a huge discharge into the atmosphere. “Nobody had any idea that we were facing a major nuclear disaster,” he recalled. “Quite simply, in the beginning even the top experts did not realize the gravity of the situation.”²⁵Chernyaev, who was at Gorbachev’s side throughout the crisis, recalled that “even our top leadership did not fully realize the difficulties and dangers associated with nuclear energy.” He acknowledged that “one can blame Gorbachev for trusting those responsible,” but added, “since nuclear energy was directly linked to the military-industrial complex, it was taken for granted that everything was in perfect order. And that there was no chance of a ‘surprise’ like Chernobyl.”²⁶

The reason for the lack of information was the Soviet system itself, which reflexively buried the truth. At each level of authority, lies were passed up and down the chain; the population was left in the dark; and scapegoats were found. Gorbachev was at the top of this decrepit system; his biggest failure was that he did not break through the pattern of cover-up right away. He reacted slowly, a moment of paralysis for this man of action. He seemed unable to get the truth when he needed it from the disaster scene or the officials responsible for nuclear power. While Gorbachev’s personal charisma had sparked excitement on the streets of Leningrad the year before, he did not appear in public for eighteen days after the explosion. While he disdained the secrecy of the military, he was just as silent before his own people and much of Europe in a situation of real peril. Gorbachev, who in January called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, suddenly was faced with a real-time, catastrophic example of what the world might be like after a nuclear explosion, and it was even more frightening than he could have guessed.

Without a containment shelter, radioactive isotopes soared into the atmosphere. Winds carried the contamination north, and by Sunday, radiation was detected in Sweden at the Forsmark nuclear power station, one hundred miles north of Stockholm. The Swedes confronted the Soviets at midday Monday, April 28. Gorbachev had assembled an emergency Politburo meeting at 11 A.M., but the Kremlin had not said a word about the accident, at home or abroad. In notes from the emergency meeting, aides to Gorbachev wrote: “The information was alarming but scant.”²⁷According to Volkogonov, the historian, as the Politburo discussed how to handle the accident, Gorbachev said, “We must issue an announcement as soon as possible, we must not delay…” Alexander Yakovlev also said, “The quicker we announce it, the better it’ll be…” Other accounts suggest some Politburo members wanted to keep silent.²⁸ The announcement was delayed for hours and hours. But people with radios that could pick up foreign broadcasts in Moscow already knew something truly horrible had happened; the reports were alarming.

Gorbachev later claimed there were two reasons for the delay: he lacked information and didn’t want to create panic. The Kremlin eventually instructed the news media to distribute a statement so terse as to relay none of the catastrophic nature of the event. The announcement was issued at 9 P.M. on April 28:

An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, damaging one of the reactors. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. The injured are receiving aid. A government commission has been set up.²⁹

On the next day, April 29, Gorbachev called another Politburo meeting. According to Volkogonov, Gorbachev now realized “that he had anything but a routine problem on his hands,” given the global alarm about the accident. He began consulting with physicists and security officials. Gorbachev opened the Politburo meeting with a terse remark, “Perhaps we aren’t reacting as sharply as the states around us?” Gorbachev proposed they create an operational group to manage the crisis. He then asked, “How are we to deal with the population and international public opinion?” He paused and added a somewhat contradictory remark: “The more honestly we conduct ourselves, the better. To ensure that a shadow of suspicion should not fall on our equipment, we must say that the power station was undergoing a planned repair…”

After more discussion, the Politburo decided to issue another public statement, which Volkogonov described as “terms that might have been used to announce an ordinary fire at a warehouse.”³⁰ The announcement said the accident had destroyed part of the reactor building, the reactor itself, and caused a degree of leakage of radioactive substances. Two people had died, the statement said, and “at the present time, the radiation situation at the power station and the vicinity has been stabilized.” One section was added for socialist countries saying that Soviet experts had noted radiation spreading in the western, northern and southern directions from Chernobyl. “Levels of contamination are somewhat higher than permitted standards, however not to the extent that calls for special measures to protect the population.”³¹

In the early weeks, firefighters and “liquidators,” people called from all over the country to help mitigate the disaster, fought bravely and worked with amazing courage and dedication in the face of danger. Firefighters recalled standing on a roof so hot their boots melted; helicopter pilots braved the smoldering ruins to dump 5,020 metric tons of sand and other material in an effort to suffocate what appeared to be a red glow, the burning graphite reactor below.³² But while individuals performed acts of heroism, the bosses of the Soviet state obfuscated. One of the first actions of the plant director was to cut nonessential telephone lines around Chernobyl.³³ An evacuation of Pripyat was begun only thirty-six hours after the explosion; the second stage of the evacuation, including a wider zone that eventually displaced 116,000 people, did not begin until May 5. The Communist Party in Ukraine insisted that May Day parades should carry on as usual in Kiev even though winds were blowing in that direction. On May 1 in Moscow, Nikolai Ryzhkov, the prime minister, signed an instruction to take Soviet news correspondents to areas adjacent to the Chernobyl power station with a goal of preparing reports in newspapers and television showing the “normal vital activity of these areas.”³⁴ But the truth was dawning at the highest levels in Moscow. The same instruction from Ryzhkov admitted the Health Ministry “failed” to provide full information from the scene and insisted that the ministry “take urgent measures to bring order into this affair.”

Reagan wrote in his diary, “As usual the Russians won’t put out any facts but it is evident that a radioactive cloud is spreading beyond the Soviet border.”³⁵

Vladimir Gubarev, the science editor of Pravda, who had good contacts in the nuclear establishment, heard of the accident soon after it happened and called Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s close adviser and champion of new thinking. But Yakovlev told him to “forget about it, and stop meddling,” Gubarev recalled. Yakovlev wanted no journalists to witness the scene. But Gubarev was persistent, and kept calling Yakovlev every day. Yakovlev finally authorized a group of journalists to go to Chernobyl, including Gubarev, who had a physics degree but also wrote plays and books. He arrived May 4 and returned May 9. His private report to Yakovlev depicted chaos and confusion. One hour after the explosion, the spread of radiation was clear, he said, but no emergency measures had been prepared. “No one knew what to do.” Soldiers were sent into the danger zone without individual protective gear. They didn’t have any. Nor did helicopter pilots. “In a case like this, common sense is required, not false bravery,” he said. “The whole system of civil defense turned out to be entirely paralyzed. Even functioning dosimeters were not available.” Gubarev said, “the sluggishness of local authorities is striking. There were no clothes, shoes, or underwear for victims. They were waiting for instructions from Moscow.” In Kiev, the lack of information caused panic. People heard reports from abroad but didn’t get a single word of reassurance from the leaders of the republic. The silence created more panic in the following days when it became known that children and families of party bosses were fleeing. “A thousand people stood in line in the ticket office of the Ukraine Communist Party Central Committee,” Gubarev said. “Naturally, this was perfectly well known in the city.” When Gubarev returned to Moscow, he gave Yakovlev his written report. It was passed to Gorbachev.³⁶

Gorbachev finally spoke about the disaster on May 14, two and a half weeks after it happened, in a nationally televised address. He looked “like a man bereaved,” recalled Angus Roxburgh, the BBC correspondent. “His face showed that he knew he had lost credibility.” His speech dodged the reasons for the catastrophe, and advanced the line that people had been alerted “as soon as we received reliable initial information.” Gorbachev seemed to lose his cool entirely at some of the wild accusations that spread in the West while the Kremlin had bottled up information, such as early reports of mass casualties in the thousands. He also took umbrage at criticism of his sincerity as a reformer. The United States and Germany “launched an unrestrained anti-Soviet campaign,” he complained.

In the weeks after Chernobyl, Gorbachev began to shake off his early inertia. At the Politburo meeting July 3, his fury boiled over at the nuclear establishment.

For 30 years you’ve been telling us that everything was safe. And you expected us to take it as the word of God. This is the root of our problems. Ministries and research centers got out of control, which led to disaster. And, so far, I do not see any signs that you’ve learned your lesson from this… Everything was kept secret from the Central Committee. Its apparat didn’t dare to look into this area. Even decisions about where to build nuclear power stations weren’t made by the leadership. Or decisions about which reactor to employ. The system was plagued by servility, bootlicking, window-dressing…persecution of critics, boasting, favoritism, and clannish management.

Chernobyl happened and nobody was ready—neither civil defense, nor medical departments, not even the minimum necessary number of radiation counters. The fire brigades don’t know what to do! The next day, people were having weddings not far away from the place. Children were playing outside. The warning system is no good! There was a cloud after the explosion. Did anyone monitor its movement?³⁷

In Gorbachev’s anger after the disaster, he did not turn the spotlight of blame on the Soviet party or the system itself. Rather, he responded by blaming individuals and finding scapegoats, including the plant operators, who were later put on trial. Gorbachev wanted to shake off the lethargy of the system, not challenge its legitimacy. Yet the inescapable truth was that Chernobyl offered a glimpse of how the Soviet Union was rotting from within. The failures, lassitude and misguided designs that led to the disaster were characteristic of much else. “The great glowing crater at Block 4 had revealed deep cracks in the state,” Volkogonov said. “After the Afghan fiasco, which Gorbachev condemned but which dragged on for another four years, Chernobyl was the next bell tolling for the system.”

Gorbachev’s emphasis on glasnost, or openness, grew significantly when he finally came to grips with what happened at Chernobyl. The word glasnost eventually became a signature of his reforms, along with perestroika, which referred to the idea of rebuilding society, politics and the economy. At the July 3 Politburo meeting, he declared, “Under no conditions will we hide the truth from the public, either in explaining the causes of the accident nor in dealing with practical issues.” He added, “We cannot be dodging the answers. Keeping things secret would hurt ourselves. Being open is a huge gain for us.” Shevardnadze’s assistant Sergei Tarasenko said Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were shamed by the way the radioactive cloud floating over Europe had revealed what they failed to announce. “For the first time, they understood that you cannot cover up anything,” Tarasenko said. “You can say, ‘Nothing happened there,’ but with radiation you cannot hide it. It will go in the air, and anyone will know it is there.”³⁸ Shevardnadze wrote in his memoirs that Chernobyl “tore the blindfold from our eyes and persuaded us that politics and morals could not diverge.”³⁹

Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff, recalled that Chernobyl changed the entire country’s view of nuclear danger. “After Chernobyl, the nuclear threat stopped being an abstract notion for our people. It became tangible and concrete. The people began to see all the problems linked with nuclear weapons much differently.”⁴⁰ This was especially true for Gorbachev. In his televised address, he said Chernobyl showed “what an abyss will open if nuclear war befalls mankind. For inherent in the nuclear arsenals stockpiled are thousands upon thousands of disasters far more horrible than the Chernobyl one.” Gorbachev’s words struck some as hollow at the time he spoke, a propaganda diversion from the real crisis of what had just occurred and his bungled response. But once again, as with the January 15 proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons, propaganda reflected what Gorbachev believed. He may well have asked himself, if there were no working dosimeters at Chernobyl, if soldiers lacked proper uniforms, if operators were relying on crossed-out instructions, what would happen to a city hit by a nuclear weapon? The smoldering Chernobyl site held portents more grave.

“In one moment,” he told the Politburo on May 5, “we felt what a nuclear war is.” In a secret speech at the Foreign Ministry on May 28, which was only published years later, Gorbachev implored the diplomats to make all possible effort “to stop the nuclear arms race.”⁴¹

Thirty-one people were killed as direct casualties of the Chernobyl accident. Twenty-eight died in 1986 due to acute radiation syndrome, two more from injuries unrelated to radiation and one suffered a heart attack. While it is much more difficult to determine long-term cancer mortality from the contamination, one estimate is that up to four thousand additional cancers may have resulted among the six hundred thousand people exposed to higher levels of radiation, such as liquidators, evacuees and residents of the most contaminated areas.⁴²

Reagan never lost his antipathy to Soviet communism, but now, in early summer of 1986, he wanted to do business with Gorbachev. Reagan mentioned in a letter to Gorbachev that “we have lost a full six months in dealing with the issues which most merit our personal attention.” Suzanne Massie, the author and cultural expert, came to give Reagan her impressions from a recent visit, and reported “the Soviet Union was on the road to collapse,” recalled Shultz, who attended with the president. “There were shortages of everything, and people now realized they had to turn to free enterprise. Chernobyl was of great symbolic importance, she felt: it showed that Soviet science and technology were flawed, that the leadership was lying and out of touch, that the party could not conceal its failures any longer. Chernobyl means ‘wormwood,’ a reference to bitterness and sorrow from the Book of Revelation. There are many biblical allusions in Russia now.”⁴³ While the shortages had been a feature of Soviet life for years, Massie’s description dramatized the situation for Reagan and clearly left a deep impression on him. “She is the greatest student I know of the Russian people,” he wrote that evening.⁴⁴

On May 14, the same day as Gorbachev’s televised speech about Chernobyl, Shultz had a long talk with Reagan. He planted a small seed that would grow large in the months ahead. “The Soviets,” he said, “contrary to the Defense Department and the CIA line, are not an omnipotent, omnipresent power gaining ground and threatening to wipe us out.

On the contrary, we are winning. In fact, we are miles ahead. Their ideology is a loser. They have one thing going for them: military power. But even then they have only one area of genuine comparative advantage—the capacity to develop, produce, and deploy accurate, powerful, mobile land-based ballistic missiles. There’s only one thing the Soviet Union does better than we do: that is to produce and deploy ballistic missiles. And that’s not because they are better at engineering. They’re not…So we must focus on reductions in ballistic missiles. Reductions are the name of the game.⁴⁵

Shultz urged Reagan to begin to think about what he would give up at the bargaining table. “This is the moment when our bargaining position is at its strongest.” Shultz wanted to signal to the Soviets that Reagan would trade limits on his Strategic Defense Initiative for deeper cuts in offensive weapons, like ballistic missiles, but Shultz was opposed at every turn by Weinberger, the defense secretary, who urged Reagan not to even hint at compromise of his dream.

On June 12, Weinberger surprised everyone. At a small, secret meeting in the White House Situation Room, Weinberger made a radical proposal. He suggested that Reagan should ask Gorbachev to eliminate all ballistic missiles. These were the guns of the nuclear age, the fast-flying, no-return, nuclear-tipped weapons that Reagan worried about after he visited Cheyenne Mountain in 1979. It was a radical idea that would go right to the heart of Soviet military strength—the Soviets were most powerful in land-based missiles like the SS-18, while the United States forces were stronger at sea. “Everyone was astonished,” Shultz recalled of the Weinberger proposal. Reagan just smiled. He reflected in his diary that night that the proposal would show whether the Soviets are “for real or just trying for propaganda.”

Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a nuclear weapon had never been used in combat, but hundreds of explosive tests shook the Earth. Kennedy and Khrushchev halted all tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and in the oceans with the 1963 limited test ban treaty, but underground explosions were frequent. The 1974 threshold test ban treaty limited underground tests to less than 150 kilotons, although it was never ratified. Testing was a subject of constant suspicion; the United States carried out its own secret tests and accused the Soviets of violating the treaties.

When Gorbachev announced a unilateral Soviet moratorium on testing in 1985, marking forty years since Hiroshima, he challenged the United States to follow suit. Gorbachev hoped the moratorium would crimp research for Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Tests would be needed to develop an effective nuclear-pumped X-ray laser. “If there is no testing, there will be no SDI,” Chernyaev wrote.⁴⁶ Reagan refused to go along with Gorbachev’s moratorium, saying a test ban could not be effectively verified. Thus, the dispute over “verification,” whether or not a test ban was being observed, became both a scientific and political issue. Reagan had a second reason for refusing to go along with Gorbachev: American designers wanted to test a new generation of warheads that would be able to survive the radiation effects of a nuclear blast.⁴⁷ Gorbachev’s moratorium was brushed off as propaganda. From 1949 until the start of the moratorium, the Soviet Union had carried out 628 nuclear explosions, 421 of them at the remote Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan in Central Asia. The United States had carried out its 978th test, code-named Jefferson, just days before Chernobyl.⁴⁸

By the spring of 1986, Gorbachev was under pressure from the Soviet nuclear weapons establishment to resume testing. His peace overture, the unilateral moratorium, had borne no results. “It is hard to tell when the new thinking will arrive,” he lamented in a meeting with advisers. “But it will come, and maybe unexpectedly fast.”

In those exhausting days, Velikhov, the open-minded physicist, once again showed the way. His contacts in the West proved critical. Velikhov knew of Americans outside the U.S. government who were skeptical of Reagan’s policies and who were independent thinkers. One of them was Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University, who was chairman of the Federation of American Scientists. The group was founded in 1945 by atomic scientists concerned about control of the technology they had helped create, and von Hippel practiced what he called “public interest science,” attempting to influence government policy. In the early 1980s, he was caught up in the nuclear freeze movement and sought to provide an analytical basis for some of its initiatives. He had met Velikhov several times at conferences, and they enjoyed brainstorming together.⁴⁹ Riding together in the back of a bus at a conference in Copenhagen, Velikhov suggested to von Hippel: perhaps independent, nongovernment scientists from the United States could help demonstrate the feasibility of seismic verification, which had deadlocked the superpowers?⁵⁰

A similar notion was gaining ground among American scientists. One who was keenly interested in building such a bridge was Thomas B. Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. Cochran, a nuclear specialist who had opposed the U.S. plutonium breeder reactor program in the 1970s, was digging into evidence of secret U.S. nuclear tests. When Reagan came into office, he became interested in branching out from strictly environmental issues. In March 1986, Cochran was attending a Federation of American Scientists conference in Virginia. During a coffee break, he talked with von Hippel about a seismic verification experiment.

Then, in April, von Hippel was in Moscow and sought out Velikhov. “Do you have any good ideas?” Velikhov asked him, as he always did when he met the Americans. Velikhov was disorganized—von Hippel once found his desk drawer filled with unsorted business cards—but he restlessly sought new ideas. Velikhov and von Hippel decided to hold a workshop in Moscow on seismic monitoring. Three different proposals were aired at the workshop, held in May. A few days after the workshop ended, Velikhov, a vice president of the Academy of Sciences, signed an agreement with Cochran’s group to allow a team to position seismic monitoring equipment adjacent to the Semipalatinsk nuclear weapons test site.⁵¹ This was one of the Soviet crown jewels, the counterpart to the Nevada Test Site. Velikhov urged Cochran to get back within a month; the test moratorium was scheduled to expire soon. They needed to do something big to help Gorbachev keep the moratorium in place.

There was just one hitch: Velikhov did not have official permission for the Americans to make the trip to such a secret location. (The Semipalatinsk site was totally closed; during the Cold War, the United States deployed radioactivity-sniffing aircraft and other methods to monitor Soviet weapons tests.) Velikhov took a gamble—if Cochran could somehow show verification was possible, it would strengthen Gorbachev’s hand in prolonging the moratorium.

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography loaned the first seismic gear, relatively unsophisticated surface monitors. Cochran and his team lugged them to Moscow in early July.⁵² The plan was to set them up at three locations outside of Semipalatinsk, within 150–200 kilometers from the center of the testing area, but not actually on the site. The Soviets were not conducting tests at the time. Cochran’s goal was simply to show that the Soviets would allow American seismologists to set up stations inside the Soviet Union, record data, and bring it out. This would be immensely symbolic, calling into question the Reagan argument that a test ban could not be verified, and helping support Velikhov’s effort to get Gorbachev to extend the moratorium.⁵³

The American team arrived in Moscow on July 5, but before they could unpack their equipment, Velikhov ran into trouble.

“All of our military was completely against it,” Velikhov said. Gorbachev got cold feet and decided to ask the Politburo to rule whether Velikhov could allow the Americans to get close to the secret test site. The Soviet leadership was still struggling with the Chernobyl aftermath. “It was a very, very tense meeting on Chernobyl,” Velikhov recalled. “And after this meeting, everybody was tired, and there was a discussion of Semipalatinsk. Gorbachev was tired, and as usual, he wished somebody else would make this decision, not him. I made the case, but he didn’t give me any indication of strong support.”

Then, abruptly, two prominent figures turned against Velikhov. They were Dobrynin, the former ambassador to the United States, and Zaikov, the Politburo member for the military-industrial complex. They demanded: Why isn’t the measuring reciprocal? Why are we not putting our equipment in Nevada at the American test site?

Look, replied Velikhov impatiently, you have it all wrong. Reagan wants to continue testing. We are trying to impose a moratorium. We should help the scientists who will show the world that a test ban can be verified!

“After the meeting, it was inconclusive,” Velikhov recalled. He had no authority to sign the papers and give permission to Cochran. When the meeting was over, Velikhov was sitting with Gorbachev. What should he do?

Gorbachev replied, in his maddeningly vague way: “Follow the line of discussion of the meeting.”

“As I understood it?” Velikhov asked.

“Yes,” said Gorbachev.

Velikhov took that to mean “yes.” He gave a green light to Cochran’s team. The only condition, apparently to satisfy the military, was that the American scientists turn off their monitors in the event of any Soviet weapons test. Cochran agreed.⁵⁴ The team began to set up the first station on July 9. It was an amazing moment, a toe into a closed zone, accomplished by an environmental group, not by the United States government. It demonstrated that scientists could, on their own, break through the Cold War secrecy and mistrust. It also underscored the unusual clout of Velikhov. “Not only his clout,” Cochran said, “but his chutzpah.”⁵⁵

When Cochran, von Hippel, Velikhov and other scientists went to Gorbachev’s offices at the Central Committee in Moscow on July 14, they urged him to extend the moratorium. Cochran carried back from the test site the first seismic record, made by a scratchy needle moving across smoked paper fastened to a drum recording device. Pravda played up the meeting in a front-page article the next morning.

A few days later, on July 18, former president Richard Nixon held a private talk with Gorbachev in Moscow. Gorbachev told Nixon he wanted to send a signal to Reagan: he was eager to move ahead, he would not seek to postpone action until Reagan left office. “In today’s tense atmosphere, it means we cannot afford to wait,” Gorbachev said. Nixon reinforced the idea, saying Reagan was also primed to move. Nixon transmitted the message to Reagan, writing up a twenty-six-page memo for the president on his return.

On July 25, Reagan sent Gorbachev a seven-page formal letter, an outgrowth of the meeting at which Weinberger had proposed eliminating all ballistic missiles. The language of the Reagan letter was convoluted. It proposed that either the United States or the Soviet Union could research missile defense, and if they succeeded in creating it, would share, but only if both sides also agreed on a radical idea: “eliminate the offensive ballistic missiles of both sides.” If they didn’t agree to share-and-eliminate, then either side could, after six months, build missile defense on its own. Thus, Reagan had taken his dream of missile defense and hammered it together with Weinberger’s improbable proposal to get rid of the missiles.

On testing, Reagan firmly refused to stop.

On August 18, Gorbachev once again extended the Soviet nuclear-testing moratorium. Velikhov’s efforts had paid off. But Gorbachev was restless. When he went on vacation at the end of the month, Gorbachev was accompanied by Chernyaev, his national security adviser, as a one-man staff. They sat on the veranda or in Gorbachev’s office before lunch, reviewed the cables and made telephone calls to Moscow. Gorbachev asked the Foreign Ministry to provide an outline of ideas for the next meeting with Reagan. When the document came from Moscow, the suggestions were dry repetitions of what had been offered at the stalled arms control negotiations in Geneva.

Gorbachev threw it on the table. “What do you think?” he asked Chernyaev.

“It’s no good,” Chernyaev replied.

“Simply crap!” Gorbachev said.

Gorbachev asked Chernyaev to draft a letter to Reagan inviting him to a summit very soon, suggesting one venue might be Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, perhaps in September or October. When Chernyaev asked why Reykjavik, Gorbachev said, “It’s a good idea. Halfway between us and them, and none of the big powers will be offended.”⁵⁶ Shevardnadze subsequently took the invitation to Washington on September 19. In the letter, Gorbachev offered a choice of London or Iceland; Reagan agreed to Iceland. The letter proposed “a quick one-on-one meeting… maybe just for one day, to engage in a strictly confidential, private and frank discussion (possibly only with our foreign ministers present).”⁵⁷ Gorbachev said the talk “would not be a detailed one,” but designed to prepare a few issues for a later summit agreement. Reagan wrote in his diary, “This would be preparatory to a Summit.”⁵⁸

But what was going through Gorbachev’s mind was something far more ambitious. He began to plan for a grand overture. He wanted to move very far, and fast. In their private discussion and memos, Gorbachev and Chernyaev plotted a dramatic turning point in the arms race. The summit must bring “major, sweeping proposals” to the fore, Chernyaev wrote. On September 22, Gorbachev told the Politburo he was willing to consider releasing twenty-five dissidents on a list demanded by Reagan, a move to assuage the president.⁵⁹ In early October, a paper on the summit came to Gorbachev from Akhromeyev and others, offering guidelines for what Gorbachev should do. Gorbachev rejected it; he wanted to be bolder.⁶⁰ Chernyaev offered his views to Gorbachev, which captured the mood: “The main goal of Reykjavik, if I understood you correctly in the South, is to sweep Reagan off his feet by our bold, even ‘risky’ approach to the central problems of world politics.”⁶¹ Chernyaev urged Gorbachev to make strategic weapons—missiles, bombers, submarines—his main topic, seeking a 50 percent reduction. Gorbachev agreed on the need for sweeping change, but did not want to get bogged down in arithmetic. “Our main goal now is to prevent the arms race from entering a new stage,” he said. “If we don’t do that, the danger to us will increase. If we don’t back down on some specific, maybe important issues, if we don’t budge from the positions we’ve held for a long time, we will lose in the end. We will be drawn into an arms race that we cannot manage. We will lose, because right now we are at the end of our tether.”

By contrast, Reagan approached the Reykjavik meeting casually, without any of the careful study he had applied before Geneva. There was no precooked agenda, as in previous summits. The Americans had little inkling of what Gorbachev was planning. Shultz wrote Reagan on October 2 that arms control would be central, but the Soviets “are largely talking from our script.” A Soviet specialist at the State Department wrote a two-page memo that opened: “We go into Reykjavik next week with very little knowledge of how Gorbachev intends to use the meeting.” Poindexter wrote “talking points” that he gave to Reagan, including “anticipate no substantive agreements per se,” and “meeting is in no sense a substitute or a surrogate for a summit.”⁶²

But in Moscow, in his instructions to his summit aides October 4, Gorbachev was once again clear and direct about his ambitions—they were sky high. He talked about finding something to offer Reagan with “breakthrough potential,” and at the top of Gorbachev’s list was “the liquidation of nuclear weapons.” As a more immediate goal, he wanted to be rid of the arms race in European missiles, to remove the threat of the fast-flying Pershing Ils. “In our mind we must hold the priority task to kick the Pershing Ils out of Europe,” he said. “This is a gun at our temple.”

Gorbachev mentioned “liquidation of nuclear weapons” repeatedly.

He also told the aides he had a strategy. He would push for bold achievements, and “if Reagan does not meet us halfway, we will tell the whole world about this. That’s the plan.”

“If we fail, then we can say—Look, here’s what we are prepared to do!”

Reagan and Gorbachev met at Hofdi House, an isolated, two-story white structure overlooking the bay with a reputation for being haunted—it had been sold by the British ambassador in 1952 after pictures kept falling inexplicably off the walls. The North Atlantic weather cast cold, driving rain squalls—and brief splashes of brilliant sunshine—across the city on Saturday, October 11. Reagan and Gorbachev met at 10:40 A.M., sitting in brown leather armchairs opposite a small table in a room on the first floor, with a window on the gray and turbulent sea just beyond, and, on another wall, a dark blue oil painting, a seascape of waves crashing onto the rocks. In their initial meeting alone, Reagan repeated his favorite Russian proverb, “trust, but verify,” and Gorbachev wasted no time telling Reagan that the arms negotiations were stalled and they needed to give them an “impulse.” Suddenly, there was an awkward moment. Reagan dropped his note cards. Gorbachev deflected the embarrassment by suggesting they invite their foreign ministers to join them; Shultz and Shevardnadze entered the room. Shultz remembered the scene: “Gorbachev was brisk, impatient and confident, with the air of a man who is setting the agenda and taking charge of the meeting. Ronald Reagan was relaxed, disarming in a pensive way, and with an easy manner.”

Gorbachev launched into his dramatic proposals right at the outset. He proposed a 50 percent reduction in what he called “strategic offensive arms,” a very broad definition that could cover many weapons. He pledged the Soviets would accept deep cuts in the giant land-based missiles. He proposed to eliminate all medium-range missiles in Europe, including the Pioneers and the Pershing IIs. He called for “full and final prohibition of nuclear testing.” Gorbachev proposed that both sides promise for ten years to stick by the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty. This would put restraints on Reagan’s dream: research on missile defense would have to be confined to the laboratory.⁶³

Reagan then replied to Gorbachev rather formally, reading from his cards. They used consecutive translation, which meant each remark was translated after it was spoken, which took time. Reagan’s presentation repeated the idea in his July 25 letter that once his Strategic Defense Initiative was ready, he would share it, and the ABM treaty would disappear, replaced by a new agreement, while both sides would reach “total elimination of strategic missiles.” From this very first exchange, Reagan clung tenaciously to his vision.

At the first break, “excitement was in the air,” Shultz said. He realized that Gorbachev had offered extraordinary and unexpected concessions. “He was laying gifts at our feet,” Shultz said. Shultz and other U.S. officials crowded into the secure “bubble” at the embassy, a small, vaultlike soundproof enclosure. Reagan then joined them, joking, “Why did Gorbachev have more papers than I did?” Nitze said, “This is the best Soviet proposal we have received in 25 years.”

In the afternoon session, Reagan and Gorbachev debated the 50 percent cut in weapons. Gorbachev wanted a simple 50 percent slash, while Reagan was worried that it would still leave the Soviets with advantages. But their talk was businesslike, and Gorbachev passed to Reagan a data sheet of Soviet weapons. “Let us cut this in half,” he said. “You are troubled by our SS-18 heavy missiles, and they will be reduced by 50 percent.” They agreed to leave the details to their staffs to hammer out overnight. Then Reagan returned to his missile defense dream. He told Gorbachev that it would “make missiles obsolete,” and “provide a guarantee against the actions of any madman,” and is “the best possibility for ensuring peace in our century.” Gorbachev took the lecture in stride, but he had heard it all before, and Reagan was giving no ground at all on Gorbachev’s demand to keep the research in the laboratory.

Gorbachev’s temper flared, and he warned Reagan that if he built the Strategic Defense Initiative, there would be a Soviet response—an “asymmetrical” one. He did not say what it would be, only that it would be “different.”

Reagan apparently did not realize that Gorbachev, in talking about a response, was contemplating a massive, offensive assault of nuclear warheads to overwhelm Reagan’s defenses. Rather, Reagan imagined Gorbachev’s system as something benign, like his own. “If you find that you have something a little better, then perhaps you could share it with us,” Reagan suggested.

“Excuse me, Mr. President,” Gorbachev replied sternly, “but I do not take your idea of sharing SDI seriously. You don’t want to share even petroleum equipment, automatic machine tools or equipment for dairies, while sharing SDI would be a second American revolution. And revolutions don’t occur all that often. Let’s be realistic.”

They decided to continue the next day, Sunday, which had not been part of the original plan—and ordered their staffs to work all night on compromises.⁶⁴

Shultz later recalled that “the whole nature of the meeting we had planned at Reykjavik had changed.” Instead of a quick meeting, it was now becoming a full-scale summit. Through the night, American and Soviet officials sought common ground. The conditions were trying; without photocopying machines, they used carbon paper. Two U.S. officials, Colonel Bob Linhard of the National Security Council staff, and Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense, had nowhere else to work, so they put a board on a bathtub and got down to business. One of the surprises of the marathon overnight talks was that the U.S. officials for the first time got to know Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff who had pledged to help Gorbachev, and they found him to be a formidable negotiator. At one point, in an informal moment, Akhromeyev told Shultz, “I’m the last of the Mohicans.” When Shultz asked what he meant, Akhromeyev said he was the last active Soviet commander who had fought the Nazis in World War II. Shultz then asked him where he had learned the phrase. “In boyhood,” Akhromeyev said. “I was raised on the adventure tales of James Fenimore Cooper.” Shultz recalled that Akhromeyev seemed “far more at ease with himself, more open, more ready for real conversation” than earlier Soviet negotiators.⁶⁵

By morning, as a result of the dramatic all-night conversations, breathtaking agreements to slash nuclear arsenals were drafted on paper. If the summit had just stopped there, if the two leaders had signed the papers, it would have been the climactic turnaround of the arms race. The Euromissiles would be dismantled except for one hundred on each side, and long-range or strategic weapons cut by 50 percent, a stupendous achievement when compared with the strategic arms treaties negotiated by Nixon and Carter. The 1972 SALT I accord, for example, had only put a freeze on missile launchers; now Reagan was slicing into the metal of the feared SS-18. Reagan agreed to negotiations on a nuclear test ban, too.

“We were getting amazing agreements,” Reagan later wrote in his memoirs. “As the day wore on, I felt something momentous was occurring.”⁶⁶

But then Gorbachev turned up the heat. “Now I am testing you,” Gorbachev said, as he insisted they take up missile defense. He told Reagan that he wasn’t demanding that he abandon his dream, just keep it in the laboratory. This meant Reagan could “show the idea is alive, that we are not burying it,” Gorbachev said. But Reagan would not budge. “The genie is already out of the bottle. Offensive weapons can be built again. I propose creating protection for the world for future generations, when you and I will no longer be here.”

Gorbachev begged for a concession. “As the American saying goes, it takes two to tango,” he insisted.

Soon, perhaps out of fatigue, the two leaders began to shadow-box with their old slogans. Reagan brought out his Marx and Lenin aphorisms, and Gorbachev replied disdainfully, “So you are talking about Marx and Lenin again.” For his part, Gorbachev bristled at the memory of Reagan’s 1982 speech at Westminster, and the prediction that the Soviet Union would wind up on the ash heap of history. “I will tell you, that is quite a terrifying philosophy,” Gorbachev said. “What does it mean politically, make war against us?”

“No,” Reagan replied.

Then, almost as quickly, they gave up and turned back to the danger of nuclear weapons. Reagan launched a defense of his dream. “It appears at this point that I am the oldest man here,” Reagan said. “And I understand that after the war the nations decided they would renounce poison gases. But thank God that the gas mask continued to exist. Something similar can happen with nuclear weapons. And we will have a shield against them in any case.”

Exasperated, Gorbachev concluded, “The president of the United States does not like to retreat.” He seemed resigned to failure. “I see that the possibilities of agreement are exhausted.”

They didn’t give up, however. Gorbachev hammered away at the idea of keeping missile defense confined to the laboratory. Reagan was alternately insistent and unfocused. He told Gorbachev, “I can imagine both of us in ten years getting together again in Iceland to destroy the last Soviet and American missiles under triumphant circumstances. By then I’ll be so old that you won’t even recognize me. And you will ask in surprise, ‘Hey, Ron, is that really you? What are you doing here?’ And we’ll have a big celebration over it.”

“I don’t know whether I will live till that time,” Gorbachev said.

“I know I will,” Reagan replied.

During a break, Shultz attempted to craft new language in an effort to keep alive the hope of some kind of agreement. Reagan offered it to Gorbachev: a ten-year commitment to the ABM treaty, during which there would be “research, development and testing” of missile defenses.

Gorbachev immediately saw what was missing. The new formula omitted any mention of the word laboratory. Was it done on purpose? Yes, Reagan said.

Reagan also proposed two five-year periods for weapons elimination—exactly the same time frame as Gorbachev had suggested in January. But in Reagan’s version, there would be a 50 percent cut in “strategic offensive arms” in the first five years and the remaining 50 percent of “offensive ballistic missiles” in the second. Gorbachev said, correctly, the two five-year periods each eliminated a different category of weapon—how could that make sense? The first phase was all strategic arms, the second phase was only missiles. These were obviously different categories. “There is some kind of confusion here.” Indeed there was. The U.S. draft had been inexact in an effort to satisfy both sides.

Reagan was also confused. “What I want to know is, will all offensive ballistic missiles be eliminated?” he asked.

Gorbachev suggested that in the second phase, the wording should say “strategic offensive weapons, including ballistic missiles.” Perhaps they could improve the language later on, he said.

Then Reagan suddenly took everything further than it had ever gone before. An incredible moment in the history of the Cold War arrived abruptly, without any warning, without preparation, without briefing papers or interagency process, without press conferences or speeches, in the small room overlooking the bay.

“Let me ask this,” Reagan inquired. “Do we have in mind—and I think it would be very good—that by the end of the two five-year periods all nuclear explosive devices would be eliminated, including bombs, battlefield systems, cruise missiles, submarine weapons, intermediate-range systems, and so on?”

Gorbachev: “We could say that, list all those weapons.”

Shultz: “Then let’s do it.”

Reagan’s proposal was, by any measure, the most concrete, far-reaching disarmament initiative by a U.S. president ever to be formally submitted in a superpower summit negotiation. It was not a throwaway line. If earlier he had talked about eliminating ballistic missiles, or been imprecise or cloudy about what was under discussion, at this moment he swept away any doubts and clearly proposed total nuclear disarmament. There was no confusion. Reagan had reached the very core of his beliefs at the very peak of his power.

But Reagan and Gorbachev did not take out a paper and sign it at that moment. It was a huge missed opportunity.

Gorbachev, while saying there was a chance for such an agreement, again insisted that research on missile defense must be confined to the laboratory. “The question of laboratories is of fundamental importance.”

Reagan refused, saying his aim was “to make a kind of gas mask against nuclear missiles” and a system to protect against “the danger of nuclear maniacs.”

Gorbachev: “Yes, I’ve heard all about gas masks and maniacs, probably ten times already. But it still does not convince me.” He added, again, that he only wanted to keep missile defense research in the laboratory.

Reagan: “You’re destroying all my bridges to continuation of my SDI program.”

Gorbachev: “In regard to laboratories, is that your final position? If so, we can end our meeting at this point.”

Reagan: “Yes it is.”

More verbal jousting followed, with no progress. Gorbachev appealed to Reagan’s sense of history. If they could sign an agreement containing all the Soviet concessions, “you will become, without exaggeration, a great president. You are now literally two steps from that.” If they could sign, Gorbachev pleaded with Reagan, “it will mean our meeting has been a success.” And if not, “then let’s part at this point and forget about Reykjavik. But there won’t be another opportunity like this. At any rate, I know I won’t have one.”

Both men seem to have sensed their historic moment was slipping through their fingers.

“Are you really going to turn down a historic opportunity for the sake of one word in the text?” Reagan demanded. The word was “laboratory.”

“You say that it’s just a matter of one word,” Gorbachev shot back. “But it’s not a matter of one word, it’s a matter of principle.” If he went back to Moscow having allowed Reagan to deploy his missile defense, Gorbachev added, “they will call me a fool and irresponsible leader.”

“Now it’s a matter of one word,” Reagan lamented. “I want to ask you once more to change your viewpoint, to do it as a favor to me so that we can go to the people as peacemakers.”

“We cannot go along with what you propose,” Gorbachev responded. “If you will agree to banning tests in space, we will sign the document in two minutes. We cannot go along with something else… I have done everything I could.” Shultz recalled that Gorbachev said, “It’s ‘laboratory,’ or good-bye.”

Reagan passed a note to Shultz: “Am I wrong?” Shultz whispered back, “No, you are right.”

Reagan stood up to go and gathered up his papers, as did Gorbachev, according to Shultz. “It was dark when the doors of Hofdi House opened and we all emerged, almost blinded by the klieg lights. The looks on our faces spoke volumes,” Shultz recalled. “Sad, disappointed faces,” said Chernyaev.

“I still feel we can find a deal,” Reagan said to Gorbachev as they parted.

“I don’t think you want a deal,” Gorbachev replied. “I don’t know what more I could have done.”

“You could have said ‘yes,’” Reagan said.

“We won’t be seeing each other again,” Gorbachev said, meaning that they would not see each other again in Reykjavik. The remark was overheard and set off a rumor that the talks had failed terribly.

Shultz joined Reagan back in the residence, where the president and his top advisers slumped in easy chairs in the solarium. “Bad news. One lousy word!” Reagan said.⁶⁷

That evening, he summed it up briskly in his diary. “He wanted language that would have killed SDI,” Reagan wrote. “The price was high but I wouldn’t sell & that’s how the day ended. All our people thought I’d done exactly right. I’d pledged I wouldn’t give away SDI & I didn’t but that meant no deal on any of the arms reductions. I was mad—he tried to act jovial but I acted mad and it showed. Well the ball is in his court and I’m convinced he’ll come around when he sees how the world is reacting.”⁶⁸

“I was very disappointed—and very angry,” Reagan recalled years later in his memoirs.

Gorbachev was also fuming. “My first, overwhelming, intention had been to blow the unyielding American position to smithereens, carrying out the plan we had decided in Moscow: if the Americans rejected the agreement, a compromise in the name of peace, we would denounce the U.S. administration and its dangerous policies as a threat to everyone around the world.” Chernyaev later noted this was the Politburo’s instructions to Gorbachev: to come out blasting Reagan if the Americans refused to give the Soviets what they wanted.

But as Gorbachev walked to a press conference, he was unsure. Had they not accomplished a lot, even if they failed to reach a final agreement?

“My intuition was telling me I should cool off and think it all over thoroughly. I had not yet made up my mind when I suddenly found myself in the enormous press conference room. About a thousand journalists were waiting for us. When I came into the room, the merciless, often cynical and cheeky journalists were waiting for us. I sensed anxiety in the air. I suddenly felt emotional, even shaken. These people standing in front of me seemed to represent mankind waiting for its fate to be decided.”

In another dramatic turn, Gorbachev decided not to follow his instructions from the Politburo. He decided not to smash Reagan to smithereens, and instead he sounded optimistic.

“We have already reached accord on much,” he told the journalists. “We have come a long way.”⁶⁹

————— 12 ————— FAREWELL TO ARMS

When George Shultz entered the pressroom on the evening of October 12, 1986, in Reykjavik, the secretary of state had disappointment etched in his face. Shultz opened his remarks with a strained voice. Max Kampelman, one of the American negotiators, was nearly in tears. The two leaders had come so close to a deal—and then departed empty-handed. The Washington Post carried a two-line banner headline the next morning: “Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out Other Gains.” Lou Cannon of the Post wrote that the summit ended “gloomily” and Gorbachev was described as giving a “bleak assessment” of the prospects for the future. But in capturing the drama of the moment, the press corps failed to grasp the long-term significance. Reagan and Gorbachev had debated, negotiated and in some cases reached agreement on the most sweeping disarmament proposals of the nuclear age. Both men realized very quickly they had reached a turning point in the Cold War. “Let us not despair,” Gorbachev told Chernyaev on the plane home to Moscow, saying he was still a big optimist.¹

Gorbachev reported to the Politburo two days later that the negotiating positions of the past had been “buried” once and for all. “A totally new situation has emerged,” he said, a “new, more elevated plateau from which we now have to begin a struggle for liquidation and complete ban on nuclear arms… This is a strong position. It reflects new thinking.”² Chernyaev quoted Gorbachev as saying in the weeks that followed: “Before, we were talking about limitations on nuclear arms. Now we are talking about their reduction and elimination.”³

Yet for all his optimism, Gorbachev knew a huge opportunity had been missed at Reykjavik. Not a single nuclear warhead had yet been dismantled, not a single treaty had been signed. Gorbachev needed results—and he felt time was slipping away. His dreams of nuclear disarmament were driven by very genuine fears of the danger. But there were other, pragmatic reasons, too. His tentative efforts at perestroika had failed to improve Soviet living conditions, and a gathering storm loomed over the economy. Oil prices tumbled in 1986, and so did hard currency revenues. The country was forced to import grain and meat and borrow heavily from abroad. A huge budget deficit opened up. Gorbachev acknowledged at a Politburo meeting: “Now the situation has us all by the throat.”⁴

The overriding goal for Gorbachev was to transform the Reykjavik summit talk into concrete gains that might alleviate the military burden. Gorbachev seized the brake handles on the hurtling locomotive and threw himself into bringing about real change. Internal documents and evidence from memoirs suggest that it was not at all evident to the generals, or the weapons builders, or the old guard in the leadership, how radical a turnabout Gorbachev was contemplating after Reykjavik. After Gorbachev’s report to the Politburo, the ruling body acted cautiously. They issued an instruction to the military to prepare for possible deep cuts in strategic arms. But at the same time, the Politburo considered it entirely possible the Soviet Union would remain locked in Cold War competition, that there would be no deep cuts and they would have to retaliate against Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, “especially its outer space components.” For all Gorbachev’s enthusiasm, they thought, the arms race might not end soon.⁵

Although the Politburo members did not see where Gorbachev was headed, Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff, most certainly did. Akhromeyev was above reproach by the military elite for his long service to the country, and he gave Gorbachev the cover and legitimacy he needed to attempt a radical farewell to arms.

In 1986, after helping Gorbachev with the January 15 proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons, Akhromeyev concluded that it was time to create a new Soviet military doctrine to match Gorbachev’s era.

The military doctrine was the foundation of all the assumptions, goals and preparations of the sprawling Soviet defense machine, from frontline troops to the General Staff, from research institutes to arms factories. The old doctrine declared that the United States and NATO were the main adversaries of the Soviet Union; that the Soviet Union must strive for parity with the West in weapons. In the late autumn and early winter of 1986, Akhromeyev tore up the old doctrine. This was an excruciatingly difficult moment for him, requiring a reversal of all he had been taught. “The doctrine that had existed before 1986 was an indisputable truth for me and the General Staff,” he recalled. “It was bequeathed to us by the World War II commanders… who taught and molded me and people like me, whose names we pronounce when we take an oath to serve our Fatherland! How can all this be changed? Everything I had been taught for many years in the academies, on maneuvers. To change things I myself had been teaching to the younger generation of generals and officers, for many years already. A substantial segment of our military experience, theory and practice was being ditched.”

Just after Reykjavik, Akhromeyev delivered a lecture on the new doctrine at the Academy of the General Staff in Moscow, where the best and brightest officers studied. He spoke to an elite audience, which included military specialists, professors and strategists. The changes were stark. While the United States would still be the main adversary, Akhromeyev said, “we are prepared to dismantle the mechanism of military confrontation with the United States and NATO in Europe.” While a war would still be contemplated with nuclear and conventional weapons, he said, “we stand for complete liquidation of nuclear weapons in the world.” Instead of striving for parity, he said, the Soviet Union would reduce its forces, either by agreement or unilaterally if necessary.

“While I was speaking, there was absolute silence in the hall,” Akhromeyev recalled. “The faces reflected incomprehension, bewilderment and alarm.” When he was finished, “all restraints broke loose. The decorum of our military scientists was gone! Many of them seemed to forget that it was the head of the General Staff who was speaking to them. Accusations just short of treason were hurled at me. A number of points of the report were called erroneous and unacceptable.” What had taken months for Akhromeyev to think over was delivered in about ninety minutes. “One could understand why they were in a state of shock,” he said. “I had to answer questions for another two hours.”⁶

A grand retreat had begun.

Right after the Reykjavik summit, Reagan was at the top of his game. In a nationally televised speech October 13 and in campaign appearances across the country before the November election, Reagan launched one of the most extraordinary—and persuasive—public relations campaigns of his presidency. He boasted that he had stood up to Gorbachev. On the campaign trail, he evoked enthusiastic cheers from audiences when he declared that at Iceland, “I just said, ‘No!’” Reagan portrayed his refusal to give up the Strategic Defense Initiative as a triumph, even though SDI did not even exist.

Soon, however, Reagan was plunged into a season of troubles. Serious questions were raised about what was actually said at Hofdi House. Gorbachev noted in a televised speech from Moscow on October 22 that he and Reagan had agreed to the complete elimination of all strategic offensive weapons by 1996.⁷ This seemed to differ from Reagan’s claim, in his own televised speech after the summit, that he had discussed elimination of all ballistic missiles in ten years.⁸ In an embarrassing moment for Reagan, the Soviets made public part of their note takers’ minutes of the summit, showing that in fact Reagan had discussed elimination of all strategic weapons. The White House reluctantly acknowledged that Gorbachev was right, saying it was a goal, not a proposal. Reagan was lambasted by critics for sloppy handling of nuclear policy. Next, it turned out he had gone to Reykjavik without consulting the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., about the sweeping proposals made to Gorbachev, nor had anyone reported back to the nation’s military leaders about what happened at Reykjavik. The joint chiefs were apparently never notified of Reagan’s July 25 letter containing the Weinberger formula for “zero ballistic missiles.” After the summit, Crowe asked the other service chiefs what they thought. “The unanimous answer was that from a national security perspective it was completely unacceptable. The chiefs were quite disturbed,” he recalled. Crowe lost sleep for several nights worrying about how to proceed.

Although Crowe feared he would lose his job, he decided to speak up at the White House National Security Planning Group meeting October 27. It was unusual for a military man to rise at such a meeting, but Crowe delivered a four-page statement. “Mr. President,” he said, “we have concluded that the proposal to eliminate all ballistic missiles within 10 years time would pose high risks to the security of the nation.” This was a bombshell—the nation’s top soldier telling the president he had risked the nation’s security by giving away too much. Crowe waited for the reaction.⁹

“Admiral,” the president said, “I really love the U.S. military. I have always loved it. Those young men and women do a wonderful job for our country, and everywhere I go I tell people how proud I am of our armed forces.” The meeting ended.

“If the president was angry, it was not obvious to me,” Crowe recalled later. “If he had heard my remarks, it was not obvious to me. If he simply did not wish to respond, that was not clear to me either. Nor did I know where the controversial proposal stood now.” Reagan had not only heard Crowe, but thought he had answered him. That night in his diary, Reagan wrote, “The Joint Chiefs wanted reassurances that we were aware of the imbalance with the Soviets in conventional arms & how that would be aggravated by reduction in nuclear weapons. We were able to assure them we were very much aware & that this matter would have to be negotiated with the Soviets in any nuclear arms reduction negotiations.”¹⁰ Once again, Reagan kept his eye on the very big picture and blithely skipped over the unpleasant details.

On November 4, Republicans lost the Senate majority they had held for six years. And in the weeks and months that followed, Reagan was engulfed by the biggest scandal of his presidency. The Iran-Contra affair centered on secret operations, run in part out of the White House National Security Council, in which the United States sold missiles and missile parts to Iran to secure the release of American hostages in Lebanon, and then diverted some of the proceeds from the arms sales to help the Nicaraguan contras, circumventing a ban on aid imposed by Congress. The scandal went to the heart of a contradiction in Reagan’s thinking. In rhetoric, he stood tall on principles and pledged never to make deals with terrorists or the states that backed them. But in private, he could be deeply moved by individual human suffering, and sold the weapons to Iran out of his emotional reaction to appeals from the families of the American captives. The diversion of aid to the contras also reflected the wild and woolly side of the CIA under Casey, which seemed eager to launch swashbuckling covert wars against communism on every continent, blatantly disregarding laws passed by Congress. The scandal caused Reagan’s popularity at home to drop suddenly in late 1986 and early 1987. His presidency went into a deep freeze.

Gorbachev was puzzled and irritated. He thought he had put Reagan in a box at the summit. He had made an irresistible all-or-nothing offer, and he was sure Reagan would come around to accept it. Gorbachev repeatedly called it the “package”: concessions on the intermediate-range missiles and on the long-range weapons must be contingent on limiting the Strategic Defense Initiative. “We will stand on this, firmly,” Gorbachev confidently told the Politburo on October 14. “We do not need any cheap tricks, only the package.” But to Gorbachev’s consternation, Reagan gave no signs of flexibility in the weeks after the summit. “What is it that America wants?” Gorbachev asked at the Politburo on October 30. “I have more and more doubts about whether we can achieve anything at all with this administration.”¹¹

Gorbachev also had his own troubles, especially the war in Afghanistan.¹² The war had become a morass for the Soviets, and provided a fresh test of whether Gorbachev could withdraw from the military burdens he inherited. On November 13, 1986, a restless Gorbachev told the Politburo he wanted to get out of Afghanistan. “We must not waste time!” he said. “We have been fighting for six years! Some say, if we continue the same way, it may be going on for another 20 or 30 years. And this is what’s going to happen. People have raised the question: are we going to stay there forever? Or should we end this war? If we don’t it will be a complete disgrace. Our strategic goal is to wrap up the war in one, maximum two years, and pull out the troops.”

Yet, as Chernyaev recalled later, “We carried the heavy burden of Afghanistan into the new year. For all of Gorbachev’s determination to end the war… no significant steps were yet taken. And this, like the aftermath of Chernobyl, was a huge weight on all his further reform activities. It greatly restricted his freedom of political and economic maneuver, including his efforts to realize the idea of Reykjavik.”¹³

Another setback for Gorbachev came on his nuclear testing moratorium. The Soviet test sites had been silent for eighteen months, but the United States refused to join, and conducted some twenty tests during the period. The moratorium was good for propaganda, but it brought Gorbachev no tangible results. The Soviet nuclear weapons establishment was eager to resume explosions. On December 18, Gorbachev threw in the towel. The Soviet Union announced it would resume testing in 1987, right after the next American weapons test. Gorbachev was discouraged by having to give up one of his cherished initiatives, and dispirited at the continued signs of backsliding by Reagan on other issues.¹⁴ Gorbachev said the Iran-Contra scandal “pushes them to do it in order to save the president.” He worried about more surprises from Reagan. “We are dealing with political dregs,” he said. “One can expect anything from them.”

In December, Gorbachev approved the new military doctrine Akhromeyev had forged, but he heard grumbling from the military. “We should not become like the generals, who are trying to scare us,” Gorbachev said. “They are already hissing among themselves: what kind of leadership do we have? ‘They are destroying the defense of the country.’ They say that Ogarkov is very upset. To him it is just give, give more. Cannons should be longer!”¹⁵

With small steps, those around Gorbachev began slowly to reverse the secrecy and deceit so deeply woven into the hypermilitarized Soviet system. Fresh streams of candor began to run through the corridors of the Kremlin. The new thinking—honest, but still cautious—was evident in the detailed reference papers that Vitaly Katayev prepared for his superiors in the Central Committee defense department, especially Lev Zaikov, the Politburo member in charge of the military-industrial complex. The style of the typewritten reports reflects Katayev’s precision and background as an engineer: three neat columns across, often many pages long, each row addressing a new issue, or question. At the top, he typed “S P R A V K A,” or information.

On December 24, 1986, Katayev finished another spravka that showed he was candid—at least to his bosses in the system—about shortcomings in the Soviet military machine. In this document, Katayev carefully dissected the points in a speech made in San Francisco four weeks earlier by Gates, the deputy CIA director. Gates claimed that a radar station being constructed north of Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, violated the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, a charge the United States had made before in the glossy annual booklet Soviet Military Power.¹⁶ The Americans claimed the station could be used for “battle management” of a nationwide anti-missile system. This was not the case. The Soviets claimed the radar was for civilian space tracking. This was also not true. In fact, it was a permitted type of radar for early warning against missile attack, but the Soviets had put it in a prohibited location. The treaty said that early-warning radars could only be built around the periphery of a country, facing outward. The Soviet leaders had put this radar station inland, 1,669 miles from the Pacific Ocean and nearly five hundred miles north of the border with Mongolia, clearly not at the perimeter. The radar antenna faced northeast, too, which was not exactly outward. The real reason it faced this way was to plug another Soviet shortcoming, a hole in the early-warning network—to watch out for American missiles coming from submarines in the northern Pacific Ocean. Katayev candidly acknowledged the Soviet violation in his spravka: “The building of the radar in the city of Krasnoyarsk indeed contradicts the Article 6b of the ABM Treaty because the antenna curtain is oriented toward the inside of the territory.” Although Katayev had admitted it internally, it was a violation the Soviets would not acknowledge publicly for more than two years.

On another point in the speech in San Francisco, Gates warned that the Soviet Union was “laying the foundation” for a nationwide missile defense system, which would be prohibited by the treaty, and pursuing advanced technology to do it, such as laser, particle beam, kinetic energy and microwave electronics. This argument was often made by U.S. officials to build support for the Strategic Defense Initiative. But it was hype. Katayev wrote in his spravka the Soviets were in fact way behind the level of technology suggested by Gates. The alarmist charges were greatly exaggerated. The most advanced Soviet research on laser and other exotic technology “are at the initial stage of laboratory stand experiments,” he said. Prototypes of such weapons could not be created any sooner than the year 2000. The Soviets were unable to shoot down anything with a laser.¹⁷

Another important voice for glasnost, and against the long tradition of military secrecy, was Velikhov, the open-minded physicist and adviser to Gorbachev. In January 1987, four weeks after Katayev’s spravka, Velikhov came up with an idea. He wrote to the Central Committee defense department—Katayev’s office—proposing to challenge the misleading American statements about Soviet laser weapons. A showcase nuclear disarmament conference was scheduled for later in the month in Moscow, and Velikhov was one of the organizers. Scientists, celebrities and antinuclear activists were being brought in from all around the world. Velikhov suggested: what if Gorbachev himself announced at the conference that the Soviet Union would open up the top-secret test facility at Sary Shagan that was so often at the center of American propaganda? What if the Americans were invited to see for themselves that Gates and Soviet Military Power were wrong? Velikhov suggested that a group of five to eight American scientists and journalists be taken on a “spontaneous” four-hour visit. Contrary to American claims about the lasers, their actual power was “thousands of times less than required” for shooting down missiles, he said. “There exists a complete and unique chance to demonstrate the false nature of the official American claims,” Velikhov insisted. “An exposure of the lie with one concrete example may have big political consequences.”

Velikhov was a vice president of the Academy of Sciences, and his proposal immediately commanded the attention of top security and defense officials, including Zaikov, Akhromeyev and the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov. A staff report dumped cold water on Velikhov’s idea, saying the American visitors would quickly realize the Soviet equipment was really quite old. The two lasers at the complex were experimental samples using components from the early 1970s, the staff report said. The visiting scientists and journalists might think the Soviets were insincere, or covering up something, the report added. Akhromeyev worried that the Americans—seeing the size of buildings and the nature of the test range—might try to prove that the Soviets were planning to build missile defenses in the future. There was also worry that the visitors might see a secret project called “Gamma” to build an anti-satellite weapon in the future. In fact, Gamma never materialized. The only thing to hide at Sary Shagan was the painful truth: Soviet technology was way behind.

On February 12, the Central Committee answered Velikhov: proposal rejected. No Americans could see the secret test range. But Velikhov had opened the door a crack, and did not give up.

Another key moment in Gorbachev’s drive for change came December 16, 1986, when he telephoned Andrei Sakharov, who was watching television with his wife, Yelena Bonner. Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner and dissident physicist who had helped design the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was banished to Gorky in 1980 without trial for speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Soviet human rights violations. Reagan had raised the question of Sakharov in a letter to Gorbachev delivered at the Reykjavik summit. Gorbachev did not want to seem to be under pressure, but in December he told Sakharov on the phone, “You can return to Moscow.” Sakharov stepped off the train in Moscow at the Yaroslavl station on December 23.

In February, Sakharov appeared in public for the first time since his return, attending the international disarmament conference, “The Forum for a Nuclear-Free World and the Survival of Mankind.” The conference was jam-packed with celebrities invited from around the world, but Sakharov’s presence cast a special glow. Even more significant was Sakharov’s message: it was time to get on with reducing dangerous missiles and break the deadlock over the Strategic Defense Initiative. It was time to crack open the Gorbachev “package” from Reykjavik.¹⁸

Gorbachev had earlier been certain the package deal would bring results. But now, in late February 1987, the Soviet Union was preparing to set off its first nuclear explosion since the end of the moratorium. Gorbachev needed something new, and bold. Sakharov’s speech at the conference has been credited by some as pushing Gorbachev to move. But there was another strong impetus. On February 25, Gorbachev’s influential adviser, Alexander Yakovlev, wrote an extensive memo to him, arguing the time had come to unbundle the “package” and make separate deals to reduce nuclear weapons.

Yakovlev, the paragon of new thinking who had walked with Gorbachev in the orchard in Canada, said Gorbachev needed to pay attention to the political dynamics. “In politics, maximum freedom of maneuver is always valuable,” he wrote. “The ‘package’ in its present form only ties our hands.” At the top of Yakovlev’s list of priorities, if the package were dropped, was to seek a separate agreement on the intermediate-range missiles that would ease the threat posed by the American Pershing II missiles in Europe. “For us, this would be tantamount to removal of a very serious threat,” he said. Yakovlev expressed a sense of urgency. “It is extremely important now not to lose the tempo we have developed, and not to lose time. If we want to untie the package, we need to do it right now, because later the effect of it will be much weaker.” A public speech making the announcement “could compensate, in the eyes of the world public, for the fact of our reciprocal resumption of nuclear testing.”¹⁹

If Gorbachev untied the package, it would mean the very real concessions he made at Reykjavik—such as eliminating all the Pioneers—would be pocketed by Reagan, without any slowdown in the missile defense plan. But Gorbachev also realized that, since Reykjavik, they had been treading water. His package tactic wasn’t working. Gorbachev desperately wanted to get results, not shadow-box over the future.

On the day after Yakovlev’s memo, February 26, 1987, the Soviet Union set off its first nuclear explosion since 1985, in tunnel No. 130 at the Semipalatinsk testing range in Kazakhstan. Gorbachev had absorbed Yakovlev’s argument by the time he addressed the Politburo that day. “The biggest step that would make an impression on the outside world, on public opinion, would be if we untie the package and agree to cut 1,000 of our most powerful missiles,” he said.

“Let’s untie the package.”

On February 28, he made the announcement. “The Soviet Union suggests that the problem of medium-range missiles in Europe be singled out from the package of issues, and that a separate agreement be concluded on it, and without delay.” Reagan took the news cautiously, saying it was “progress” toward a “new opportunity,” speaking to reporters in his first visit to the White House pressroom since disclosure of diversion of the Iran money to the contras two months earlier.

The Pioneer missile had a brutish silhouette and carried three warheads, each 150 kilotons and independently targetable. The missile’s range was called intermediate or medium: less than the giant missiles that flew across the oceans, but more than those designed for use on battlefields. The Pioneer was a modern, mobile missile, transported on huge six-axle vehicles, which could keep the weapon in a state of constant combat readiness and launch it. Between 1978 and 1986, 441 Pioneer systems were deployed, including a version with improved accuracy and range in 1980, but they created a terrible problem the Soviet leadership had not anticipated. “The Soviet leadership at the time failed to take into account the probable reaction of the Western countries,” Gorbachev recalled. “I would even go so far as to characterize it as an unforgivable adventure, embarked on by the previous Soviet leadership under pressure from the military-industrial complex.” The NATO response—the Pershing IIs and the ground-launched cruise missiles—became “a pistol held to our head,” as Gorbachev put it. “Not to mention the exorbitant and unjustifiable costs of developing, producing and servicing the SS-20—funds swallowed up by the insatiable Moloch of the military-industrial complex.”²⁰

Katayev, the Central Committee staff man with long experience in the missile design bureaus, knew how the Soviet leaders fell into such a blunder. As he toured the archipelago of factories, bases and institutes under his supervision, Katayev found excess everywhere. Missiles were built because the design bureaus and factories needed to keep production lines open, not because the military wanted them. He recalled meeting with the directors of two factories building submarine-launched missiles. When he suggested they were wasting money manufacturing weapons no one would use, the factory bosses objected. “The order for missiles is given, it is included in the plan, funds are given, and so we make them,” Katayev recalled of their response to his protest. “And the way these missiles are used by the military—this is not our problem.”

The navy was the worst. At one point Katayev calculated there were between four and eight missiles manufactured for each submarine launching tube, compared to a ratio of 1.2 or 1.3 missiles per tube in other countries. “A vast number of sea-launched missiles in the Soviet Union were kept in poor conditions, reducing the combat reliability of the weapons,” Katayev said. He took a three-day voyage on a Project 941 submarine, the Typhoon, a huge vessel with two separate pressure hulls, which carried twenty solid-fuel missiles with a range of more than six thousand miles. As he watched, the crew launched four missiles toward the test range in Kamchatka. Katayev turned to the Typhoon chief designer, Sergei Kovalyov.

“Sergei Nikitich, four missiles flew, this is roughly the cost of a residential building of 200 apartments. What do you need this for?” Katayev asked.

Kovalyov replied simply that it was a training exercise. But he admitted that once the missile left the tube, he was finished with it. The point was just to train for the launch. Katayev said a concrete-filled trainer missile would work just as well, and make no difference for the crew. As Katayev recounted the conversation, Kovalyov replied, “Why not? Somehow this idea never occurred to me. There were always plenty of missiles, we didn’t give it a thought. Because this new solid-fuel missile is certainly a little expensive for training novices.” From then on, they started to use a concrete-filled missile for training.

Katayev, precise and careful, loved lists and charts. He filled his notebooks with them, in neat handwriting, often accompanied by notes and drawings. He saw in his own records proof that missile production was excessive. He took the charts to his superiors. He implored Zaikov: they had far more missiles than the country needed. The missile overproduction was not increasing the security of the country; rather, in the case of the Pioneers, it had led to a “dangerous, strategic dead end.” But Katayev knew that his conclusion was not shared by either the generals or the legendary missile designers. The Pioneers were the newest Soviet missile, the best technology, with twenty or thirty years of useful service duty ahead of them—and all those involved were appalled at the idea of sacrificing them. Katayev recalled one particularly emotional meeting in 1985 when the idea of reducing the missile arsenal was debated. There were shouts of protest: “Sabotage!” and “The Fifth Column!” and “Remember Khrushchev!” (for the Cuban missile crisis fiasco). “I tried in vain to defuse the emotions with the help of technical arguments in favor of reducing the number of missiles,” Katayev recalled. After the stormy meeting, he remained in the conference room with one of Akhromeyev’s deputies. Katayev attempted in earnest to argue his point. “Unbeknownst to everybody,” Katayev told the deputy, “the time has arrived when the accumulation of nuclear weapons has outgrown its own level of safety and when it reached the zone where both our own nuclear weapons and those of the Americans have turned from being a means of deterrence into an instrument of increased danger. And first of all, for the Soviet Union, not for the Americans. Nobody in this country has considered it! They thought, the more missiles the better. We are the ones who have to step away from the danger—not Reagan.” They talked past midnight. Katayev recalled that although Akhromeyev’s office was right next door, he never once came into the room.²¹

If Akhromeyev heard the discussion, he must have been personally torn. He hated to think they were wasting what they had built at such cost. But he was committed to Gorbachev, and perhaps even more important, Akhromeyev understood the folly of the original decision to deploy the Pioneers aimed at Western Europe. Chernyaev concluded, “As a military professional, he realized the danger Pershing II missiles posed to us, and he had always disapproved of the policy of targeting SS-20s on the U.S.’s NATO allies. A ‘local nuclear war’ was by definition impossible.”²² Other military leaders were not so farsighted. “Gorbachev had to go through a difficult struggle with his own generals,” Chernyaev said. “It took a long time to convince them to get rid of the SS-20s in Europe.”

When Thatcher came to Moscow, March 23 to April 1, 1987, she told Gorbachev that it was folly to eliminate nuclear weapons. Sitting across the table from each other in Saint Catherine’s Hall, they had a vigorous argument, not unlike their first one at Chequers. “You, Madam Thatcher, with your stance on nuclear weapons, hamper the negotiations and hinder efforts to start a process of genuine disarmament,” Gorbachev said. “When you solemnly declare that nuclear weapons are beneficial, it’s clear that you are an ardent supporter of them—prepared to accept the risk of war.”

Thatcher “got very tense, blushed, and her expression hardened,” Chernyaev recalled. “She reached out and, touching Gorbachev’s sleeve, began to talk without letting him get in a word.” She insisted that nuclear weapons had kept the peace. “She became so excited that the discussion got completely out of hand. They started to interrupt each other, repeat themselves, assure each other of their best intentions.” When Thatcher flew home, she described it as the most fascinating and important overseas visit she had ever taken; she realized “the ground was shifting underneath the communist system.”²³

Gorbachev revealed his deep frustrations to Shultz on April 14. At a Kremlin meeting, he complained the Reagan administration was behaving as if nothing was going on in the Soviet Union, when in fact it had a better opportunity to improve relations than any U.S. administration in decades. “Where do we go from here?” he wondered.²⁴ They immediately began to wrestle over details of how to eliminate the Pioneer and Pershing II missiles. The negotiations to eliminate intermediate-range missiles were to cover those with a range of between approximately 300 and 3,500 miles. The Pershing IIs had a maximum range of 1,100 miles, and Pioneers about 3,100 miles. The Soviet Union had also deployed a relatively new short-range missile, the SS-23, named after the Oka, a Russian river. The single-stage, solid-fueled Oka was easily moved around on trucklike launchers, which could erect and fire it. The Soviet military calculated the range of the SS-23 as only 250 miles, and thus felt it should not be included in negotiations on intermediate-range missiles. American experts guessed it might have greater range, given the size of the projectile.²⁵ The missile was prized by the Soviet military because of its mobility, and it was capable of carrying either nuclear or conventional warheads. Earlier, Gorbachev had offered to freeze the level of these missiles, and he went still further and proposed negotiating deep cuts, and ultimately elimination.

But in the Kremlin meeting, Shultz suggested the United States first wanted to build up its arsenal of short-range systems to match Soviet levels, after which they could negotiate.

Gorbachev unexpectedly offered, on the spot, to eliminate the Oka missiles altogether, if the United States would agree to a “global zero,” or none on either side.

When Gorbachev made the offer, Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff, was not in the room. He was scheduled to arrive only later, after a break.

Shultz replied to the offer by saying he would consult with the NATO alliance.

“Why can’t you make a decision?” Gorbachev insisted.

Shevardnadze interjected, “I am amazed that the United States is objecting to unilateral Soviet elimination of operational short-range missiles.”

Gorbachev had just made an extremely sensitive concession. By the time Akhromeyev entered the hall later for a discussion of strategic weapons, Gorbachev had abandoned a whole weapons system. Akhromeyev only found out the next day, when he saw his name was on the list of attendees at the meeting, put there because Gorbachev wanted to show he had approved. Akhromeyev later said the concession was a “miscalculation” that infuriated the generals. “The military leadership was indignant at the incident with the Oka,” Akhromeyev recalled. “The Foreign Ministry didn’t give any appropriate explanation of the one-sided deal. The first serious split appeared between the military and Shevardnadze.” The generals tried to fight back in the months that followed, but were reprimanded. Gorbachev had maneuvered skillfully to get his way against his own military, but he still lacked any tangible result from the Americans. Appearing before the Politburo days later, Gorbachev sputtered in frustration that Shultz could not make a decision on the spot. The conversation was good, he said, but “essentially empty—we did not move anywhere.”²⁶

“We have to recapture the initiative,” said Shevardnadze.

From his office at the Central Committee, Katayev, the precise and careful staffer, slowly came to a profound conclusion: the leadership of the country—hierarchical, centrally planned, rigid and hidebound by long practice—simply had no process for deciding how to abandon and destroy the weapons it had built at such enormous cost, even if disarmament had been a propaganda line for decades. The previous strategic arms control treaties from the Nixon and Carter era had only limited the growth of weapons, and destroyed none of them. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention had outlawed an entire class of weapons and the Soviet Union secretly built them anyway. There was no road map for retreat. Katayev recalled it was an enormous psychological barrier, as well as a practical roadblock to decisions.

Katayev, who understood the excesses, quietly set about changing the way defense decisions were handled in the Kremlin. In the Brezhnev years, designers and builders filled the power vacuum. Once Gorbachev came into office, specialists like Katayev and others gained a greater voice. For the most part, in their private discussions, Katayev found the specialists favored disarmament, and were cognizant of the Soviet overkill. At the top, a group of powerful decision-makers remained from earlier times. They were known as the “Big Five”: the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, KGB, the Military Industrial Commission, and the Central Committee. Katayev elevated the role of technical experts like himself as a “working group” serving the Big Five. It marked a shift in the way arms control was handled in the Kremlin, giving the technocrats and specialists more input, although few knew about it outside. All the documents describing the change were stamped “Top Secret.” On May 6, 1987, members of the Big Five sent Gorbachev a recommendation to make Katayev’s arrangement permanent. Gorbachev signed it.²⁷

Another shoot of fresh thinking about how to brake the arms race came to the surface at the military’s General Staff headquarters in Moscow. Valery Yarynich had been assigned to work at the headquarters of an internal think tank, the Center for Operational-Strategic Research, established just as Gorbachev took power. Yarynich, the communications expert who had once witnessed the Cuban missile crisis panic, arrived at the center in 1985 after finishing with Perimeter, the semiautomatic nuclear missile retaliatory system. As glasnost blossomed, Yarynich enjoyed a freedom to raise issues with relative openness inside the heart of the Soviet military, and he devoted himself to analyzing the risks of nuclear war. “We had a chance to think and say what we thought without fear of punishment,” he said. The research center was given a difficult task—to find the theoretical justification to support lower levels of nuclear weapons. It was a forward-thinking idea born of Gorbachev’s new era. He was assigned to run a research project called Kupol. The project used mathematical models to study scenarios of a possible first-strike nuclear attack from the United States.

Yarynich and his coworkers on Kupol found a very important insight in the mathematical models. When considering a possible nuclear attack, it was not enough to just measure the number of warheads that would probably reach their targets, or the number that could retaliate. The Soviet command and control systems, which were reliable and split-second, also had to be figured into the calculation. If one took command and control into account, then mathematical models showed the goal of deterrence could be guaranteed with a drastic reduction of nuclear arsenals. This was because it was likely there would always be at least some retaliation for an attack. Even the smallest retaliation in a real nuclear war meant pretty massive destruction. The attacker always faced this uncertainty. Thus, Yarynich concluded, the massive overkill of the arms race was unnecessary.

Yarynich was seized with an idea—what if the two superpowers could open up and share such mathematical models? What if the leaders could see what he and his coworkers had discovered in Kupol? But the reaction from Soviet military leaders was not very encouraging. They could not imagine exchanging top-secret command and control data with the United States. “The old thinking prevailed over the new,” Yarynich recalled.

At the same time, he saw on the streets that the “new thinking” and glasnost of Gorbachev were spreading. Barriers were collapsing everywhere. One day, the experts, including Yarynich, got a translated copy of a book published in the United States in 1985. The book, The Button: America’s Nuclear Warning System—Does It Work? by Daniel Ford, questioned whether command and control was the weak link in the American nuclear deterrence. Yarynich said the Russian experts were “astounded by the degree of openness, detail and healthy criticism which the author used to describe the American system. And it dealt no harm to America whatsoever!” Yarynich suggested that his staff prepare a similar work. Once again, his suggestion went nowhere.²⁸

By summer 1987, nearly two years had passed since the space designers and rocket builders had put on Gorbachev’s desk their blueprints for a sprawling Soviet version of the Strategic Defense Initiative. To see their handiwork, Gorbachev flew to the Soviet cosmodrome at Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, on May 11. The next day, he toured the launch pad for the giant two-stage, four-engine heavy space booster, Energia. Wearing a hard hat and in a business suit, Gorbachev walked in a broad circle clockwise around the enormous white booster, which stood 190 feet tall and weighed 2,400 tons fully fueled. It was full at that moment. For weeks, the launcher had been kept in two-day readiness for takeoff. The Energia had never flown before and was built to carry the Soviet space shuttle, the Buran, but the shuttle was not ready, so designers planned instead to use the first launch of the Energia to carry aloft a mysterious black cylinder. On the black vehicle was painted the name Polyus, or Pole, in white letters on the outside, but inside it carried the Skif-DM, the demonstration model of the space laser weapon, the most tangible result so far of the drive to build a Soviet Star Wars. The Skif-DM was among those projects that had been touted to Gorbachev by the space designers in 1985, shortly after he took office. Since then, work had been rushed. In fact, there was no laser inside; the Skif-DM was a mock-up, a placeholder for a possible future weapon. The Soviet builders had not mastered the technology.

Gorbachev had spent the last two years warning the United States against weapons in space—precisely the purpose of Skif-DM. As Gorbachev was briefed, walking around the huge booster on May 12, with other Politburo members trailing behind, examining the white rocket and black cylinder, he abruptly told the designers: “The Politburo is not going to allow you to launch this rocket.” Gorbachev had said many times he did not want an arms race in space—and he meant it.

Boris Gubanov, the chief designer, was dumbfounded, but tried to carry on. He explained to Gorbachev details of the heavy launcher: fuel, tremendous pressures and temperatures at launch. In the next hour or so, Gorbachev softened. He asked if they could wait a few months. Gubanov said it was impossible: the rocket was ready, it was fueled, people worked around the clock, they could not sustain such a pace. At lunchtime, Gubanov recalled, the word came back: permission to launch. The next day, Gorbachev praised the workers at Baikonur. And he reminded them, as he had done so often before, “We are categorically against moving the arms race into space.”

Gorbachev left the cosmodrome on May 14. At 9:30 P.M. the next day, the Energia roared into the night sky with the Skif-DM payload inside the mysterious black container, Polyus.

The Energia booster performed flawlessly. Four hundred and sixty seconds after launch, the Polyus separated from the Energia.

Then something went wrong. The Polyus was supposed to turn 180 degrees and fire engines to push itself into higher orbit. Instead, it kept turning all the way to 360 degrees, so when the engines fired, it was in the wrong direction. It shot itself back down toward Earth. The Polyus flew straight for the Pacific Ocean.

The black Polyus cylinder fell into the sea. All work on the Skif project came to a halt.

Gorbachev did not attempt to revive the Skif. He did nothing—another step toward his goal of slowing the arms race.²⁹

The most devastating defeat for the Soviet military in 1987 came not directly from Gorbachev, but he exploited it. It came at the hands of a dreamy nineteen-year-old youth who lived in Hamburg, Germany. Mathias Rust was deeply disappointed by the failure of Reagan and Gorbachev to make a deal at Reykjavik. He decided to make a personal protest. He rented a single-engine Cessna 172P, a sports airplane, and told his family he was going to tour Scandinavia. He flew it to the Faroe Islands on May 13, and the next day to Keflavik, Iceland, the airfield from which Reagan and Gorbachev had departed after the summit.

After further travel, on May 28, he took off from Helsinki, having filed a flight plan for Stockholm. Twenty minutes into the flight, he switched off his communications gear and turned east. Finnish air traffic controllers feared he had crashed and launched a rescue effort. Rust disappeared into the clouds.

It was a holiday in the Soviet Union: “Border Guards Day.”³⁰ At 2:25 P.M., the Cessna, with a small German flag on the tail, flying low, crossed a beach into Estonia and Soviet airspace. Thirty-one minutes later, Rust passed near the town of Kohtla-Yarve, at approximately three thousand feet. He set a course for Moscow. The Soviet air defense system picked up the plane, alerted the antiaircraft batteries and scrambled a fighter jet. The Soviet jet pilot zoomed past the small Cessna—flying seven times the speed of the small craft—and reported that it was a light plane, white, with a blue stripe, at under three thousand feet. Rust saw the Soviet jet, recognized the red star, and could spot the oxygen mask and coveralls of the pilot. He feared he would be shot down. “My heart fell into my pants,” he recalled. But then nothing happened, the fighter disappeared and Rust flew on toward Moscow.

On the ground, Soviet air and ground defenses, built up over decades to warn of American bomber fleets bearing nuclear weapons, went limp. Radar operators made no effort to determine the type of airplane that had just invaded their space. They made no immediate report to the headquarters of the Air Defense Forces. The rapidly changing weather and a certain blurriness on the radar screen caused the operators to doubt whether it was a plane at all; they thought it might be a flock of birds.³¹The fighter jet had only forty minutes of fuel at low altitudes, and could not remain aloft longer to search. Another group of jets were scrambled; one spotted Rust, but they did nothing. Then the radar operators lost track of Rust altogether at 3:58 P.M. No further action was taken. At 6:38 P.M., the Moscow regional air defenses switched to “routine watch duty.”

At exactly that moment, Rust was approaching Moscow, confused by its sprawling size. He spotted the cubelike Rossiya Hotel, and near it, Red Square. He approached for a landing, but there were people in the square, and he feared casualties, so Rust pulled up and circled again, and again.

On the third approach, Rust spotted a wide, open road bridge, and landed on it at 6:45 P.M., taxiing the plane toward Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral. A crowd gathered around as Rust, with oversized aviator eyeglasses and an orange jacket, climbed out and announced he was on a mission of peace. He was arrested by the KGB and taken away.

Rust’s solo flight riveted the attention of the country and the world. Jokes were told in Moscow in the days that followed: a group of citizens gathered in Red Square with their luggage. When a policeman asked why they were there, they answered, “We are waiting for the flight to Hamburg.” But Rust’s daring stunt was no joke for the military. It came at the dawn of the age of low-flying, radar-evading cruise missiles. If he could make it all the way to Moscow and be mistaken for a flock of birds, then what of the country’s defenses against cruise missiles? The Soviet military was red faced. The rules after the Korean Air Lines disaster in 1983 were not to shoot at civilian intruders, but to force them to land. They had not even tried.

Gorbachev was in Berlin meeting with Warsaw Pact leaders—telling them of the new Soviet military doctrine—when he got word. He told the Soviet allies that Rust’s stunt “was no reason to doubt the efficiency of our technology or the reliability of our defense,” but in private, he was floored. “I was utterly shaken and completely at a loss as to how this could have happened,” he recalled.³² As Gorbachev stepped off the plane back in Moscow, Chernyaev recalled, his eyes were “flashing with anger.” Chernyaev wrote Gorbachev a note before a Politburo meeting the next day. “A great military power was reduced to a joke in the space of a minute,” he said. “What happened forces us to reflect again on the state of the army. Our equipment wasn’t at fault. To spot such a tiny aircraft, 1930s-era technology would suffice. Rather it was a broader carelessness and lack of responsibility that was to blame, not an episodic problem but something endemic that reflects a much more serious illness in the armed forces.” Chernyaev pleaded with Gorbachev to consider undertaking a reform of the military and to fire the defense minister, Sokolov. “Maybe I’m blinded by anger and emotion over this shameful incident, which, in one moment, devalued not only our air defenses but our entire military structure. But I believe that perestroika and new thinking cannot be successful without a reform of the army.”³³

At the Kremlin, the Politburo meeting was tense. Gorbachev, mocking and furious, said the Rust intrusion showed the impotence of the defense ministry. The first deputy minister of defense, Pyotr Lushev, began to brief the Politburo on what happened. He described how the plane had flown undetected toward Moscow.

Gorbachev: And this lasted for two and a half hours during which time the intruder aircraft was within the zone of the 6th Army? Did they report it to you?

Lushev: No. I learned about it after the aircraft’s landing in Moscow. Gorbachev: Learned from the traffic police?

Lushev described the existing orders not to shoot down a civilian plane but force it to land. The jet fighters were going too fast to do this. Ryzhkov, the head of the government, asked, “And helicopters, wasn’t it possible to use them?” Lushev replied, “There are no helicopters” in the Air Defense Forces.

Summing up, Lushev said the reasons for the episode were “a loss of vigilance and a dulled sense of responsibility, especially on duty shifts,” and “carelessness of the duty officers, who had grown used to routine action and were unprepared to operate in non-standard circumstances.”

Gorbachev: “And then how are we going to operate in combat conditions, when non-standard situations occur?”

Gorbachev fired the head of the Air Defense Forces and accepted Defense Minister Sokolov’s resignation on the spot. About 150 senior officers were also fired. Dmitri Yazov, a mild-mannered former deputy defense minister, was appointed to succeed Sokolov. The one top military man who was untouched by the affair was Akhromeyev.

Gorbachev called Chernyaev at home that evening. “We discredited the country, humiliated our people,” Gorbachev said, according to Chernyaev’s account. Gorbachev wondered if he should have resigned too. Then he added, “But fine, at least everyone here, and in the West, will know where power lies. It is in the hands of the political leadership, the Politburo. This will put an end to gossip about the military’s opposition to Gorbachev, that he’s afraid of them, and they are close to ousting him.”³⁴

On June 12, 1987, in Berlin, Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of Europe’s division between East and West, and addressed Gorbachev directly. “We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness,” he said. “Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West or to strengthen the Soviet state without changing it?

“General Secretary Gorbachev,” Reagan declared, “if you seek peace—if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—if you seek liberalization, come here, to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The speech was classic Reagan, infused with his powerful faith in freedom and prosperity and the link between the two. Reagan recalled in his memoir that when he saw the wall, he spoke with genuine anger in his voice. Gorbachev still did not entirely understand Reagan, nor his rhetoric, and called Chernyaev a few days later. “He is trying to provoke us, to make us snap, which would help them get the Soviet threat back. If, like Reagan, I was giving interviews every week, I would say that he hasn’t forgotten his previous occupation over these eight years.”³⁵

Gorbachev’s retreat from the arms race led to confusion not only in the military but in the prestigious defense institutes and design bureaus. They needed to find new justifications for their programs. And Reagan’s missile defense dream still flummoxed some of them. Katayev recalled that in August, Alexander Nadiradze, the missile designer who created the Pioneer, sent a panicky letter to the Central Committee. Four years after Reagan had first announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, Nadiradze declared he had figured out the truth: it was a plan to use space to shoot a nuclear warhead back down to Earth! This was worse than first strike. He said the missile defense plan should be exposed as an “aggressive weapon that gives the USA a new possibility to deliver an instant nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.” He claimed his research showed “an undersized missile ‘Space-Earth’ will be capable of carrying a nuclear charge of 0.1–0.15 megaton, a solid-fueled rocket engine will allow it to accelerate toward Earth–at about 4–5 kilometers per second–in 30 seconds.” He added, “From the moment of the order to launch, the time of the rocket’s flight to Earth will be only 1–2 minutes.” Nadiradze said if Reagan’s program were deployed, then the Soviet Union should destroy American satellites in space. The Polyus and the Skif might be dead, but the hopes of the missile designers burned on.³⁶

In early September, Velikhov, the open-minded physicist, struck another hammer blow against Soviet military secrecy.

Thomas B. Cochran, the American scientist who had set up the seismic monitoring stations around Semipalatinsk, was traveling with three members of Congress, several aides and a New York Times journalist, showing them the equipment. On a stopover in Moscow, Velikhov telephoned Cochran at the Sovietskaya Hotel, about 6 P.M., and told him to get the delegation to the airport by midnight. Velikhov had won permission to take them to see the disputed Krasnoyarsk radar that the Reagan administration said was a treaty violation.

Velikhov was attempting exactly the kind of glasnost gamble the Central Committee had rejected in February. The group took off for Siberia at 4 A.M., reached the radar site in late afternoon and slowly circled the entire radar site by helicopter, looking down on two large concrete structures, one a transmitter and the other a receiver. The receiver, nearly thirty stories tall, had a long, sloping side, facing northeast. Both structures were unfinished; the receiver’s radar face appeared to be partially covered with corrugated metal sheets. At first the Soviets said the Americans could not go inside the structures. After a meal of roasted pig, fruit and vodka toasts in a large white tent, the Americans pleaded for a chance to go inside, and the Soviets relented. The Americans discovered the project was years from completion, just empty shells, empty rooms and no electronics. Judging by what they could see, the visitors concluded it would not be a battle management system, as the Reagan administration claimed. For one thing, a battle management system would be hardened against a nuclear blast; this structure was not. Nor did it look like it was dedicated to space-tracking, as the Soviets claimed.³⁷ Although they could not be sure, the visitors surmised it was probably an early warning radar, pointing in the wrong direction. It was not facing outward, as required by the ABM treaty. What was most remarkable was that the congressmen got an eyewitness look at a top-secret site. The team took over one thousand photographs and made an hour of video, and no one tried to interfere. Velikhov’s openness undercut both the American propaganda and the Soviet lie. “It’s the beginning of military glasnost,” said Representative Tom Downey, D-N.Y., who led the delegation. In their report, the congressmen said the chances that it was a battle management radar were “extremely low.” Yet even with such an extraordinary firsthand look, Downey and the others did not change the Reagan administration’s view.

In Moscow, the top level of the Soviet leadership was privately at a loss about what to do with Krasnoyarsk. They knew the radar was a violation of the treaty, but they had not admitted it. They also knew that their public explanation of its purpose (space-tracking), as well as Reagan’s claims (battle management), were both untrue. On October 23, Gorbachev told Shultz that there would be a one-year moratorium on construction. Shultz replied that the United States would accept nothing short of dismantlement. A month after that, on November 21, an internal memo from the Big Five ministers suggested that the Soviet Union should continue to attempt to pressure the United States for some concessions in exchange for giving up the radar. The prospect of dismantling the whole thing was already being discussed internally. But the memo did not suggest an admission that the radar was in violation of the treaty.³⁸

When Shultz saw Gorbachev in Moscow in October, the Soviet leader seemed feisty, and there was more acrimony in their discussion than in the past. Shultz failed to secure agreement on a summit date to sign a treaty on intermediate-range weapons. Shultz wrote in his memoirs that Gorbachev appeared to have been through a tough period.³⁹ In the days before Shultz arrived, Gorbachev had suffered a major crisis, an outbreak of open criticism in the Politburo. On October 21, Yeltsin, in a rushed, short speech before a Central Committee plenum, complained that reform was moving too slowly, and that Gorbachev was starting to enjoy the adulation of a “cult of personality,” a reference to Stalin. Yeltsin resigned on the spot from the Politburo. His speech and resignation stunned the hall. Gorbachev found himself squeezed between Yeltsin’s demands for faster reform and Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, who resisted it.⁴⁰ Then, a few days after Shultz left Moscow, Gorbachev agreed to the summit dates. “The Soviets blinked,” Reagan wrote in his diary.

The yawning gulf of misunderstanding between Washington and Moscow had remained. Despite all that happened in 1987—the new military doctrine, the Rust affair and its aftermath, the abandonment of the Oka missile, the failure of the Soviet Star Wars, the achievement of eliminating the INF weapons–the Defense Intelligence Agency sent a report to Congress stating that “all evidence points to continuity in the Soviet Union’s military policy.”⁴¹

Two weeks before Gorbachev arrived in the United States, Gates, the deputy CIA director, wrote a memo to Reagan about the Soviet leader that failed to grasp the essence of Gorbachev’s attempts to reverse the arms race, and miscast his goals and motivations. There is a “continuing extraordinary scope and sweep of Soviet military modernization and weapons research and development,” Gates said, offering not even a brief acknowledgment of Gorbachev’s efforts to change course. “We still see no lessening of their weapons production. And, further, Soviet research on new, exotic weapons such as lasers and their own version of SDI continues apace.” In fact, the Soviet version of SDI was a shambles and would never be built. Gates concluded that despite “great changes underway” in the Soviet Union, “it is hard to detect fundamental changes, currently or in prospect, in the way the Soviets govern at home or in their principle objectives abroad.” Gates told the president, amid the summit excitement, that “a sober–even somber—reminder of the enduring features of the regime and the still long competition and struggle ahead will be needed.”⁴²

Still, the December summit in Washington was far from somber, and crackled with energy. Gorbachev spontaneously stopped his limousine on Connecticut Avenue and began shaking hands with thrilled passersby. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty with a brisk exchange of pens and handshakes in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. The treaty would eliminate 1,846 Soviet Pioneers and 846 American Pershing IIs, the first time in the nuclear age that an entire class of Soviet and U.S. weapons was wiped out, and under stringent verification provisions. It was not the end of nuclear danger, but it was the most concrete joint accomplishment of Reagan, the dreamer, and Gorbachev, the radical, nuclear abolitionists who found each other at the right moment. In remarks before they signed the treaty, Reagan said, “We have listened to the wisdom of an old Russian maxim, doveryai, no proveryai—trust, but verify.”

“You repeat that at every meeting,” Gorbachev said.

“I like it,” Reagan replied, smiling.

————— 13 ————— GERMS, GAS AND SECRETS

In the thick woods south of Moscow, at Obolensk, the microbiologist Igor Domaradsky redoubled his search for agents of death. He experimented with genetic engineering, combining the gene of diphtheria with the agents of plague or tularemia to make a hybrid pathogen. He turned his results over to the military, never to hear of them again. He labored to engineer a tularemia strain resistant to antibiotics. If used in a weapon, once spread, the disease would be difficult to treat. He created two strains that retained their virulence, but with only limited resistance to antibiotics. This was always the challenge—Domaradsky had never been able to achieve a high resistance and, simultaneously, sufficient virulence. If he got higher resistance, he got less virulence. One of the strains was tested on monkeys, but proved unsatisfactory. Domaradsky was adrift, and his conflict with the institute director, Nikolai Urakov, worsened as the months went by. Urakov blocked one of Domaradsky’s students from receiving a doctorate, questioned Domaradsky’s salary, gave Domaradsky piles of paperwork and insisted Domaradsky move out of his breezy flat in Protvino and into the dark woods at Obolensk. Domaradsky at one point took a daring step, writing a letter of complaint about Urakov to the Politburo. The letter resulted in an internal investigation and more conflict. Finally, Domaradsky asked to be transferred to another job in Moscow. He left Obolensk in the summer of 1987, having done much to launch the biological weapons program, but never to return.

Domaradsky thought his research on genetically modified agents fell short. He believed the search for a tularemia agent was a stopgap idea. It wasn’t contagious and the military wanted more virulent and dangerous pathogens that could spread. Overall, he said, “Very little was done to develop a new generation of these weapons, as had been the original goal” of the interagency council he had joined in Moscow in 1975. “I have to say that it has justified neither the hopes nor the colossal investment of material. Essentially nothing remarkable was ever produced…”¹

Domaradsky’s conclusion was premature. As he left, others took up the quest to create the agents of death.

In Domaradsky’s final year at Obolensk, a new scientist arrived. Sergei Popov was the bright young researcher who had worked on genetic engineering at Koltsovo, figuring out how to make the immune system turn on itself. At the time he arrived at Obolensk, the new building for working on dangerous pathogens was rising out of the forest. Popov recalled seeing Domaradsky roaming the halls, a bitter outcast. They did not talk. Popov believes he was brought in as Domaradsky’s successor in the intensifying search for genetically altered agents to be used in a biological weapon. When he departed Koltsovo in 1986, Popov turned over to other scientists his “construct,” the piece of DNA that would be inserted into a genome. Once at Obolensk, he began to look for ways to broaden his early discovery, using bacteria as the vehicle instead of viruses. “New, improved constructs had been provided to me in Obolensk,” he recalled. “My mission was to continue what had been started in Koltsovo.” The goal was to create agents with new and unusual characteristics, causing death in ways that would be unfathomable, and unstoppable.

For Popov, the Obolensk lifestyle seemed a welcome change from Koltsovo. With Moscow only an hour away, Popov drove north and loaded up his car with food and goods unknown in Koltsovo. But at work, Popov ran into resistance from Urakov, who was not pleased. “Urakov did not want me there,” Popov said. “Why would he? It was recognized that he had not kept up with the problem, and that microbiology was underdeveloped at the institute. Domaradsky also failed to meet the goal, and Biopreparat decided to assign a new person who would solve the problem. And imagine, a military general who was told something like this. He was against me from the very beginning! But Biopreparat insisted.”

In the years that followed, Popov sought to engineer some of the most hazardous biological agents ever imagined. Using his earlier experience with the smallpox virus, he sought to create a pathogen that would deceive the victim. With genetic engineering, he hoped to create a deadly one-two punch: a first wave that would cause illness, followed by recovery, then a second wave that would be unexpected and fatal. It was a profoundly evil idea, to manipulate the very smallest building blocks of life, creating a germ that could not be stopped by remedies known to mankind. Nor was the idea his handiwork alone. It was the deliberate policy of the Soviet state.

The method Popov took was to construct a pathogen within a pathogen; the second one would deliver the deadly assault. He told Urakov he wanted to try five different microbes as the vehicle, or the first stage of the illness. Each of the agents was under control of a different group at the institute, and Popov would have to work with them all. The five were: Burkhholderia mallei, which causes glanders, an infectious disease primarily affecting horses; Burkholderia pseudomallei, which causes melioidosis, an infectious disease prevalent in tropical climates; Yersinia pestis, which causes plague; Bacillus anthracis, which causes anthrax; and Legionella, which leads to legionellosis, or Legionnaires’ disease. Although Popov was at the center of the research, thousands of people participated in it. The best and brightest graduates from Soviet universities were recruited for Obolensk. Each floor of the new building was outfitted for work on different pathogens. Popov scrutinized each for signs that it would make a good carrier. Anthrax didn’t work; plague was not good enough. Eventually, Popov found that only Legionella would succeed. The amount needed was small; a lethal dose was only a few Legionella cells. But there were technical obstacles; it wasn’t easy to grow enough Legionella to experiment with and, if weaponized, it would be very difficult to mass-produce.

For the second stage, Popov returned to the lessons of Koltsovo and his discovery there. He inserted into Legionella the genetic material that would cause the body to attack its own nervous system. Nerves are covered with a myelin insulation that helps them transmit impulses. Popov’s plan was to cause the body’s immune system to destroy the myelin. This would cause paralysis and, eventually, death. If the new genetically engineered pathogen worked, the victim would first come down with Legionnaires’ disease, a form of pneumonia. “Some of the infected would die, and some recover, absolutely recover. However, in two weeks the recovered person would develop paralysis and would die,” Popov explained. The paralysis and death were caused by the destruction of the myelin insulation. In effect, the body would wreck its own nervous system. “When your body tries to heal itself,” Popov said, “it actually does the reverse.”

“It was deceptive,” Popov said. “The first wave disease would disappear or would never be an acute disease. It could be a little bit of coughing, or nothing, you don’t feel it, that’s it. And then two weeks later, the disease would be hardly treatable, actually there would be no way to effectively treat it.”

The idea took him years to perfect. But the result was so terrible that when Popov saw what happened to guinea pigs during testing, he was overwhelmed with doubt.²

On the bleak steppe of Kazakhstan, new workers streamed into the massive new factory at Stepnogorsk. By 1986, Ken Alibek, the chief of the anthrax assembly line, recalled that he supervised nine hundred people, and the Soviets had created “the most effective anthrax weapon ever produced.” He remembered working at a frenzied pace, spending all his days and nights in the laboratories. “I still shuddered occasionally when I looked at the bacteria multiplying in our fermenters and considered that they could end the lives of millions of people. But the secret culture of our labs had changed my outlook.”

The pressure-cooker environment took a heavy toll, and accidents happened every week. Once, he recalled, a technician was infected with anthrax. The man’s neck began to bulge, closing off his breathing. Antibiotics did not work. Within days, death seemed inevitable. At the last minute, they injected the man with a huge dose of anthrax antiserum and saved him. “The technician’s narrow escape drove home the potency of our new weapon,” Alibek recalled in his memoir. “Our powdered and liquid formulations of anthrax were three times as strong as the weapons that had been developed at Sverdlovsk.”

In 1987, the anthrax was tested on Vozrozhdeniye Island, according to Alibek. With the success of the tests, the old facility in Sverdlovsk, where the accident had occurred eight years earlier, was no longer needed. The massive new factory at Stepnogorsk was far superior. “Our factory could turn out two tons of anthrax a day in a process as reliable and efficient as producing tanks, trucks, cars or Coca-Cola,” Alibek said. “With the creation of the world’s first industrial-scale biological weapons factory, the Soviet Union became the world’s first—and only—biological superpower.”³

But not everything was quite as efficient as Alibek claimed. Popov recalled that Stepnogorsk suffered “huge problems.” Among them, “People in charge were drunkards, and they didn’t care very much about what they did. The only requirement was that anthrax had to kill; they tested the product on animals. From the microbiological standpoint, they did a dirty work. As a result, the facility was very unproductive, and the results were often miserable—sometimes good, but sometimes they harvested no anthrax. The anthrax cells dissolved in the process we call phage lysis.” This is a virus that attacks the bacteria. “So, quite often the anthrax microbe just didn’t survive in those huge fermenters. And Biopreparat people often complained about it. They asked if we could help Alibek with his problem… They could not solve it. They thought the reason was the poor sterility of the components.”

Nonetheless, Alibek recalled, the larger goal was achieved. “Stepnogorsk demonstrated our ability to wage biological warfare on a scale matched by no other nation in history. We had taken the science of biowarfare further in the previous four years than it had traveled in the four decades since World War II.”

Alibek was promoted and transferred to Moscow in September 1987. After just a few months, he was given his first major assignment at Biopreparat headquarters. He was to supervise creation of a new smallpox weapon. He spent an afternoon reading over a top-secret document that he described as a five-year plan for biological weapons development, signed by Gorbachev in February 1986. The document carried a line for what kind of weapon, what kind of systems and when each would be tested between 1986 and 1990, he said. Among other things in the plan, Alibek saw a line for funding a 630-liter viral reactor to produce smallpox at Koltsovo. “Our military leaders,” he recalled in his memoir, “had decided to concentrate on one of the toughest challenges of bioweaponeering —the transformation of viruses into weapons of war.” He added, “Gorbachev’s Five Year Plan—and his generous funding, which would amount to over $1 billion by the end of the decade—allowed us to catch up with and then surpass Western technology.”⁴

When Alibek visited Vector, the smallpox project was just getting off the ground. “Vector’s prize acquisition was the expensive new viral reactor authorized by Gorbachev’s decree,” he recalled. “Designed by one of our Moscow institutes… it was the first of its kind in the world. It stood about five feet high and was enclosed within thick stainless steel walls. An agitator at the bottom kept the mixture inside churning like clothes in a washing machine. Pipes led out in several directions, both for waste matter and weapons-ready material. A window on its convex roof allowed scientists to observe the viral culture at all times.”

Popov also knew of the five-year plan for biological weapons and was certain it had been approved at the highest levels. “We didn’t have any doubt the Central Committee was behind all of this. Not a single doubt,” he said. Once, in Moscow, Popov also read a top-secret document in a folder that described the long-term program. “I remember that I misplaced the document and took it somewhere as I was walking through Biopreparat offices, and they chased me because it was a top-secret document. I had it in my folder, it wasn’t even a briefcase, they gave it to me in a folder, there was a special table I had to sit at. I don’t know how it happened, maybe I went to the restroom or something.” The guards grabbed him and returned him to the table.

In all of Gorbachev’s struggle for disarmament—his determination to push back the military and its powerful designers, his willingness to abandon the doctrine of two blocs inexorably at odds, his rhetoric about a world free of nuclear destruction and danger—there was one unexplained gap. Hidden in secret institutes, referred to obliquely even in the Kremlin as “works on special problems,” the biological weapons drive was going at full speed at the same moment that Gorbachev reached the apex of his cooperation with Reagan. Gorbachev abhorred nuclear weapons, and he declared his intention to eliminate chemical weapons. Did he also fear the pathogens?

One key question is how much Gorbachev knew about the program. The record suggests that some members of the Politburo knew in great detail what kinds of horrors were being cooked up at Obolensk and Vector. Lev Zaikov, the Politburo member in charge of the military-industrial complex, who was Katayev’s boss, certainly knew. Gorbachev must have become aware of the program when he became general secretary in 1985, and perhaps before. There is a document in Katayev’s files that lists a Central Committee resolution on biological weapons on November 18, 1986. This was in effect an order from the Politburo that Gorbachev certainly would have known about. Three sources—Alibek, who built the anthrax assembly line; Popov, who worked at both Koltsovo and Obolensk; and Vladimir Pasechnik, a well-informed institute chief in the system who later defected to Britain—claim that Gorbachev and the Politburo were kept abreast of the program in the late 1980s. Alibek claims to have seen the specific five-year plan signed by Gorbachev. Chernyaev, perhaps the closest aide to Gorbachev, also confirmed in an interview that Gorbachev knew the Soviet Union was in violation of the biological weapons treaty. Chernyaev insisted that Gorbachev wanted to end the biological weapons program, but the military misled him, promising to shut it down, although they did not.⁵ “Not even Gorbachev was fully informed about the activities of our military-industrial complex,” Chernyaev wrote in his memoirs.

It is also not known what intelligence Gorbachev received from the KGB. The United States had abandoned offensive biological weapons in 1969, but scientists in the Soviet program have insisted they were told by the KGB for many years that the American offensive germ warfare program did exist; it was just well hidden.

If Gorbachev knew of the Soviet program, and if he was so determined to slow the arms race in missiles, why did he not take stronger action to slow the arms race in test tubes? He had done so much else with glasnost to unearth the misdeeds of the Soviet past—admitting the mass repressions of Stalin, for example—why could he not expose or stop the dangerous germ warfare efforts that began long before he came to power? This is difficult to answer.

One explanation may be that the biological weapons program was so entrenched that Gorbachev might have decided it was impossible to tackle, or at the very least, as a tactical matter, that he should wait until later to deal with it. In other cases it took Gorbachev years to bring about a change in course and overturn past errors and deep secrecy involving military affairs.

Also, Gorbachev might have felt himself unable to challenge the authority of those who ran the biological weapons empire. The Chernobyl experience was relevant—it showed him how hard it was to confront the nuclear priesthood, and surely the biological weapons scientists and generals could be just as difficult. In Gorbachev’s last two years, as his power waned, he may simply have lacked the willpower or stature to take on a new power struggle. “He didn’t know how to exercise his control,” Chernyaev said. Gorbachev may have been reluctant to admit the full scope of Soviet violations out of fear of what it could do to his public image and that of his “new thinking” all over the world. He may have opted to avoid the whole subject because he had no idea how to handle the impact of such a damaging disclosure.

One reason that has been suggested by Soviet officials for Gorbachev’s inaction is that biological weapons may have been seen as some kind of military asset, to be held in reserve, perhaps to compensate for other shortcomings in defense. But it is doubtful Gorbachev preserved the pathogens out of any sense of their strategic or military value. Gorbachev was clearly determined to ease the threat of war, not build new weapons of such comparable power and danger.

Still, it remains a puzzle why, given Gorbachev’s dedication to glasnost and his enormous effort at disarmament in the nuclear field, he did not do more to stop the dangerous biological weapons program. In all the years of Gorbachev’s drive for change and openness, the Soviet Union continued to cover up Biopreparat and all it encompassed.

One of the most elaborate deceptions involved the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak, the worst disaster of the Soviet biological weapons program. Through the decade of the 1980s, the Soviets fabricated details about the outbreak to suggest it had explicable, natural causes, such as tainted meat. Soviet officials spread these falsehoods around the world. They lied in international meetings, to other scientists and to themselves. They misled the distinguished Harvard molecular biologist Matthew Meselson, who had been called in by the CIA to puzzle over the early reports about the Sverdlovsk accident in 1980.

Meselson had been trying through the 1980s to answer the questions he first raised when studying the intelligence reports. An effort in 1983 to organize an expedition to Sverdlovsk fell apart after the Korean airliner shoot down that year. In 1986, he was invited to come to Moscow by officials at the Ministry of Health. On that visit, Meselson met with several top Soviet health officials, including Pyotr Burgasov, the deputy health minister who, at the time of the outbreak, spread the story that contaminated meat was the cause of the anthrax epidemic. Burgasov probably knew better; he had been involved with the Soviet biological weapons program since the 1950s and had served in the Sverdlovsk facility from 1958 to 1963. In the meetings in Moscow with Meselson, August 27–30, 1986, Burgasov repeated that contaminated meat was the cause and added that contaminated bone meal had been fed to cattle and caused the epidemic. Meselson also met with Vladimir Nikiforov, chief of the infectious diseases department at the Central Postgraduate Institute, located within the Botkin Hospital in Moscow, and Olga Yampolskaya, a specialist in infectious diseases there, who had been present during the Sverdlovsk epidemic. Nikiforov was the courtly scientist who had courageously told the Sverdlovsk pathologists to hide and preserve their autopsy results in 1979. But now he was advancing the official line. Nikiforov showed Meselson fourteen photographic slides from the autopsies that, he insisted, supported the argument that anthrax had been ingested by eating the contaminated meat. The lungs of the victims, he claimed, were “undamaged and free of hemorrhage.” Before leaving Moscow on August 29, Meselson told the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy what he found in his discussions. The Soviet officials had insisted victims had died from intestinal anthrax; Meselson said he had no way of knowing if the story was true, but it “did seem to hang together.”⁶

In September 1986, the Soviet officials offered the same false explanation in Geneva at the Second Review Conference for the Biological Weapons Convention. Soviet officials prepared a briefing for Gorbachev warning him that suspicions were deepening in the West that the Soviet Union had something to hide. Nonetheless, the cover-up continued at the conference and afterward.⁷ On October 10–12, 1986, Joshua Lederberg, president of Rockefeller University, who was chairman of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences, visited Moscow. Lederberg was a pioneering microbiologist, recipient of the 1953 Nobel Prize for the discovery that bacteria engage in a form of sexual reproduction and thus possess a genetic mechanism similar to those of higher organisms. Lederberg was presented with the story that anthrax bacteria had been spread by contaminated meat from cattle fed a bonemeal supplement that was improperly sterilized, and produced from naturally infected carcasses. Like Meselson, Lederberg was deceived. “My personal conclusion,” Lederberg later wrote, “is that the present Soviet account of the epidemic is plausible on its face and internally consistent.” The Soviet explanations are “very likely to be true.”⁸

In Moscow, on November 18, 1986, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers approved a measure, proposed by the Defense Ministry, to move the secret formulas for biological weapons and the manufacturing plants away from the military. Specifically, the measure called for action by 1992—in the course of the next six years—to eliminate “the stockpile of biological recipes and industrial capacities for production of biological weapons located at the sites of this ministry.” This appears to mean that over the next six years, the Defense Ministry would transfer the formulas and production facilities to the better-concealed Biopreparat complex. Such a move was already undertaken with the anthrax facility at Sverdlovsk, which was moved to Stepnogorsk. The reason for the move, according to the documents, was to meet the goal “of insuring openness of work in conditions of international verification.” This was code for the fact that Soviet leaders wanted to keep the program alive—and well hidden—at a time when international inspectors might be nosing around. It seems extremely likely that such a high-level action by the Central Committee, which was led by members of the Politburo, would have come to Gorbachev’s attention.⁹

In 1987, a fresh worry arose in Moscow among the top echelons of Biopreparat and the military. For all their efforts at secrecy, a speech on chemical weapons treaty verification by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze threatened to crack open the door to their empire. During Gorbachev’s glasnost, Soviet diplomats in several negotiations had expressed a willingness to allow more intrusive verification of arms control treaties, to show they were not cheating. This new openness was the spirit of a speech August 6, 1987, by Shevardnadze at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. In the spring, Gorbachev had announced the Soviet Union would stop manufacturing chemical weapons. Now, Shevardnadze went further and promised support for “the principle of mandatory challenge inspections without right of refusal.” This was a “vivid manifestation” of Soviet commitment to “genuine and effective verification,” he said. For years, the United States had accused the Soviet Union of violating treaties and demanded effective verification. It was the essence of Reagan’s favorite Russian slogan, “trust, but verify.” While Shevardnadze’s overture was made for chemical weapons, it dawned on Soviet biological warfare experts back in Moscow that it could easily be applied to them, too. The inspections could take unpredictable turns. If the West wanted to peek into a suspect facility—say, Obolensk or Koltsovo or Stepnogorsk—how could they refuse? Nikita Smidovich, an aide to Shevardnadze who wrote the Geneva speech, said the biological weapons chiefs realized the chemical inspections threatened their closed world. They concluded, he said, if the inspectors “can go everywhere, they will probably get to us as well, so we need to get prepared.”¹⁰

On October 2, 1987, after Shevardnadze’s speech, the Central Committee and Council of Ministers issued an order to speed up preparations for possible international inspections. The goal was not to be open, but the opposite: continue the secret germ warfare program by moving the formulas and factories to a more secret place. And do it quicker.¹¹

The Sverdlovsk deception reached a new level of audacity April 10–17, 1988, when Burgasov, Nikiforov and a third Soviet medical official, Vladimir Sergiyev, came to the United States with a presentation of their theory about contaminated meat and bonemeal. Meselson said he arranged the visit in hopes that the Soviet officials would be exposed to expert questioning from American scientists. The Soviets delivered their bogus story to distinguished audiences three times: at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It was clear to us that infectious meat was the cause,” claimed Burgasov. “The whole idea of some sort of aerosol is impossible,” he said. He dismissed the possibility of a leak of anthrax bacteria from Compound 19. “I couldn’t imagine that in the midst of the highly populated area that there could be any work on highly dangerous pathogens,” he said, although he knew that was probably what happened. Nikiforov, who also knew the truth, narrated autopsy slides that portrayed great black intestinal sores, which pointed toward contaminated meat, not inhalation. In all, the Soviet officials had addressed more than two hundred private and government medical scientists and arms control experts, delivering untruths to all of them. Afterward, summarizing the Soviet presentations, Meselson wrote that he found the Soviet explanation “plausible and consistent with what is known from previous outbreaks of human and animal anthrax in the USSR and elsewhere, including the US.” Meselson still hoped to send a group of American scientists to Sverdlovsk.¹²

Alibek, who had built the anthrax assembly line at Stepnogorsk and was now working in Moscow at the Biopreparat headquarters, sensed the tension over possible international inspections. “Once knowledgeable foreign scientists set foot in one of our installations, our secret would be out,” he wrote in his memoir. When Alibek became first deputy director of Biopreparat in 1988, he was put in charge of hiding the evidence. The assignment soon crowded out his other duties. A special task force for the deception plans was set up at the Moscow Institute of Applied Biochemistry. Even the name of the institute was itself a deception. “The institute had no connection with biochemistry: its function was to design and manufacture equipment for our labs,” he said. The task force was given the equivalent of $400,000 to create a cover story, or “legend,” for Biopreparat operations and to demonstrate the “civilian” character of the work, that they were making medicines to defend against disease, or pesticides.

“Nevertheless, some of us worried that foreign inspectors would see through our schemes.” By 1988, Biopreparat had produced an instruction manual for employees on how to answer questions for inspectors, Alibek said. “Every conceivable question—What is this room for? Why is this equipment here?—was followed by a prepared reply, which workers were expected to memorize.”

“I was most concerned about our smallpox project,” he said. “If foreign inspectors brought the right equipment to the Vector compound in Siberia, they would immediately pick up evidence of smallpox.” As part of the global smallpox eradication effort, in which the Soviet Union had played a leading role, there were supposed to be only two repositories for the remaining smallpox strains, one in the United States and the other in Moscow at the Ivanovsky Institute of the Ministry of Health. This is what the Soviet Union had pledged to the World Health Organization. What the world didn’t know until years later was that the Soviet Union had broken its word.¹³

In 1988, worried about foreign inspections, an order was given by the Soviet military to get rid of a large supply of anthrax spores that had been removed from Sverdlovsk after the accident. This Bacillus anthracis had been in storage at the town of Zima, near Irkutsk, in Siberia. When the order came to destroy it, more than one hundred tons of anthrax solution, in 250-liter stainless steel containers, was taken by train, and then by ship, to Vozrozhdeniye Island, where it was mixed with hydrogen peroxide and formic acid, and then buried in eleven graves dug in the earth. The graves, four to six feet deep, were unlined, so nothing would prevent the anthrax from seeping deeper into the ground. As they lay there under the earth, the anthrax spores were not all destroyed. Some remained active for many years to come.¹⁴

One thousand miles east of Moscow, in a flatlands beyond the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, stood a nondescript rectangle-shaped compound, more than a mile long and nearly a mile wide, situated almost precisely on a north-south axis, with orderly rows of low-lying wood-plank warehouses and corrugated metal rooftops, surrounded by trees and traversed by rail lines. Inside the warehouses, berths cradled row upon row of projectiles, from 85mm artillery rounds to larger warheads for Scud missiles. They were set on racks like so many wine bottles in a dark cellar. In this one remote compound, near the town of Shchuchye in western Siberia, 1.9 million projectiles were filled with 5,447 metric tons of the nerve agents sarin, soman and a Soviet analogue of the nerve gas VX. All told, it was 13.6 percent of the Soviet chemical weapons arsenal.¹⁵ The projectiles were the legacy of a shadowy era of the arms race in which the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union stockpiled massive amounts of chemical weapons, while negotiations to restrict them dragged on for two decades in Geneva without result. From the beginning of his disarmament drive, Gorbachev wanted to be rid of these chemical weapons.

The killing power of chemical weapons is monstrous. Less than ten milligrams of the American nerve agent VX—a small drop of fluid on the skin—could kill a grown man in fifteen minutes or less. A liter of such an agent contains enough lethal doses, theoretically, to kill one million people.¹⁶ Such nerve agents serve no peaceful purpose—they are solely agents of death. The author Jonathan Tucker described them as colorless, odorless liquids that enter the body through the lungs or skin and attack the nervous system. The victim falls to the ground, convulses and loses consciousness, after which inhibition of the breathing center of the brain and paralysis of the respiratory muscles cause death by asphyxiation within minutes.

The Soviets had amassed at least forty thousand tons of chemical agents, and the United States thirty-one thousand tons. While silent about biological weapons, Gorbachev openly sought to get rid of the chemical arms. He announced in Prague on April 13, 1987, that the Soviet Union would stop manufacturing them. He mothballed the Soviet factories for making the chemicals and filling the munitions.

After his speech on surprise inspections in Geneva, Shevardnadze invited foreign observers to a top-secret Soviet chemical weapons testing facility at Shikhany, on the Volga River 560 miles southeast of Moscow. Shevardnadze said he wanted to “build an atmosphere of trust.” On October 3–4, 1987, a delegation of 110 experts from 45 countries and 55 journalists were flown there in four airplanes. At the facility, on a freshly poured concrete slab, the delegation saw nineteen projectiles and containers, including hand grenades, rocket and artillery rounds, and a nine-foot-tall chemical warhead for the Scud.¹⁷ The visit seemed to be another sign of the Gorbachev glasnost. Yuri Nazarkin, the Soviet representative at arms control talks, declared, “We have nothing to hide.”¹⁸ This was not quite true. Missing from the lineup on the concrete pad was a new type of chemical weapon Soviet scientists were desperately trying to develop to keep pace with the United States.

Until the 1980s, both the United States and Soviet Union built chemical weapons that contained a single agent that would be dispersed when detonated. This was called a unitary chemical weapon. The agents tended to degrade over time. The United States stopped manufacturing them in 1969, when potential hazards were discovered in the U.S. arsenal. In 1985, Congress approved destroying the older weapons while authorizing the creation of a new type of chemical weapon, known as a binary. It would have two parts, each a stable ingredient that, when combined at the last minute in the shell or bomb, would turn into a toxic cocktail. This was a tricky engineering feat, but a binary weapon might have a longer shelf life. Reagan approved production of the new binary weapon right after the December 1987 summit with Gorbachev. “Maybe that will get the Soviets to join us in eliminating chemical warfare,” he wrote in his diary.¹⁹ The Soviets were already rushing—in secret—to create the same thing. They experimented with binary weapons in the 1970s, but failed to come up with a successful model. Then, in the 1980s, they launched another quest. One part of this new drive was to create a binary weapon out of ordinary chemicals that might be used in fertilizer or pesticides. These were called the novichok generation of agents, or the “new guy.”

Vil Mirzayanov was a witness to the potential power of these deadly nerve agents. He had worked for many years at the headquarters of chemical weapons research in Moscow. In May 1987, one of his friends, an experienced military chemist, Andrei Zheleznyakov, suffered an accident. He was a test engineer whose job was to check finished products. He was working on a binary weapon, one of the novichok generation. According to Mirzayanov, there was a chemical reactor under a fume hood, and then a pipe carrying the substance to a spectrometer, which was too big to put under the hood. It was in the room, with ventilation on the ceiling, but not protected by the hood.

The pipe somehow broke, and the poison leaked into the air. Zheleznyakov quickly sealed the leak, but it was too late. He felt the impact immediately—myosis, the constriction of the pupil of the eye. “I saw rings before my eyes—red, orange,” he later recalled. “Bells were ringing inside my head. I choked. Add to this the feeling of fear—as if something was about to happen at any moment. I sat down and told the guys: I think it has ‘got’ me. They dragged me out of the room—I was still able to move—and took me to the chief. He looked at me and said, ‘Have a cup of tea, everything will be fine.’ I drank the tea and immediately threw up.

“They took me to the medical unit,” he added, “where I was injected with an antidote. I felt a little better. The chief told me: ‘Go home and lie down. Come back tomorrow.’ They assigned me an escort, and we walked past a few bus stops. We were already passing the church near Ilyich Square, when suddenly I saw the church lighting up and falling apart. I remember nothing else.”

His escort dragged Zheleznyakov back to the medical unit. They called an ambulance and took him to the hospital, accompanied by KGB agents, who told doctors he had suffered food poisoning from eating contaminated sausage. The KGB agents made the doctors sign a pledge never to discuss the case. After eighteen days in intensive care, doctors managed to save his life.

At the end of the hospitalization, he was given a pension and told to remain silent. Zheleznyakov suffered aftereffects for a long time, including chronic weakness in his arms, toxic hepatitis, epilepsy, severe depression and an inability to concentrate. Zheleznyakov had been a jovial man and was known as a talented woodcarver, but the accident left him unable to work or be creative. He died five years after the accident.²⁰

Novichok had shown its teeth.

————— 14 ————— THE LOST YEAR

Reagan’s last hurrah with Gorbachev came on a warm spring day, May 31, 1988. Having finished the third plenary meeting of their fourth summit, they stepped out into the lilac-scented breezes for a walking tour around the Kremlin and Red Square, trailed by aides and journalists. They stopped near a thirty-nine-ton cannon dating from 1586 that stands in a plaza in the center of the Kremlin. Asked if he still considered the Soviet Union to be an evil empire, Reagan replied, “No.” Surprised, reporters asked why. Reagan paused, and tilted his head to one side. “You are talking about another time, another era,” he said.

The moment marked the end of Reagan’s cold war. On his first visit to the Soviet Union after so many decades of antipathy, Reagan and Gorbachev did not sign any nuclear arms treaties, a missed opportunity for deep cuts in strategic weapons, and they would not eliminate any more weapons together in the eight months remaining in Reagan’s term.¹ But they began to put the superpower rivalry to rest, in a vivid and symbolic way, walking the cobblestones of Red Square for twenty minutes under the afternoon sun. Gorbachev, in a light business suit, showed Reagan, in a darker one, the onion-shaped domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, the GUM department store, the State Historical Museum and Lenin’s tomb. At one point, Reagan and Gorbachev put their arms around each other’s waists, like two tourists posing for photos. “What we have decided to do,” Reagan said, “is talk to each other and not about each other, and that’s working just fine.”

Later in the day, Reagan delivered one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency to students at Moscow State University. He spoke in the lecture hall standing under a large white bust of Lenin with a mural spreading out behind him depicting the Bolshevik Revolution. Reagan articulated his themes of democracy, capitalism and freedom, ideas that had so animated his anti-communism. Reagan declared the world stood at the start of a new revolution “quietly sweeping the globe without bloodshed or conflict.” This was the “information revolution,” Reagan said, describing the power of one computer chip, and “its effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world, shatter old assumptions, and reshape our lives.” Reagan celebrated freedom, entrepreneurship and dissent. And, quoting Boris Pasternak, he championed “the irresistible power of unarmed truth” to the students. Reagan endorsed Gorbachev’s drive for change, and voiced anew his goal of abolishing nuclear weapons. Those days in May marked the zenith of his extraordinary partnership with Gorbachev.

Reagan’s enthusiasm was not shared by his vice president, George Bush, who was watching the spectacle at his home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush was campaigning that year to be Reagan’s successor, running against a liberal Democrat, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Bush was profoundly cautious by character. His guiding principles were good stewardship—public service in an old-fashioned sense—and avoiding mistakes. He had doubts about whether the changes in Moscow were real, and he was uneasy at the scenes from Red Square. A few weeks later, speaking in San Francisco to the World Affairs Council of Northern California, he expressed this uncertainty. “We must be bold enough to seize the opportunity of change,” he said, “but at the same time be prepared for what one pundit called ‘The Protracted Conflict.’” Bush clearly had not made up his mind. He was more certain about the past than the future. “The Cold War is not over,” he declared.²

The next few months underscored how wrong he was. Gorbachev rushed toward fundamental change. The Soviet leader announced troops would begin a pullout from Afghanistan by May 15, 1988, and they did. In private conversations in the Kremlin, the Cold War was being tossed into the waste bin of history. For example, on June 20—nine days before Bush said the Cold War was not over—Gromyko, once the hardest of the hard-liners, gave strong voice to the new thinking, declaring at a Politburo meeting that decades of competition in the arms race had been senseless. “And so we made more and more nuclear weapons,” he said, according to a transcript of the meeting. “That was our mistaken position, absolutely mistaken. And the political leadership bears the entire blame for it. Tens of billions were spent on production of these toys; we did not have enough brains” to stop.³

By autumn, Gorbachev was preparing his most daring proposal yet, a major speech to the United Nations announcing a massive Soviet troop pullback from Europe. Meeting with a small group of his foreign policy advisers October 31, he recalled Winston Churchill’s famous speech, “Sinews of Peace,” at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946. In the address, Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” with Soviet control tightening over “all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.” Gorbachev declared his own ambition was to mark the end of the era. “In general, this speech should be an anti-Fulton—Fulton in reverse,” Gorbachev said.

On November 3, after a Politburo meeting, Gorbachev brought up his plan with a wider group of senior officials. Chernyaev recalled that Gorbachev was “clearly nervous.” He carefully maneuvered so as not to ignite opposition from the military. He did not disclose the full details of the planned one-sided pullback. He noted that the Soviet military was far larger than would be required under the new doctrine Akhromeyev had drafted. This would be difficult to admit publicly. “If we publish how matters stand, that we spend over twice as much as the United States on military needs, if we let the scope of our expenses be known, all our new thinking and our new foreign policy will go to hell,” Gorbachev said. “Not one country in the world spends as much per capita on weapons as we do, except perhaps the developing nations that we are swamping with weapons and getting nothing in return.”⁴

Gorbachev’s address to the United Nations on December 7 was a milestone in his retreat from the Cold War. He condemned the “one-sided reliance on military power” that had been a pillar of Soviet foreign policy, and he announced unilateral reductions in the Soviet armed forces of five hundred thousand men, including six tank divisions in Eastern Europe. It was a profound break from the past to make such a sizable one-sided pullback. Gorbachev said the Soviet Union would no longer hold the nations of Eastern Europe in its grip, another breathtaking change in approach. “Freedom of choice is a universal principle,” he said. “It knows no exceptions.”

After the speech, Gorbachev took a ferry to meet Reagan for a farewell lunch on Governor’s Island, joined by Bush, who had just been elected president. In the twilight hours of his presidency, Reagan was ebullient, and wrote in his diary that the meeting was a “tremendous success” and Gorbachev had “a better attitude than at any of our previous meetings. He sounded as if he saw us as partners making a better world.”⁵ Yet on substance, Reagan did not discuss Gorbachev’s remarkable speech in any detail, and they parted without having realized their most cherished goal, eliminating the long-range nuclear weapons, the brass ring they had nearly grasped at Reykjavik. The hope of cutting the arsenals by 50 percent was bogged down in negotiations.⁶

At the Governor’s Island meeting, Bush, the president-elect, kept quiet, not wanting to upstage Reagan.⁷ Gorbachev noticed the hesitation. “We should take into account that Bush is a very cautious politician,” Gorbachev told the Politburo on his return to Moscow. Georgi Arbatov, director of the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, the leading Soviet specialist on America, was more blunt. Gorbachev read out to the Politburo group Arbatov’s assessment that the United States has “suddenly sent a trial balloon: we are not ready; let’s wait, we will see. In general, they will drag their feet, they want to break the wave that has been created by our initiatives.”⁸

Bush did not share Reagan’s hopes of eliminating nuclear weapons. He decided against an early summit with Gorbachev. Two days after Bush was inaugurated, Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, said, “I think the Cold War is not over.”⁹ Within a month of taking office in January 1989, Bush ordered a series of internal foreign policy studies, including one on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, which produced little and wasted months. “In the end, what we received was mush,” said Bush’s close friend and his new secretary of state, James A. Baker III.¹⁰ In general, Bush saw Gorbachev’s dynamic of change, but interpreted it as a competitive threat to the United States rather than an opportunity. “I’ll be darned if Mr. Gorbachev should dominate world public opinion forever,” Bush wrote to a friend March 13.¹¹

Baker recalled many years later that Bush paused in early 1989 primarily to put his own stamp on foreign policy, and because slowing down the pace with the Soviets would also help calm the right wing of the Republican Party. Baker said the pause was driven by these needs, and was not a response to Gorbachev or the situation in Moscow. The administration soon came up with the idea of “testing” Gorbachev, setting up hoops and demanding that Gorbachev jump through them.¹²

On April 29, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney predicted in a televised appearance that Gorbachev would “ultimately fail.”¹³ Bush also found reinforcement from Scowcroft, who was extremely cautious because he feared that Gorbachev was trying to rope the United States into another period of détente in order to gain some advantage, as many felt had happened in the 1970s. “Once burned, twice shy,” Scowcroft said later.¹⁴

When Baker visited Moscow on May 10, Shevardnadze told him Gorbachev was eager to eliminate the whole class of tactical, or short-range, nuclear weapons in Europe. “Do not dodge” the issue, Shevardnadze warned Baker. A day later, Gorbachev announced he was unilaterally withdrawing five hundred warheads from Eastern Europe, and promised even more if the United States would take similar steps. But Baker brushed off the proposal as a political ploy.¹⁵ On May 16, Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary, told a press briefing that Gorbachev was throwing out arms control proposals like a “drugstore cowboy,” a slang term meaning someone who makes promises they can’t keep.¹⁶

On July 20, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Jack F. Matlock Jr., met with Alexander Yakovlev, one of the leading architects of Gorbachev’s new thinking. “There is only one danger—nuclear weapons,” Yakovlev insisted, imploring the United States to accelerate negotiations. Matlock replied that Reagan’s dream of nuclear abolition was no longer on the table. “Reagan believed in the possibility of liquidation of nuclear weapons,” Matlock said. “Bush thinks that we need to reduce them to a minimum, but not liquidate them. He believes that without nuclear weapons the risk of war being unleashed would increase.”¹⁷

While Bush delayed, Gorbachev’s ambitions for disarmament were as keen as ever. Katayev’s files contain a Politburo work plan on arms control and defense issues for 1989—with dozens of instructions and tight deadlines, starting in early January and running well into the next year—which underscored how the Kremlin wanted to move briskly on many fronts. The list, ten pages long, included the new initiative to reduce tactical or short-range nuclear weapons; the elimination of chemical weapons; publication of once-secret data on Soviet military spending; creating a global space organization; reducing foreign aid to other states in the Soviet bloc; boosting science and technology for the civilian sector; and downsizing the military-industrial complex. The list included directives to various ministries and agencies aimed at jump-starting defense conversion, or switching military production to civilian goods, with an aim of creating better living standards for a society staggering under shortages and economic hardship.¹⁸

Katayev drafted a five-page instruction, prepared for the Central Committee’s approval in January 1989, laying out the rationale for a dramatic cut in Soviet weapons. The document is yet another powerful piece of evidence that Gorbachev at this point was pushing to slash military spending. The goal of defense cuts, the instruction said, was to free up resources “for accelerated development of the national economy” and provide for the most urgent everyday needs of the Soviet people.¹⁹Another document in Katayev’s files shows that Soviet military spending peaked in 1989 and began a sharp decline thereafter.²⁰ As promised, the Soviet army retreated from Afghanistan by February 15, when the last Soviet commander of the 40th Army, Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, walked back across the Amu Darya River bridge at Termez.

By late 1988 and early 1989, just as Bush was taking office, Gorbachev may have reached the zenith of his powers as a leader. It would have been an ideal time to seize the initiative and lock in a 50 percent cut in strategic weapons, as well as reductions in other systems, such as tactical nuclear weapons. A strategic arms treaty also might have been easier because Bush was not dazzled by Reagan’s grand dream of a defense against ballistic missiles that had proven so contentious in earlier years. But Bush hesitated.

In Moscow, Gorbachev’s room for maneuver soon began to shrink. The forces of freedom and openness he had unleashed began to overtake him, creating obstacles and open resistance: new forces of democracy at home; a sweeping tide of change in Eastern Europe; the reawakening of old nationalist dreams in the Soviet republics. On March 26, the first relatively free election since the Bolshevik Revolution was held for a new Soviet legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies. In the balloting, the Communist Party leadership in Leningrad was turned out, pro-independence parties won in the Baltics and Yeltsin, the radical reformer, triumphed in Moscow. The Communist Party establishment took a shellacking. When the new legislature met for the first time from May 25 through June 9, Gorbachev ordered the proceedings broadcast on television. People stayed home from work to watch the broadcasts; the country was transfixed by debates that broke new ground in freedom of speech. One result was that Gorbachev, the party, the KGB and the military were lambasted with open and often trenchant criticism. The virus of freedom seemed to be spreading fast.

In China, Gorbachev’s visit in May brought the student protests for democracy in Tiananmen Square to a new level of intensity. They were suppressed by the massacre a few weeks later. Across Eastern Europe, ferment spread, especially in Hungary and Poland, where the Solidarity movement came out from the underground and won in the elections to parliament. On July 7, Gorbachev affirmed to leaders of the Warsaw Pact that the Soviet Union would not intervene to stop the juggernaut, and they were free to go their own way. During the same week, Akhromeyev, in his new capacity as an adviser to Gorbachev, had a remarkable tour of U.S. military installations during which he and Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, openly debated how to end the arms race.²¹ Bush’s trip to Poland and Hungary in July exposed him to the torrent of change there.²² In his diary, Chernyaev captured the madness and the drama of these months. “All around Gorbachev has unleashed irreversible processes of ‘disintegration’ which had earlier been restrained or covered up by the arms race, the fear of war…” he wrote. Socialism in Eastern Europe is “disappearing,” the planned economy “is living its last days,” ideology “doesn’t exist any more,” the Soviet empire “is falling apart,” the Communist Party “is in disarray” and “chaos is breaking out,” he wrote.²³

In September, Shevardnadze flew with Baker on the secretary’s air force plane to a meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In a long talk on the flight, Shevardnadze drove home to Baker the urgency of Gorbachev’s problems at home, especially the forces of disintegration pulling the republics away from the center. Baker had not realized in the spring that Gorbachev’s situation was so precarious and the window of opportunity was closing. “Our CIA was way, way behind the curve,” he said. Baker recalled the first hints came only that summer, and by September, on the flight to Jackson Hole, it “really became obvious.”²⁴ One concrete outcome of the Baker and Shevardnadze meeting in Wyoming was an agreement to exchange data about chemical weapons stockpiles. However, the Soviet Union did not disclose the secret research on the new binary weapon, the novichok generation.

Chernyaev called 1989 “The Lost Year.” It was also the beginning of the crack-up. A gargantuan superpower was starting to come unglued, with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons strewn across the landscape.

As authority weakened in the Soviet Union, secrets leaked out of the military’s most carefully guarded citadels. Velikhov, the progressive physicist and Gorbachev’s adviser, personally exposed some of them in another amazing glasnost tour. In July, he brought a group of American scientists, led by Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, to the Black Sea to conduct a verification experiment involving a Soviet cruise missile, armed with a nuclear warhead, on a navy ship.²⁵ It was rare for Americans to get so close to a Soviet weapon. The point was to determine if radiation detectors could spot the presence or absence of a nuclear warhead. While some theoretical studies had been done, the experiment offered a chance to check the radiation detectors against a real weapon. The question was important because of the larger debate at the time about whether there could be effective verification of sea-launched cruise missiles. The United States claimed it was impossible to verify nuclear warheads on naval cruise missiles, and insisted they should be left out of the negotiations on strategic arms. The Soviets wanted to count them—and limit them—because of the American advantage. Velikhov wanted to pierce the veil of secrecy, in hopes it would reduce the danger of the arms race, just as he had done in 1986, bringing Cochran to the secret Semipalatinsk nuclear-testing site, and again in 1987 to the disputed Krasnoyarsk radar. This time, the KGB tried to stop Velikhov, but Gorbachev overruled them.²⁶

On a sunny July 5, 1989, the Americans, joined by a group of Soviet scientists, lugged their radiation detectors aboard the Slava, a 610-foot Soviet cruiser at Yalta on the Black Sea. At that moment, the ship held a single SS-N-12 nuclear-armed cruise missile, NATO code-named “Sandbox,” stored in the forward, exterior starboard launcher. The Soviets were so nervous about the visit that they had rehearsed it for weeks. They feared the Americans might learn too much about the design of the warhead. The sea was a sparkling blue, and Cochran wore shorts, a baseball cap and a T-shirt as he and his team wrestled the test equipment onto the missile tube to measure the radiation. The evening before the experiment, the Soviets had insisted that, by the plan, the Americans could take only a very short reading, but Cochran got a longer one and plenty of data. Soviet scientists carried out their own tests, too. In one extraordinary glasnost moment, the hatch was opened and the Americans took photographs of the dark, menacing tip of the cruise missile, lurking just inside the cover.²⁷

No sooner were the scientists back in Moscow on July 7 than Velikhov bundled them off to the airport to see another secret installation. They flew 850 miles east to Chelyabinsk-40, near the town of Kyshtym, a nuclear complex built in Stalin’s day, where reactors had churned out plutonium for nuclear weapons. The complex was top secret, but when Velikhov appeared at the gates, they swung open. “It was the first time foreigners were in a town whose whole existence was to destroy America,” Velikhov recalled.²⁸ Von Hippel, the Princeton professor who had known Velikhov since the early 1980s, said that Velikhov wanted the Americans to see a plutonium reactor being shut down, fulfilling a promise Gorbachev had made earlier. After the tour, “We had a fairy-tale-like dinner on an island in the middle of this lake, with a long table with white tablecloth and silver laid out under the birch trees,” Von Hippel remembered. Boris Brokhovich, the seventy-three-year-old director of Chelyabinsk-40, stripped naked and plunged into the lake. Several of the Americans then followed him. Not far from the lake was the scene of a devastating accident more than three decades earlier, when a storage tank exploded, throwing 70–80 metric tons of waste containing 20 million curies of radioactivity over the surrounding area. The total release of long-lived fission products, almost comparable to Chernobyl, had contaminated thousands of square kilometers. The accident, September 29, 1957, was hushed up for decades, but revealed after the Soviet collapse.

The last stop on Velikhov’s glasnost tour was the most daring, the one he had first suggested to the Central Committee, and which they had rejected: the Sary Shagan laser test site. This was the facility the Reagan administration claimed “could be used in an anti-satellite role” and might also be used for missile defense. It was the subject of the ominous illustration in Soviet Military Power showing a beam shooting straight up into the heavens. The Soviet leadership knew the claims were untrue but had been embarrassed to admit it. Velikhov brought the Americans to see for themselves on July 8. Von Hippel quickly realized the U.S. claims had been vastly exaggerated. “It was sort of a relic,” he said of the lasers he saw there, which were the equivalent of industrial lasers, easily purchased in the West. There was no sign of the war machine the Reagan administration had conjured up. “These guys had been abandoned, a backwater of the military-industrial complex. It was from an earlier time. It was really pitiful.” The one “computer” consisted of transistor boards wired together—built before the personal computer. “They had been trying to see whether they could get a reflection off a satellite,” he recalled. “They never succeeded.”²⁹

Velikhov’s campaign for openness paid one of its most surprising dividends in 1989, when the Soviet leadership finally admitted that the Krasnoyarsk radar was a violation of the ABM treaty, as Katayev’s candid internal spravka had indicated in 1987. Shevardnadze acknowledged the treaty violation in a speech to the Soviet legislature, and claimed, “It took some time for the leadership of the country to get acquainted with the whole truth and the history about the station.” This was a dubious claim, since Shevardnadze had signed a document laying out the issues two years before. The larger point was clear, however. Gorbachev was coming clean.³⁰

The glasnost championed by Velikhov did not extend to Biopreparat. On July 27, 1989, the masters of biological weapons met in Moscow at the office of Lev Zaikov, the Politburo member who oversaw the military-industrial complex. According to minutes and handwritten notes in Katayev’s files, the meeting began at 6:30 P.M. and was attended by sixteen other officials in addition to Zaikov. The meeting was a Politburo “commission,” a formal high-level committee of members of the ruling body of the Soviet Union, and although Gorbachev was not present, he must have known about the discussions. Among those present were Yuri Kalinin, the head of Biopreparat; Valentin Yevstigneev, the head of the military’s 15th Main Directorate, which oversaw biological weapons; Foreign Minister Shevardnadze; Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, and his predecessor, Viktor Chebrikov, who remained a member of the Politburo; Mikhail Moiseev, chief of the General Staff; and others. Akhromeyev was originally on the list, but his name was crossed out.³¹

The first item on the agenda was listed as “About measures for modernizing the organization of work on special problems.” The term “special problems” was a euphemism for biological weapons. The officials were once again worried about the arrival of international inspectors and how to cover up the illegal work. The goal of the meeting was to prepare a Central Committee resolution, which would be a major policy instruction.

Katayev’s notes of the meeting are fragmentary and leave unanswered questions. But they also open a window on high-level discussions about the illicit germ warfare program—evidence of a remarkable back-and-forth discussion that was kept utterly secret.

Kalinin opened the meeting, suggesting that biological weapons were cheap.

The Katayev notation:

The unit of measurement is not stated, but apparently was dollars. Experts in nonproliferation had worried about the same thing for many years—biological weapons could be the poor man’s atomic bomb.

Then, according to Katayev’s handwritten notes, Kalinin complained that the United States had concealed the location of work on biological weapons.

Next, Kalinin reported to the group on the status of preparations for international arms inspections. Some facilities were being modified so they could be displayed as centers for civilian medicines. According to Katayev’s notes, Kalinin said the cleanup would have to remove any speck of evidence that would point to a weapons program. “Today we are not finding spores,” Katayev wrote. “But possibly in pockets.”

If inspectors came, Kalinin said, they would be given the explanation “these are for manufacturing vaccines.”

Kalinin said he needed eighteen months to bring two more sites into order, and appeared to be seeking permission.

Shevardnadze, who had endorsed the idea of surprise inspections in his speech in Geneva, interjected. “Violation or not?” he demanded, according to Katayev’s notes. “What is the purpose of legends?” or cover stories. “There will be a convention in a year’s time—any enterprise will be under verification.” This was a reference to a chemical weapons treaty, or international convention, which would include provisions for surprise inspections as a verification measure. It was being hammered out by negotiators.

Zaikov asked why Kalinin needed the eighteen months. Couldn’t he be ready sooner?

Kalinin said something about “secret designs,” perhaps hinting that more time was needed to hide the true purpose of the facilities. Katayev noted, cryptically, and without specifying which facilities were being discussed: “All recipes are destroyed. Stockpiles liquidated… Equipment is multi-purpose—remains. It serves to manufacture medications. We are going to preserve the equipment for the time being.”

Zaikov wanted the equipment taken down, too. He was also worried about documents, and wanted them destroyed. At one point he suggested all the documents be “liquidated” in three months. Katayev wrote another cryptic line in his notes, quoting Shevardnadze: “What we violate and what we don’t.”

A little more than two months after the meeting in Zaikov’s office, the Central Committee issued the resolution, ordering more cover-up activity, with an eye toward possible future inspections, according to records in Katayev’s archives. This instruction was to recall all documentation from sites “connected with manufacturing of special-purpose product,” design new means of disguising them and modernize facilities so they could appear to be manufacturing defensive biological agents, such as vaccines. The goal, according to the resolution, was to preserve “the achieved parity in the field of military biology.”³²

A very small group of intelligence officials in the United States and Great Britain worked on biological weapons. They were mainly technical specialists, and they were outnumbered in the intelligence and policy community, where vast staffs worked on nuclear and strategic weapons, and on topics such as the Soviet economy. The CIA even had a full-time analyst devoted to monitoring canned goods in Soviet stores. The germ warfare experts felt like a lonely band, warning of dangers that were often not taken seriously by others and for which they could not offer absolute proof. Christopher Davis, who served on the British Defense Intelligence staff for ten years as the senior specialist on biological weapons, said that methods that had worked for counting nuclear missile silos were virtually useless when it came to assessing a biological weapons program. The missiles and hardware could be tracked from above, but not the pathogens. “A building is a building at the end of the day,” he explained. “It might have some strange features but there is little one can conclude about its function without x-ray eyes. You can’t tell what anyone is doing inside, and that’s the key question. In intelligence terms, it’s a very hard target.”³³

The claims of the biological weapons experts met with deep skepticism by other defense, intelligence and policy officials. “The biological weapons clique inside Washington was so doomsdayish, that they tended to undermine their own credibility,” said Doug MacEachin, who had become arms control director at the CIA in March 1989. “It never had a whole lot of credibility. They went beyond the evidence too many times.” MacEachin was also influenced by his own calculation that biological weapons would have little use on the battlefield; thus no one would go to all the trouble, certainly not in the nuclear age.³⁴

In the autumn of 1989, Ken Alibek, deputy director of Biopreparat, recalled visiting Obolensk, south of Moscow. On the first floor of the big new building, in the auditorium, the annual review of work at the institute was held. “We were not allowed to bring briefcases or bags inside the room,” Alibek recalled. “We could take notes, but they were gathered up by security guards after each meeting. We had to get special permission to see them again.”

The next-to-last speaker was Sergei Popov, the young researcher who had worked at both Koltsovo and Obolensk. He approached the lectern to give a report on a project that Alibek called “Bonfire.”

“Few paid attention at first. Work on Bonfire had dragged on for some fifteen years, and most of us had given up hope of ever achieving results.”

But Alibek added that his attention perked up when Popov announced that a suitable bacterial host had been found. This was the two-punch weapon in which one agent would be the vehicle and the attack on the immune system would be the second, deadly strike. Alibek recalled watching an experiment involving animals. Alibek wrote in his memoir they were rabbits, but Popov said later they were guinea pigs. Behind glass walls in a laboratory, a half-dozen were strapped to boards to keep them from squirming free. Each was fitted with a masklike mechanical device connected to a ventilation system. Watching from the other side of the glass, a technician pressed a button, delivering small bursts of the genetically altered pathogen to each animal. When the experiment was over, the animals were returned to their cages for examination. They all developed symptoms of one sickness, such as high temperatures. In one test, several also developed signs of another illness. “They twitched and they lay still,” Alibek recalled. “Their hindquarters had been paralyzed—evidence of myelin toxin.”

It was Popov’s two-punch killer agent on display. “The test was a success,” Alibek recalled. “A single genetically engineered agent had produced symptoms of two different diseases, one of which could not be traced.” The room fell silent. “We all recognized the implications of what the scientist had achieved. A new class of weapons had been found.”³⁵

Popov vividly recalled working with the guinea pigs. By 1989, the scientists at Obolensk had reached a period of uncertainty. There was less money than before. “It was a frustrating time of disappointment and moral challenge,” he said. “And at that time, I made a commitment to myself. I committed myself to never deal with animal experiments again. The trigger was my last huge experiment with guinea pigs. Something like a few hundred guinea pigs had been held in a containment facility. I and my colleagues visited them every day. Wearing space suits, we fed the survivors and took out the dead. I was very shocked with how it went. Nothing new, but it was unpleasant. Absolutely unpleasant.

“I just couldn’t stand any more the conditions the animals were held in. We saw animals dying, awfully, starving, experiencing paralysis and convulsions in conditions neglecting the very sense of life. The agent paralyzed half of the animal’s body. I did not want to be involved in this any more.”³⁶

————— 15 ————— THE GREATEST BREAKTHROUGH

Vladimir Pasechnik was reserved, diffident and modest, but his face brightened when talk turned to science. In a photograph taken in the 1980s, when he was an institute director in Leningrad, he was wearing a corduroy jacket, glancing up from his desk, creases across his forehead, his hair receding, eyes inquiring, one hand holding down a notebook or journal. Born in 1937, Pasechnik lost both his parents in the siege of Stalingrad. He had overcome many obstacles to study as a physicist, and graduated at the top of his class at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. But the sacrifices of the war left a deep scar on Pasechnik, and he was determined to use his science for peaceful purposes. After graduation, he became a researcher at the Institute of Higher Molecular Compounds in Leningrad, attracted by the chance to create new antibiotics and treat diseases like cancer.¹ In 1974, one of Pasechnik’s professors was asked to recommend a young researcher for a special assignment. Pasechnik was selected to set up a new scientific research facility, the Institute of Ultra Pure Biological Preparations in Leningrad.² It seemed a promising opportunity—the new institute would have resources for the best equipment and could attract the finest talent. He took the job, and in the years that followed he demonstrated ability as a talented and strong-willed manager. By 1981, the institute had become one of the most advanced microbiology facilities in the Soviet Union. It was also part of Biopreparat, the secret Soviet biological weapons machine. Pasechnik later told people that it was about this time that he realized the research could not be just for defensive purposes, as he originally believed, but was for offensive weapons.

While Domaradsky and Popov attempted to modify the genetic makeup of pathogens, Pasechnik’s mission was more practical: to optimize the pathogens for use in combat, and to build superefficient industrial methods to produce them. If anthrax or other agents were to be deployed in wartime, they needed to be manufactured in large batches, remain stable, survive dissemination into the air and be effectively dispersed. Pasechnik’s job was to find ways to prepare and manufacture the pathogens so they could be weaponized without losing effectiveness and virulence. Working with models of the deadly agents, he sought to master the complex process of how to concentrate the pathogens and turn them into aerosols.³

Soviet biological weapons builders were bedeviled with complications. Before being deployed as an aerosol, a pathogen must be mixed in a proper “formulation,” with the addition of chemicals and other substances, specific for each germ. If done correctly, it will maintain the pathogen’s virulence or toxicity while in storage or in the weapon. But if done incorrectly, the agents may die or lose their power. They can also clog nozzles or clump up inside a weapon, which would make it ineffective, or they can be neutralized by the environment once disseminated. Also, they can face other complications that render them ineffective, such as the anthrax spores killed by phage lysis bacteria in Stepnogorsk. Moreover, it was essential to keep the particles small, to penetrate deep into the lungs of the victims. According to U.S. estimates, the ideal size is one to five microns; a micron is one-millionth of a meter. If larger, they would be filtered out by the upper respiratory tract before reaching the lungs; larger particles also settle out of the air more quickly. However, Biopreparat and the Soviet military produced agents up to twelve microns, knowing that, even if they did not reach the lungs, they would still infect the victim once trapped inside the body in the upper respiratory tract.⁴

One of Pasechnik’s most important inventions was a “milling” machine that used a powerful blast of air to turn batches of dried agent into a fine powder. He also developed new methods of microencapsulation—covering the tiny particles containing the infectious agents in polymer capsules to preserve and protect them from ultraviolet light. Pasechnik frequently accompanied the officers from the 15th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry when they visited the research institutes. Popov recalled that Pasechnik sat in the front row, writing everything down in his notebooks.

Alibek, then first deputy director of Biopreparat, recalled in his memoir how he had once spent a long, tiring day in Leningrad with Pasechnik, going over projects at the institute. “Pasechnik seemed sad and a bit depressed as he drove me to the railway station, where I planned to catch the overnight train back to Moscow. I asked him if anything was wrong. Posing such a personal question to a man like Pasechnik was risky. He was one of our senior scientists, twelve years older than me, and he had always been somewhat aloof. I worried that he might take offense.”

“Can I be honest with you,” Pasechnik replied. “It’s like this. I am fifty-one years old, and I am going through a strange time in my life. I don’t know if I have accomplished what I want to. And they’re going to make me retire soon.” Alibek knew that fifty-five was the mandatory retirement age in Biopreparat, but recalled that he clapped Pasechnik on the shoulder and told him not to worry. “Four years is a long time, and they could be your best years!”

Pasechnik smiled thinly, Alibek said.⁵

But this conversation did not even begin to reveal the depth of Pasechnik’s despair. According to those who knew him and later spoke with him, Pasechnik had found it increasingly difficult to justify his work devoted to weapons. Each year, the tasks assigned to him by the military were more demanding, as they sought still more virulent and effective agents and ever-larger industrial capacity for producing them.

Foremost among his tasks, Pasechnik worked on creating models of a plague agent that would be resistant to antibiotics. If the models worked, they could easily be adapted for the real Yersinia pestis. His dream of working on a cure for cancer was fading. His promise to himself to use science for peaceful goals was unfulfilled. His personal crisis was profound. Pasechnik felt trapped, and began to plan an escape.

In October 1989, Pasechnik went to France on a business trip to purchase laboratory equipment. Alibek had approved the trip and forgotten about it. While in France, Pasechnik received a message to return for an urgent meeting of all Biopreparat institute directors in a few days’ time. Pasechnik told a colleague traveling with him to go on ahead, he would follow the next day. When the colleague arrived back in Moscow, alone, he found Pasechnik’s wife waiting at the airport—and she was surprised Pasechnik was not on the plane. In Paris, Pasechnik walked to the Canadian Embassy, knocked on the door and announced that he was a scientist at a secret biological weapons laboratory in the Soviet Union and wanted to defect. The Canadians shut the door in his face. Pasechnik felt desperate. He feared going to the United States or Britain, thinking either country might force him to go back to work on biological weapons. But with few options left, he reluctantly called the British Embassy from a phone booth and repeated that he was a Soviet germ weapon specialist and wanted to defect.

The British Secret Intelligence Service responded with alacrity. He was picked up in a car, flown to Heathrow on a British Airways shuttle flight and taken to a remote safe house on the English coast.⁶

It was a rather miserable, cold and wet Friday afternoon in London, October 27, 1989. The workday was nearly over and dark had fallen. Christopher Davis, a surgeon commander in the Royal Navy, educated at Oxford and London universities, and the senior biological warfare specialist on the Defense Intelligence Staff, recalled that he was looking forward to the weekend. He had cleared his desk. There was not a piece of paper on it, everything locked away, as required. Then his phone rang around 5 P.M., and his boss, Brian Jones, was on the line.

“Chris, you better come to my office,” Jones said. Davis went to the small office, not much larger than his own. Jones handed Davis a one-page document, a message from the British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, describing the arrival of a Soviet defector, and a brief summary of what the defector was telling them.

“Oh, shit,” Davis said. His eyes were riveted on one word on the page, “plague.” He immediately realized the significance. He told Jones, “The Soviet Union is developing strategic biological weapons. Plague is not a battlefield weapon!”⁷

In Moscow, Alibek’s secretary rushed into his office on Monday morning. Pasechnik’s deputy, Nikolai Frolov, was on the line from Leningrad and needed to talk to Alibek immediately. Alibek recalled he was so overworked, he felt like putting his head on his desk and going to sleep.

“We’ve got a problem,” Frolov said, sounding strained. “Pasechnik hasn’t come.”

Alibek replied reassuringly, saying it was no problem if Pasechnik was a little late to the meeting of institute directors. “No! No!” Frolov nearly yelled into the phone. “I mean, he hasn’t come back from France!”

Frolov’s account of what happened spilled out in a torrent of excited words, Alibek recalled. In France, Pasechnik had been up all night, lying in bed, fully dressed, before telling his colleague to go on ahead without him. When the colleague got ready to leave for the airport, Pasechnik hugged him and said proshchai, or farewell, rather than the usual do svidaniya, or until we meet again.

“I listened to the entire story with a knot tightening in my stomach,” Alibek said. He went down the hall to see Kalinin, the director of Biopreparat. When told of Pasechnik’s disappearance, Alibek said, it was as if Kalinin had just heard about the death of a close relative. Kalinin went pale. He told Alibek he would call Gorbachev immediately.⁸

In the days after he defected, Pasechnik was constantly nervous. He had left his family behind. He was frightened that he would be tried as a war criminal, or pilloried in public, or forced to go back to work on the pathogens, or returned to the Soviet Union. He knew volumes about the research at Biopreparat and was terrified of the British reaction. “It must have been like walking the plank and not knowing if the waters are going to be shark infested or you are going to make it to shore and be okay,” recalled Davis. “That’s what made it all the more brave, I think, in making the decision he could no longer do what he was doing. It was an exceptional move.”

The case was given a code name, Truncate. Davis became one of the two main debriefers, along with a man from MI6, and periodically they were joined by David Kelly, who was head of microbiology at Porton Down, the British chemical and biological defense research facility. Davis was among the small band of allied biological weapons experts who had puzzled for years over Soviet activities. When Pasechnik was interviewed, an invented name was always used, such as “Michael,” but Davis knew Pasechnik’s real identity. They spoke English, although sometimes Davis had to ask for a translation, as when Pasechnik tried to describe a hamadryas baboon. When he wasn’t speaking about the Soviet system, Pasechnik was curious about Britain, asking questions about family life and communities, and marveling, for example, that Kelly had a personal computer at home.

What Davis and his colleague learned from Pasechnik was more revealing than all the fragments of information they had accumulated over the years. “It was an extraordinary moment,” Davis said. “If you’re an intelligence officer, this doesn’t happen but once in a lifetime. Maybe never in a lifetime. It was just one of those exceptional moments. Prior to the time when he came, there were no defections of any note. Neither were there any good, high-level human intelligence sources in place.” He added, “The fact that Vladimir defected was one of the key acts of the entire ending of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It was the greatest breakthrough we ever had.”

What Pasechnik told them was remarkable. The Soviet Union had not only weaponized classic pathogens, but was seeking to create new agents designed to be resistant to antibiotics and to break down the defenses of the victim. The Soviets were also working on vaccines that would shield their germ warfare operators from harm, and they were developing detectors to sense a possible attack. Not only was there a large program devoted to battlefield weapons, which were for short-range attacks, but the emphasis on plague and smallpox suggested a focus on long-range, strategic weapons. Pasechnik noted that the Soviets had not yet achieved one of their prime goals, the creation of a new biological warfare agent completely resistant to treatment, but the work was still underway.

Pasechnik also revealed how the Soviet program might ultimately be concealed, perhaps with small, mobile laboratories that could never be found. Pasechnik told them about the sprawling network of laboratories and production facilities hidden in Biopreparat that had cost in excess of 1.5 billion rubles over fifteen years and employed tens of thousands of scientists and support workers. He told them how the Interbranch Scientific and Technical Council, where Domaradsky had once worked, was responsible for coordinating and administering the germ warfare effort with money from the military. He revealed that the Soviets had created a system of false financial plans for the institutes, purporting to show they were working on innocent civilian biotechnology projects, in order to cover up the actual military biological weapons work.

While hesitant at first, Pasechnik gained confidence over time, and his knowledge was relayed in a way that was calm and precise. “He was a very frank source,” said Jones. According to Davis, Pasechnik was clear about “what he knew personally, or as a result of data that he was aware of, and what he had been told, and what he had just found out chatting with other people. He never, ever stretched things.”

Only three months after the Politburo commission met in Zaikov’s office to discuss the cover-up, Pasechnik was sitting in Britain, laying the Kremlin’s darkest secrets on the table. His information helped the British draw up a list of twenty excuses the Soviets might use to hide their illegal work. As Pasechnik talked, British policy-makers began to realize that some of their core assumptions in recent decades had been wrong.

Jones, who earned his doctorate in metallurgy, had just two years earlier become head of unit DI-53, which analyzed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons intelligence data, from all sources, for the U.K. Defense Ministry. The focus was overwhelmingly on nuclear weapons materials and chemistry; Jones recalled that his unit had just two people who specialized in chemical and biological warfare. One of them was Davis.

When the British gave up their biological weapons program in the late 1950s, the central assumption then, and since, had been that nuclear weapons were the most effective deterrent. “The same year our nuclear capability became active, we dropped our biological weapons program and chemical weapons program,” Jones said. “Nuclear would do for us.” Then, in the early 1970s, the Biological Weapons Convention was signed; British diplomats played a major role. The popular assumption, he added, was that biological weapons had no utility in modern warfare. “They are not a deterrent, they are difficult to use defensively, they didn’t fit, as it were, into Western perceptions of useful military material,” Jones recalled. An added factor was Nixon’s 1969 decision to close the U.S. program. Jones added, “The Russians had nuclear weapons—why on earth would they need biological weapons?” The British postulated that, if the Soviets were doing anything, it might be trying to create an improved battlefield chemical or biological weapon that would emit toxins, perhaps a sort of hybrid chemical-biological weapon. They assumed such a new weapon would be used for close-in battlefield combat against troops. “There was this idea that this is what the Russians were really after,” Jones said.⁹

But Pasechnik’s debriefing opened up the British thinking to a much broader spectrum of weapons, ranging from tactical to strategic. The Soviet program was far more ambitious than the West had ever imagined. This was evident from the moment Pasechnik began talking about the pathogens he knew the most about, such as Yersinia pestis, the agent that causes plague. Pasechnik said that great emphasis had been placed on the perfection of pneumonic plague as a weapons agent by optimizing its production, storage, aerosol dissemination and resistance to antibiotics. Pasechnik said his institute had worked on models of the plague agent to create a kind of super-plague.

One of the most chilling disclosures Pasechnik made was that the Soviet military had already weaponized plague and was pouring it into some kind of warheads, which had to be refilled every few months. In order to produce enough agent, the industrial capacity had been scaled up, reaching two metric tons a year. He revealed the Soviets had tested the plague agent on baboons on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea as recently as 1989.

As the secrets spilled out, the mention of plague carried special weight. “You do not choose plague to put on a battlefield,” Davis said. “You choose plague because you’re going to take out the other person’s country. Full stop. That’s what it is about.”¹⁰

“Plague is highly transmissible. Remember, one third of the population of Europe disappeared in the 13th Century with plague. And it’s quick. If you don’t get treatment within 12–24 hours at best, after symptoms appear in pneumonic plague, you will die, whether we give you antibiotics or not. It’s over.”

This was Pasechnik’s message. The target of the plague weapon was unprotected populations. “That was the gift, to realign the thinking, to move it back to the traditional use of biological weapons as a weapon of mass destruction,” Jones said.

Later, Pasechnik told the British his institute was tackling an assignment to develop a method of aerosol distribution that would work from a vehicle flying two hundred feet above the ground. Pasechnik did not work on the vehicle itself, only the dissemination system, but the British had no difficulty guessing what kind of weapon flew at two hundred feet: a cruise missile. The fast-flying, low-altitude cruise was a modern weapon, feared for its ability to fly under radar. A cruise missile carrying deadly biological agents could be launched from a submarine, release the pathogens somewhat away from the target, and then disappear. The thought of it startled Pasechnik’s debriefers.

Over months of conversations, a picture emerged not only of the traditional pathogens, but also of the more advanced genetic engineering underway at Koltsovo and Obolensk. Although Pasechnik’s institute had only a specialized role, he was aware of the broader effort to boost resistance to antibiotics. Pasechnik also told the British of the work being done to fool the body’s immune system. Pasechnik was careful to delineate where the research had not borne fruit; he noted that improved plague had not been the result of genetic engineering, but rather of conventional genetic selection techniques. Pasechnik also told the British that genetic engineering of tularemia—Domaradsky’s dream—had been a goal, but was unsuccessful in the field tests.¹¹

Pasechnik knew the people in the system, including the bosses, Alibek and Kalinin, at the Biopreparat headquarters on Samokatnaya Street. He knew the names and missions of the separate military biowarfare facilities in Kirov, Sverdlovsk and Zagorsk. He knew of the massive anthrax factory at Stepnogorsk. Pasechnik’s information showed conclusively the Soviet Union had violated the Biological Weapons Convention and deceived the outside world. The Soviets concealed their misdeeds under layers and layers of disguise, and Pasechnik peeled it away.

The disclosures soon led to a quiet debate in British intelligence and policy circles: did Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, the Soviet reformers, know about the dangerous agents in the test tubes? Pasechnik was perplexed by the frequent questions he got from his debriefers about Gorbachev. He said Gorbachev must have known if Shevardnadze knew. That was how the system worked. And Pasechnik was certain that Shevardnadze had attended some of the high-level meetings in 1988. Davis’s assessment strongly supported this view as well.

If Gorbachev knew, then the British had to question their assumptions about him, too. Thatcher was the first Western leader to declare that Gorbachev was a man with whom she could do business. In Washington, after nearly a year of dithering, Bush was also planning his first summit with Gorbachev. Was this a man they could do business with, or was he the leader of a country and a system that created—and was still creating—the most destructive biological weapons mankind had ever known, in violation of all treaty promises?

In London, the revelations from Pasechnik were summarized into a quick note for the Joint Intelligence Committee. The first recipient of such reports is always Her Majesty, The Queen. The second is the prime minister, who at the time was Thatcher.

In early November 1989, while Pasechnik was still being debriefed, the Berlin Wall crumbled. Over the previous summer, Hungary had opened its border with Austria. Thousands of East Germans had flooded West German embassies in Budapest and Prague. In October, Gorbachev had visited Berlin and signaled that the Soviet Union would not intervene, a lesson drawn from his searing visit to Prague after the Soviet invasion in 1968 and his soul-searching talks with his best friend MlynááY. In an evening torchlight ceremony on that Berlin visit, handpicked party youth activists had stunned Gorbachev by ignoring the hard-line party boss Erich Honecker on the reviewing stand and instead shouting to Gorbachev, “Perestroika! Gorbachev! Help us!”¹² Gorbachev had become a beacon of change that was now shaking the very pillars of the empire he ruled. In early November, roiled by public protests, a new government in East Germany permitted travel to the West through Czechoslovakia, prompting tens of thousands of people to crowd the roads. Hastily, new rules for travel were drafted by the government, and the plan was to announce them November 10, but inadvertently the decision was read aloud at a government press conference at the end of the day November 9.¹³ News reports vaguely suggested that East Germans could get visas to leave the country immediately through border crossings, touching off a frenzy of excitement. Rumors spread that all travel restrictions were being lifted. Thousands of people gathered at the Berlin Wall in the evening. The guards, who had no instructions, just opened the gates, and the Berlin Wall was breached twenty-eight years after it was first erected. The long division of Europe was over.

In Washington, reporters were summoned to the Oval Office at 3:34 P.M. Bush was nervously twisting a pen in his hands. He later recalled feeling awkward and uncomfortable. Ever cautious, he was worried that any comments he made could trigger a Soviet crackdown. The memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre was still fresh. Lesley Stahl of CBS News remarked that “this is a sort of great victory for our side in the big East-West battle, but you don’t seem elated. I’m wondering if you’re thinking of the problems.”

“I am not an emotional kind of guy,” Bush said.¹⁴

In Moscow, Chernyaev wrote in his diary the next day, November 10, “The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over.”

After the fall of the wall, even more threatening storms were on the horizon for Gorbachev. The Soviet economy plummeted in 1989; there were acute shortages of goods, along with a grain crisis and declining oil production. Perestroika had not produced better living standards. At a Politburo meeting on the day the Berlin Wall fell, Gorbachev was preoccupied not with Eastern Europe, but the possibility that the Soviet Union would disintegrate, as internal republics began to consider breaking away. The leaders of Estonia and Latvia, two tiny Baltic republics, had told Gorbachev in recent days “they have a feeling that there is no other way than to leave the USSR,” Gorbachev told the Politburo.¹⁵

After Bush had waited almost a year to engage Gorbachev, he was now confronted by a confluence of serious troubles: the future of Germany, and indeed Europe, was up for grabs; Gorbachev was in deeper and deeper trouble at home; and arms control negotiations were going nowhere. When Bush and Gorbachev finally met in a summit December 2–3 on the Mediterranean island of Malta, severe winds and high waves lashed the harbor as they talked aboard the Soviet cruise liner Maxim Gorky. Bush reassured Gorbachev that he supported perestroika, but he also defended his words of caution when the Berlin Wall came down. “I do not intend to jump up on the Wall,” Bush said, mangling one of his favorite aphorisms, that he would not “dance on the wall” to embarrass the Soviet leader. “Well,” Gorbachev replied, “jumping on the Wall is not a good activity for a president.” They laughed. For eight hours, they talked about a ban on chemical weapons; how to accelerate negotiations on strategic nuclear weapons and reduce troop levels in Europe; the revolution in Central Europe; Nicaragua; Afghanistan; and Soviet economic and trade woes. Not once did they mention biological weapons.¹⁶

In Moscow in late 1989, Pasechnik’s defection sent shock waves through the small group of Soviet officials who knew. On December 6, the Kremlin made an urgent decision. According to a spravka in Katayev’s files, the Ministry of the Medical Industry, which had jurisdiction over Biopreparat, was ordered by a Central Committee resolution—effectively a decision by the Politburo—to accelerate the preparation of facilities for possible foreign inspection. The order said the facilities must be ready by July 1, 1990, “to prevent undesirable consequences” from the defection of Pasechnik.¹⁷

Alibek recalled in his memoir that “we took comfort in the fact that there were many things Pasechnik didn’t know. He had not been personally involved in weapons production, and much of what he could tell Western intelligence agencies was likely to be hearsay at best, thanks to our internal security regime. Nevertheless, Pasechnik’s interrogators would have learned the secret that had been kept hidden for so long: the real function of Biopreparat.”¹⁸

Alibek was right that Pasechnik did not bring the British information about weapons production. But Pasechnik had spent many hours visiting the microbiology institutes and taking notes about their activities. His memory was sharp.

In early 1990, a very modest effort inside the Soviet system at more openness about the Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic was immediately crushed.

By this time, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had deeply antagonized the military. They negotiated the destruction of hundreds of the most modern Soviet nuclear warheads and missiles and slashed military spending. The Warsaw Pact was disintegrating as Soviet troops made an unceremonious and precipitous retreat. All of these actions were in keeping with Gorbachev’s intention to end the hypermilitarized state and ease the burden of defense on the economy and society, but the military took it hard, very hard. They were furious, especially at Shevardnadze.

On January 5, Shevardnadze’s ministry tried to force a little openness about biological weapons. The ministry distributed a draft Central Committee resolution stating that the best way to deflect outside demands about biological weapons, in the wake of the defection of Pasechnik, would be to propose an exchange of data with the Americans in two areas: weapons work before the Biological Weapons Convention went into effect in 1975, and information on how any biological weapons development since then was being converted to civilian purposes. The Foreign Ministry also suggested that if specific questions came up about the Sverdlovsk anthrax incident, the Americans should be told that “indeed, an accident took place,” an investigation was underway and the results might be shared with them. Shevardnadze’s deputy for arms control, Viktor Karpov, circulated this document. He sent the draft to officials at Biopreparat (Alibek was on the list), the military (including the 15th Main Directorate, which handled bioweapons), the KGB, the Health Ministry, the Academy of Sciences and others.

Five days later, the military exploded. Dmitri Yazov, the defense minister, wrote a letter to all who had received the draft proposal. He complained the military had been left totally out of the loop. The military realized, correctly, that the offer of a data exchange would “radically contradict” previous statements that “the Soviet Union has never worked on nor produced nor possessed stockpiles of biological weapons,” Yazov said. In other words, the Foreign Ministry had proposed to open the window on the lie, and the military wanted to slam it shut before it got out.

On Sverdlovsk, Yazov insisted “there were no explosions and accidents” at the facility. The epidemic was caused by tainted meat, a government commission had determined at the time, and “at the present time there exists no new information or circumstances that would force a doubt about the correctness of the conclusions.”

The military was so alarmed that it demanded Karpov recall all fifteen copies of the draft resolution. The documents show the military prevailed. The language in the Foreign Ministry draft was immediately changed. Karpov sent out the amended instructions the next day, January 11.¹⁹

From October 1989 through January and February 1990, the British worked long hours to sift through the mountain of new information they received from Pasechnik. Details began to be shared with the United States. At the CIA headquarters, Doug MacEachin, the arms control director, received a file of reports coming in from London, not yet formally circulated in the CIA, summarizing the debriefings with Pasechnik, concluding that the Soviets were building strategic biological weapons. Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist, went to Britain to interview Pasechnik, and came away shocked by the revelation of the smallpox program and convinced that Pasechnik was genuine. MacEachin asked the CIA’s technical teams to help him corroborate what the defector was saying, using satellite data to locate facilities and other details.

Like the British policy staff, MacEachin had long assumed the Soviets would not build germ weapons if they had nuclear ones. “We also had authoritative information that the common view amongst the professional Soviet military, the line officers, was that biological weapons and chemical weapons are not weapons, they’re terrorism devices,” MacEachin said. “You know, they’re no good in the battlefield. How are you going to deploy a BW weapon on the battlefield?” He said that while biological weapons would cause mass casualties in a city, “bugs and gas are not the weapons that professional soldiers use. And we had plenty of evidence the Soviet military was very professional. One of the major arguments against putting a BW weapon on a SS-18 was: what a waste of time. It didn’t track.”

MacEachin took the new information to a meeting of the key arms control policy-makers at the White House, known as the “ungroup.” Out of a fear of leaks and bureaucratic infighting over arms control, the Bush White House had decided to handle the most sensitive matters in a very small circle. The members came from the departments of State and Defense, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the Energy Department as well as the National Security Council. No assistants were allowed to sit on the back benches, no leaks were tolerated and the very existence of the group was known to only a few people. It was called the “ungroup” because formally it did not exist.²⁰

After the Malta summit, the group had plenty to deal with: troop reductions in Europe, chemical weapons negotiations and pressure to reach a new strategic arms treaty by early June, when Bush and Gorbachev had scheduled a full summit in Washington. When all the regular business was finished at the ungroup one day in February, MacEachin asked everyone to wait. They had a frightening new problem which he described as “a turd in the punchbowl.”

What he told them next was astounding: a high-level human source had provided the outlines of a vast, secret Soviet biological weapons program, concealed in a civilian organization, Biopreparat. For the members of the ungroup, this was a potential time bomb. Every day, Gorbachev was sinking deeper. Bush had already put U.S. diplomacy on pause for a year. MacEachin told the ungroup, referring to the defector, “If what he says turns out to be even partially corroborated, it is of sufficient significance that, if we don’t resolve this problem, we ain’t going to get a single arms control agreement.” MacEachin believed that hawks in Congress, including the conservative senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who was the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was already attacking Gorbachev for violations of other treaties, would seize on the news to block any more agreements with Moscow. “Can you imagine Jesse Helms sitting up there with that in his hand?” MacEachin recalled. The senator would say, he predicted, “You can’t deal with the Soviets, they’re liars, cheaters, bums, rats, scums—and I’ve got the list right here in my hand.” MacEachin told the ungroup that the British defector was credible and “we’re going to try and make sure we corroborate. He’s given us so many details that we’ve got to be able to do some corroboration.”²¹

Bush decided to keep the story of Biopreparat under wraps, just as the Soviets had themselves done for so many years. The United States and Great Britain at last possessed tangible evidence that had so long eluded the experts on Soviet biological weapons, but because of all the pressures building up on Gorbachev, because of the dramatic rush of events in Europe, the president decided not to go public. To do so would not only trigger outrage in Congress, it might also severely damage Gorbachev and Shevardnadze at a time when the Soviet leaders could ill afford it. Dennis Ross, who was director of the Policy Planning office at the State Department and a top assistant to Baker, recalled, “Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were under enormous pressure. We wondered, what can their traffic bear? And we were trying to get [a unified] Germany into NATO. Germany in NATO is a strategic architecture for the next generation. Germany is bigger than anything else. And you’re going to introduce this? There were competing objectives and we had to make a choice.”²²When Baker met Gorbachev on February 9, not a word was said about biological weapons. MacEachin said that in the spring the CIA briefed only a small circle of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and swore them to maximum secrecy. The story did not leak.

Alibek recalled in his memoir that disclosure might have forced Gorbachev to abandon the whole biological weapons enterprise on the spot. But that is not what happened. Bush’s decision “gave us unexpected breathing space,” Alibek said. “We continued to research and develop new weapons for two more years.”

Gorbachev’s power ebbed in the spring of 1990. Mass protests were held against his rule, the Baltic republics declared independence and Yeltsin became the chairman of the Russian parliament. The Congress of People’s Deputies, the legislature that Gorbachev’s reforms had created, repealed the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power. Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s closest adviser, was riddled with doubt. “I was deeply worried about what was happening in the country,” he said. “Most of all because nothing was working out the way Gorbachev intended, much less how it really ought to have.”²³ Gorbachev wanted to save his country with his reforms, but instead it was coming apart at the seams. When Shevardnadze came to Washington April 4–6, the Americans realized the Soviet military was in a state of near rebellion against its civilian leadership. At one point, Shevardnadze retracted a concession about cruise missiles he had made to Baker in February. “I had the image of a diplomat with a political gun to his head,” Baker recalled. “Any step forward could lead to suicide.”²⁴

Alibek at this point was still a company man, deputy director of Biopreparat, working at the headquarters. But he also had a change of view, and wondered how much longer they could go on covering up the biological weapons program. “Like everyone else, I was furious with Pasechnik and believed he had put our security at risk,” he said. “But where others desperately wanted to preserve the status quo, I saw no choice but to change course.” He thought they should mothball the pathogen production lines, while preserving the sample strains and research facilities. The laboratories would be easier to hide—they could be portrayed as making vaccines—than the factories mass-producing anthrax and smallpox. “If circumstances required, we could always recover our strength. So long as we had the strains in our vaults, we were only three to four months away from full capacity.”²⁵ Alibek said that the KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, sent a memorandum to Gorbachev recommending the “liquidation of our biological weapons production lines” because of the Pasechnik defection. The memorandum argued that the germ warfare program was no longer a secret from the West, so the Soviet Union should “cut our losses” and close down the factories.²⁶

But rather than shut down the biowarfare machine, the system applied more camouflage. A detailed plan to deflect American questions about biological weapons was approved at a Politburo meeting April 25, 1990. The plan was to offer what would seem to be more openness, an exchange of visits. These would not be intrusive, formal inspections, but rather choreographed visits to select Soviet laboratories that had already been well scrubbed, as well as demands to see American sites and an exchange of information about defensive work, such as vaccines. The written plan, contained in five pages of “additional directives” and three appendixes approved by the Politburo, included an assertion that the Soviet side sincerely wanted to establish more “openness” and “trust” about biological weapons. One appendix was a draft agreement for both sides to sign, titled, in part, “measures to strengthen trust and broaden openness.” But it was all doublespeak. The true intent was to take the heat off Biopreparat. To deflect questions about the 1979 anthrax accident, another appendix offered “informational material about the Sverdlovsk facility.” This three-page document claimed Sverdlovsk had worked on vaccines against anthrax. It said nothing about the 1979 accident, nor about work on offensive biological weapons.²⁷

At one point, Alibek recalled, he was given the job of getting a signature on the document about an exchange of visits from Karpov, the Foreign Ministry official for arms control. “I headed through the midday Moscow traffic to Smolenskaya,” the square where the ministry, in one of the distinctive Stalin-era wedding-cake towers, looms over the city.

“I didn’t need an armed guard, since there were no state secrets in my briefcase,” Alibek said. “Just a portfolio of lies.”

Karpov read the papers, then looked up at Alibek, he recalled. “You know, young man, I see a troubled future ahead of you.”

“I was taken aback,” Alibek recalled in his memoir. He protested that others had signed the documents. “I am just the courier.”

Karpov shook his head wearily, Alibek recalled.

“I know who you are and I know what you do,” Karpov said. “And I know that none of what is written here is true.” He signed.

Alibek persuaded his boss, Kalinin, that they should mothball some of the pathogen-making industrial plants and preserve the research laboratories. Alibek recalled he drafted a decree for Gorbachev to sign. There were just four paragraphs. The decree said Biopreparat would cease to function as an offensive biological weapons agency and would be made into an independent organization. A few weeks later, on May 5, Alibek said the decree came back from the Kremlin. “We’ve got it,” Kalinin told him. When Alibek looked at the document Gorbachev had sent back, however, “I went numb.” He explained, “Every paragraph I had drafted was there, but an additional one had been tacked on at the end. It instructed Biopreparat ‘to organize the necessary work to keep all of its facilities prepared for further manufacture and development.’”

The first part ended Biopreparat’s functioning as an offensive biological warfare organization, Alibek recalled in his memoir. The last part resurrected it.

Alibek protested, but Kalinin dismissed his worries with a flutter of his hand. “With this paper,” Kalinin said, “everyone gets to do what he wants to do.”

Using the Gorbachev order, Alibek said he sent a message to Stepnogorsk, the anthrax factory, and ordered the destruction of an explosive test chamber he had spent much time and effort to create. He also talked to Sandakhchiev at Vector about converting some facilities to civilian use. Alibek said he went to Siberia several times to oversee the conversion, which was completed by the end of 1990. But at the very same time, Sandakhchiev built a new facility for cultivating viruses for weapons, he said. “Similar double games were being played around The System,” he said. “While I closed production lines down,” Alibek said, another Biopreparat official “was authorizing new railcars for the mobile deployment of biological production plants.”²⁸

The United States and Great Britain, now in possession of Pasechnik’s detailed and frightening overview, quietly confronted the Soviets. On May 14, 1990, the British and American ambassadors in Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite and Jack F. Matlock Jr., delivered a joint démarche, or formal protest. In separate meetings that afternoon, they took the protest to the heart of the leadership, meeting with Chernyaev, who was Gorbachev’s assistant, and Alexander Bessmertnykh, a deputy to Shevardnadze.

Matlock said Chernyaev “was not at all polemical” when the ambassadors delivered the protest. “He said immediately that there were three possibilities,” Matlock recalled. One was that the information was incorrect. “We of course interjected that we were certain it was correct,” Matlock said. Second, Chernyaev said, perhaps there was such a program and Gorbachev knew about it but had not told Chernyaev. Third, he said, it was possible such a program existed but neither he nor Gorbachev knew about it. “Chernyaev’s reply, allowing the possibility of a program with or without Gorbachev’s knowledge, was the first time I heard such a comment” from a Soviet official, Matlock recalled.²⁹

At the Foreign Ministry, Bessmertnykh took detailed notes. He recorded that Matlock and Braithwaite said the West had “new information” on specific Soviet biological weapons facilities, personnel and programs. They added, according to his notes, “We have a basis to suggest that in the USSR a large-scale secret program in the field of biological weapons is being carried out and there exists significant stockpiles of such weapons far in excess of the reasonable requirements for research purposes.”

The ambassadors insisted they did not want “public agitation” over the issue. Braithwaite appealed to Bessmertnykh to resolve it “without additional fuss.” Matlock said it was being handled only in top-secret channels, and the United States was “absolutely not interested in burdening our relations with a new problem on the eve of the most important negotiations at the highest levels.” The planned summit between Bush and Gorbachev in Washington was just weeks away. Bessmertnykh promised to inform Shevardnadze.³⁰

The démarche got the Kremlin’s attention. The next day, May 15, 1990, Zaikov sent a typewritten letter to Gorbachev. The letter, found in the Katayev archive, is a milestone in the story of the Biopreparat deception. It shows that Gorbachev personally instructed another Politburo member to report to him on biological weapons work.

Zaikov’s response was sent to Shevardnadze, too. “This is for your eyes only,” warned a small cover note to Shevardnadze, signed by Zaikov.³¹

“In accordance with your instructions,” Zaikov wrote to Gorbachev, “I report to you on the subject of biological weapons.” The word biological was neatly handwritten in blank spaces throughout the letter, apparently because the issue was so ultrasensitive he did not want a typist to know.

Zaikov put a very selective spin on the past and present history of the biological warfare program. It is evident from the letter that Soviet officials lied not only to the world, but to each other, including to the president of the country. “In our country,” Zaikov told Gorbachev, “the development of biological weapons began in the 1950s at three USSR Ministry of Defense organizations, located in Kirov, Zagorsk, and Sverdlovsk.” In fact, the Soviet work on biological weapons dated back to the late 1920s. Zaikov had identified three of the military’s chief facilities in the postwar period, including Sverdlovsk.

“In 1971,” Zaikov continued, “they were joined in this work by another 12 organizations of the USSR Ministry of the Medical Industry and the former USSR State Agroindustrial Committee. By 1985, they had developed 12 recipes and means for using them. These were produced in suitable quantities, stored, and destroyed after the expiration of useful life (an average of 6 months.)”³²

Zaikov’s description hardly did justice to the ambitious quest for genetically engineered microbes, production and weaponization, and the string of laboratories and factories built by Biopreparat and the military. Zaikov then reviewed the history of the treaty, noting it “had no effective inspection mechanism for ensuring compliance, nor was there a precise definition of the difference between developing biological weapons and defensive means against them.”

Zaikov was correct that the boundary between offensive and defensive biological weapons work was sometimes unclear. But the Soviets had not just stepped over the line, they had taken giant and deliberate strides into activity clearly prohibited by international treaty. Zaikov did not inform Gorbachev of the Soviet violations. He instead claimed it was the West that may have violated the agreement.

Next, Zaikov described the high-level Soviet decision making on biological weapons in the last few years. He told Gorbachev that Soviet officials had concluded there was a possibility of inspections under a forthcoming global ban on chemical weapons, and even “possible” inspections to check on compliance with the 1972 biological weapons treaty. He reminded Gorbachev of the Central Committee decision of October 6, 1989, a few weeks before Pasechnik defected. That decision, Zaikov said, was that “all research capacity for biological weapons be redirected and used to develop defensive means against these weapons so as not to contradict our international obligations.” What Zaikov neglected to tell Gorbachev was that the October 6 decision also stated that the Soviet Union would try to “preserve” its “parity” in “military biology.”

Zaikov then told Gorbachev, “In 1988, the stocks of special recipes were destroyed, production of active materials at industrial facilities was halted, and special processing and munitions-assembly equipment was dismantled.”³³ Zaikov went on to remind Gorbachev of the high-level decisions made earlier to accelerate the process of getting some facilities scrubbed for possible inspection.³⁴ Three research laboratories “are currently being prepared for international inspection,” he said—Obolensk, where Popov and Domaradsky had worked on genetic engineering of bacteria and where Popov saw the guinea pigs die; Koltsovo, where Popov had first experimented with genetically modified viruses; and Pasechnik’s facility in Leningrad, where, among other things, he had explored how to produce agents more effectively and to make them even more potent. These three laboratories were at the heart of the Biopreparat program.

“It is possible that some Western circles have a heightened interest in our country’s compliance with the 1972 Convention after the defection of V. A. Pasechnik in France in October, 1989,” Zaikov wrote. Pasechnik, he added, “had knowledge of the content of special biological research work, as well as the locations of organizations involved in this work.”

“However,” he reassured Gorbachev, “any possible leak of information by Pasechnik, who is a narrow specialist, will not cause damage in revealing our scientific and technical achievements in this field, but might provide a basis for Western countries to question the Soviet Union’s compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention.” Zaikov told Gorbachev that the Soviet Union had given the United Nations

a complete list of the names and locations of 17 facilities that handle high-risk infectious materials, including facilities developing defensive means against biological weapons. At the same time, the USA disclosed only six such facilities, although some data indicate there are far more than that.

In fact, the Soviet declarations to the United Nations were woefully incomplete, failing to include some of the secret mass-production facilities or the offensive nature of the Soviet program.

Zaikov closed the letter by telling Gorbachev that “if the issue arises” of mutual visits to biological facilities “in order to lessen concerns about their activity,” the Americans could be invited to Koltsovo, Obolensk and the older military laboratory at Kirov. Zaikov said the Soviets should demand access to three American sites.³⁵

Gorbachev’s reaction to the Zaikov letter is not known, but events moved quickly after he received it. Baker had just arrived in Moscow for meetings to plan the upcoming summit in Washington. He did not raise biological weapons at any of the regular negotiating sessions in the Soviet capital. But on May 17, Shevardnadze invited Baker on a sightseeing trip to Zagorsk, a town forty-three miles northeast of the Kremlin with a famous Russian Orthodox monastery. At Baker’s request, MacEachin, who was also in Moscow, assembled a short paper outlining what the United States knew, and he gave it to Baker. As they cruised to Zagorsk in Shevardnadze’s ZIL limousine, flying Soviet and American flags on the front, with no aides but two interpreters in the car, Baker raised the issue of biological weapons and handed the paper to Shevardnadze. Baker recalled that Shevardnadze said, in the present tense, “he didn’t think it could be so, but he would check it out.” Ross recalled the paper was a special effort to make sure Shevardnadze knew Baker took the issue seriously and wanted a response.³⁶

The next day, May 18, the British defense secretary, Tom King, was in Moscow and held formal talks with Dmitri Yazov, the Soviet defense minister. King also pressed Yazov about biological weapons. Yazov said it was inconceivable that the Soviet Union would have a policy of developing biological weapons. Yazov’s manner was hopelessly clumsy, recalled Braithwaite, the British ambassador, who was present. “Yazov muttered to his aide that the British had presumably learned something from ‘that defector,’ went red in the face, but blandly denied all knowledge,” Braithwaite recalled.³⁷

Before his departure for Washington, Baker saw that the Gorbachev revolution was running aground. Negotiations on nuclear arms control—the unfinished business of Reykjavik—were “going nowhere slowly.” Baker wrote to Bush from Moscow: “The economic problems, the public mistrust, the sense of losing control, the heat of the nationality issue, and concerns about Germany, are all weighing very heavily.” Baker said he left “with an overriding impression that Gorbachev was feeling squeezed.” Germany was “overloading his circuits,” and “the military now seemed in charge of arms control.”³⁸

A troubled Gorbachev returned to Washington for a summit May 31, 1990. Two years had passed since his sunny walk in Red Square with Reagan. Bush had finally come around to the belief that Gorbachev was a genuine reformer. In the weeks before the summit Bush called Gorbachev a “tremendous statesman” and “bold Soviet leader” who tried to “initiate daring reforms.” But the hour was late. On Saturday, June 2, Bush and Gorbachev helicoptered together to Camp David, the 143-acre presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. Bush recalled they were each accompanied by military aides carrying the briefcases that would link each of them to their command posts in the event of nuclear war.

Bush persuaded Gorbachev to change out of his suit and tie into a sweater for an informal discussion at Aspen Lodge, sitting at a glass table on the veranda, overlooking the pool, golf course and putting green. Gorbachev was joined by Akhromeyev and Shevardnadze; Bush by Baker and Scowcroft. The sky was clear and a breeze rustled through the trees. Much of the discussion was about regional conflicts around the world, including Afghanistan.³⁹ Gorbachev recalled that at one point during the day, Bush called him aside for a very private chat. “It was just the two of us and my interpreter,” Gorbachev said.

Bush told Gorbachev that the CIA was reporting that the Soviet Union had not destroyed all its biological weapons and production facilities.

“I said,” Gorbachev recalled, “my intelligence people report that you have not destroyed all your biological weapons. I believe you, I said, but why don’t you believe me?”

Bush: “Those are the reports I get.”

Gorbachev: “Well, you are not an expert on biological weapons. And I am not an expert on biological weapons. Let us have mutual verification, mutual verification of whether biological weapons have been destroyed. Let your people come to our weapons facilities, we also know where your facilities are, and we will come to your country. Let’s have an exchange.”

Gorbachev was trying to deflect Bush, just as Zaikov had suggested.

According to Gorbachev’s account, Bush responded to the idea of an exchange by proposing that the Americans should check the Soviet Union first.⁴⁰

Years later, when Gorbachev was asked directly whether he knew that Biopreparat existed, he seemed uneasy. His reply was vague. “No, I can’t say I remember dealing with that organization,” he said. “But there was medical research and they make vaccines against epidemics. Where is the line, the point where research becomes biological weapons and production? This is still controversial, even today, because you need cooperation, you need the kind of international relationship to make it possible to get rid of those weapons.” Gorbachev then quickly changed the subject.⁴¹

When Thatcher met with Gorbachev in Moscow on June 8, she also raised with him “the evidence which we had gleaned that the Soviet Union was doing research into biological weapons.” It was something “which he emphatically denied,” she recalled, “but nonetheless promised to investigate.”⁴²

In July 1990, Baker gave Shevardnadze another paper outlining American concerns about biological weapons.⁴³ Shevardnadze had invited Baker for a relaxing visit to a scenic area of Siberia in early August. Before they met, however, Shevardnadze needed to come up with an answer to the Western protests. On July 27 and again on July 30, a group of officials gathered at Zaikov’s office in Moscow to draft talking points that Shevardnadze would use to respond to Baker. According to the talking points, found in Katayev’s files, the group decided to preserve the facade.⁴⁴

Baker and Shevardnadze spent most of August 1 boating and fishing on idyllic, mile-deep Lake Baikal. When they got around to discussing arms control, Shevardnadze was guided by the papers written in Zaikov’s office: six neatly typed, double-spaced pages. Shevardnadze opened with a solemn declaration that he took the American and British complaints with “utmost seriousness.” Then he said, “I can state that at the present time no activity is being carried out in the Soviet Union that would violate the articles of the convention on prohibition of biological weapons. We have no biological weapons.”

Shevardnadze claimed the issue of Soviet compliance had been taken up “by the political leadership of the country,” and “special decisions were taken” followed by instructions “to take all measures to provide rigorous compliance with this international agreement.” In fact, the decisions were taken to hide the incriminating evidence. Shevardnadze also said, in a bit of window dressing, the Soviet Union was thinking about enacting new legislation that would make it a crime for any actions that “will” violate the convention—in the future.

Shevardnadze, following the script, promised Baker that the Soviet side was ready “to arrange a visit to any of the biological facilities named by the American side in the U.S. memo.” And, he said, the Soviets would even go so far as to allow American scientists to “work at the Soviet biological facilities.” In a page that was not numbered, but apparently added at the end of his presentation, Shevardnadze suggested both sides work out a program of joint scientific work on defense against biological weapons. Shevardnadze also gave Baker a written paper containing the Soviet response to his questions.

Shevardnadze had been aware of, and participated in, discussions of the scrub-down and cover-up strategy to hide Biopreparat in 1989. In his memoir, Shevardnadze alluded to this moment. “If anything, Jim could have had some doubts about my honesty, in connection with an unpleasant story I do not intend to tell here.” He added, “Lying is always unproductive.”⁴⁵

Back at the CIA in Washington, a decision was made not to punish the Soviets but to take up their offer of visits. “We said to ourselves, about Shevardnadze, he’s lying, but let’s not decide to ram it up their ass,” MacEachin recalled. “The number one objective for U.S. national security is to eliminate, and get onsite inspections. We knew if we accused, there would be 900 meetings of finger-pointing without anything happening.”⁴⁶ In the months that followed, working in total secrecy, Baker and Shevardnadze negotiated the details of the first visits to suspected Soviet biological weapons sites.⁴⁷ But they had many other pressing demands to cope with.

On August 2, while Baker and Shevardnadze were meeting privately, they were interrupted by Baker’s spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, who handed Baker a message saying that Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Baker enlisted Shevardnadze and Gorbachev in what became a concerted, months-long effort to build a diplomatic coalition against Iraq. Gorbachev was reluctant to see the use of force and kept hoping that Saddam could be talked into pulling out of Kuwait. Nevertheless, when Baker came to Gorbachev’s official country residence at Novo-Ogaryovo on November 7, the Soviet leader said, “What’s really important is that we stick together.”⁴⁸

In these hectic months, a treaty reducing troop levels in Europe was signed, an agreement was reached on the unification of Germany and Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize. At home, Gorbachev sank. He tried to fashion a new Union Treaty to hold the restive republics together, while Yeltsin urged them to grab all the independence they could. Chernyaev observed that “Gorbachev seemed truly at a loss, the first time I’d ever seen him in that state. He could see power slipping from his hands.”⁴⁹ Shevardnadze brooded over the growing strength of reactionary forces, especially the “men in epaulets,” and felt Gorbachev was abandoning their shared cause of democratic reform. “The only thing I needed, wanted, and expected from the President was that he take a clear position: that he rebuff the right-wingers, and openly defend our common policy,” Shevardnadze recalled. “I waited in vain.”

On the morning of December 20, after a sleepless night, Shevardnadze wrote out a resignation. He called his daughter in Tbilisi and told her, then informed two of his closest aides. He left for the Kremlin.⁵⁰ The Congress of People’s Deputies fell into a stunned silence as he spoke. Shevardnadze complained bitterly of a lack of support; the reformers had scattered. “Dictatorship is coming,” he warned. Gorbachev, sitting nearby, listened impassively. When the speech was over, he clutched his forehead and looked down at his papers.⁵¹

In the autumn of 1990, another Soviet defector, a medical biochemist, sought asylum at the British Embassy in Helsinki. He had once had top-secret clearances in the Soviet system and worked at Obolensk in the very early years when it was being carved out of the forest. He later worked in the antiplague system, and described to the British how pathogens were harvested from it for use in biological weapons. The defector’s information reinforced Pasechnik’s revelations.⁵²

Very early in the morning on Monday, January 8, 1991, Davis and Kelly stood in Moscow in the bone-chilling cold. Seven American and five British representatives—experts on biotechnology, microbiology, virology, arms control verification and the structure of the Soviet program— were about to begin the very first visit to suspected biological weapons sites. Davis, usually sharp and no-nonsense, was a bit groggy. It was deep winter, absolutely frigid, and he had uncharacteristically overslept. The British-American team had arrived in total secrecy; Davis had not even told his wife where he was going or why. Standing in front of an aging yellow bus, Davis was introduced for the first time to Alibek, who was put in charge of the visit. Alibek, smoking a cigarette, wore a brown wool sweater while everyone else on the Soviet side was in suits and ties. Alibek spoke no English and had never met an American or Briton. He recalled his surprise that the Westerners “knew a lot about us,” and one asked why “Biopreparat chief Kalinin” wasn’t present. Alibek lied, “Unfortunately, Mr. Kalinin is extremely busy.” Kalinin had instructed him never to even mention his name.⁵³

The bus set off for the Institute of Immunology at Lyubuchany, 35 miles south of the Kremlin, which did support work for Obolensk. The bus crawled in a snowstorm, and suddenly Davis heard a loud bang. The bus windshield shattered from the cold. “It was bloody awful,” Davis recalled. “This is the big game. This is day one. We haven’t even reached the place yet, and we have to slow down because we can’t keep going at speed, or we’d all die of exposure. We’re shivering now, probably doing 15 miles per hour, and we arrive late, frozen to death.” Alibek said the Soviet strategy for the visits, worked out over the previous weeks, was to hide as much as possible, and “waste as much time as possible” with meals, drinks and official speeches, to limit time for the visitors to carry out inspections. Vodka and cognac were ordered up at every stop. Popov said “there was a huge training program” before the visits so that every employee knew to repeat the “legend” that they were working only on defense against pathogens. “Every department and every lab had several meetings,” Popov recalled. The first stop was easy—the institute had no dangerous pathogens on hand.

Next came Obolensk, the compound in the woods that had played such a central role in the work of Domaradsky and Popov. When they arrived January 10, Davis noted that, although thousands of people worked there, the halls were eerily empty. Urakov, the stern director who had clashed with Domaradsky, welcomed them with a long speech, sandwiches and drinks. When the Westerners pressed to get to work, Urakov warned them that if they wanted access to the floor containing Yesenia pestis, they would have to be quarantined for nine days on site. The point was to discourage the visitors from asking for access. Alibek had actually given orders the previous weekend for Obolensk and Vector to be totally disinfected, so the risk of exposure to dangerous pathogens was very low. Still, Urakov’s threat worked, and they did not ask to go there.⁵⁴

The Westerners had brought their own plan of action for the visit to the complex, which had more than thirty buildings, and they split up into small teams. Davis was the person on the delegation with the most complete knowledge, and he needed to be in several places at once. He went with one team to Korpus 1, the large cubelike modern building in which each floor was dedicated to a different pathogen. But when another team in the older part of the complex found something interesting, he was asked to come over, and was driven there by the Russian hosts.

Davis happened upon an unmarked door that, he recalled, looked like that of a restroom. This opened into a shower changing room, and eventually a high-ceiling room containing a large freestanding hexagonal steel chamber, which Pasechnik had told them about. Biological bombs would be exploded inside the chamber, and animals, pinned down at one end, were exposed to the pathogens. Pasechnik had said the facility was used to test whether pathogens remained effective after being released by an explosive device.

They climbed inside the chamber. It was dark.

“Can we turn the lights on, I can’t see,” Davis asked. The Soviets said the bulb was burned out.

Davis reached for a small flashlight held by his trusted friend and deputy, Major Hamish Killip. Before Davis could turn the flashlight on, a Soviet official accompanying them grabbed his wrist and stopped him, saying it was a prohibited electronic device. They struggled back and forth. Davis protested strongly that he was on an officially sanctioned mission by the president of the Soviet Union. “We are your guests,” he insisted. “This is not the way to behave!”

“I wasn’t letting go of the flashlight, and he has ahold of me, and we’re in a standoff here. It was tense. They didn’t know what to do, and I wasn’t going to back off.” Eventually, the laboratory officials relented and managed to turn on the overhead light.⁵⁵ Davis noticed the steel walls appeared to have been recently burnished, to erase any marks that would indicate explosive fragments. But when Davis looked at the door, which seemed to be double-skinned and made of a softer metal, he saw the telltale dents. What’s this? he asked.

The laboratory officials said it was poor workmanship with a hammer when the door was installed. “They knew that we knew this was laughable rubbish,” Davis said. Alibek remembered that Davis spoke up directly, saying, “You have been using explosives here.” Davis said the visit to the chamber was “pay dirt” showing the Soviets had an offensive biological weapons program, as Pasechnik had so painstakingly described. “It was quite chilling,” he said. The size of the equipment at Obolensk was a tip-off to the American and British experts that offensive weapons work was underway, and not just vaccines or defensive research. “You’ve got this gigantic building. You’re brewing up large quantities. You’re beginning to smell a rat here.”

Next, on January 14, the team went to Vector, the facility at Koltsovo where Popov had first experimented with genetic engineering. Sandakhchiev, the driven, chain-smoking Armenian who had once dreamed of creating a new artificial virus every month, began to give the foreigners a dull lecture on the latest advances in Soviet immunology, but the visitors, now alert to the Soviet delay strategy, cut him off. Davis and Kelly wanted to see the laboratories. “I could see their eyes widen with astonishment as we took them past enormous steel fermenters, larger than what any Western pharmaceutical firm would ever use for the mass-production of vaccines,” said Alibek. They were not permitted, however, to enter the most sensitive floors where virus research was being done.

At one point, a midlevel researcher let slip to Kelly that the laboratory was working on smallpox. Kelly asked him, quietly, through the interpreter, to repeat what he had just said. The researcher repeated it three times: Variola major. Kelly was speechless. The World Health Organization had eradicated smallpox, and samples were supposed to exist in only two official repositories, at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and at the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology, a Ministry of Health facility in Moscow. Vector was not supposed to be working with smallpox; it was not supposed to have any smallpox. When Kelly later confronted Sandakhchiev, the director denied that offensive work was being carried out, and then refused to answer any more questions.

Alibek knew that one of Vector’s prize possessions was the 630-liter smallpox reactor, standing five feet tall, which could manufacture great quantities of the virus. The visitors took note of the reactor and other equipment, including the most advanced aerosol-testing capability any of them had ever seen. There could be no justifiable explanation other than an offensive biological weapons program, they concluded.

At the last stop, Pasechnik’s institute in Leningrad, Alibek thought he could relax. “The worst was behind us,” he later wrote. “Nothing at Pasechnik’s old institute would pose a threat. Or, so I thought.” All the incriminating equipment had been moved, and the laboratories scrubbed down.

Then, during the tour, one of the visitors stopped by an imposing machine and asked, “What’s this?”

“I groaned inwardly,” Alibek said. “I had forgotten about Pasechnik’s jet-stream milling equipment. It had been too heavy to move.” This was the machine that used a powerful blast of air to turn agents into a fine powder. An institute official proffered an explanation. “For salt,” he said. “That’s where we mill salt.”

The visitors saw machinery for preparing biological aerosols that would be the perfect size for sticking in the human upper respiratory system. And they saw equipment Pasechnik had alerted them about for disseminating pathogens from a low-flying craft, such as a cruise missile.

After the visitors left, Alibek felt victorious. Although the Westerners had suspicions, he recalled, “they could prove nothing, and we had given nothing away.”

The delegation knew they did not get a full view of Biopreparat, but they had seen enough. They wrote in their report: the sheer size and scope of the program, the configuration of the facilities, the nature and extent of the work on pathogens, the guards and physical security and the large aerosol experiments—all of it pointed to an offensive germ warfare effort that was far beyond anything needed for civilian purposes.

Pasechnik had told them the truth.

————— 16 ————— THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

In the winter months of early 1991, nearly six years after the Politburo had chosen him as a younger, energetic standard-bearer who could save the party and state, Gorbachev, approaching his sixtieth birthday, felt exhausted. His attempt to create real, competitive politics gave rise to a potent rival, Boris Yeltsin, who became a rallying point for many who opposed Gorbachev, the establishment and the party. Nationalities long suffocated inside the Soviet Union began to awaken, with aspirations for independence, something Gorbachev had never foreseen.

Gorbachev’s perestroika, or restructuring—which began with a goal of rejuvenating socialism, and later was aimed at creating a hybrid of socialism and capitalism—was never a full-throated drive to free markets. Gorbachev had experimented with capitalism, and given permission for the first private entrepreneurs to set up their own businesses, known as the cooperatives. But shortages, disruption and hardship spread across the country. A catastrophic drop in oil extraction, along with low oil prices, took a heavy toll; foreign currency reserves were almost exhausted, and a lack of commercial credits made imports almost impossible. Flour was rationed. Gorbachev announced at a meeting of the Security Council one day in the spring that, in two or three months, the government would no longer be able to feed the country.¹ And his halting half-steps away from the centrally planned economy led to demands, championed by Yeltsin, for a more radical leap to the free market.

“There were already bread lines in Moscow like those for sausage two years before,” Chernyaev recalled. “I took a car on Saturday and drove all around Moscow. Bread stores were closed or absolutely empty—not figuratively, but literally!”² He wrote in his diary on March 31, “I don’t think Moscow has seen anything like this in all its history—even in the hungriest years.” And, he added, “on that day, certainly, nothing remained of the image of Gorbachev.”³

The aggrieved losers in this vortex of change began to resist. They included the military, which felt humiliated as soldiers and tanks retreated from Europe, only to discover they were almost destitute at home; the party elite, which lost its monopoly on power; and the security agencies, primarily the KGB, who saw themselves as guardians of a power structure under siege and a country near disintegration. Gorbachev attempted to buy time. He tried to satisfy the disillusioned old guard while hanging on to the allies of perestroika, the progressive intellectuals, but he could not do both, and succeeded at neither. The progressives abandoned him for Yeltsin, a more promising agent of change. The hard-liners pushed Gorbachev to use force, and declare a state of emergency to reassert control in the old Soviet tradition. A coterie of the hardliners, from the KGB, the military and the party, would soon take matters into their own hands.

In earlier years, Gorbachev and Reagan, in a courageous break with the past, managed to slow the speeding locomotive of the Cold War arms race. After some hesitation, Bush also realized Gorbachev was a man to do business with, a negotiating partner, an anchor in a stormy sea.

Then the anchor broke loose. Gorbachev lost control.

Very early on the morning of Sunday, January 13, Soviet tanks, led by members of Alpha Group, an elite KGB special forces unit, attacked pro-independence demonstrators at the television tower in Vilnius, Lithuania. The troops opened fire and killed more than a dozen people in a massacre that caused a wave of apprehension and revulsion. The assault had been secretly orchestrated in Moscow by the hardliners around Gorbachev, perhaps in expectation that Gorbachev would have no choice but to order a crackdown and state of emergency. On the night of the assault, Kremlin records showed the hard-liners met in the office of Gorbachev’s chief of staff, Valery Boldin, from 7:15 P.M. until 2:30 A.M., shortly after the shooting began.⁴

The day after the Vilnius massacre, speaking to parliament, Gorbachev insisted he had known nothing about the violence until it was over, “when they woke me up.” He blamed independence leaders in Lithuania for provoking it. His comments didn’t answer the central question: either Gorbachev, as commander in chief, was in control of his own security forces or he wasn’t. Both were disturbing possibilities. Liberals who had been at Gorbachev’s side, appalled by the use of force, quit the party, including the entire editorial board of Moscow News, a leading voice of perestroika, which published a devastating joint statement from the intellectuals. Chernyaev wrote in his diary on January 14 that Gorbachev’s address to parliament was “a disorganized, confusing speech full of rambling digressions…”⁵

“I was in complete despair,” said Chernyaev, perhaps Gorbachev’s most loyal adviser. He wrote a letter of resignation, admonishing Gorbachev that “…you chained yourself to policies that you can only continue by force. And so you contradict your own philosophy.” The hard-liners were “pathetic and shameful,” Chernyaev said. “They discredit you, making the center look ridiculous. And you’re following their logic, which is basically the code of the streets—you beat me up… so now I’ll call my big brother and you’ll get it!”

“You’re losing the most important thing that we’ve gained from new thinking—trust,” he wrote. “You’ll never be trusted again, no matter what you do.” Chernyaev reminisced about his partnership with Gorbachev “the great innovator and father of perestroika.” But “now I don’t recognize or understand him.”⁶

However, Chernyaev never gave Gorbachev the letter, and did not resign. In the days that followed, Gorbachev did not order more repression, as the hard-liners hoped he would. But at the same time, Chernyaev said, Gorbachev never figured out that his public appeals to reason and negotiation could not halt the Baltic secession. It was all but inevitable.

The American and British biological weapons team departed the Soviet Union on the weekend of January 19–20, even more worried than when they arrived. In late January and February, the teams met in Washington to go over their notes and write a report. On March 5, the new British prime minister, John Major, told Gorbachev of his concerns about the biological warfare program during a tête-à-tête meeting in Moscow. On March 25, Baker again raised it in papers sent to Gorbachev that outlined concerns raised by the January visits.⁷ Neither Major nor Baker said a word about it in public.

When Pasechnik’s revelations were first made, the rationale for keeping it secret was to avoid creating problems for Gorbachev. Now Gorbachev’s situation was far more vulnerable. A new strategic arms treaty, years in the making, was finally nearing completion. If details of a massive Soviet biological weapons program and blatant violation of earlier treaty commitments became public, it would swiftly wreck any chance for Senate ratification.

On April 5, Braithwaite, the British ambassador, came to see Chernyaev, this time with a formal, written message from Major, a detailed, damning and very accurate list of findings based on the outcome of the January visits.⁸ On May 11, Foreign Minister Bessmertnykh delivered an answer to Baker’s papers from March, continuing the cover-up on every point.

In late May, Margaret Thatcher, now out of office, visited Gorbachev in the Kremlin. After a dinner with him, she returned to the British ambassador’s residence, where Braithwaite was waiting, along with the American ambassador, Matlock, whom Thatcher had invited. With an after-dinner drink in her hand, Thatcher settled into a chair in Braithwaite’s study, turned to Matlock and said, “Please get a message to my friend George,” meaning the president.

“We’ve got to help Mikhail,” she pleaded. “Of course, you Americans can’t and shouldn’t have to do it all yourselves, but George will have to lead the effort, just as he did with Kuwait.” She paused, Matlock recalled, and then explained why she felt so strongly. “Just a few years back, Ron and I would have given the world to get what has already happened here.” She wanted Bush to invite Gorbachev to the Group of 7 summit in London in July and deliver a massive Western aid package. Matlock hesitated. The Soviet economy was a shambles, and pouring aid into it might be a waste, he said. Thatcher glared. “You’re talking like a diplomat!” she responded. “Just finding excuses for doing nothing. Why can’t you think like a statesman? We need a political decision to support this process, which is so much in everyone’s interest.”

Matlock sent Thatcher’s message to Bush that night. Then he wrote in his own journal, “I think that Mrs. Thatcher is right.”⁹

On June 17, Valentin Pavlov, the prime minister and one of the hardliners who had planned the Vilnius attack, asked the Supreme Soviet to give him extraordinary powers that were granted only to the president. He did not tell Gorbachev beforehand. It was a daring power grab, but Gorbachev reacted only with a statement that he hadn’t endorsed the proposal. In a closed meeting of the assembly, other hardliners at the center of the gathering storm—KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and Interior Minister Boris Pugo—also backed Pavlov’s move.

Matlock was surprised at Gorbachev’s timidity. Why didn’t he fire these appointees trying to usurp his power? On June 20, Matlock had coffee with Gavriil Popov, a close ally of Yeltsin who had just been elected mayor of Moscow on the shoulders of the growing democratic movement. When they were alone in the library at Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence, Popov took out a sheet of paper, scribbled a note and handed it to Matlock. In a large, uneven Russian scrawl, it said:

A COUP IS BEING ORGANIZED TO REMOVE GORBACHEV.

WE MUST GET WORD TO BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH.

Yeltsin was at that moment in the United States.

Matlock then wrote on the same sheet:

I’LL SEND A MESSAGE. BUT WHO IS BEHIND THIS?

Popov wrote on the paper and shoved it back to Matlock:

PAVLOV, KRYUCHKOV, YAZOV, LUKYANOV

Popov took the paper back when Matlock had read it, tore it into small pieces and put them in his pocket.¹⁰

Matlock sent an urgent message to Washington for Bush, who was to meet with Yeltsin at the White House later that day. Within hours, Matlock was instructed to take a warning to Gorbachev. About 8:20 P.M.in Moscow, early evening but still broad daylight at this time of year, Matlock arrived at Gorbachev’s office. Chernyaev was present. Gorbachev greeted him as “Comrade Ambassador!” and lavished praise on Matlock, which made him uncomfortable. Matlock sat at the long table in Gorbachev’s office facing the window, with Gorbachev and Chernyaev on the other side.

“Mr. President,” Matlock said, “President Bush has asked me to notify you of a report we have received which we find greatly disturbing, although we cannot confirm it. It is based on more than rumor but less than hard information. It is that there is an effort under way to remove you, and it could happen at any time, even this week.”

Matlock did not name his source. He was trying to convey that the information was not from intelligence sources, but that was just what Chernyaev and Gorbachev assumed he was saying. On his notepad, Chernyaev wrote, “American services” had given the warning the coup would be the next day.¹¹

Both Gorbachev and Chernyaev laughed. Matlock recalled that Gorbachev then grew serious. “Tell President Bush I am touched. I have felt for some time that we are partners, and now he has proved it. Thank him for his concern. He has done just what a friend should do. But tell him not to worry. I have everything well in hand. You’ll see tomorrow.”

According to Chernyaev, Gorbachev also said, “It’s a hundred percent improbable.”¹²

After Matlock spoke, Gorbachev lapsed into a soliloquy, saying that things were unsettled, Pavlov was inexperienced and had realized the mistake of his power grab earlier in the week, Yeltsin was being more cooperative, a new union treaty would soon be signed and Gorbachev’s visit to the London summit would be a further step into the world economy.

Looking back, Matlock said later that Gorbachev may have wrongly interpreted what he was saying, and assumed he was referring to the reactionary forces in parliament as the source of trouble. Chernyaev’s notes confirm Gorbachev mistakenly thought Matlock was referring to the parliamentary hard-liners, not Kryuchkov of the KGB and Yazov from the military.

The next day Pavlov’s power-grab proposal was defeated in parliament. Talking to reporters afterward, Gorbachev was flanked by a grim Yazov, Pugo and Kryuchkov, and said, with a large grin, “The ‘coup’ is over.”¹³ But Matlock was not sanguine about Gorbachev. “He was the one with the most to lose, and yet he was acting like a somnambulist, wandering around oblivious to his surroundings.” In fact, Gorbachev got warnings from other sources, too. Just after Matlock left, Gorbachev told Chernyaev that he’d received a warning the day before from his special envoy, Yevgeny Primakov.

“Beware!” Primakov had insisted. “You’re trusting the KGB and your security service too much. Are you sure you are safe?”

Gorbachev replied, “What a chicken! I told him, ‘Zhenya, calm down. You of all people shouldn’t yield to panic.’”¹⁴

Two nights after Matlock’s warning, Bush phoned Gorbachev, who brushed off the chances of a coup.

“A thousand percent impossible,” he said.¹⁵

On June 21, Valery Yarynich walked into a small conference room with a single wood table on the upper floors of the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, a prestigious Soviet research institute in Moscow. Yarynich was the expert on communications who had worked many years in the Strategic Rocket Forces. He worked on Perimeter, the semiautomatic system for launching a retaliatory nuclear strike. Perimeter was still ultra-secret. After Perimeter was finally put into operation in 1985, Yarynich served during the Gorbachev years at a think tank inside the military’s General Staff headquarters in Moscow, where he concluded, based on mathematical models, that deterrence could be guaranteed with far fewer nuclear weapons.

Yarynich was invited to the conference room to participate in a meeting between Russian and American civilian experts on the problems of command and control of nuclear forces. Such a meeting would have been unheard of in earlier years, but in the atmosphere of greater openness, it was possible to talk about subjects that had long been strictly offlimits. Waiting in the conference room was one of the foremost civilian experts in the United States on nuclear command and control, Bruce Blair, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington think tank. Blair came in a coat and tie, and carried a small notebook. He had a lot of questions. During service in the Air Force, he spent two years as a Minuteman missile launch officer in the early 1970s, working shifts in underground silos. Subsequently, he carried out top-secret research on the vulnerability of American command and control of nuclear weapons for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. At Brookings, Blair wrote a book about American nuclear systems, Strategic Command and Control. For his next book, Blair had been searching, since 1987, for clues about Soviet command and control. While Blair had valuable sources in the United States, it was excruciatingly difficult to learn the truth in the Soviet Union; anything about nuclear command and control was top secret. Often, Blair gathered fragments of information but could not figure out the larger picture. Day after frustrating day, in countless smoke-filled rooms, he conducted interviews. When he met with Yarynich in the conference room, Blair realized he had finally connected with a real expert, someone who shared Blair’s depth of knowledge about launch systems and procedures. Yarynich emphasized that he was speaking only for himself, not for his superiors. “He’s here on his own, a confidential meeting,” Blair wrote in his notebook. He also noted that Yarynich was from the Center for Operational and Strategic Research in the General Staff, a specialist on command and control. However, Blair didn’t write down Yarynich’s name; in his view it was still too sensitive.

Blair found it took hours and hours of conversation to extract anything useful from Soviet military officers. But Yarynich was surprisingly assertive; he seemed to be “someone who had a lot on his mind.” Yarynich told Blair a Kremlin leader might have only two to four minutes to make a decision about retaliation if warned of a missile attack. The Soviet leader might have to make a decision in the dangerous situation known as “launch on warning,” in other words, firing off nuclear missiles based entirely on a warning. If a false warning, it could be a disastrous decision. Blair took careful notes.

From his American sources, Blair had heard of a Soviet system called the Dead Hand, a computer-driven machine that would, in the event the Soviet leadership were wiped out, launch a retaliatory attack without human hands on the button. When Blair asked about it, Yarynich responded that there was no Dead Hand in the Russian system. Blair wrote those words in his notebook. But Yarynich was careful to tell Blair something else, too. There was no automatic Dead Hand, but there was a semiautomatic system of some kind. Blair didn’t fully comprehend that day what Yarynich was telling him, but some details were in his notes. He didn’t connect the dots, at first.¹⁶

A year and a half had passed since Pasechnik’s defection. Gorbachev had been the recipient of repeated, specific complaints from the Americans and British about Biopreparat. The latest came in a letter June 19 from Bush to Gorbachev, which once again asserted that the Soviet Union had a large-scale biological weapons program and called for another meeting of experts.¹⁷ Gorbachev wrote back to Bush in mid-July. His letter pledged to keep up the spirit of “frank dialogue” between them. But Gorbachev was not forthcoming. He followed the script of the Soviet cover-up—deny the weapons program, proclaim a desire for openness and refer to the narrow line between offensive and defensive biological research.

Soon after sending Bush the letter, Gorbachev joined leaders of the Western industrial democracies in London, as Thatcher had urged. On July 17, Gorbachev met Bush at Winfield House, a mansion in Regent’s Park used as the official American ambassador’s residence. Gorbachev made an appeal to Bush for economic assistance, but Bush felt the Soviet Union was not ready.¹⁸ After lunch, Bush and Gorbachev sat alone, with only interpreters and aides, to again take up the thorny issue of biological weapons. “Gorbachev categorically denied all the accusations,” Chernyaev said. According to Chernyaev, an exchange between Bush and Gorbachev followed:

Bush: Mikhail, I received your letter. I don’t know what’s going on; either we’re misinterpreting things, or your people are doing something wrong or misunderstanding something…Our specialists continue to alarm us… It’s hard for me to figure it out.

Gorbachev: George, I have figured it out. I can tell you with confidence: we aren’t making biological weapons… I asked for a report on this matter. The report is ready, it’s been signed by Minister of Defense Yazov and other people. I told you the essence of this report, its main conclusions. I suggest we finish with this.

Bush: Let’s do that. If our people are mistaken, or misleading us, they’re in trouble. But we need clarity. Maybe another meeting of experts would help.

Chernyaev said he, too, was concerned about being misled. “And I broached it in a memo to Gorbachev: Did he know himself exactly where matters stood, was he sure he wasn’t being misled as had happened with the Krasnoyarsk radar station and in some other cases?” Gorbachev replied that he was confident. “I know!”¹⁹

Nearly five years after Reykjavik, the United States and the Soviet Union finally agreed on a treaty to reduce the most dangerous strategic nuclear weapons. But the agreement, more than seven hundred pages long, was not as sweeping as Reagan and Gorbachev had envisioned at Reykjavik. Instead of the elimination of all ballistic missiles, or 50 percent fewer nuclear warheads, the treaty left the two superpowers with forces about 30 percent lower. Each had plenty of firepower: even after the treaty, the two countries would be allowed a total of eighteen thousand nuclear warheads. There were some notable gains: the agreement sliced deeply into the largest Soviet missiles. The number of SS-18s would be cut in half, to 154, and stringent new compliance measures would be imposed to prevent cheating—including twelve types of on-site inspections.²⁰

When Bush and Gorbachev signed the agreement in St. Vladimir’s Hall at the Kremlin on the afternoon of July 31, there was almost no trace of the old dispute over the Strategic Defense Initiative, the single issue on which the Reykjavik summit foundered. Gorbachev, who had protested so long and so loudly about weapons in space, did not mention it once. Bush noted it only in passing. Gorbachev had been urged to build a Soviet Star Wars machine by the military-industrial complex. He did not. Gorbachev had also been urged to build a massive retaliatory missile force—the “asymmetric response”—to overwhelm the American defensive shield. He did not. One of Gorbachev’s greatest accomplishments was in the things he did not do.

An argument was often made in later years that it was the Strategic Defense Initiative that bankrupted the Soviet Union. It is true that Reagan’s vision gave Soviet leaders a fright—it symbolized the unbridled nature of American ambitions and technological superiority. But in the end, Reagan did not build it. The Soviet Union did not build one either. Gorbachev was determined to avoid an arms race in space, and Soviet technology could not possibly have met the challenge. The early plans for a Soviet “Star Wars” never reached fruition. The Soviet system bankrupted itself, and by late 1991, the end was near. When Gorbachev and Bush signed the strategic arms treaty, the Soviet economy was imploding, sucking oxygen out of everything, including the military-industrial complex. The fabled design bureaus and defense factories ran out of cash, and gradually ground to a halt. The powerful riptide of the economy pulled everything down with it.

On August 3, the eve of his annual vacation, Gorbachev offered some private, candid thoughts to Chernyaev. Chernyaev remembers him sitting on the wing of an armchair. “I’m tired as hell, Tolya,” he said. “And tomorrow, right before I leave, I have another government meeting. The harvest, transportation, debts, communications, no money, the market falling apart.” He added, “Everywhere you look, things are in a bad way.” Gorbachev brightened when he remembered the agreement with Yeltsin July 23 on a new union treaty. Gorbachev and Yeltsin had discussed replacing some of the hard-liners, including Yazov, the defense minister, and Kryuchkov, the KGB chief, as they restructured the highest levels of government. Gorbachev planned to formally sign the new union treaty on August 20 at a Kremlin ceremony. “But his overall mood was still dark,” Chernyaev recalled.

“Oh, Tolya,” Gorbachev said, “everything has become so petty, vulgar, provincial. You look at it and think, to hell with it all! But who would I leave it to? I’m so tired.”²¹

Gorbachev took Chernyaev with him on the holiday to Foros in the Crimea. After lunch on Sunday, August 18, Gorbachev went to work on his speech about the new union treaty. He planned to fly back to Moscow on Monday for the ceremony on Tuesday. The treaty would radically decentralize the Soviet Union by giving the republics broad new powers, including control over their own resources.

On Sunday, the hard-liners swung into action.²²

On the grounds of Gorbachev’s resort compound, code-named Zarya, or Dawn, duty officers stood by with a suitcase for command of the Soviet nuclear forces. The suitcase was known as the chemodanchik, or little suitcase, and formally called the Cheget. It connected to a special communications network, Kavkaz, that would enable the Soviet leader to authorize the launching of nuclear weapons. There was also a small portfolio with written codes. In the Soviet command and control system, as it stood in 1991, three leaders—the president, the defense minister and the chief of the General Staff—would have to give a permission to launch. All three were accompanied by the Cheget suitcases. This permission would be passed simultaneously to the General Staff headquarters in Moscow and the three commanders-in-chief: of land-based rockets, naval and air forces. Once permission was given, the actual launch order would be issued by the General Staff to the three commanders-in-chief. Thus, Gorbachev’s suitcase was not a nuclear button but a communications link for monitoring and decision making. There was also the option of switching on the secret Perimeter system. The nuclear suitcase and Perimeter were put into operation shortly before Gorbachev took office. Akhromeyev had played a key role in making sure the modernized system was on duty and ready. But Gorbachev regarded the whole apparatus with disdain. He abhorred the thought of nuclear war.

At the Zarya compound, nine duty officers worked shifts in groups of three, two operators and one officer, squeezed into small rooms in a guest house about one hundred yards from Gorbachev’s lodge. The doors were always closed, and they took turns leaving for meals. When off duty, they left the compound and bunked several miles away at an isolated military lodge, which had only a local phone and no communications.

At 4:30 P.M. on Sunday, Gorbachev talked over the phone with Georgi Shakhnazarov, one of his leading advisers, who was at a nearby compound, about the forthcoming speech.

At 4:32 P.M., Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Kirillov, the commander of the nuclear watch, was startled by a signal from his equipment that all communications links were down. The television in his room went off too. The only working line was a radio-phone connected to a government phone exchange in Mukholatka, a nearby small town. Kirillov called there and asked to be connected to the commanders in Moscow. They said it was impossible, they had no communications with anyone. At 4:35 P.M., another duty officer called Mukholatka and asked why there was no line to Moscow. “Accident,” he was told.

Ten meters away, in the same building as the duty officers, Chernyaev was in his small room, with the windows closed and the air-conditioning running. An assistant interrupted him to say a high-level delegation had arrived unexpectedly from Moscow and was entering Gorbachev’s building. “Something strange is going on,” the assistant said. “Did you know they cut off communications?” Chernyaev immediately picked up the phone to call Moscow. All three receivers at his desk—to the government exchange, the satellite line and the ordinary internal phone for the compound—were dead.

At 4:40 P.M., Kirillov was summoned out of the duty officers’ room. In the hall, he saw General Valentin Varennikov, commander of Soviet ground forces, standing with several other men. Varennikov asked about the status of the communications. Kirillov said the lines were dead. “That’s the way it should be,” Varennikov said, adding that it would remain so for twenty-four hours and that the president knew about it.

Kirillov went back to the room and continued to try to get in touch with Moscow. The government exchange at Mukholatka stopped answering altogether.

The Soviet nuclear forces were cut off from their civilian commander.

At 4:40 P.M., Gorbachev, wearing shorts and a sweater in his study, was interrupted by his chief bodyguard, Vladimir Medvedev, who said a group had come from Moscow, demanding to see him immediately. Gorbachev rarely invited visitors to his working vacation, and was baffled how they had penetrated the tight security around him. Medvedev said they had been let in by Lieutenant General Yuri Plekhanov, chief of the 9th Main Directorate of the KGB, responsible for Gorbachev’s overall protection. One by one, Gorbachev picked up the phones at his desk—the government line, the satellite line, the internal line and the city line. All dead. Finally, he picked up the red phone to the strategic nuclear forces. Silent. Gorbachev found Raisa, who was reading a newspaper on the veranda, told her what was happening and to expect the worst. She was shaken but remained cool, he recalled. They went into the nearby bedroom and called in their daughter, Irina, and her husband, Anatoly, and explained. They all knew Russia’s terrible history of leaders assassinated, imprisoned and exiled. The last reformer, Khrushchev, had been forced from office. “You must know,” Gorbachev told his family, “that I will not give in to any kind of blackmail, nor to any threats of pressure and will not retreat from the positions I have taken.”²³ Raisa said, “It’s up to you to make a decision, but I am with you whatever may happen.”

When Gorbachev climbed the stairs to his second-floor study, he saw the visitors had already entered the small room. They were Varennikov, who had been in charge of troops in Vilnius; Boldin, Gorbachev’s trusted chief of staff; Oleg Shenin, a Politburo member; and Oleg Baklanov, the party secretary for the military-industrial complex. Plekhanov was also with them, but Gorbachev threw him out.

Gorbachev demanded, “Who sent you?”

“The committee,” they said.

“What committee?”

“The committee set up to deal with the emergency situation in the country.”

“Who set it up?” Gorbachev insisted. “I didn’t create it and the Supreme Soviet didn’t create it. Who created it?”

Baklanov said the committee—which became known as the State Committee for the Emergency Situation, known by its Russian acronym GKChP—was established because the country was sliding toward disaster. Baklanov added, “You must sign a decree on the declaration of a state of emergency.” The visitors demanded Gorbachev hand over his powers to the vice president, Gennady Yanayev. Baklanov said Yeltsin had been arrested, then corrected himself and said Yeltsin will be arrested. He also suggested that perhaps Gorbachev’s health had deteriorated terribly. He told Gorbachev that other members of the committee included Yazov, the defense minister; Pugo, the interior minister; Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB; Pavlov, the prime minister; and Yanayev. Most of them had been present in Boldin’s office before the Vilnius crackdown in January. Gorbachev seethed at the personal treachery. “I had promoted all these people—and now they were betraying me!” He refused to sign anything, and told the delegation of plotters to go to hell. Varennikov demanded Gorbachev’s resignation. Gorbachev insulted him by pretending not to remember his name. “Oh yes,” he said. “Valentin Ivanovich, is it?”

Gorbachev said he would not resign.

Boldin, Gorbachev’s longtime chief of staff, said, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, you don’t understand what the situation in the country is.” Gorbachev shot back, “Shut up, you prick! How dare you give me lectures about the situation in the country!”²⁴

Gorbachev swore at them as they left.

For the next three days, Gorbachev and his family were effectively prisoners of their own compound, tormented and sleepless. Gorbachev feared Baklanov’s statement about his health meant they might poison him, so the family and staff refused to accept food from outside and lived off compound supplies. Raisa took charge of looking out for their safety. Gorbachev strolled openly around the compound to show anyone who saw him that he was healthy. Armed guards had appeared at the garage, gates to the compound and the helicopter pad. The exit road was blocked by trucks. They listened to a tiny Sony transistor radio, and heard on the BBC that in Moscow the coup plotters had announced Gorbachev was ill and his duties taken by Yanayev. Gorbachev’s own security detail managed to rig up a television antenna and they saw a press conference in Moscow at which Yanayev appeared drunk. They heard that Yeltsin had called on people to resist the coup. “I was sure, quite convinced that the whole business could not continue for long—they would not get away with it,” Gorbachev said. He and Chernyaev walked outside, where they could not be bugged. Gorbachev called the plotters “agents of suicide” and “scoundrels.” Gorbachev found it hard to believe Yazov and Kryuchkov had betrayed him.

On Monday, August 19, Chernyaev found Gorbachev resting his back, lying on the bed, writing in a notebook. Chernyaev sat down next to him and began swearing about all that had happened in the last day. Gorbachev looked at him sadly, he recalled, and said, “Yes, this may not end well. But you know, in this case, I have faith in Yeltsin. He won’t give in to them, he won’t compromise. But that means blood.” Later in the day, Gorbachev, Chernyaev and Raisa huddled in a small pavilion at the beach, a place they hoped did not have KGB bugs. Raisa tore a few sheets of clean paper from a notebook and gave them to Chernyaev with a pencil. Gorbachev dictated a statement of demands for the outside world: turn on the phones and give me back the plane to return to Moscow and to work. In the middle of the night, they drew the curtains. With help from Irina and Anatoly, Gorbachev made a videotape denouncing the coup plotters. Raisa wrote in her diary, “Whatever happens to us, the people should know the truth about the fate of the President.” They took apart the videocassette and cut the tape into four pieces using manicure scissors. Each piece of tape was wrapped in paper and sealed with tape, hidden around the house until they could smuggle them out. The cassette was reassembled so it would not show that it had been taken apart.

In Moscow on Monday morning at 8 A.M., Colonel Viktor Boldyrev, commander of the division in the General Staff that oversaw the nuclear system, was ordered by his superiors to bring the chemodanchik and the nuclear suitcase duty officers back to Moscow. Boldyrev replied that there was no way to communicate with them. The lines were still down.

In Foros, at 9 A.M., the next regular shift of duty officers for the nuclear suitcase showed up at Gorbachev’s gate. They had been isolated at the military lodge and had no idea what had happened. At the gate, they were informed their passes were no longer valid. A radio played broadcasts from the GKChP. After an hour, they were told to go back.

Boldyrev finally got through to Foros, with help from the KGB, and instructed all the duty officers to return to Moscow with the nuclear suitcase. That afternoon, at 2 P.M., the officers gathered up their equipment—including the president’s Cheget and the portfolio with the codes—and boarded a jeep for the airfield. They flew back to Moscow on Gorbachev’s plane, the one that was supposed to bring him to the Kremlin for a ceremony signing the new union treaty on Tuesday. The duty officers were met in Moscow by representatives of the General Staff, who took the suitcase.²⁵

Yeltsin had been elected president of the Russian republic, the largest of the internal Soviet republics, in June. Combative and iron willed, he rallied the people of Moscow against the plotters. At his dacha on the morning of August 19, Yeltsin and a few allies wrote a statement of resistance. Then he donned a bulletproof vest under his suit, and sped into town. Tanks were rolling toward the nineteen-story building on the banks of the Moscow River known as the Russian White House, where Yeltsin had his offices. Yeltsin walked out of the White House toward a mass of people who had come to defend the building. As journalist Michael Dobbs recalled, “A roar went up from the crowd when they spotted the towering figure of the Russian president striding purposefully down the ceremonial steps in front of the White House.” Yeltsin climbed up Tank No. 110 of the Taman Division and read out his statement. “The use of force is absolutely unacceptable,” he declared. “We are absolutely sure that our compatriots will not permit the tyranny and lawlessness of the putschists, who have lost all sense of shame and honor, to be confirmed. We appeal to military personnel to display their high sense of civil courage and refuse to participate in the reactionary coup.”²⁶

The coup attempt collapsed Wednesday, August 21. Tanks and troops were poised for action on the streets of Moscow, but the KGB’s crack special forces troops, who were supposed to attack the White House, refused to do so.

Gorbachev lost control of the nuclear suitcase, but the nuclear commanders in the military kept their cool. At least one of the three who would have to launch an attack, Air Force General Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, was openly against the putsch. He recalled in his memoir that he told Yazov that the other two commanders-in-chief, of the rocket forces and the naval forces, also backed him. Most likely, they would not have followed any orders from the clownish coup plotters.²⁷ Yarynich, who knew well the workings of nuclear command and control, was inside the defense ministry during the days of the coup. “The vast number of people in the military were awaiting positive changes in the country, sympathized with the changes, and did not fall into a panic,” he said. “The military understood the danger of rocking the boat in this storm, and did everything to prevent the boat from keeling over.”²⁸

As Gorbachev flew triumphantly back to Moscow, Chernyaev recalled a sense of euphoria on the plane. But when Gorbachev landed at Vnukovo Airport at 2 A.M., August 22, it became clear the tension had taken a terrible toll on his family. On the last day in Foros, Raisa had suffered a small stroke. In the car from the airport, Gorbachev’s daughter Irina suffered a nervous breakdown, throwing herself on the seat in wracking sobs as her husband, Anatoly, tried to console her.

“I have come back from Foros to another country, and I myself am a different man now,” Gorbachev declared. But Gorbachev did not realize how deeply the country had been transformed in those three days. The old system—the party and state that shaped his life and that he had led to glasnost and perestroika—was now dead. Gorbachev later admitted, “At the time I was not yet fully aware of the extent of the tragedy.” Perhaps shell-shocked or preoccupied with his family’s trauma, Gorbachev fumbled. He did not go directly to the White House, where crowds were waiting, nor to the huge victory demonstration the next day. He was unaware of how people had changed, wanting a complete break with the old system. Gorbachev told a press conference August 22 that the Communist Party remained a “progressive force,” despite the betrayal of its bosses. Two days later, under pressure from Yeltsin, he retreated, resigning as general secretary of the party and calling for dissolution of the Central Committee. Yeltsin suspended actions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was still president, but the country was rapidly disintegrating as the republics asserted independence, some before and some after the coup attempt.²⁹

Chernyaev was working in the offices of the Central Committee on Old Square one day right after the coup when he heard the public address system urgently instruct everyone to leave immediately. He ignored the announcement and worked on for several hours. Then, when he reached the door to leave, he saw crowds outside. For his personal safety, he was evacuated through an underground tunnel to the Kremlin. The offices of the Central Committee were turned over to the Moscow city government as thousands cheered. The party heaved its last breath.

Sergei Akhromeyev, who had come to those same Central Committee offices six years earlier and promised to work with Gorbachev, who had been through so much with Gorbachev on arms control, pulling troops out of Afghanistan, revising the military doctrine and negotiating at Reykjavik, was despondent. He did not know about the coup attempt in advance, but once it began, he flew back to Moscow from his vacation and helped prepare the military for the assault on the White House that never came. Akhromeyev was not one of the original coup plotters, but he gave them an assist. After the putsch collapsed, Akhromeyev hanged himself by a white nylon cord in his Kremlin office. He left a note on his desk.

I cannot live when my motherland is dying and everything that I ever believed in is being destroyed. My age and previous life give me the right to leave this life. I fought to the end.³⁰