Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (99 page)

At the end of July 1979, Mrs Thatcher saw Haig’s successor, General Bernard Rogers, who suggested that, with the death of the ailing Brezhnev which was expected soon, the new Soviet leadership would face ‘the temptation to test the West’. He predicted that 1982 would be ‘the critical year for the West’, and told Mrs Thatcher that NATO must reach an INF decision by Christmas.
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Three days later, she wrote to Carter to agree that the INF decision must come before the end of the year: ‘You can count on our support.’
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In September, the Cabinet agreed that Britain should accept 144 of the 464 GLCMs planned for Europe. (A further sixteen were later accepted, at West Germany’s request.)

In purely domestic political terms, Mrs Thatcher’s decision did not prove difficult; nor was she at odds with political colleagues. What was important, both at home and abroad, was her tone, very different from the conciliatory one of the Labour years. She injected a sense of urgency and danger into all the discussions. ‘We in Europe have unrivalled freedom,’ she told her first party conference as prime minister in October. ‘But we must never take it for granted. The dangers to it are greater now than they have ever been since 1945. The threat of the Soviet Union is ever present. It is growing continually.’
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She spread the same word on the Continent, making the Soviet threat a leading theme of her Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture in Luxembourg later that month: ‘The Russians have equipped themselves with military forces whose capabilities and philosophy are better matched to the demands of an offensive than of a defensive policy and whose ambitions are global in scale. Nor is the Russian challenge only military. It is also political and ideological.’
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She was frank when meeting the enemy. In May 1979, Cecil Parkinson, then a trade minister, took his Soviet counterpart, who was in London to launch the Soviet National Exhibition at Earls Court, to call on her:

He had been the Trade Minister for some twenty-one years and he had only one joke, which was ‘Every time I come here, you have a new agriculture/trade etc. minister.’ When I took him to see the PM he said, ‘Every time I come here, you have a new prime minister.’ She said, ‘I can’t promise to serve for as long as Mr Brezhnev, but I’m not without ambition.’

And then she said, ‘You know my views about Russia and Communism, but we are the hosts of this exhibition and I will be coming to it.’ He looked surprised. She said, ‘I don’t say these things for effect. I mean what I say and if I say I’ll come, I’ll come. And if you say you’ll do something I’ll expect you to do it. And if we both keep our word, we’ll get on famously.’
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She duly attended the show, telling the press, as she walked round the exhibits, that, despite her presence, she was still the Iron Lady.
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At Mrs Thatcher’s supper with the Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin at Moscow airport
_on
her way to the Tokyo summit in June, the record shows a similar tough playfulness: ‘Mr Kosygin told the Prime Minister that … the Soviet Union was a peace-loving country which did not produce all the massive armaments which the Prime Minister attributed to them … The Prime Minister told Mr Kosygin that he should not be so modest. Nobody who had seen the Soviet tanks and missiles which were paraded through Red Square would underestimate the Soviet Union’s capacity.’ She also tackled Kosygin about problems for the Soviet Union in the Islamic world: ‘When the Prime Minister referred to current unrest in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mr Kosygin made no comment.’
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Mrs Thatcher had more than held her own with Kosygin, but she remained extremely sensitive over her relationship with the Soviet Union. Shortly after this encounter, the
Daily Telegraph
reported that Kosygin had invited Mrs Thatcher to visit Moscow again and that she had responded positively.
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Kosygin had indeed made a very informal, passing reference to the Prime Minister returning to Moscow and Mrs Thatcher, equally informally, had replied that she would be glad to. She had intended this reply to be more polite than substantive and certainly not for public consumption. ‘The Prime Minister was much angered by the leak,’ wrote Stephen Band, a Foreign Office official, to a colleague in the Embassy in Moscow, ‘and the FCO were asked to state formally that they were not responsible for it … The incident has not helped FCO/No 10 relations, which are already not good.’
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Reflecting a common Foreign Office frustration, Band later noted that ‘Ministers, and the Prime Minister in particular, are extremely conscious of the platform on which they won the election and of the right-wing interest groups both inside and outside Parliament to which they feel they owe allegiance. They are therefore
determined not to be seen
publicly
to be getting too close to the Russians too fast.’
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In fact, Mrs Thatcher’s suspicions of the Soviets went far beyond any allegiance to right-wing groups. She considered them untrustworthy and intrinsically hostile, a view that would soon be borne out by events.

Almost exactly six months after Mrs Thatcher’s meeting with Kosygin, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, on Christmas Day 1979. The existing Communist leader, whose regime showed signs of falling apart, was murdered, and a new puppet ruler, Babrak Karmal, was installed. Soviet tanks soon occupied the streets of Kabul.

When Mrs Thatcher had visited President Carter in Washington before Christmas, he had told her privately that Soviet troop numbers were building up on the Afghan border.
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On 20 December, the Foreign Office had summoned a Soviet diplomat to express British concern, but had been told that no interference was planned. Once the invasion had taken place, Mrs Thatcher wrote a formal letter of protest to Brezhnev, beginning, ‘I have been profoundly disturbed at recent developments in Afghanistan …’
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But although her anger was real enough, ‘disturbed’ was not really the right word. The invasion fitted with her expectations of Soviet behaviour. Robert Conquest wrote to her office: ‘For anyone with an ounce of sense, there is no lesson to be learnt from the Afghan events:
they merely confirm, in dramatic fashion, what was known to many and should have been known to all of those concerned with Western
policy. For the time being, those who have been dangerously in error about Soviet motivations and intentions
have been shocked into facing reality
’ (Mrs Thatcher’s underlinings).
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This was her view too. She summoned the Soviet Ambassador and told him that the invasion of Afghanistan was even worse than that of Czechoslovakia in 1968, because Afghanistan had not been a Soviet satellite.
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Michael Alexander, who was with her as the details of the invasion came through, noted her reaction to the news, and recorded that his own was different: ‘she interpreted the invasion as an exercise in Russian expansionism … I must confess that I argued with her that night that the invasion was if anything an act of desperation on the part of the Russians – rather out of keeping with their usual caution. The Russians were going in because they could not control the situation in any other way. That struck me as something over which we should not lose too much sleep.’
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The disinclination to lose sleep over something always irritated the hyperactive Mrs Thatcher. To her, the enemy was now in plain view. She felt vindicated, and her blood was up. Her arguments were now listened to more carefully, and the case for deploying GLCMs and Pershing IIs in Europe became easier to make. President Carter was one of those whom
Conquest described as ‘shocked into facing reality’. He suspended efforts to ratify SALT II, imposed an embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union and used his State of the Union address at the end of January 1980 to say that the Afghan invasion ‘could pose the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War’. Mrs Thatcher was keen to help him wake up the West. When Carrington wrote to her about the Western reaction to the invasion, to say, rather languidly, that ‘It may of course take time to work out the most appropriate positive steps to take, ’ she wrote a wordless ‘!’ on his letter.
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But she herself did not have a very clear idea of how best to react. Her immediate response was to see if the news might enable the West to bring Iran, which, two months earlier, had occupied the US Embassy in Teheran, holding fifty-two diplomats hostage, back into the fold. Partly motivated by the British commercial interest in avoiding the trade sanctions against Iran which President Carter sought, she argued that Afghanistan made the UN sanctions resolution against Iran inappropriate. She told the Foreign Office to make sure that the ‘enormity of the act’ of invasion ‘was not lost to sight’, but without suggesting how.
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The most obvious way of ostracizing the Soviet Union was to try to boycott the Olympic Games which were due to be held in Moscow that summer, an idea encouraged by the United States. When she and Carrington met to discuss this, Mrs Thatcher urged a boycott, but also said that the government could not forbid athletes to take part if they wanted. With magnificent world-weariness, Carrington commented that ‘perhaps the best outcome would be if the Government recommended against participation but the various committees, and the participants themselves, decided to go to Moscow none the less.’
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This, in fact, is what happened. Carter forbade American athletes to take part, but was not followed by other countries. Mrs Thatcher lobbied Helmut Schmidt and others to hunt for an alternative Olympic venue, and unsuccessful efforts were made to see if the Games could move to Montreal. Mrs Thatcher was partly motivated by the need to console potential American hurt feelings about Iran. She told OD Committee
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that because Britain was opposed to sanctions on Iran it should be extra-supportive of the United States over the Olympic boycott.
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Initially the President was
unimpressed by the response in London and elsewhere to the Soviet invasion. ‘UK and other Europeans reaction to SU/Afghan situation are
very
weak,’ he wrote on a memo from the National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
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But, as Brzezinski later explained, Carter’s view towards Mrs Thatcher’s government soon shifted: ‘all things considered we were very happy with their actions. Far more so than most European nations.’
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A speech Mrs Thatcher delivered in the Commons at the end of January, condemning Soviet aggression and calling for Europe to stand behind the United States, was particularly welcome in the White House.
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‘Frankly, I consider it to be the best statement on this subject,’ Brzezinski wrote to the British Ambassador, Nicko Henderson. ‘I say this with heavy heart, having made some myself.’
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While Americans were generally dismayed by the European reaction, Mrs Thatcher, reported
Time
magazine, was ‘one outstanding exception’.
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A series of letters were exchanged between the Prime Minister and Sir Denis Follows, the President of the British Olympic Committee. But no amount of rhetoric from Mrs Thatcher about the example of the Berlin Games helping Nazi propaganda in 1936 or the fact that, by going to Moscow, athletes ‘would seem to condone an international crime’
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had any effect. The Olympic Committee ignored the parliamentary vote in favour of a boycott and went ahead with its plans for the Games. Further embarrassment was caused because the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, was president of the International Equestrian Federation, and therefore had originally expected to go to Moscow. At the end of April, he signed a statement by the International Olympic Sports Federation condemning the boycott. It is understood that he wrote privately to Mrs Thatcher to apologize and explain that he had tried to tone down the statement. Mrs Thatcher, who by this time knew the form about writing to royalty (‘With my humble duty, I am, Sir, your Royal Highness’s obedient servant …’), was nevertheless quite tart in her reaction to the idea that politics could be kept out of the matter: ‘Alas, everything in connection with the USSR has a political flavour. That unfortunately is the problem.’
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In the end, the Olympic boycott went off at half-cock. Some British athletes, encouraged by their official bodies, went to Moscow. Others, following Mrs Thatcher’s urging, decided to stay at home. The Games were no great success, but nor was the boycott.

Much the same no-score draw was achieved by short-term Western reaction to the invasion in general. On the one hand, the Russians had made a mistake, in both propaganda and military terms, from which Soviet Communism never fully recovered. On the other hand, the West’s response was largely ineffective. Certain decisions with huge and controversial
consequences were made – the arming of Afghan mujahidin resistance to the Soviets, and a much greater Western support for increasing the military power of President Zia’s Islamist regime in Pakistan (about which Mrs Thatcher professed herself ‘a little unhappy’)
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– but the more immediate acts were inconsequential, and often showed the West divided.

As she tried to encourage a robust and co-ordinated alliance response, Mrs Thatcher was dismayed by much of what she found. Against her copy of the communiqué on Afghanistan from the Franco-German summit at the beginning of February, she wrote: ‘!!! All
words
’ (underlined three times). When she met Helmut Schmidt later in the month, she expressed herself ‘bitterly disappointed’ by the failure of the EEC to support Carter and his Olympic boycott. Schmidt told her that he thought ‘There is now a clear and present danger of a Third World War.’
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She failed in her attempt to implement Carter’s request for an emergency NATO summit on Afghanistan, and the truth was that, although she supported Carter’s desire to be strong, she doubted his tactics and skill. When she discussed the proposed NATO meeting with Schmidt, she admitted that she questioned ‘the wisdom of the proposal but felt it necessary to support President Carter’.
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She feared the summit would highlight disunity. In June, President Giscard decided to take the withdrawal of some Soviet military units from Afghanistan as ‘un element nouveau et positif’, and to make France the intermediary in possible discussions between the West and the Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko. Passing this on to Mrs Thatcher, Michael Alexander wrote: ‘Giscard was very prompt in circulating this message.’ Mrs Thatcher scribbled: ‘Yes – he is – half way to Neville Chamberlain.’
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