Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (88 page)

What I heard was reassuring. President Reagan did not pretend that they yet knew where the research could finally lead. But he emphasized that keeping up with the United States would impose an economic strain on the Soviet Union. He argued that there had to be a practical limit as to how far the Soviet Government could push their people down the road of austerity. As so often, he had instinctively grasped the key to the whole question. What would the effects be of SDI on the Soviet Union? In fact, as he foresaw, the Soviets did recoil in the face of the challenge of SDI, finally renouncing the goal of military superiority which alone had given them the confidence to resist the demands for reform in their own system. But of course this still lay in the future.

What I wanted now was an agreed position on SDI to which both the President and I could lend our support, even though our long-term view of its potential was different. I now jotted down, while talking to National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, the four points which seemed to me to be crucial.

My officials then filled in the details. The President and I agreed a text which set out the policy.

The main section of my statement reads:

I subsequently learnt that George Shultz thought that I had secured too great a concession on the Americans’ part in the wording; but in fact it gave them and us a clear and defensible line and helped reassure the European members of NATO. A good day’s work.

March 1985 saw the death of Mr Chernenko and the succession of Mr Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership. Once again I attended a Moscow funeral: the weather was, if anything, even colder than at Yuri Andropov’s. I had almost an hour’s talk with Mr Gorbachev that evening in the Kremlin. The atmosphere was more formal than at Chequers and the silent, sardonic presence of Mr Gromyko did not help. But I was able to explain to them the implications of the policy I had agreed with President Reagan the previous December at Camp David. It was clear that SDI was now the main preoccupation of the Soviets in arms control.

Mr Gorbachev brought, as we had expected, a new style to the Soviet Government. He spoke openly of the terrible state of the Soviet economy, though at this stage he was still relying on the methods associated with Mr Andropov’s drive for greater efficiency rather than radical reform. As the year wore on, there was no evidence of improvement in conditions in the Soviet Union. Indeed, as our new – and first-class – ambassador to Moscow, Bryan Cartledge, pointed out in one of his first dispatches, it was a matter of, ‘jam tomorrow and meanwhile, no vodka today’.

A distinct chill entered into Britain’s relations with the Soviet Union as a result of expulsions which I authorized of Soviet officials who had been spying. The defection of Oleg Gordievsky, a former top KGB officer, meant that the Soviets knew how well informed we were about their activities. I had several meetings with Mr Gordievsky and repeatedly tried to have the Soviets release his family to join him in the West. (They eventually came after the failed coup in August 1991.)

In November President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev had their first meeting in Geneva. Not much of substance came out of it but a good personal rapport quickly developed between the two leaders (though not, sadly, between their wives).

During 1986 Mr Gorbachev showed great subtlety in playing on western public opinion by bringing forward tempting, but unacceptable, proposals on arms control. Late in the year it was agreed that President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev – with their Foreign ministers – should meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, to discuss substantive proposals.

In retrospect, the Reykjavik summit on that weekend of 11 and 12 October can be seen to have a quite different significance than most of the commentators at the time realized. Ever greater Soviet concessions were made during the summit: they agreed for the first time that the British and French deterrents should be excluded from the INF negotiations; and that cuts in strategic nuclear weapons should leave each side with equal numbers. They also made significant concessions on INF numbers. As the summit drew to an end President Reagan was proposing an agreement by which the whole arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons – bombers, longrange Cruise and ballistic missiles – would be halved within five years and the most powerful of these weapons, strategic ballistic missiles, eliminated altogether within ten. Mr Gorbachev was even more ambitious: he wanted the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons by the end of the ten-year period.

But then suddenly, at the very end, the trap was sprung. President Reagan had conceded that during the ten-year period both sides would agree not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, though development and testing compatible with the treaty would be allowed. Mr Gorbachev said that the whole thing depended on confining SDI to the laboratory – a much higher restriction that was likely to kill the prospect of an effective SDI. The President rejected the deal and the summit broke up. Its failure was widely portrayed as the result of the foolish intransigence of an elderly American President, obsessed with an unrealizable dream. In fact, President Reagan’s refusal to trade away SDI for the apparent near fulfilment of his dream of a nuclear-free world was crucial to the victory over communism. He called the Soviets’ bluff. The Russians may have scored an immediate propaganda victory when the talks broke down. But they had lost the game and I have no doubt that they knew it.
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For they must have realized by now that they could not hope to match the United States in the competition for military technological supremacy and many of the concessions they made at Reykjavik proved impossible for them to retrieve.

My own reaction when I heard how far the Americans had been prepared to go was as if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet. The whole system of nuclear deterrence which had kept the peace for forty years was close to being abandoned. Had the President’s proposals gone through, they would also have effectively killed off the Trident missile, forcing us to acquire a different system if we were to keep an independent nuclear deterrent. Somehow I had to get the Americans back onto the firm ground of a credible policy of nuclear deterrence. I arranged to fly to the United States to see President Reagan.

I have never felt more conscious than in the preparation for this visit of how much hung on my relationship with the President. I received the fullest briefing from the military about the implications of a defence strategy involving the elimination of all ballistic missiles.

I flew into Washington on the afternoon of Friday 14 November. That evening I practised my arguments in meetings with George Shultz and Cap Weinberger. I saw George Bush for breakfast the following morning and then left for Camp David where I was met by President Reagan.

To my great relief I found that the President quickly understood why I was so deeply concerned about what had happened in Reykjavik. He agreed the draft statement which we had finalized after talking to George Shultz the previous day and which I subsequently issued at my press conference. This stated our policy on arms control after Reykjavik. It ran as follows:

I had reason to be well pleased.

It is easy to imagine what the effect of the Camp David statement must have been in Moscow. It meant the end of the Soviets’ hope of using SDI and President Reagan’s dream of a nuclear-weapons-free world to advance their strategy of denuclearizing Europe, leaving us vulnerable to military blackmail. It also demonstrated that, whether they liked it or not, I was able to have some influence on President Reagan on fundamental issues of alliance policy. Mr Gorbachev, therefore, had as much reason to do business with me as I with him, and it is no surprise that I was soon invited to Moscow.

I prepared myself very thoroughly. On Friday 27 February 1987 I held an all-day seminar on the Soviet Union at Chequers. I also read through in detail the – usually long and indigestible – speeches which Mr Gorbachev had been making and I felt that something new was emerging from them.

I was not going to Moscow as the representative of the West, but it was clearly very important that other western leaders should know the line I intended to take and that I should gauge their sentiments beforehand. I knew President Reagan’s mind and therefore limited myself to sending him a lengthy message.

I also arranged to meet President Mitterrand and then Chancellor Kohl on Monday 23 March. President Mitterrand believed, as I did, that Mr Gorbachev was prepared to go a long way to change the system. But the French President knew too that the Soviets respected toughness. He said that we must resist the attempt to denuclearize Europe. I warmly agreed.

Nor did I find any disagreement with Chancellor Kohl.

My last public pronouncement about the Soviet Union before I left had been my speech to the Conservative Central Council in Torquay on Saturday 21 March. It would have been easy to tone down my criticism of the Soviet regime. But I was not prepared to do so. Too often in the past western leaders had placed the search for trouble-free relations with foreign autocrats above plain speaking of the truth. I said:

I sat across the table from Mr Gorbachev in the Kremlin, a long flower vase between us. I was accompanied by just one member of my staff and an interpreter. It was soon clear that he intended to take me to task for my Central Council speech. He said that when the Soviet leaders had studied it they had felt the breeze of the 1940s and ′50s. It reminded them of Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri (about the ‘Iron Curtain’) and the Truman doctrine.

I did not apologize. I said that there was one point which I did not make in my speech but which I would make now. This was that I knew of no evidence that the Soviet Union had given up the Brezhnev doctrine or the goal of securing world domination for communism. We were ready to fight the battle of ideas: indeed this was the right way to fight. But instead we in the West saw Soviet subversion in South Yemen, in Ethiopia, in Mozambique, in Angola and in Nicaragua. We saw Vietnam being supported by the Soviet Union in its conquest of Cambodia. We saw Afghanistan occupied by Soviet troops. We naturally drew the conclusion that the goal of worldwide communism was still being pursued. This was a crucial consideration for the West. We recognized that Mr Gorbachev
was committed to internal reforms in the Soviet Union. But we had to ask ourselves whether this would lead to changes in external policies.

I went on to show that I had read Mr Gorbachev’s speeches with as much care as he seemed to have read mine. I told him that I had found his January Central Committee speech fascinating. But I wanted to know whether the internal changes he was making would lead to changes in the Soviet Union’s foreign policies as well. I added that I had not expected that we would have generated quite so much heat so early in the discussion. Mr Gorbachev replied with a roar of laughter that he welcomed ‘acceleration’ and was pleased we were speaking frankly.

The conversation went back and forth, not just covering regional conflicts but going right to the heart of what differentiated the western and communist systems. This I described as being a distinction between societies in which power was dispersed and societies based on central control and coercion.