Frederick Forsyth: The Negotiator

Drawn up in front of the podium was an honor guard of the Militia, the civil police from the Interior Ministry, the MVD; and another drawn from the Border Guards Directorate of the KGB. In an attempt to add the common touch, two hundred engineers, technicians, and members of the airport staff formed a crowd on the fourth side of the hollow square. But the focal point for the speaker was the battery of TV cameras, still photographers, and press placed between the two honor guards. For this was a momentous occasion.

Shortly after his inauguration the previous January, John Cormack, surprise winner of the preceding November’s election, had indicated he would like to meet the Soviet leader and would be prepared to fly to Moscow to do so. Mikhail Gorbachev had not been slow to agree and to his gratification had found over the previous three days that this tall, astringent, but basically humane American academic appeared to be a man-to borrow Mrs. Thatcher’s phrase-“with whom he could do business.”

So he had taken a gamble, against the advice of his security and ideology advisers. He had acceded to the President’s personal request that he, the American, be permitted to address the Soviet Union on live television without submitting his script for approval. Virtually no Soviet television is “live”; almost everything shown is carefully edited, prepared, vetted, and finally passed as fit for consumption.

Before agreeing to Cormack’s strange request, Mikhail Gorbachev had consulted with the State Television experts. They had been as surprised as he, but pointed out that, first, the American would be understood by only a tiny fraction of Soviet citizens until the translation came through (and that could be sanitized if he went too far) and, second, that the American’s speech could be held on an eight- or ten-second loop so that transmission (both sound and vision) would actually take place a few seconds after delivery; and if he really went too far, there could be a sudden breakdown in transmission. Finally it was agreed that if the General Secretary wished to effect such a breakdown, he had but to scratch his chin with a forefinger and the technicians would do the rest. This could not apply to the three American TV crews or the BBC from Britain, but that would not matter, as their material would never reach the Soviet people.

Ending his oration with an expression of good will toward the American people and his abiding hope for peace between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., Mikhail Gorbachev turned toward his guest. John Cormack rose. The Russian gestured to the lectern and the microphone and made way, seating himself to one side of the center spot. The President stepped behind the microphone. He had no notes in view. He just lifted his head, stared straight at the eye of the Soviet TV camera, and began to speak.

“Men, women, and children of the U.S.S.R., listen to me.”

In his office Marshal Kozlov jerked forward in his chair, staring intently at the screen. On the podium Mikhail Gorbachev’s eyebrows flickered once before he regained his composure. In a booth behind the Soviet camera a young man who could pass for a Harvard graduate put his hand over a microphone and muttered a question to a senior civil servant beside him, who shook his head. For John Cormack was not speaking in English at all; he was speaking in fluent Russian.

Although not a Russian speaker, he had before coming to the U.S.S.R. memorized in the privacy of his bedroom in the White House a five-hundred-word speech in Russian, rehearsing himself through tapes and speech-coaching until he could deliver the speech with total fluency and perfect accent while not understanding a word of the language. Even for a former Ivy League professor it was a remarkable feat.

“Fifty years ago this, your country, your beloved Motherland, was invaded in war. Your menfolk fought and died as soldiers or lived like wolves in their own forests. Your women and children dwelt in cellars and fed off scraps. Millions perished. Your land was devastated. Although this never happened to my country, I give you my word I can understand how much you must hate and fear war.

“For forty-five years we both, Russians and Americans, have built up walls between ourselves, convincing ourselves that the other would be the next aggressor. And we have built up mountains-mountains of steel, of guns, of tanks, of ships and planes and bombs. And the walls of lies have been built ever higher to justify the mountains of steel. There are those who say we need these weapons because one day they will be needed so that we can destroy each other.

“ Noh, ya skazhu: mi po-idyom drugim putyom .”

There was an almost audible gasp from the audience at Vnukovo. In saying “But I say, we will/must go another way,” President Cormack had borrowed a phrase from Lenin known to every schoolchild in the U.S.S.R. In Russian the word put means a road, path, way, or course to be followed. He then continued the play on words by reverting to the meaning of “road.”

“I refer to the road of gradual disarmament and of peace. We have only one planet to live on, and a beautiful planet. We can either live on it together or die on it together.”

The door of Marshal Kozlov’s office opened quietly and then closed. An officer in his early fifties, another Kozlov protégé and the ace of his planning staff, stood by the door and silently watched the screen in the corner. The American President was finishing.

“It will not be an easy road. There will be rocks and holes. But at its end lies peace with security for both of us. For if we each have enough weapons to defend ourselves, but not enough to attack each other, and if each one knows this and is allowed to verify it, then we could pass on to our children and grandchildren a world that is truly free of that awful fear that we have known these past fifty years. If you will walk down that road with me, then I on behalf of the people of America will walk it with you. And on this, Mikhail Sergeevich, I give you my hand.”

President Cormack turned to Secretary Gorbachev and held out his right hand. Although himself an expert at public relations, the Russian had no choice but to rise and extend his hand. Then, with a broad grin, he bear-hugged the American with his left arm.

The Russians are a people capable of great paranoia and xenophobia but also capable of great emotionalism. It was the airport workers who broke the silence first. There was an outbreak of ardent clapping, then the cheering started, and in a few seconds the fur shapkas started flying through the air as the civilians, normally drilled to perfection, went out of control. The Militiamen came next; gripping their rifles with their left hands in the at-ease position, they started waving their red-banded gray caps by the peak as they cheered.

The KGB troops glanced at their commander beside the podium: General Vladimir Kryuchkov, Chairman of the KGB. Uncertain what to do as the Politburo stood up, he, too, rose to clap with the rest. The Border Guards took this as a cue (wrongly, as it turned out) and followed the Militiamen in cheering. Somewhere across five time zones, 80 million Soviet men and women were doing something similar.

“ Chort voz’mi …” Marshal Kozlov reached for the remote control and snapped off the TV set.

“Our beloved General Secretary,” murmured Major General Zemskov smoothly. The marshal nodded grimly several times. First the dire forebodings of the Kaminsky report, and now this. He rose, came around his desk, and took the report off the table.

“You are to take this, and you are to read it,” he said. “It is classified Top Secret and it stays that way. There are only two copies in existence and I retain the other one. You are to pay particular attention to what Kaminsky says in his Conclusion.”