James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Undeterred, Massie turned to Bill Cohen, one of the senators she had befriended. Cohen and McFarlane were old friends. For a time in the late 1970s, McFarlane had served as a Republican staff aide to the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which Cohen was a Republican member. Massie told Cohen that what she had seen and heard in Moscow seemed to go beyond the usual Soviet truculence. The United States should do something to try to turn things around, she said. Cohen called the new national security adviser, who agreed to see Massie. She relayed to the White House Bogdanov’s mutterings about the possibility of war. The two governments needed to find ways to start talking again, Massie argued. Even small steps, specific steps, would help. She offered to go back to Moscow to try to negotiate a new cultural agreement between the two countries to replace the one suspended when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan.

To McFarlane, Massie’s report of the mood in Moscow was merely one more sign that the climate between Washington and Moscow was becoming dangerous. He had already seen other, more serious indications. That fall, Reagan and his administration were confronted with what became known as the war scare of 1983.

The CIA began receiving reports that the Soviet Union believed the Reagan administration might be preparing to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The principal source was Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB’s resident, or station chief, in London, who nine years earlier had been recruited by MI6, the British intelligence service. Gordievsky told his British handlers that during the first year of the Reagan administration, Andropov, then the head of the KGB, had ordered Soviet intelligence officials throughout the world to monitor American activities for signs of preparations for war; he was afraid the new team would launch a nuclear first strike. In the fall of 1983, Gordievsky reported that Soviet officials had grown even more alarmed as they observed the United States and NATO countries begin preparing for the military exercise known as Able Archer 83. This was a test of the procedures for how the NATO chain of command would obtain approval from member countries for the release of a nuclear weapon. Under the original plans, Reagan himself was going to take part in the exercise. 8

The reports that the Soviets were afraid they were about to be attacked began flowing into the White House in the early autumn of 1983. McFarlane at first dismissed the accounts; he believed they represented a Soviet attempt to create divisions between the United States and its allies before the deployment of American Pershing missiles in Europe later that fall. But other reports from the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe and from European diplomats seemed to corroborate what Gordievsky was saying: Soviet officials were openly expressing anxiety about a possible American attack. McFarlane took these accounts seriously enough to tell Reagan not to participate in Able Archer, and the exercise went forward without him. 9

During Able Archer, NATO forces changed their message formats in a way that Soviet intelligence officials had not seen in previous NATO exercises. In the practice drill, NATO also moved imaginary forces up several stages of readiness to high alert. Gordievsky reported that the KGB, in monitoring Able Archer, believed that genuine forces had gone on high alert and took seriously the idea that NATO might be on the verge of a preemptive attack. Gordievsky himself began to worry; he was growing increasingly upset with his British handlers and the CIA. “It was, ‘Jesus, what’s happening? I’m working for you guys in the name of peace, not in the name of confrontation and war,’” recalled Fritz Ermarth, who later studied the Able Archer episode for the CIA. “He was disturbed by the trend of events and the atmospherics and was ready to place some of the blame for this on U.S. policy.” 10

In Washington, CIA director William Casey was carrying Gordievsky’s reports about a Soviet war scare directly to Reagan and McFarlane. Some of the more hawkish Soviet experts in the U.S. intelligence community, including Ermarth, thought at the time that Casey should not have been passing along the alarmist messages. “I was concerned that they [Soviet officials] were doing influence operations here and in Europe, getting messages through, that they were trying to spook us,” said Ermarth in an interview. “I was mad at Casey that he hadn’t sufficiently snake-checked this thing. Not that Gordievsky wasn’t being honest.”

In early 1984, under Ermarth’s direction, the CIA did a Special National Intelligence Estimate that dismissed the “war scare” as merely a Soviet propaganda campaign. “We believe strongly that Soviet actions are not inspired by, and Soviet leaders do not perceive, a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States… ,” it concluded. “Recent Soviet ‘war scare’ propaganda… is aimed primarily at discrediting U.S. policies and mobilizing ‘peace’ pressures among various audiences abroad.” However, a study by British intelligence that same year determined that Soviet officials had taken seriously the possibility of a nuclear strike against them. Several years later, another review by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board similarly found that Soviet officials had not been merely posturing but had, in fact, been genuinely afraid of war. 11

Although the intelligence community was divided on the significance of the “war scare,” the episode had a clear and indisputable impact on Reagan himself. One day in late November 1983, at the end of his morning intelligence briefing, the president asked McFarlane if the Soviets really thought the United States was planning a nuclear attack. “How could they believe this?” he wondered. McFarlane reminded the president that the Soviets were edgy because the new Pershing missiles the United States was installing in Europe could hit Soviet targets within seven minutes, much more quickly than intercontinental missiles from the United States. Reagan himself later admitted to growing concern during this period with how Soviet officials viewed the United States. In his 1990 autobiography, he said that by the end of 1983, he had begun to realize “that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike.” 12

When the Reagan administration and its allies began deploying the new Pershing missiles in Europe in late 1983, the Soviet Union, in response, suspended participation in all arms-control talks with the United States. According to McFarlane, in December, just before leaving Washington to spend Christmas in California, Reagan said he would like to find some way to start new high-level talks with Moscow. As secretary of state, Shultz had been gently encouraging the president for more than a year to establish more regular and direct contact with Soviet leaders. At the end of the year, over a round of golf in Palm Springs, Reagan and Shultz talked at length about the importance of opening new channels to the Soviet leadership. 13

There was a political dimension to Reagan’s growing eagerness for dialogue. He was preparing to run for reelection in 1984, and his Democratic opponents were already beginning to seize upon the heightened tensions with the Soviet Union as a possible campaign issue. On January 3, 1984, in a speech to the National Press Club, former vice president Walter F. Mondale, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, warned that under the Reagan administration, the “risk of nuclear war” had increased. “It’s three minutes to midnight, and we are scarcely talking to the Soviets at all,” Mondale asserted. He promised that if he were elected president, he would have “regular contacts” with Moscow. “Mr. Reagan may become the first president since Hoover never to have met with his Soviet counterpart,” Mondale declared. 14