James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

From time to time in recent months Soviet officials have approached American officials or private citizens who are in touch with senior officials in our government and offered comments which, they suggest, represent your views…. However, the comments received in this manner have not always been consistent and thus I have difficulty determining to what degree they in fact represent your views. 4

Gorbachev said he liked the idea of a confidential channel for unofficial messages and then named his ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, as his representative. Reagan responded that Dobrynin could carry Gorbachev’s confidential messages to Shultz and said he hoped Gorbachev would grant similar access to Arthur Hartman in Moscow. In theory, the back-channel emissaries, such as Massie and Bogdanov, were cut out. Yet this episode in 1985 didn’t end the informal message carrying (and, in fact, may have merely represented an effort by Reagan to mollify Shultz, who wanted all communications to go through him). Afterward, Massie still carried to the White House messages from Bogdanov that were taken by the president as coming directly from Gorbachev. Reagan on occasion still gave Massie private messages to take back to Moscow.

In the early fall of 1986, Reagan was confronted with a new crisis when Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report , was suddenly detained and charged with espionage. The Soviet action came precisely one week after the FBI had arrested Gennadi Zakharov, a Soviet scientist on the staff of the United Nations Secretariat in New York, and charged him with spying during a three-year period in which he sought to recruit and pay an employee of an American defense contractor. Zakharov was subject to prosecution in the United States; he did not enjoy diplomatic immunity because he was not part of the Soviet mission to the United Nations. In moving against Daniloff, the Soviets clearly seemed to be aiming for a trade: Daniloff for Zakharov.

Reagan was incensed. The CIA assured him that Daniloff was not a spy. Moreover, Daniloff’s arrest was merely the latest in a series of similar episodes. “This whole thing follows the pattern,” he wrote in his diary. “We catch a spy, as we have this time, and the Soviets grab an American— any American and frame him so they can demand a trade of prisoners.” 5

The case touched off nearly a month of frenetic diplomacy between the United States and the Soviet Union. It also produced intense internal frictions within the Reagan administration. At the NSC, Poindexter and his aides wanted to draw the line, strictly barring any sort of trade; but Shultz and the State Department were urging caution and quiet diplomacy. Shultz was furious at the CIA, believing that its operatives had compromised Daniloff by using the correspondent’s name in trying to contact a source in Moscow and by mentioning his name in a written communication. The secretary of state told Reagan that because of the CIA’s bungling conduct (of which Daniloff was unaware), Soviet officials had sufficient legal grounds to attempt to bring Daniloff to trial. 6

Massie’s private lunch with the Reagans on September 23, 1986, took place at the very peak of these tensions. There is no record of their conversation, but Reagan afterward sent her to meet with Shultz. The secretary of state recorded what she told him in his own memoir.

Her message was that Gorbachev almost certainly had not ordered Daniloff picked up—it was the ‘theys’ of the regime. Gorbachev, she said, now was referring to ‘they,’ as in ‘they’ got Khrushchev. He was under pressure from hard-liners, and his room for maneuvering was narrow. She had urged the president not to push Gorbachev too far on the Daniloff matter, for she felt such pressure would serve those in the USSR ‘who want to stop this process of improvement.’ 7

The impasse over Daniloff had been holding up all other business between Reagan and Gorbachev. The president was trying to arrange a summit in Washington, which would in turn clear the way for him to visit Moscow before he left the White House. Gorbachev was even more eager for another meeting with Reagan, at which he hoped for new agreements on arms control that would enable him to cut back on defense spending. In mid-September, in the midst of the Daniloff affair, Shevardnadze suddenly brought Reagan a proposal from Gorbachev for a quick meeting soon in Reykjavik, one that could prepare the way for a fuller summit in Washington.

On September 28, five days after Massie’s private lunch with the Reagans, a deal was worked out for Daniloff’s release. Shultz and Shevardnadze worked out the plan at a meeting in New York City. It involved a sequence of orchestrated steps. First, Daniloff was set free and flown out of the Soviet Union. Next, Zakharov pleaded no contest to espionage charges and was immediately expelled from the United States. Then the Soviet authorities agreed to allow a leading dissident, Yuri Orlov, and his wife to leave the country. The release of Orlov enabled the Reagan administration to assert that it was not simply making a trade of Zakharov for Daniloff, a spy for a newspaper correspondent. Finally, on September 30, the White House announced that Reagan and Gorbachev would meet in Reykjavik only ten days later.

The outcome—the resolution of the Daniloff case and the agreement to meet in Reykjavik—represented a fundamental turning point for Reagan, for his Soviet policy, and for his relationship with his own conservative supporters.

This was the point when the right wing turned irreversibly against Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union, and when the president decided to move ahead with Gorbachev anyway, in the absence of his usual support from the hawks. Reagan’s conciliatory “Ivan and Anya” speech of January 1984 could be explained away as election-year politics. The harmonious Geneva summit of 1985 could be seen as merely a meeting without concrete results. But Reagan’s actions in the fall of 1986 could not be written off in similar fashion.

In Congress, conservatives such as Representative Jack Kemp rose up in fury over the handling of the Daniloff case. On the newspaper op-ed pages, commentators including William Safire and Charles Krauthammer ridiculed the administration. Reagan’s favorite columnist, George Will, was particularly scathing. “When an administration collapses, quickly and completely, as the Reagan administration has done in the Daniloff debacle, a reasonable surmise is that the administration, like a balloon, had nothing in it but air,” Will wrote in a column published September 18, 1986. In another column two weeks later, Will condemned the administration for failing to recognize the enduring ideological differences between America and the Soviet Union. “The administration believes that Gorbachev wants to end the arms race so he can raise his people’s standard of living,” Will wrote. “The administration partakes of the national vanity of believing that if Soviet leaders just see our supermarkets and swimming pools, they will see the folly of trying to win an arms race with a nation this rich.” 8

Vanity or not, this was precisely what Reagan believed. Will was paraphrasing one of the president’s favorite lines; Reagan often said he wished he could give Soviet leaders a tour of the United States so that they could see its prosperity. Frank Carlucci, who served as Reagan’s national security adviser and defense secretary, recalled the time he was riding with Reagan in a helicopter: “He looked down and said, ‘See all those nice homes? If I could just have Gorbachev come in and look at some of those homes, I’m sure he’d change his ways.’” 9

In fact, Reagan’s perceptions of the Soviet Union and of Gorbachev were much closer to the truth than were those of his conservative critics. The memoirs and histories of the Gorbachev era demonstrate that in the late summer of 1986, the Soviet leader decided he urgently needed a new agreement with the United States to limit Soviet military spending. “If we don’t back down on some specific, maybe even important issues, if we won’t budge from the positions we’ve held for a long time, we will lose in the end,” Gorbachev told his colleagues in the Politburo. “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.” 10