Reagan, Gorbachev and Bush at Governors Island

This memorandum to the General Secretary from the influential advisor to Soviet leaders and director of the U.S. and Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Georgy Arbatov, provides an after-action assessment of the Moscow summit and the state of U.S.-Soviet relations. Arbatov points to the significance of the summit as being a "discovery" of the Soviet Union by America and the West and the breaking of the enemy image. He outlines the broad arms control agenda that remains, but cautions Gorbachev that during the last stages of the electoral campaign in the United States it would not be realistic to expect any serious progress. Arbatov clearly believes the Reagan administration has spent its potential to make any serious steps on strategic or conventional weapons. In one part of the memorandum, he carefully suggests that it might be time for the Soviet Union to undertake some unilateral initiative on conventional weapons in Europe, like significant reductions in tanks, which would impress European public opinion and make quick progress with the new U.S. administration more likely.

Here, the former Soviet Ambassador to the United States and future head of the International Commission of the Central Committee Anatoly Dobrynin advises Gorbachev on the next moves toward the United States. Dobrynin explains perceptively the dynamics of the presidential campaign in the U.S. and suggests that Gorbachev should try to meet with the president-elect as early as possible, before he is inaugurated, in order to preserve the continuity and momentum in U.S.-Soviet relations. The best time and location for such a meeting would be in New York especially if Gorbachev was making an address to the General Assembly of the United Nations. The address then could provide a major stimulus for a new start in U.S.-Soviet relations.

In this document Gorbachev thinks aloud in the presence of a narrow circle of foreign policy experts, in effect brainstorming with them on the content of his upcoming speech to the U.N. General Assembly. In addition to Foreign Minister Shevardnadze and Gorbachev's foreign policy assistant Chernyaev, the circle also includes Alexander Yakovlev as head of the International Commission, former ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin as head of the Central Committee's International Department, and Dobrynin's deputy, Valentin Falin. The major thrust of Gorbachev's initiative, as he envisions it, is about disarmament and the gradual withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. But the spirit is less pragmatic than messianic. The Soviet leader visualizes himself as a world figure who will not only assuage the security fears of Western countries, but will outline an entirely new cooperative global order. When Gorbachev says, "In general this speech should be an anti-Fulton - Fulton in reverse," he means to undo the Cold War that was declared most dramatically in the "Iron Curtain" speech delivered by Winston Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946.

In this diary entry, Chernyaev records a "historic" conversation at the Politburo, after the formal agenda items. This is the first time Gorbachev presents his decision to announce deep unilateral cuts in his UN speech to the full Politburo. Chernyaev notes that Gorbachev is "clearly nervous," because he is aware of the radical nature of the steps he is going to undertake, and because of the presence of Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov in the room, who would have to approve the cuts. The General Secretary makes an unprecedented push for cutting Soviet military expenses and publishing the numbers as a matter of building trust. He tries to impress the Politburo with the unreasonably high Soviet military expenses and the need to withdraw from Eastern Europe. Gorbachev has to walk a fine line-making the conservatives feel that they are part of the decision making process, and yet leaving them out of decisions on actual scope of the cuts-therefore he never mentions the actual numbers. Only at the end of his intervention does Gorbachev mention that the cuts will be unilateral-a huge break with the past Soviet position, which demanded reciprocal cuts in conventional weapons in Europe.
Chernyaev predicts this is "an event that may well take the second place of importance after the April of 1985" - referring to the party plenum when the policy of perestroika was formally announced.

Here, Gorbachev's foreign policy adviser and confidant Anatoly Chernyaev provides suggestions to Gorbachev in anticipation of the opposition among the military to the deep unilateral cuts that would be announced in Gorbachev's U.N. speech. Chernyaev suggests that the initiatives should be presented in such a way that would co-opt the military as much as possible even though they were not involved in the real decision making leading to the U.N. initiative. In addition, Chernyaev suggests taking preliminary measures to accommodate the large numbers of officers who would have to be retired before their turn, and moved to temporary housing. The advice would never be fully followed, which indeed would lead to strong frustration and rising opposition among the military, culminated in the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev.

This Top Secret SNIE, produced just two weeks before Gorbachev's speech at the U.N., demonstrates how much the Soviet leader took the US government by surprise with the unilateral cuts in Soviet ground forces (by 500,000 out of a total force of 5 million)) and the withdrawals from Eastern Europe (50,000 troops, 10,000 tanks, 8,500 artillery systems, and 800 combat aircraft). The intelligence community consensus reflected here posits that the Soviets "prefer to negotiate with NATO to achieve mutual reductions of conventional forces" because "it makes more sense to trade force reductions, thereby retaining a balance in the correlation of forces." The SNIE goes on to suggest that "the Warsaw Pact probably realizes that negotiating an agreement with NATO that is acceptable to the Soviets could take years - and might not even be possible" - a judgment that would become obsolete within days, yet would live on into the new Bush administration as the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Robert Gates, would move to the White House as deputy national security advisor. Just in case, however, the authors of the SNIE mention that "for political effect, the Soviets may also take unilateral initiatives" such as withdrawing some troops from Hungary. But they completely misjudge the troops cuts, claiming that the "Soviets may attempt to portray force restructuring as a unilateral force reduction" but really this is "intended primarily to make units more effective for prolonged conventional combat operations against NATO."

This document provides the CIA evaluation—prior to Gorbachev’s U.N. speech—of the radical personnel changes the Soviet leader made at the September Party Plenum. There, Gorbachev consolidated the two Central Committee international departments (covering socialist and non-socialist countries) into a single body; created a supervisory International Committee with Alexander Yakovlev at the head; and completely rearranged the party’s power structure. The CIA’s analysis is detailed and informative but typically cautious in its “lowest common denominator” view of the dramatic changes inside the Soviet Union. No doubt the writers understood that senior echelons of the U.S. intelligence community such as then-Deputy Director Robert Gates—as well as the incoming Bush administration—still regarded Gorbachev’s initiatives and their growing popularity as a threat to the stability of the Western alliance system and a formidable challenge to U.S. foreign policy. Thus the assessment uses language such as, “The West is likely to face greater Soviet foreign policy activism”—as if such activism by definition could not be in the interest of the United States.
This was an intelligence failure. Eastern Europe remained relatively calm, but in the Baltic republics and the Caucasus forces of national independence, and ethnic and social centrifugal dynamics, were already beginning to destabilize the Soviet Union. Only after his retirement as CIA Director did Gates declare that the effects of Soviet political reforms and glasnost were “unforeseen by Gorbachev and unforeseen by CIA.”[8] Perhaps the most notable statement in the assessment is the following: “Given the realities of the system, Gorbachev can only hope to lay the groundwork for a process of change that could take decades.” However, the assessment continues, if he fails to improve the quality of life of Soviet citizens, “the political gains of September 1988 could be short lived.”

In his meeting with Undersecretary Armacost as reported in this cable, Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin had suggested that there was interest on both sides in a meeting between Secretary Shultz and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze before the anticipated meeting between the Presidents and before Gorbachev’s address at the United Nations. Armacost and Dubinin had reviewed the concept of the summit and agreed that no important issues would be resolved there, but it would be a recapitulation of Reagan and Gorbachev’s accomplishments and a pledge to stay the course. Dubinin was clearly not informed about the content of Gorbachev’s upcoming speech. Shultz in this telegram instructs the US Embassy in Moscow to contact the Foreign Ministry and communicate his agreement to meet with Shevardnadze on the morning on December 7, 1988. The meeting would take place as scheduled and focus mainly on human rights issues in the Vienna CSCE conference and the Soviet proposal for a Moscow human rights conference.

Gorbachev was just informed about the 8.0 Richter scale earthquake in Armenia and the resulting destruction and loss of life. The conversation starts with the discussion of its effects and the relief efforts and moves on to arms control and bilateral relations. In this last conversation of a very short summit, one can hear Gorbachev appealing directly to president-elect Bush for continuity in U.S.-Soviet relations. He praises Reagan for the cooperation they achieved and jokingly suggests that “president deserve[s] some kind of merit award for his knowledge of Russian proverbs.” Reagan also speaks highly about the changes that took place in the Soviet Union since 1985. What is conspicuously absent from this conversation is any reaction to the UN speech of the kind Gorbachev was hoping for. His goal for the speech was to set a new agenda based on bold new unilateral proposals and to spark a similar initiative from the new administration. However, all that Bush says is that “he had seen Gorbachev’s speech on TV, and he seemed to have had a full house, with every seat filled,” showing no knowledge of the substance. Gorbachev repeats several times that the proposals he made were intended to make the new president’s life easier, and that the only thing he could not do was fix the U.S. budget deficit, but even budget deficits in both countries could be remedied if the two countries worked together. Gorbachev had to cut the meetings short and fly back to the Soviet Union to deal with the earthquake.

This remarkable closed-door testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee by the top three CIA analysts of the Soviet Union occurs at the precise moment that Gorbachev is speaking to the United Nations on December 7, 1988. MacEachin opens his testimony by saying "in about 15 minutes or so we may find out if one of my analytical judgments is going to turn out to be correct," referring to his prediction that Gorbachev will have to cut the proportion of Soviet resources that go to the military. At the same time, MacEachin disparages the "plausible but totally unfounded story of very large cuts." (page 3) Later (page 32) he says that "Blackwell just went down the hall to watch some" of the U.N. speech on television, and (page 36) he mentions the "news bulletin" of the 500,000 troop cut, calling the discussion "analysis on the fly."
Most striking is the way this testimony illustrates the rifts within the U.S. government between Gorbachev skeptics like Robert Gates and the new national security advisor Brent Scowcroft on one side, and the career analysts like MacEachin on the other. MacEachin remarks (page 37) that "if Gorbachev is successful he will cause major social displacement in the United States" because "[t]here are not many homes for old wizards of Armageddon, and it is kind of like old case officers trying to find employment." And MacEachin offers a true confession in the extraordinary passage on page 38, which demonstrates how prior assumptions about Soviet behavior, rather than actual intelligence data points, actually drove intelligence findings:
"Now, we spend megadollars studying political instability in various places around the world, but we never really looked at the Soviet Union as a political entity in which there were factors building which could lead to the kind of - at least the initiation of political transformation that we seem to see. It does not exist to my knowledge. Moreover, had it existed inside the government, we never would have been able to publish it anyway, quite frankly. And had we done so, people would have been calling for my head. And I wouldn't have published it. In all honesty, had we said a week ago that Gorbachev might come to the UN and offer a unilateral cut of 500,000 in the military, we would have been told we were crazy. We had a difficult enough time getting air space for the prospect of some unilateral cuts of 50 to 60,000."

This poignant transcript of the last official meeting between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev shows the two leaders practically avoiding any substantive discussion of the momentous changes in Soviet policy Gorbachev had just announced at the U.N. Instead, they wax nostalgic for their series of summits dating back to Geneva 1985, and Reagan presents the Soviet leader with an inscribed photograph of that meeting. Gorbachev is clearly eager to move forward with the President-elect, who demurs that "he would need a little time to review the issues" (even after eight years at Reagan's right hand?) but "wished to build on what President Reagan had accomplished, working with Gorbachev." Ironically, Bush says "he had no intention of stalling things. He naturally wanted to formulate prudent national security policies, but he intended to go forward." Yet, the transition to new hard-line advisers and the Bush White House determination to commission a months-long review of national security policy actually would stall forward progress on arms reductions and even any engagement with Gorbachev. The two men would not meet again for an entire year (until the Malta summit in December 1989), and by that time, the world would have changed around them, the Berlin Wall would be gone, German unification would be the absorbing controversy, and Gorbachev would be losing the ability on his side to deliver more of what he announced at the U.N. that very day.

While Gorbachev was speaking at the United Nations and meeting with Reagan and Bush at Governors Island, Paul Nitze was in Italy meeting with Prime Minister De Mita, Foreign Minister Andreotti and Defense Minister Zanone. Striking is the disconnect between the New York pronouncements and the Rome discussions. In the latter, both sides express their worry about the prospect of further reductions in nuclear weapons. Nitze believes that “reductions in nuclear weapons per se was not necessarily good,” unless they reduce the risk to NATO and “improve survivability of our own systems.” Nitze says the U.S. should “put full pressure” on Gorbachev to negotiate on conventional stabilization (while Gorbachev had just addressed the conventional imbalance in Europe by announcing unilateral Soviet troop withdrawals). Nitze is very doubtful that negotiations on conventional forces would be easy or quick, as if he hadn’t heard what Gorbachev said at the U.N. Conversation with Zanone focuses on future European security, and the cohesion of NATO in the face of a diminishing Soviet threat. Zanone complains, “It is difficult to maintain support for defense spending since the parliaments are becoming infected with the sense of diminished threat.” Politicians no longer control what the public knows, and they can see Gorbachev disarming with their own eyes. Andreotti raises the issue of the British and French nuclear weapons as a possible difficult subject of negotiations in the future, and expresses his hope that the incoming Bush administration would “not alter the position of the Reagan administration on START,” and move ahead to reach agreement on 50% reductions. Nitze confirms the president-elect’s intention to “follow through in a sensible way.”

The cable summarizes the talks and identifies two main themes. The first theme is the change in the Soviet Union, where according to Gorbachev “The USSR is seeking to become stronger in political, economic and social terms, but does not intend through economic improvement to threaten the U.S. or the West.” Reagan supports the direction of change in the USSR. The second theme is “change for the better in U.S.-Soviet relations and the prospects for constructive continuity.” The cable notes that Vice-President Bush assured Gorbachev of such continuity. The cable also notes two items Gorbachev did not raise—one is the linkage between further progress on START and the SDI, and the second is Afghanistan—although he made several proposals on Afghanistan in his U.N. speech. The cable references only in passing the breakthrough initiatives on conventional arms control and massive Soviet troop reductions in Europe announced in the U.N. speech, just as they were referred to in the presidential meeting.

The cable summarizes a meeting between Pakistan’s Ambassador Jamsheed Marker and Undersecretary of State Michael Armacost at which they review the Reagan and Gorbachev meeting for any content relevant to Afghanistan. Armacost emphasizes that Gorbachev did not raise the issue of Afghanistan in his luncheon conversation with Reagan. He sees “the absence of invective” on the subject as a sign that the Soviets will stick to their pledge to withdraw from Afghanistan by February 15, 1989. However, Armacost discounts Gorbachev’s proposals on Afghanistan in his U.N. speech since “none of them were new or really serious,” and that “neither the call for a cease-fire nor a beefed up U.N. peacekeeping force is practical.” He says the Soviet proposals to engage Rabbani (even inviting him to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev) “reflected Soviet desperation.” Armacost believes that “Gorbachev’s call for an international conference and an international peace corps are merely replays of earlier Soviet efforts to internationalize their dilemma in Afghanistan.” The U.S. side is not interested in discussing any post-war reconciliation or international cooperation in Afghanistan with the Soviets beyond one “bottom line: the Soviets should get out.” Gorbachev meanwhile was worried about the growing Islamic fundamentalism and instability on the Soviet border, while the U.S. has no strategy beyond lubricating the Soviet exit.

In this conversation, requested by the U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, the Ambassador assures Politburo member and head of the International Commission Alexander Yakovlev that there would be continuity in U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union under the new President George H. W. Bush. Matlock praises the new President's seriousness and professionalism, compares him favorably to Reagan in terms of his experience in foreign policy, including being personally involved in developing the policy line toward the Soviet Union. At the same time, however, Matlock states bluntly that the United States would not be ready with its approaches on strategic arms negotiations by February 15 (the deadline for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan), and that the new President needed time for an in-depth study and analysis of these issues. Yakovlev emphasizes especially that the Soviet leadership is hoping for "enhanced continuity" and resolution on arms control issues and regional conflicts and that Gorbachev's goal in his meetings in New York was precisely to prevent a long pause in U.S.-Soviet relations after the new administration comes to power. Yakovlev also expresses his frustration with the U.S. position on the settlement in Afghanistan: "the United States so far has not shown any desire to actually encourage the Afghan settlement."

This is one of very few official records of Soviet Politburo proceedings that are available publicly. This December meeting is the first after Gorbachev's return from the United States, having cut short his travels in order to deal with the results of the disastrous earthquake in Armenia. Gorbachev devotes much time to summaries of the increasingly grave forecasts for his perestroika program by foreign analysts, but then dismisses their seriousness. Part of the context for Gorbachev's lengthy monologues and Shevardnadze's proposals for a "businesslike" withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe is the growing bewilderment of certain military and KGB leaders who were not fully informed in advance about the scale and tempo of Gorbachev's announced unilateral arms cuts. Still, there is no trace of real opposition to Gorbachev's course. The Soviet party leader has learned a lesson from the military's lack of reaction to the previous discussions of "sufficiency," and he is now ramming change down their throats. Ever obedient, Defense Minister Yazov states, "everyone reacted with understanding," even after Shevardnadze aggressively attacks the military for retrograde thinking, for directly contradicting the U.N. speech, and for proposing only "admissible" openness rather than true glasnost. Ironically, when Shevardnadze and Ligachev suggest announcing the size of Soviet reductions "publicly," Gorbachev objects: if the Soviet people and party learn how huge the Soviet defense expenditures really are, it will undermine the propaganda effect of his U.N. speech. In yet another call for strategy vis-a-vis Eastern Europe, a conservative Politburo member, Vitaly Vorotnikov, says, "I consider the situation in a number of socialist countries to be so complicated that we should clarify our thinking in one document or another." No such integrated strategy ever appeared.

The remarkable section headlined "Disagreements" provides a striking contrast to President Reagan's comment in the Governors Island summit that "we were all on Gorbachev's side concerning the reforms he was trying to make in the Soviet system." Here, in a summary of the thinking of President Bush's own top advisers Scowcroft and Gates, the estimate says, "Some analysts see current policy changes as largely tactical, driven by the need for breathing space from the competition.... They judge that there is a serious risk of Moscow returning to traditionally combative behavior when the hoped for gains in economic performance are achieved." In contrast, "Other analysts believe Gorbachev's policies reflect a fundamental re-thinking of national interests and ideology as well as more tactical considerations..." and amount to "historic shifts in the Soviet definition of national interest" and "lasting shifts in Soviet behavior." The evidence now available from the Soviet side, including the documents included in this posting and the others in the National Security Archive's series on the U.S.-Soviet summits, demonstrates that the latter analysts were precisely correct; yet they did not have nearly the influence on U.S. policy after the 1986 Reykjavik summit, or especially in the first year of the George H.W. Bush administration, that the hard-liners did who were so wrong because of their presumptions about the Soviet Union. These disagreements within the U.S. side and the suspicions of top policymakers in Washington would create a kind of paralysis in the process of arms reductions after Governors Island, leaving worldwide persistence of nuclear weapons and fissile material in particular at far higher levels than the U.S. and the Soviet Union could have achieved if a more accurate U.S. view of Gorbachev's reforms had carried the day.