by John Hackett
3 January 1985. The President of Mexico is assassinated.
9 January. The German Democratic Republic now announces the arrest of the American TV crew. They will be tried on a capital charge of instigating the riots and murdering two policemen in East Berlin on 31 December.
10--18 January. The US declares that it must have more naval forces in the Gulf in order to stabilize the situation there. A US task force is despatched to Bandar Abbas.
19 January. Egypt invites the Soviet Union to take control of the Suez Canal. The US Sixth Fleet effectively closes the northern exit.
20 January. The Inauguration Day message to President Thompson from Soviet President Vorotnikov is hailed by a frightened world as astonishingly placatory, and presaging a new detente. President Vorotnikov says:
a. The Egyptian government has today asked the Soviet Union to take control of the Suez Canal. The Soviet government has said it would wish to do this only in co-operation with US observers on the spot, because the sole Soviet object will be to enforce the mutual standstill agreed with President Carter after his Christmas Day messages. Both the Soviet Union and the Americans may feel, in their different ways, that the other side has broken that standstill in the past three weeks. ‘But from the beginning of your presidency I beg that we should work together on these difficult issues.’
b. The members of the American TV crew accused of the capital offence of the murder of policemen in East Berlin are being repatriated immediately through West Berlin. (At the same time it was revealed that the driver who had carried away the film, and a number of other dissidents traced through him, had been executed as being ‘primarily responsible for the murders in which the American journalists had merely been participating onlookers’, and that death penalties had also been carried out ‘on two Polish counterrevolutionaries who had in November brutally murdered the mayor of Wroclaw’.)
c. President Vorotnikov urgently invites President Thompson to a summit meeting, which he hopes will take place ‘during this very first week you are in office’.
This ‘Soviet plea for a Munich detente’, as the Peking Daily called it, had been preceded by the following secret communication from Soviet Foreign Minister Baronzov to the Politburo on 19 January.
THE BARONZOV MEMO
The objectives of our operations in the Middle East and Southern Africa have now been achieved. We are in a stronger position than we dared originally to hope. In particular:
1 We have now re-asserted our control in Poland and East Germany. Although we have executed counter-revolutionaries there, some American newspapers will easily be persuaded to say that, because we are returning the US television crew, we are being conciliatory. The Polish and East German counter-revolutionaries have learned that the West will not support them during a Thompson presidency; Thompson is thus revealed to them as a broken reed. If there is trouble in Poland or other Eastern European socialist states in 1985 or 1986, it will now be easier to intervene in Yugoslavia, if needed, and to implement existing plans for the invasion of West Germany. It will be clearly shown that the regime in the Soviet Union cannot be shaken by subversion and coups d’état.
2 We have seized a very strong position in the Middle East. The North Arabian (i.e., Saudi Arabian and Iraqi) oil supply is now in Egyptian hands. We must ensure that this continues to mean in Soviet hands. Israel has been neutralized under guarantees which should for the time being be honoured.
We can allow the Iranians to send oil to the United States and Europe, across sea lines that we should increasingly be able to command, because there will be a sufficient scarcity of it to put the capitalist countries at a severe disadvantage. Their own capitalist laws of supply and demand mean that the price of oil will stay very high. This will speed the march of these countries towards reliance on nuclear energy, though we can agree with, stimulate and support the many sincere environmentalists in those countries who say that this form of energy is dangerous and immoral. They will argue that it is especially dangerous and immoral for nuclear technology to come to poorer countries, so these poorer countries will have to rely increasingly on those who control the North Arabian oil supply, that is, on the Egyptians and the Soviet Union. We can also use the oil weapon to increase our control over the economies of socialist countries in Europe, especially Poland and the German Democratic Republic. We should be highly conservationist, and not allow anybody to have too much oil from Arabia. One of our main objects in the summit negotiations with President Thompson should be to try to extend our hold over Arabian oil: if possible, not just Saudi Arabian and Iraqi oil, but oil from some of the Lower Gulf states as well.
3 The settlement in Southern Africa is much less important. From a political standpoint we could make concessions to the Americans there, and leave the Cubans and Jamaicans in the lurch. This is a matter for the Politburo to decide in consultation with the Ministry of Defence.
The Soviet Foreign Office wishes, through me, to put on record its appreciation of the efficiency and daring shown by the Soviet armed forces in the past three difficult weeks - in the Middle East, in Africa, in the North Sea and in East Berlin. The heavy expenditure on the armed forces in the past decade has made Soviet foreign policy much easier to implement at this critical time; it has therefore been fully justified.
In this last sentence Minister Baronzov had a point.
CHAPTER 7: Summit and Aftermath
Preparations for a summit meeting continued, but, by tacit mutual consent, at a rather slower tempo than that originally demanded by Moscow. As a first step the US and Soviet Foreign Ministers visited their respective allies in Europe. The Secretary of State found Western European opinion torn between two opposing anxieties. In spite of the North Sea, West Europe was still heavily dependent on Middle East oil. From this point of view, therefore, they hoped that the United States would secure the reopening of the oil route by firm action in the Gulf, the Indian Ocean and Southern Africa. But they were reluctant to advocate this too openly because they feared the obvious American rejoinder: ‘If you want the oil as much as we do, come and help us get it.’ Very few of them had any significant capability for military action outside Europe. Most of them pleaded the old argument that NATO’s area of responsibility was limited to Europe and a defined area of the North Atlantic - north of the Tropic of Cancer - and that the action was likely to lie outside those limits. They were faced, not for the first time, with this basic inconsistency between the terms of the Alliance and the real situation on the ground. The line of demarcation on the continent of Europe was better defined and had a history of thirty-five years of stability, due to the concentration of NATO defence on the maintenance of that line as inviolate. But if the causes of tension were outside, where no clear lines existed, and if the tension spread around the world until Europe was encircled by conflict, could the states of Western Europe afford to stay in their tight little laager?
Alternatively, the question was put with some irony from the American side: if the Europeans can’t or won’t help to keep the oil producers free and the sea lanes open, will they do more in Europe and the Atlantic so that US reinforcements can in some part be diverted from Europe to other areas more immediately at risk?
At this point the other latent anxiety of the Europeans began to show itself more clearly. If the US, with direct or indirect help from Europe, took a strong line with the Soviet Union or its Middle Eastern or African supporters, and if this action were successful, would not the Soviet Union be tempted to restore its overall situation and acquire a major bargaining counter by attacking in Europe? This might be particularly tempting if US forces in Europe were to be reduced, or if it was known that fewer US reinforcements were available.
Europe’s will to win and power to make decisions were further sapped by internal developments. The Community, now enlarged to include Spain, Portugal and Greece, had taken some steps towards the common production of military equipment, but had not yet acquired the institutions necessary for the fo
rmulation of a common foreign policy or for more effective pooling of military forces in the field. Moreover, Western Europe had not yet fully decided how to live with Euro-communism. In Italy the Communist Party had gained ground by its reputation for restoring law and order, but its very success, and its participation in government, made it more vulnerable to the corruption of power. On the other hand, being now about as powerful as it wanted to be in Italy, without having full responsibility for all the country’s problems, the Party was no more inclined than before to a Soviet takeover, and therefore maintained, in those uneasy years of peace, a reasonably satisfactory degree of Italian participation in NATO.
In France, on the other hand, now under a Popular Front government, the balance of political forces was more precarious. The French Communist Party was still divided between those who maintained the purity of dogma above all and those who saw a modicum of flexibility as required both to keep alive the floundering unity of the left and to win back more votes from the post-Gaullist right. France’s ambivalent attitude to common defence seemed still to suit most political persuasions, but there was much greater divergence on how to handle the crisis of the early 1980s. The nuclear power programme had been limited by environmentalist protests, and even in its reduced form the stations were not fully on stream. Possessing very little native oil, France was heavily dependent on imported energy. With the East-West frontier now bisecting the Middle Eastern suppliers, would oil be more securely acquired by private deals with the USSR and Egypt, or by backing the US counter-offensive to re-open traditional routes? Or would a crafty combination of the two be best - negotiations tous azimuths, as it were?
The United Kingdom, at the peak of its oil production, was less sensitive than others to a threat to external supplies, and even the return to comparative prosperity and a Conservative government had done little to diminish the parochialism of the seventies.
In Germany the wilder excesses of the urban left had been contained, not without difficulty and with much soul-searching about the increasing power of the police. Disillusion with the European Community helped to foster a revival of the historic belief that in the long run economic prosperity would depend very largely on the development of markets and supplies in Eastern Europe. The industrial and commercial pre-eminence of the Federal Republic in Western Europe was matched by that of the German Democratic Republic in the East. Some more daring politicians were tempted by this coincidence to wonder what they might do together. The majority, while still rejecting dreams of even an economic pan-German superpower, nevertheless accepted the importance of maintaining the advantages which accrued almost imperceptibly to a people who had a foot in either camp. While it might be dangerous to envisage a removal of the barrier between them, the sharpening of its prongs by renewed East-West conflict would be decidedly uncomfortable.
So the Secretary of State did not gather a very united or determined impression of European feelings from his tour of some of the more important Western capitals. The United States would as usual have to go it largely alone in the Middle East and the South Atlantic, and would no doubt be blamed for the consequences if things went wrong - though perhaps a rather longer exposure than usual to the rough and tumble of world politics and to the shortages and privations resulting even from the present situation would encourage the European doves to grow some beaks and claws. The position papers flew thick and fast in the State Department and the options remained irritatingly open.
The Soviet Foreign Minister did not fare much better in his rather more perfunctory tour of Eastern capitals. These countries saw their painful gains in economic prosperity endangered by Soviet brinkmanship. They found it hard to believe Soviet warnings about an energy shortage by the end of the century, which could only be remedied by laying hands directly or by proxy on a large slice of Middle Eastern oil supplies - upon which was based Soviet support for Egypt’s incursion into Arabia. They feared that Soviet moves towards a war footing would put further and intolerable pressure on the supply and price of consumer goods, including food. They pointed out - in vain - that while the Soviet secret police had to deal only with a handful of known intellectual dissidents, they (in Poland, for example) were faced by a movement much more widely and solidly based on the workers’ expectation of a standard of living that would approach first that of East Germany, then that of West Germany. Except in most aspects of military technology and the technology of space, the gap was increasing between the inefficiency of Soviet production and the far greater technical and managerial skills of East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Western methods and Western technology were increasingly seen as more relevant and more desirable. The example of Euro-communism in the West suggested that Party cadres could restore some of their tarnished popularity by keeping their distance from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
So, when the Secretary of State and Foreign Minister Baronzov met at Geneva at the end of January 1985, each had to look not only at his interlocutor across the table, but also, even more searchingly, over his shoulder at the silent ranks of his allies and supporters. A week was spent agreeing on the agenda for their meeting and a further two weeks on that for the summit. At last it was settled that President Thompson and President Vorotnikov (the offices of President of the USSR and Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had by then long been firmly unified) should meet on 15 February to discuss all threats to peace and any situation likely to lead to nuclear hostilities.
Political observers and media commentators were puzzled and divided over the mood of the participants and the prospects for peace or war. Each side had stepped further into the uncharted sea of confrontation than any of their predecessors since Cuba and the Berlin blockade. The point was, did they find the temperature to their liking? Each had found a keen front man - the US in Iran and the Soviet Union in Egypt - but both were aware of the instability of such protagonists. Their more solid supporters were more than usually hesitant. In one respect each had a similar requirement: to be sure of energy supplies from the Middle East until alternative sources could be established. Public opinion in the US still felt that abundant cheap energy was a god-given right of the American people. They had elected Thompson in the belief that he would be better at getting it for them than Carter had been at persuading them they didn’t need so much. Vorotnikov had other preoccupations. The Russian people could be relied on to accept what they were given, but with Eastern Europe the choice was more difficult: either to advance more quickly towards Western consumer standards, or to restore the somewhat eroded dictatorship of the CPSU and enforce acceptance of a lower standard. The former would require more oil, the latter more Soviet troops. Both, with the growing threat from China, might be in short supply. A foreign bogey would, as usual, encourage compliance, but a bogey in the Indian Ocean might be inadequate for the purpose.
After two days of recrimination and brinkmanship, the result emerged - one that should perhaps have been more easily predictable: peace with honour. The standstill was confirmed; the control of oilfields remained as it was, that is, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq stayed with Egypt and the USSR, Iran and the Lower Gulf stayed with the West. There was to be no supply of arms to either side in Africa or Arabia (significantly, there was no reference to Iran, Cuba or Jamaica); mutual notification of naval movements was agreed, with exchange of satellite photographs to confirm it; and there would be a resumption of SALT and negotiations for MBFR (mutual and balanced force reductions).
In fact no one was satisfied with what they had got, but some were more dissatisfied than others. Thompson made much of having snatched peace out of the jaws of war (with a confused memory of a Churchillian antithesis mixed with a phrase of Chamberlain’s), and of the time won to build more ships and develop indigenous oil resources. He did not actually wave a piece of paper from the White House balcony, but the general atmosphere had more than a hint of August 1938.
The Soviet Union started building pipelines and oil
terminals to move her new oil north instead of south, its former direction. More important in the short term, the Soviet leaders devoted urgent attention to the means of restoring Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, penetrating the communist parties in Western Europe, and guarding their frontier republics against the growing presence of China. The build-up of Soviet military strength continued.
The Chinese were perhaps the most disappointed of all. In the uneasy triangle of forces so accurately forecast for 1984 by George Orwell they had hoped for much from the sharpening of US-Soviet confrontation in the Middle East and Southern Africa. They feared little from the US. Their doctrines led them to believe in the ultimate victory of their system over capitalism. They could afford to wait for history to produce its inevitable result. But rivalry with another seat of communism was different. There was nothing in holy writ to show how this would turn out. Besides, even in an age of rockets, a land frontier seemed a good deal more vulnerable than several thousand kilometres of Pacific Ocean. The standstill agreement at the US-Soviet summit deprived China of the good fortune which had seemed to be coming its way in an intensified struggle between the two rival superpowers. The ensuing reassessment showed China still a long way behind in nuclear potential and conventional sophistication. Numbers of men seemed hardly to make up for these deficiencies. It was necessary to seek some other way of compensating for the Soviet predominance in armaments.
The home front in the USSR - or at least in the Soviet areas contiguous to China - seemed to offer a possible target. It would have been dangerous for China to invoke nationalism as a subversive slogan before Sinkiang and Tibet had been fully brought under control. Now the risk of regional insurgency was far less there than in the Soviet republics in central Asia. Moreover, there were elements from many of these Moslem people, ethnically and linguistically Turkish, living in China’s far west. With a modest growth of cultural freedom and with economic development springing from Japanese investment in the new co-prosperity sphere, it should not be too difficult to create centres of attraction in China for the Uzbeks and the Kazakhs. A movement for real autonomy in the Soviet republics on the Sino-Soviet border could have enormous advantages for China, at least in providing another preoccupation for Soviet policy makers, in drawing off Soviet troops who might otherwise be threatening China, and in creating suspicion as to the loyalty of units recruited in those areas.