by H. W. Brands
Still later Poindexter offered a fuller account. He said he had known about North’s diversion and approved it in good conscience. “We didn’t see anything illegal about it,” he said. Indeed, he agreed with North that using the arms proceeds to keep the contras alive was a nice turn of policy. “They were like a gift from Iran, though Iran didn’t know that.” He said he had made a deliberate decision not to inform Reagan. “I didn’t tell the president about it so that he would have plausible deniability.” He understood that there was a political risk, but it was a risk worth taking. “It was more important that I take the risk than that the president take the risk,” he said.
So the diversion went forward. And Reagan never knew to inquire about it.
PART SIX
THE FROSTY ICELAND AIR
1986–1988
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A SIDE EFFECT OF the otherwise successful bombing of Libya was further postponement of action on arms control with the Soviet Union. Gorbachev knew Qaddafi had been a thorn in America’s side for years; he asked himself why Reagan had chosen this moment to chastise him. He concluded that Washington was trying to prove a point. “The United States attacked Libya in a show of its might and impunity,” he wrote later. Combined with the other provocations after Geneva, especially the breakout from SALT II and the resumption of nuclear testing, the strike on Libya suggested to Gorbachev that the Americans didn’t take the Soviet Union seriously. “Did the Americans think we would not notice how they used the fledgling Soviet-American dialogue as a cover for new weapon programs?” He blamed Reagan not for insincerity but for inability to rein in the powerful groups who benefited from an arms race. “Détente or even a simple warming in Soviet-American relations did not conform to the interests of certain people in the West who would use any pretext to undermine the improvement in international relations initiated in Geneva.”
Additional complications arose. In August 1986 the FBI sent a request to the White House seeking approval of the arrest of Gennadi Zakharov, a Soviet scientist employed by the United Nations who evidently was doubling as an agent of the KGB. Had Zakharov been a diplomat and enjoyed immunity from arrest and prosecution, he would have been deported. An American diplomat in the Soviet Union might have been deported in a tit for tat, but the issue would have gone no further. Because he lacked immunity, however, he could be arrested and prosecuted.
The FBI was especially eager to make the arrest, as the bureau had been embarrassed by recent revelations of Soviet spying in the United States. For similar reasons the CIA and the State Department supported the FBI request, and the White House gave its approval. Zakharov was seized in a sting operation.
A week later the Soviets retaliated by arresting Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist in Moscow, and charging him with espionage. “It is of course a frame up,” Reagan told himself. The president wrote to Gorbachev asserting as much. “I can give you my personal assurance that Mr. Daniloff has no connection whatever with the U.S. Government,” Reagan declared. The president added, “There are no grounds for Mr. Daniloff’s detention, nor for any attempt to link him to any other case. If he is not freed promptly, it can only have the most serious and far-reaching consequences for the relationship between our two countries.”
Gorbachev didn’t believe Reagan. “Your letter of September 5 prompted me to ask for information regarding the question you raised,” Gorbachev replied. “As was reported to me by competent authorities, Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent of the U.S. News and World Report magazine, had for a long time been engaged in impermissible activities damaging to the state interests of the USSR. Now an investigation is being conducted by the results of which we shall be able to make a conclusive judgment about this entire case.”
Reagan didn’t anger easily, but he grew livid at having his personal word doubted. “Gorbachev response to my letter was arrogant and rejected my statement that Daniloff was no spy,” he wrote in his diary. “I’m mad as h--l.”
WHAT REAGAN DIDN’T know was that the CIA wasn’t telling him the full story. Reagan had asked William Casey if Daniloff was a spy; Casey had assured him Daniloff was not. This was true, but it omitted pertinent information. George Shultz didn’t trust Casey or the CIA, and he demanded to learn whatever the agency knew about Daniloff. He was informed that Daniloff had received an envelope from a “Father Potemkin” for transmission to the American embassy. Daniloff delivered the envelope, which contained a message that appeared to be from a source that had previously conveyed valuable information about the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The CIA tried to contact the source through Potemkin, in the process mentioning Daniloff. This likely came to the attention of the KGB, and it might have been what Gorbachev was referring to in his letter to Reagan.
Shultz asked Abraham Sofaer, legal adviser to the State Department, to look into the matter and give his opinion. “The CIA has really reamed Daniloff,” Sofaer reported. “Based on my reading of his activities, Daniloff can credibly be prosecuted under Soviet law, and a Soviet journalist who became similarly involved with the KGB in the U.S. could credibly be prosecuted under our law.” Sofaer later commented, “The Soviets had done a beautiful job of replicating what we had done to Zakharov.”
“This put a whole new light on the case,” Shultz recalled. He phoned John Poindexter at the White House and said he had some information to share with the president on the Daniloff case. The national security adviser didn’t seem eager to receive the information, for reasons Shultz couldn’t fathom, but he couldn’t turn away the secretary of state. “I found President Reagan poorly informed about the case,” Shultz remembered, “and I felt that Poindexter clearly did not want him well informed.”
Shultz had Sofaer tell Reagan what he knew. “I went through the facts,” Sofaer said afterward. “I explained the situation.” He found Reagan to be an engaged listener. “He kept interrupting me. What about this? What about that?” Yet the president refused to alter his view of the Soviet handling of the affair. “His basic point was, these are the bad guys. They’ve concocted this record.”
Sofaer, a former prosecutor and judge, responded, “You’re absolutely right, but it doesn’t matter. If it were in a federal court and we concocted the records, and we gave Daniloff the documents, just as we gave them to Zakharov, he would be dead. He’d be prosecuted successfully in your own district courts.”
“How can we equate these things?” Reagan protested. He refused to accept Sofaer’s explanation. “The president went on and on about that,” Sofaer recalled. Sofaer kept at it. “I didn’t quit. I just went on. Every time he asked me a question, I told him what I thought. Finally I said, ‘Mr. President, you keep talking about the truth. The truth has nothing to do with the judicial system. Sure, you always try to get to the truth, and occasionally you get it, but if you think you always get the truth as a result of a judicial process, you’re wrong. That’s not what you get. You get a finding. You get a finding of guilt or a conclusion of guilt. You don’t get truth. This is not God. This is just people doing our best to make findings. I’m telling you, as a trial judge and a prosecutor, that what you would get out of the system for Daniloff is going to be the same thing you would get out of the system for Zakharov.’ ”
“That had an impact on him,” Sofaer recounted. “I could see that hit him square between the eyes. He’s a very practical man. He prides himself, in fact, on being practical. I could see that. But he kept wagging his head the way Reagan always did. ‘Well, Abe, it doesn’t seem sensible to me to equate a reporter just trying to be a good citizen, with a professional spy.’ I said, That’s clearly true as a matter of principle, but in this case, with regard to Daniloff, the outcome would be the same.”
Reagan remained reluctant, though, and Shultz sensed they had overstayed their welcome. He pulled Sofaer aside, and they turned to leave. “We were heading out the door,” Sofaer recalled. “I could see he”—Reagan—“wasn’t comfortable with his position. He was anxious about it. He got up and wa
lked us to the door. He didn’t want us to leave, almost. He kept asking questions. So I turned around, and I said to him, ‘You know, the difference here, the important thing for you to remember, is that Daniloff is an American citizen who didn’t do anything wrong. He was brought into this by our own CIA, and he could spend the rest of his life in prison if we fail to understand that a reasonable deal could be made on his behalf.’ ”
Sofaer remembered Reagan’s reaction. “It was like hitting him with a left jab. He’s a very emotional man. This man clearly cares about people. He realized that there was a human being involved here. It wasn’t just an abstract argument.”
But Reagan still rejected any moral equivalence between Zakharov and Daniloff. “Their man is a spy caught red handed and Daniloff is a hostage,” he wrote to himself. And he continued to deny, even to himself, that there would be a trade. “Most of the shows dealt with the Daniloff matter,” he recorded after watching the Sunday morning news programs. “And a number of the media and press involved launched a campaign that I had blinked and softened—giving in to Soviet demands. That’s a lot of crap and they don’t know what they are talking about.” Three days later he was still complaining about the media. “The press is obsessed with the Daniloff affair and determined to paint all of us as caving in to the Soviets which they of course say is the worst way to deal with them. The simple truth is we’ve offered no deal and are playing hard ball all the way.”
Eduard Shevardnadze was in the country for the autumn session of the UN General Assembly; he dropped down to Washington to discuss the Daniloff case and other matters between the Soviet Union and the United States. Reagan lit into him. “I let the Foreign Minister know I was angry and that I resented their charges that Daniloff was a spy after I had personally given my word that he wasn’t. I gave him a little run down on the difference between our two systems and told him they couldn’t understand the importance we place on the individual because they don’t have such a feeling.” Reagan added, “I enjoy being angry.”
GORBACHEV ENJOYED BEING angry, too. Or at least he found it politically useful. He had Shevardnadze deliver a letter to Reagan in which he reiterated that the Daniloff case required further investigation. He said he had hoped this could occur in an atmosphere of calm. “However, the US side has unduly dramatized that incident,” he continued. “A massive hostile campaign has been launched against our country, which has been taken up at the higher levels of the United States administration and Congress. It is as if a pretext was deliberately sought to aggravate Soviet-American relations and to increase tension.”
Gorbachev lamented that things had come to such a pass. The positive spirit of Geneva had been squandered. Yet he wasn’t willing to give up on it entirely. “That is why an idea has come to my mind to suggest to you, Mr. President, that, in the very near future and setting aside all other matters, we have a quick one-on-one meeting, let us say in Iceland or in London, maybe just for one day, to engage in a strictly confidential, private and frank discussion (possibly with only our foreign ministers present). The discussion—which would not be a detailed one, for its purpose and significance would be to demonstrate political will—would result in instructions to our respective agencies to draft agreements on two or three very specific questions, which you and I could sign during my visit to the United States.” Gorbachev closed, “I look forward to your early reply.”
It was an offer Reagan couldn’t refuse. Frustrated at the loss of diplomatic momentum after Geneva and eager to bring Daniloff home, the president dropped his insistence on treating Zakharov and Daniloff differently. He let Shultz arrange a deal with Shevardnadze. The American journalist was released without trial from Soviet custody and allowed to leave the country. Zakharov was permitted to plead no contest to the espionage charges and was likewise sent home. Gorbachev gave Reagan political cover by granting Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov and his wife permission to emigrate. And on the day of Zakharov’s release the American and Soviet governments announced that Reagan and Gorbachev would meet in Reykjavík, Iceland, the second weekend in October.
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A SUMMIT ON LESS than two weeks’ notice was unheard of in superpower history. Skeptics of summitry weren’t mollified by White House efforts to call the Iceland rendezvous a working meeting—“a pre-summit planning session”—rather than a summit, and anyway the efforts failed. Summits had become media events, at least in the West, and the media refused to forgo the drama and television ratings “summits” provided.
The skeptics lit into Reagan, and for the first time in his career he found himself pilloried from the right. The critics couldn’t decide whether the president had let himself be bamboozled by George Shultz and other pro-summit softies in the administration or, more alarmingly, was revealing a heretofore hidden streak of détente-like concessionism. Reagan thought he had inoculated himself against such attacks by swearing full devotion to SDI, with which the conservatives had fallen in love. “Our SDI research is not a bargaining chip,” he declared in a national radio address. He said he would talk to Gorbachev about eliminating offensive missiles but not defensive systems. “It’s the number of offensive nuclear missiles that need to be reduced, not the effort to find a way to defend mankind against these deadly missiles.” Reporters pressed him nonetheless. Would SDI be on the table in negotiations with Gorbachev, perhaps as part of a grand bargain to reduce offensive arsenals? Pouring the concrete around his feet, Reagan replied, “Our response to demands that we cut off or delay research and testing and close shop is: No way. SDI is no bargaining chip. It is the path to a safer and more secure future.”
Perhaps the critics weren’t listening. Or maybe they wanted to help the concrete harden. In any case, they let Reagan know he would pay dearly if he showed the slightest weakness in Iceland. George Will described an administration “reeling toward a summit” and mocked the logic behind the meeting: “The administration believes the impediment to Soviet reasonableness is Soviet neurosis. A therapeutic U.S. policy can dispel that, especially a policy advocated by a great communicator, especially one who knows communists from the experience of labor-union strife in Hollywood forty years ago.” Charles Krauthammer warned that the “snap summit” boded ill for American interests. “All summits are a risk, the Reykjavik summit more than most,” Krauthammer wrote. He lashed Reagan for trading Zakharov for Daniloff and feared that a similar lack of principle and courage would be revealed in Iceland. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak blamed Shultz for pushing the president into a “posture of vulnerability” as he approached Reykjavík. “He either gives Gorbachev what he wants or returns empty-handed three weeks before the election,” the co-columnists wrote. Republican congressman Jack Kemp agreed that the timing was terrible. “This is the wrong kind of environment going into a critical, high-level meeting next week,” Kemp said.
REAGAN’S NATIONAL SECURITY team worked around the clock to prepare the president for whatever Gorbachev might throw at him in Iceland. “We go into Reykjavik next week with very little knowledge of how Gorbachev intends to use the meeting,” the NSC staff conceded in a memo to Reagan. “The same was true of Geneva, of course, but the uncertainty is perhaps greater this time around.” The NSC group saw no reason to think Gorbachev had altered his long-term goals: “to unravel the Western consensus behind tougher policies toward the Soviet Union, to stabilize US-Soviet relations in a way that gives him greater latitude in his domestic policies, and over time to regain a more favorable position in the global balance of power.” Arms control would be a means toward each of these ends. But the NSC authors predicted nothing significant on this front at Reykjavík. The big question was whether Gorbachev would agree to a 1987 summit in Washington, the more likely venue for any major initiative on arms control. The memo posed three possibilities: Gorbachev had already decided to come to Washington, he remained neutrally undecided about further meetings, or he had decided he would come only if he won some significant concessions in Iceland. “It is conceivabl
e that between now and Reykjavik we may see some Soviet probes that begin to tip their hand and to indicate which of these routes Gorbachev will follow,” the memo observed. “More likely, however, is that you will have to smoke him out during your discussions.”
George Shultz weighed in separately. The secretary of state continued to battle Weinberger for the mind of the president, and he assumed the defense secretary would warn that nothing good could come from Reykjavík. Shultz pushed in the opposite direction. “We should take a positive, self-confident and commanding approach to this meeting,” he told Reagan. “The American people are all for it so we should not seem to be playing it down or disparaging its chances for solid progress.” Shultz didn’t expect breakthrough agreements at Reykjavík; these could await the next full summit, in Washington. Yet he hoped for modest progress, perhaps on human rights but especially on arms control. “Arms control will be key not because that is what the Soviets want, but because we have brought them to the point where they are largely talking from our script. This doesn’t mean Gorbachev will be easy to handle in Reykjavik, but it means we are justified in aspiring to accomplish something useful there.” A framework for reductions in ballistic missiles was a good possibility; likewise an agreement in principle on intermediate nuclear forces. The president’s position, and America’s, had never been better. “The policies you set in motion six years ago have put us in the strong position we are in today,” Shultz said. “We are now entering the crucial phase in the effort to achieve real reductions in nuclear forces—an historic achievement in itself and a major step toward your vision of a safer world for the future.”