Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Shultz’s game was defensive, for he lacked one normal asset of the secretary of State. Usually, in the battle of policy coalitions, a secretary of State tries to position himself at the political center of the national security community—as a broker between the hawkish, hard-line right and the pro-arms-control left. In the Carter administration, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had done that—with Paul Warnke, as the chief arms negotiator and director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, on his left pressing for an arms agreement, and with Defense Secretary Harold Brown and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his right, raising cautions and opposing concessions. In that lineup, the State Department can forge compromises for the president.

  But Shultz never got that chance because the normal political lineup got switched in the Reagan administration. Instead of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) advocating arms agreements, Reagan’s ACDA was manned by hard-liners in league with Weinberger. That left Shultz on the left flank—not in the center, and it hurt his bargaining leverage.

  Nonetheless, Shultz had important allies. At State, his arms guru was Paul Nitze, a slender, silver-haired former Wall Street investment banker who had helped negotiate Nixon’s 1972 arms treaties. Initially Nitze had fought SALT II, and he had strong credentials among hard-liners; now, he wanted to save SALT II. But the critical balance was swung by National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McFarlane believed in arms control, saw value in SALT II, and did not think American security had been seriously damaged by Soviet violations of arms treaties. McFarlane’s support was pivotal, for when secretaries of State and Defense disagree, the national security adviser can tip the balance with the president. It was more ticklish for the Joint Chiefs to help Shultz. Since Weinberger oversaw their budgets, they could ill afford to declare open revolt; but as careerists, they were inclined to keep SALT II. Careerists tend to favor continuity in policy, whereas in-and-outers—Reagan’s political appointees in the Pentagon—were eager to make a fresh mark on policy.12

  In a tough bureaucratic fight on arms control, the military chiefs play a crucial role. A politically astute president wants them on his side on arms issues—especially if Congress may second-guess the president. In 1979, Carter had gotten endorsement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) for his SALT II treaty. In Reagan’s first two years, military men had defended it to him: first, Haig; then General David Jones, the JCS chairman whom Reagan inherited from Carter; and later, Vice Admiral Bobby Inman, the widely respected deputy director of CIA.

  After the early skirmishes over SALT II in 1981, the battle inside the Reagan administration was not seriously joined until 1985. In 1982 and 1983, the policymakers had been engaged in framing the Reagan administration’s arms proposals. By 1984, President Reagan was caught up in his reelection campaign, eager to project a conciliatory image toward Moscow. In early 1985, the Weinberger faction mounted a new campaign to scrap SALT II.

  A natural deadline emerged: In late 1985, the United States was preparing to launch a new Trident submarine, the U.S.S. Alaska, with twenty-four multiwarhead nuclear missiles. That submarine would put the United States over the SALT II ceiling on multiwarhead missiles (1,200)—unless Reagan retired and dismantled an older, sixteen-missile Poseidon submarine. The Pentagon hawks wanted Reagan to disavow the treaty and keep both old and new submarines.

  In the foreign policy game, changing policy usually requires a powerful rationale. The Weinberger camp used Soviet bad behavior—violations of past arms treaties. For years, the American intelligence community and past administrations had been divided over whether Moscow had violated those treaties; in early 1983, a Reagan interagency task force was hopelessly mired in disagreement on that issue. Then Ken Adelman, who became director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in April, 1983, bypassed the deadlock by doing a report in his agency, which found Moscow guilty.

  Adelman, a thirty-six-year-old former student of and deputy to Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s conservative United Nations ambassador, sensed a need for pressuring the president from the outside as well as inside the administration. Adelman had connections to the right-wing Senate Steering Committee. He teamed secretly with conservative Republican senators such as Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming, James McClure of Idaho, and Jesse Helms of North Carolina to have Congress require that Reagan make public ACDA’s report.

  The Kremlin inadvertently helped the Weinberger clan. In summer 1983, American spy satellites discovered a huge new radar facility—a building five football fields long and twenty-four stories high—in the Krasnoyarsk region of East Siberia. Washington objected that under the 1972 ABM (antiballistic missile) Treaty, no such radar site was permitted hundreds of miles inland. Each side was permitted big radars near its frontiers for early warning of attack. But a radar stuck deep in the country looked like battle-management radar, a facility to help direct antimissile defenses. Under the ABM Treaty, such defenses were forbidden except at one limited site. The Krasnoyarsk radar gave new ammunition to Weinberger, Adelman and company.

  On January 23, 1984, Reagan sent a revised version of Adelman’s report to Congress, accusing Moscow of several outright violations of treaties and agreements—using chemical warfare agents (“yellow rain”) in Indochina and Afghanistan; failing to provide the West with advance notice of large-scale troop movements in Central Europe, as required by the 1975 Helsinki Accords; and unfairly encoding the telemetry (electronic messages) from its missile tests, thus impeding American efforts to check on Soviet compliance with SALT II. The report found “likely” or “almost certain” arms violations in the Krasnoyarsk radar and the development of two new land-based ICBMs (whereas SALT II permitted only new ICBM).

  That first report was sharply disputed. Pro-arms-control moderates and liberals, as well as some conservatives in Congress, questioned the evidence. The report itself acknowledged the evidence was “somewhat ambiguous.” Moscow insisted that Krasnoyarsk was a space-tracking radar facility and violated no treaty. It claimed the supposed second new ICBM, the SS-25, was a legal modification of an earlier Soviet missile, the SS-13. It argued that encryption of its test telemetry was permitted. Also, State Department officials argued that Moscow had complied with the main SALT limits, that violations were marginal, and that SALT II was still a net plus for the United States.

  The official military judgment was similar—and it had important sway with Reagan. Since 1979, the military assessment was that the Soviets were in a better position than the United States to “break out” of SALT II—that is, rapidly build up their strategic nuclear forces if the treaty were scrapped. In 1985, a White House official told me, the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that Moscow had the capacity to jump from about nine thousand strategic nuclear warheads to thirteen thousand by 1990. A CIA estimate projected up to twenty thousand by 1995. The United States could not come close to matching that. “The JCS did not want numerical restraints taken off,” one State Department policymaker told me, “for fear of a Soviet push in the arms race over the 1985 to 1990–92 period, especially at a time when the U.S. defense consensus was fading.”

  Much later, Reagan admitted that JCS estimates had jarred him. “I learned that the Soviet Union had a capacity to increase weaponry much faster than the treaty permitted, and we didn’t,” Reagan told my colleague Leslie Gelb of The New York Times.13

  In Reagan’s informal, top-level caucus of the National Security Council (the National Security Planning Group), the nation’s military leaders played a subtle game. Technically their advice to Reagan on SALT II was neutral. Several officials informed me that John Vessey, then JCS chairman, told Reagan that living with or without SALT II was a “wash” militarily. Vessey’s primary concern was maintaining “our strategic modernization program.” Translated, that meant: Don’t abrogate SALT II if that alienates Congress and jeopardizes our military budget; stick with it for political reasons. Beyond that, the Navy did not want to spend $150 million to keep a twenty-year-old Poseidon
submarine in service; it wanted new attack submarines. So the Joint Chiefs of Staff equivocated—in theory, they supported Weinberger, saying in principle SALT II should no longer be valid, but in practice, they advocated scrapping the old submarine, which meant abiding by SALT Us limits.

  Weinberger played what bureaucrats call “the hundred-percent game.” On tough issues, a policymaker may add up very close arguments and come out fifty-one percent pro and forty-nine percent con on some policy line. But meeting with other agencies, especially with the President, he argues his case one hundred percent, black and white, as an attorney would. To do less, so the theory goes, weakens your arguments and hurts your agency. Weinberger is at his best as a case lawyer, arguing his brief. “He wanted to drive a stake in that treaty,” said a senior White House official.

  Shultz’s gambit was different. Like many a power-game player, he did not want to lose, for losses are a blow to prestige. So Shultz did not buck the president head on. He and McFarlane figured that Reagan would insist on taking some action to punish Moscow for arms violations; they tried a middle course. Instead of dismantling the old Poseidon submarine, they proposed drydocking it. Technically, drydocking would violate SALT II limits, but it would take the old sub out of service and give Reagan time to decide what to do with it for the long run. Shultz’s gambit was a policy hedge, aiming at fuzzing the decision and winning the fight. At a National Security Council meeting on June 3, 1985, Shultz urged Reagan to “keep the high ground” politically—not be the one publicly to annul SALT II.

  Following a Schattschneider strategy, Shultz widened the circle, reaching outside government for support. Events were favoring his clan. First of all, arms talks with Moscow—broken off in November 1983—had resumed in early 1985, and Reagan was pressing to meet the new Kremlin leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Also, swing moderates in Congress, suspicious of Reagan’s commitment to arms control, were demanding movement in arms talks before funding more of his military buildup. A bad time for Reagan to abrogate the SALT II Treaty.

  Shultz mobilized Allied pressures on Reagan. Through its ambassadors, the State Department got European allies, especially those whom Reagan liked most, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, to send Reagan telegrams urging him to stick with SALT II. Bitterly, Pentagon officials accused State of having ghostwritten the cables for Thatcher and Kohl. With Cheshire-cat grins, veteran diplomats insisted to me they had not gone that far, but they admitted that U.S. embassies were given “talking points” for Allied governments to use against the Pentagon position. In the clinches, that’s how the foreign policy game is fought.

  Also, Shultz and McFarlane persuaded Reagan to delay his decision on SALT II for ten days to let Shultz sound out the Allies at a NATO meeting in Portugal. Shultz knew in advance he had NATO on his side. The European leaders put great stock in Soviet-American arms agreements. They were not persuaded that Soviet arms violations were serious. They did not want the West—the United States—to take the onus of annulling SALT II. And they wanted nothing to disrupt plans for a Reagan-Gorbachev summit. Shultz cabled Reagan NATO’s views from Portugal, and a senior Reagan aide told me the cable had impact with the president.

  Armed with Allied support, Shultz and McFarlane shifted their position and proposed that Reagan dismantle the submarine’s missile bays in full compliance with SALT II. In a final memorandum to Reagan, I was told, McFarlane recommended that Reagan abide by SALT II, call for Moscow to halt arms violations and offer to go the “extra mile” by giving Moscow more time to reform. That is the course Reagan announced on June 10, 1985. In sum, Shultz, backed by McFarlane and the joint Chiefs, won.

  But a key axiom of the Washington power game is that no bureaucratic war is over until the loser accepts final defeat. Weinberger did not. In fact, McFarlane, as the man in the middle, devised a compromise that gave Weinberger’s clan an important consolation prize—and a new opening. For Reagan, at McFarlane’s urging, laid out tough terms for testing Moscow’s future behavior on three counts: whether arms violations continued, how seriously the Soviets negotiated, and whether they slowed their military buildup. Weinberger was told to grade Soviet actions and propose “proportionate” countermeasures if Moscow did not measure up. That set up another battle over SALT II in 1986.

  1986: Shifting Alliances Kill SALT II

  Policy-making can be like a decathlon or a steeplechase: sheer endurance and tenacity pay off. That was true for Weinberger, for his power-game style is to stake out an extreme position and ride his policy horse without change, wearing down opponents and forcing others to compromise. For the sake of final resolution, the heat is on them to move toward his position.

  With Congress, Weinberger’s unyielding hard line backfired. But not with Reagan; for it put Shultz perennially on the defensive, trying to protect this policy from Weinberger’s sallies. In 1985, for example, when Weinberger was savaging SALT II, Shultz emphasized that the timing and the politics were bad for getting out of the treaty. But by 1986, the ground had shifted.

  Inside the administration, Shultz lost his clan. McFarlane was replaced by John Poindexter, his deputy, who did not favor SALT II. Poindexter was an active duty Navy admiral with an eye to becoming chief of naval operations, which made him technically Weinberger’s subordinate and extra mindful of his views. In addition, there was a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr. Before he was selected, Weinberger and Perle had talked with Crowe and found that he shared their views on Soviet violations of arms agreements. Together, these shifts left Shultz isolated on SALT II in Reagan’s inner circle.

  On the outside, the political trends were working against Shultz, too. By late spring, 1986, Reagan was miffed at Gorbachev for not keeping his promise to set a new summit meeting in Washington. Soviet-American arms talks had not yielded any significant progress in recent months. So there was little incentive from Moscow to keep Reagan from breaking out of SALT II. What’s more, Reagan was less inclined to listen to the European allies on arms issues than in 1985, because of their refusal—except for Margaret Thatcher—to support the American reprisal raid against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi for a terrorist bombing in Germany.

  Finally, Weinberger declared that Moscow had failed to meet Reagan’s test of its intentions on arms issues, and argued for American reprisal measures. In late March 1986, Reagan’s senior advisers all agreed on the need for some American action, although Shultz’s deputy, John Whitehead, had proposed American moves that did not violate SALT II limits, such as deploying more airborne cruise missiles and developing the Midgetman ICBM.

  The issue of SALT II came to a head on April 16, two days after the Libyan bombing raid.14 In a meeting of Reagan’s inner circle, Shultz defended the overall SALT II limits as still in the American interest. Despite Soviet violations, he said, the overall ceilings had “taken on a magical aura.” He did not want Reagan to disrupt the process of arms control.

  Across the table, Weinberger slashed away. “I’ve never liked SALT II and neither have you, Mr. President,” he asserted.

  Attorney General Ed Meese agreed. “Mr. President,” he recalled, “you gave a hundred speeches against SALT II and never liked it.”

  “Never liked it at all,” the president nodded.

  Weinberger favored deliberately violating the treaty’s ceilings to show that it was dead. He made several proposals. Casey objected to one—encoding telemetry from American missile tests to foil Soviet eavesdropping—because he feared it would prompt Moscow to encode even more of its telemetry. Otherwise, Casey joined Weinberger and Meese on renouncing SALT II.

  So did Admiral Crowe. He was bothered by Moscow’s arms violations and, breaking with former JCS chairmen, he discounted the dangers of a rapid Soviet “break out” if SALT II were revoked. The Soviets already had more than enough warheads, he said. The real issue, as Crowe saw it, was Reagan’s personal credibility; Reagan had to decide whether to carry ou
t earlier warnings to the Kremlin about its arms violations. Crowe’s comments were crucial, because he had moved the military hierarchy from Shultz’s clan into Weinberger’s clan.

  Ken Adelman, head of the arms control agency, joined Weinberger, too. He reminded Reagan that SALT II was still unratified, would never be ratified, should have expired by the end of 1985, and was flawed anyway. Adelman also challenged Shultz’s contention that the treaty’s overall limits were “magical.” He contended that Moscow had broken the overall SALT II ceilings, and pointed to a chart on an easel at the end of the table, showing a “clear violation” for overall SALT II limits.

  “Every agency in town including the State Department has found it a clear violation,” Adelman asserted.

  Shultz reddened. He turned around to ask two questions of Paul Nitze, his arms adviser. Twice Nitze nodded. State had agreed prematurely to the arms chart Adelman was citing. (State later withdrew its assent.) The issue was intricate enough for Philadelphia lawyers—whether the Soviets were actually dismantling some old Bison bombers, as required, or merely taking them off operational bases, less than required. It was a matter of interpretation still to be finally resolved.

  The Weinberger clan was exploiting a technicality, and Shultz was thrown off balance, being no master of the intricate details of arms control.