The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  The CIA moved Yurchenko to a new, larger safe house on a piece of wooded lakefront near Fredericksburg, Virginia. But Yurchenko was increasingly disillusioned. Word of his defection had leaked to the press, even though he asked the CIA to keep it secret. And his hopes to be reunited with a Russian woman he had known years earlier were dashed.29 When he defected in August, Yurchenko thought he might have been suffering from stomach cancer, although later tests in the United States showed he was not. On November 2, while at Au Pied de Cochon, a restaurant in Georgetown, Yurchenko simply walked away from his inexperienced CIA handler. When the CIA man realized what had happened, the agency and the FBI launched a manhunt all over Georgetown. They didn’t find Yurchenko. On Monday, November 3, he showed up at the Soviet Embassy, where he held a strange press conference in which he claimed he had been abducted in Rome, drugged and held against his will. “Something smells fishy,” Reagan observed in his diary on November 4.

  Yurchenko boarded a flight back to Moscow on November 6. His defection and return have long been one of the unsolved puzzles of the Cold War. Was he a deliberate plant by the KGB? For what purpose? Or did he just grow disillusioned with his treatment by the CIA? The truth is unknown. His return to Moscow brought with it one grim footnote. On the plane escorting Yurchenko home was KGB agent Valery Martynov, the officer in the Soviet Embassy working on Line X, stealing Western technology. Both Ames and Hanssen had, by this time, identified Martynov as a spy for the United States. Martynov was arrested the day he arrived in Moscow, and later executed.

  American intelligence operations in the Soviet Union were collapsing, but the CIA was not aware of the enormous damage it had suffered in 1985. Ames and Hanssen had only just begun their espionage, which went on for years. Later investigations showed how severely the American intelligence operations in Moscow had been compromised. Gates said that Howard was the “CIA’s most devastating counterintelligence setback up to that point,” and “many of our Soviet operations were compromised and either rolled up by the KGB or shut down by us.” According to a damage assessment by the CIA, nine of the agents whom Ames identified on June 13 were executed. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence later found that more than twenty operations were compromised, a “virtual collapse of the CIA’s Soviet operations.” John Deutch, the CIA director, told Congress that Ames not only caused the execution of agents who worked for the United States but “made it much more difficult to understand what was going on in the Soviet Union at a crucial time in its history.”

  The year of the spy, as 1985 became known, blinded American intelligence operations against the Soviet Union just as Gorbachev was coming to power. Reagan simply did not have the assets to help him understand what was happening behind the Kremlin walls. In the end, there were more powerful agents of change than the agents of espionage. Those forces—rooted in Gorbachev’s convictions about what his country needed, in the overpowering burden of the arms race, in Reagan’s desire to eliminate nuclear weapons—were about to unleash a momentous revolution.

  ————— 10 —————

  OF SWORDS AND SHIELDS

  In his early days in office in the spring of 1985, Gorbachev worked feverishly. Vladimir Medvedev, the Kremlin security director who had served since Brezhnev, watched in amazement. “After Brezhnev’s many years of illness and lethargy,” he recalled, “there was suddenly a volcano of energy near you.” Gorbachev worked until 1 or 2 A.M. and got up the next morning at 7 A.M. He was on his way to the Kremlin at 9:15 in the ZIL limousine. Gorbachev sat in the backseat, closing the glass sliding partition behind Medvedev and the driver, making notes, and placing calls on the two phones in the car. “Over this short period of time he managed to talk to 3 or 4 people,” Medvedev recalled. “Walking from the car to the office, he gave several orders, advice, promises—not a moment to catch his breath. Still walking, he gave concrete advice to the military, to civilians—whom to talk to, what to say, what to pay attention to, what to insist on, what to ignore. He spoke in short, precise sentences.”1

  Gorbachev sent a shock wave of excitement through a moribund society. At a time when people were accustomed to flowery but empty official pronouncements, when portraits of leaders were dutifully hung from every wall, when conformity suffocated public discussion, Gorbachev’s style was refreshingly direct.2 Often he talked too much, wavered on important decisions and was slow to break out of the old Soviet mind-set. Yet the absolute core of his early drive was to halt the decay in Soviet living standards and rejuvenate society. He believed that open discussion was essential to the survival of socialism. He didn’t fear what people had to say. He believed in Lenin’s ideals, but concluded that leaders after Lenin had gone off track, and he wanted to set things right. It would have been so much easier to fall back into the old habits, to take the well-worn old pathways, but Gorbachev did not.

  On a visit to Leningrad in May, he bantered with a large, jostling crowd on the street. It was an extraordinary sight to see a Soviet leader talking spontaneously with people. “I’m listening to you,” he told them. “What do you want to say?”

  Someone shouted back, “Continue as you began!”

  A woman’s voice broke in, “Just get close to the people, and we’ll not let you down.” Gorbachev, hemmed in tightly, responded with a smile. “Can I be any closer?” The crowd loved it.

  In a combative speech to Leningrad Communists at Smolny Institute on the same visit, Gorbachev spoke largely without notes, insisting that the economy be reenergized, demanding that people who could not accept change must step aside. “Get out of the way. Don’t be a hindrance,” he declared.3 Gorbachev was skilled at manipulating the elders of the Politburo; he didn’t tell them in advance about the speech, in which he spilled out some of their closed deliberations in March and April. He was thrilled with the enthusiastic response, and took a video home from Leningrad. The following weekend he watched it with his family at the dacha. Then he ordered it to be shown on national television.4 Crowds lined up to get a pamphlet of the text at newsstands. Anatoly Chernyaev, the deputy chief of the International Department of the Central Committee, who played a key role in the great Gorbachev drama, recalled that in the past such texts would lie on the floor of the newsstands until the leader died. “The people are flabbergasted at the TV coverage of Gorbachev’s meetings and speeches in Leningrad,” Chernyaev wrote. “The question of the day is: Did you see it? At last we have a leader who knows what he is doing and enjoys it, who can relate to the people, speak in his own words, who doesn’t avoid contact and doesn’t worry about appearing magisterial. He really wants to get our wheels out of the rut, wake the people up, get them to be themselves, to use their common sense, to think and act.”5

  At a Politburo meeting April 11, Gorbachev’s impatience was on full display. He was furious at the dreadful state of Soviet farming and at the food supply, which often spoiled in storage and transport. There were only enough warehouses for 26 percent of the fruit, vegetables and potatoes, and they were rotting; only a third of the storage facilities for produce had refrigeration. The loss of agricultural raw materials was running at 25 percent. As Chernyaev later lamented, any leader would see “the country was on the verge of collapse.” Gorbachev threatened the ministers that he would take away Kremlin privileges—an eatery and special food store—which allowed them to avoid exposure to the misery in most food shops.6

  Even in his first blunder, a campaign against alcohol abuse, Gorbachev showed his determination to save the country from itself.7 The campaign was widely ridiculed and eventually dropped, but Gorbachev knew, correctly, that alcoholism had become a scourge. Per capita, the amount of alcohol consumed was two and a half times greater than it had been under the tsars. Gorbachev recalled that the saddest part was that vodka helped fill the consumer goods deficit; there was nothing else for people to buy with their rubles. Chernyaev sensed right away the campaign was doomed. One day he stopped by a grocery. “Everyone there from the manager to the sal
eswoman is drunk. The anti-alcoholism law is nothing for them. Try to fire them. Who are you going to find to replace them?”8

  Less than two weeks after Gorbachev took power, two military men came to his office. Both held the rank of Marshal, the highest in the Soviet military. One was the unremarkable new defense minister, Sergei Sokolov, who had been appointed after Ustinov’s death. The other was Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of the General Staff. Lean and muscular, not very tall, with a strong chest like an athlete and a thin face, Akhromeyev carried himself very straight, was known as an exacting commander and rarely smiled. He had joined the Red Army at age seventeen, just before the outbreak of World War II, fought to lift the siege of Leningrad and later commanded a tank battalion in Ukraine. He ended the war as a major. His generation went into the war surprised and outgunned, fighting the Nazi tanks with only rifles and Molotov cocktails. After the war, they graduated from the military academies and devoted their lives to the belief, as Akhromeyev put it, that “everything the Soviet Union achieved in the post-war organization of Europe and the world must be protected.”9 Their determination was only strengthened by the development of nuclear weapons.

  By contrast, Gorbachev was a boy when the Germans invaded. He never served as a soldier, nor in the military-industrial complex or the defense establishment. Nor was Gorbachev in thrall to the great designers and scientists who had built the missiles and warheads that turned the Soviet Union into a nuclear superpower. Gorbachev simply did not share the worldview that the generals so deeply cherished and fervently protected. He did not see military power as decisive in global competition; he realized economic power was more potent. “We are encircled not by invincible armies,” he later concluded, “but by superior economies.”10

  In the meeting with Sokolov and Akhromeyev, Gorbachev got his first look at the true size and scope of the Soviet defense machine, and it was enormous. As they finished, Gorbachev turned to Akhromeyev. “We begin to work together in difficult times,” he said. “I speak to you as a Communist. I know what I must do in the area of economics to correct the situation. I know where and what to do. But the area of defense is new for me. I count on your help.” Akhromeyev, who had been chief of the General Staff for only six months, and before that deputy chief, held sway over military policy and planning. He promised to give Gorbachev his help.11

  Gorbachev realized that the sprawling defense establishment—the Army, Navy, Air Force, Strategic Rocket Forces, Air Defense Forces and all the institutes, design bureaus and factories that supported them—were a monumental burden on the country. How the military-industrial complex functioned, how far it ranged and how much it cost were concealed by deep secrecy, what Gorbachev called the “closed zones.”12 But Gorbachev’s travels around the country had provided him with hints. “Defense spending was bleeding the other branches of the economy dry,” he recalled. “When I visited defense plants and agricultural production complexes, I was always struck by the same picture. The defense production workshop making modern tanks, for example, had the newest equipment. The one working for agriculture was making obsolete models of tractors on old-time conveyor belts.”

  “Over the previous five-year plans, military spending had been growing twice as fast as national income. This Moloch was devouring everything that hard labor and strain produced… What made matters worse was the fact that it was impossible to analyze the problem. All the figures related to the military-industrial complex were classified. Even Politburo members didn’t have access to them.”13

  On the staff of the Central Committee, one man knew the secret inner workings of the military-industrial complex. Vitaly Katayev had the appearance of a thoughtful scientist or professor, with a long, angular face and wavy hair brushed straight back. As a teenager he loved to design model airplanes and ships. He spent two decades in aircraft and missile design and construction bureaus in Omsk and Ukraine, and took part in some of the largest missile projects of the Cold War before coming to the Central Committee headquarters in Moscow in 1974 to work on defense issues. In private, Katayev was a funny, quirky man who loved to sing and play musical instruments.14 But in his work at the Central Committee, he was very serious and precise. The Central Committee position was located in the heart of power, perhaps roughly equivalent to serving at the White House National Security Council. Katayev worked in the Defense Industry Department, later renamed just the Defense Department, which oversaw the military-industrial complex. Over many years, Katayev kept detailed records in large bound notebooks, often jotting down rows of numbers, drawing schematics of weapons systems, recording major decisions and debates. His notebooks and writings, revealed here for the first time, offer an unparalleled window on the inner workings of the Soviet military-industrial colossus.15Katayev described it once as “a sort of Soviet Texas—everything existed on a grand scale.” But Katayev knew it was not as fearsome as often portrayed. The defense establishment was run in a way that was extremely random, ad hoc, and subjective. Katayev knew that Soviet central planning did not work. Weapons were not built because they were needed, but rather because of the power of vested interests, of prominent designers, generals and Politburo members. To meet the artificial benchmarks of progress, everything had to increase every year, so the military was often saturated with weapons it did not need. The factories often lacked the necessary precision and reliability to produce high-technology weapons. Katayev recalled that while the Soviet Union had advanced science and a high level of design expertise, many projects were wrecked by miserable materials and sloppy production, for which no one was ever fired. Even such a simple ingredient as metals were often of unpredictable quality, so designers had to allow for wide margins. And it was not possible to fix the problems in electronics and high technology by design alone. A circuit board couldn’t be made more reliable by making it twice as large. There was a “permanent gap,” he said, between the drawing boards and the factories. This was the underside of the Soviet military machine.

  Katayev’s notes show that the military-industrial complex was indeed as large as Gorbachev feared. In 1985, Katayev estimated, defense took up 20 percent of the Soviet economy.16 Of the 135 million adults working in the Soviet Union, Katayev said, 10.4 million worked directly in the military-industrial complex at 1,770 enterprises. Nine ministries served the military, although in a clumsy effort to mask its purpose, the nuclear ministry was given the name “Ministry of Medium Machine Building,” and others were similarly disguised. More than fifty cities were almost totally engaged in the defense effort, and hundreds less so. Defense factories were called upon to make the more advanced civilian products, too, including 100 percent of all Soviet televisions, tape recorders, movie and still cameras and sewing machines.17 Taking into account all the ways the Soviet military-industrial complex functioned and all the raw materials it consumed and all the tentacles that spread into civilian life, the true size of the defense burden on the economy may well have been even greater than Katayev estimated.

  Gorbachev would need deep reserves of strength and cunning to challenge this leviathan. At one Politburo meeting, he lamented, “This country produced more tanks than people.” The military-industrial complex was its own army of vested interests: generals and officers in the services, designers and builders of weapons, ministers and planners in the government, propaganda organs, and party bosses everywhere, all united by the need, unquestioned, to meet the invisible Cold War threat. For decades, the threat had been the overriding reason to divert resources to defense and impose hardship on the Soviet people.18

  In title, Gorbachev was the top man in this system: general secretary of the party, supreme commander and chairman of the defense council. But when he came to power in 1985, he was not really in control. The military-industrial complex was in the hands of Akhromeyev’s generation.

  Gorbachev’s thinking about security was influenced by a group of progressives, outsiders to the military-industrial complex. They were academics from the institutes, people who,
like Gorbachev, had been excited by the Khrushchev secret speech, but had grown fatigued by the stagnation in the Brezhnev years.19 They did not trust the military but knew of its immense power. Now they hoped to see reform rise again, and Gorbachev listened to them.

  An important figure in this inner circle was Yevgeny Velikhov, an avuncular and open-minded physicist who was then deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. As a child, Velikhov had devoured books about science. He entered Moscow State University just after Stalin died in 1953. After graduation, he joined the institute, headed by Igor Kurchatov, leader of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Velikhov was lucky to be assigned to a famous physicist, Mikhail Leontovich, who supervised theoretical research on controlled nuclear fusion and plasma physics. “The atmosphere was wonderful,” Velikhov recalled. “Plasma physics was just emerging, and we felt that we had very few rivals anywhere in the world.” Velikhov was allowed to travel, and in the summer of 1962, he visited universities in New York, Boston and Chicago, and stopped at Los Alamos. He built his own network of contacts with American scientists.20

  When Velikhov became a vice president of the Academy of Sciences in 1977, he was the youngest to hold the position. His first assignment was to focus on cybernetics and computer technology in the Soviet Union, and he found they were in “very bad shape.” One day in the early 1980s, Velikhov invited Gorbachev, then a Politburo member, to his office at the academy. He recalled telling Gorbachev about the Apple computer on his desk, which he had brought from overseas. “I showed him and I said, ‘Look, this is a revolution.’” Once in power, Gorbachev continued to listen to Velikhov.