On September 14 the CIA sent out an Alert warning that “the Soviet leaders might be on the threshold of a decision to commit their own forces to prevent the collapse of the regime.”4 The White House held an interagency meeting to discuss contingency plans, and on November 3 Brzezinski reported to Carter that Soviet military advisers had been infused at levels from the Afghan Defense Ministry down to divisional commands, and that sizable military and economic aid agreements had been concluded.5
Another CIA Alert was sent on December 19, detailing a Soviet buildup along the Afghan borders,6 and on December 22 Vice Adm. Bobby Inman, director of the National Security Agency, called Brzezinski and Brown to warn that the Soviets would move their forces within 72 hours. Two days later he called again and gave a fifteen-hour warning that proved accurate.7 The invasion began on Christmas Day 1979, with Soviet propaganda falsely claiming that the troops were moving in response to an Afghan government appeal for help in strengthening its security forces.
Soviet recklessness in invading Afghanistan was a shock for the world. To Carter the invasion represented a real threat to U.S. national security. The administration believed it was plausible for the Soviets to consolidate their hold on Afghanistan and then make a push for the Persian Gulf, through either Iran or Pakistan. Carter’s main goals now were to make any such military move as politically costly as possible, and do what he could to stay Brezhnev’s hand in the future. He immediately consulted with key allies, nonaligned leaders, and the neighboring Muslim nations, asking them to condemn the Soviets’ actions.
Through the Hot Line (a direct link between Washington and Moscow established in the wake of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to provide instant communication), Carter sent Brezhnev his most strongly worded message ever, strengthening Brzezinski’s draft by labeling the Soviet action as a “clear threat to the peace,” which “could mark a fundamental and long-lasting turning point in our relations.”8 He also wanted to make it clear that a Soviet intrusion into the Persian Gulf would provoke the same response as an attack on America. With administration leadership, fifty countries signed a letter to the president of the UN Security Council requesting an urgent meeting. Carter worked with congressional and public leaders to ensure that the American people fully understood the gravity of the invasion, which he regarded as the most serious international development on his watch as president. As he explained to me later, unless the Soviets “recognize that it has been counterproductive for them, we will face additional serious problems with invasions or subversion in the future.”9
Until then Carter’s opinion on Soviet matters often aligned with Vance’s; but now it was changing. Vance was less certain the invasion presaged a broader Soviet thrust, and he continued to seek cooperation with the Soviet Union to salvage SALT. Brzezinski presented a more menacing view of the Soviet intentions and advocated tougher policies. He needed only to look at the map to envision a potential Soviet pincer movement from Africa on one side and southwest Asia on the other, with the principal artery of the world’s oil supply running through the Persian Gulf and the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz.
An excellent chess player, Brzezinski also saw Afghanistan as the perfect place to checkmate Vance in the bureaucratic wars, and win Carter over to his side once and for all on Soviet issues. He told the president that while members of his administration stood solidly behind him against the Soviets, there were two conflicting interpretations—one that saw it as an aberration from Soviet behavior and the other as a clear symptom of it. He did not need to name names.
Brzezinski had been studying Soviet policies for years, and told Carter that Moscow was entering an “assertive phase of its history,” characterized by the acquisition of military power that offered the Soviet Union temptations to project it far and wide, first by encouraging and supporting “ideological sympathizers” in Cuba, the Horn of Africa, politically in Western Europe, and now directly in Afghanistan, where Soviet power was supplanting Marxist ideology as the dynamic of Soviet foreign policy.10
Brzezinski’s geopolitical vision was heady stuff, and it worked. In a year-end television interview, the president declared: “My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week than even the previous two and one-half years.”11 Carter’s ultimate decision to side with his national security adviser, in my opinion, led to Vance’s departure from the administration.
Robert Gates, then the NSC specialist on Soviet affairs, was dismayed by the president’s remark because Brzezinski had been sending Carter his weekly Friday reports for two and one-half years focusing on precisely this assertive projection of Soviet power in Africa and Eastern Europe; Gates bemoaned that “it really hadn’t clicked with Carter until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.”12
The president was severely criticized as naive by hard-liners, but later insisted to me that he had been misunderstood: “We had just agreed to SALT … if you look at the actual text I was very clear, but the headlines were ‘Carter Surprised at Soviet Aggression,’ … which made it look as though I thought the Soviets were incapable of aggression—and you know I always knew that the Soviets were capable of aggression and had that inclination.”13
I believe Carter’s views evolved less suddenly. With Soviet adventurism rising in Africa, he was desperately trying to hold on to SALT. Moreover, he felt personally betrayed by Brezhnev after having devoted so much political capital to a conciliatory approach. But Afghanistan was the final piece of evidence that the Soviets represented a tangible threat to American interests and security, and Carter decided that the time for cooperation was over.
THE GRAIN EMBARGO
A full sense of crisis gripped the White House after the Soviet invasion. We had to act quickly and strongly, and the entire decision-making process, covering economic and domestic, as well as foreign and defense policy, was taken over by Brzezinski through a Special Coordinating Committee (SCC) of the National Security Council. In forming his plan to respond, Carter insisted that punitive action had to be clearly defined in order to be broadly supported. America would take the lead, but we would need to work closely with other nations. Within a week of the invasion, in round-the-clock, pressure-packed meetings, we came up with a comprehensive approach, combining political, economic, and military action.
Direct military intervention against the Soviet Union in such a distant and forbidding place was out of the question (until years later, when Al Qaeda made Afghanistan its base for attacks on American facilities abroad and eventually on New York City with 9/11). Still, it was possible to limit Soviet encroachment in the Gulf and Iran. Brzezinski set forth a list of geopolitical measures—creating a unified command structure in the region and staging maneuvers; institutionalizing defense ties with Saudi Arabia; and increasing American access to the military bases in the region, from Kenya and Somalia to Oman and Diego Garcia. Carter quickly expanded the American naval presence in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, strengthened military and political support to Pakistan to diminish Soviet influence in the region, and built up the Rapid Deployment Force. This was another of the Carter administration’s innovations, created in 1979 as a highly mobile strike force that could be moved immediately to areas where there were no existing U.S. bases or friendly countries. In response to the Afghan invasion, Carter made it the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, composed of all military services, focused particularly on the Persian Gulf.14
Another military component of this strategy, though unknown to the public, was the continued support of the mujahideen against the Soviet-backed Afghan forces. The entire process had to remain covert so as not to provoke the Soviets. In a top-secret operation, to avoid arousing suspicions that the United States was providing aid to Moscow’s enemies, the rebels received Soviet-manufactured weapons, which the CIA acquired from Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and handed them over to the mujahideen, primarily through Pakistan.15 I found it a sweet irony that the Soviets’ own arms were being deployed against them. Military aid con
tinued to increase during Carter’s term, including weapons against Soviet tanks and armored personnel carriers, and was enhanced by Reagan, with hand-held Stinger rockets proving decisive in devastating Soviet helicopters.16
Of all the actions we considered, the three most contentious were a grain embargo, an Olympic boycott of the 1980 Moscow games, and draft registration. To squeeze the Soviets, the most important economic measure was an embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union; but it was also the most politically difficult. President Nixon had repeatedly enforced grain embargoes, and the heavily subsidized American farming community argued it was being singled out for an excessive burden in comparison with corporate exporters of manufactured goods. During the 1976 campaign, Carter had called for ending grain embargoes.17
We received reports over the Christmas holidays that Moscow did not believe Carter intended to impose an embargo, which only made it a better strategy by showing the Soviets the extent of American conviction. Under a 1975 Ford administration agreement with the USSR, they had the right to buy up to 8 million tons of grain, with discretion to purchase another 17 million tons, for a total of 25 million. Days after their invasion, on January 3, the Soviets protectively ordered 3.8 million tons of wheat, one of their largest purchases yet.
As a farmer himself, questions surrounding a grain embargo hit Carter particularly close to home. America’s wheat farmers had been one of Russia’s main grain suppliers since the early 1970s. We knew that agriculture was one of the most vulnerable sectors of the Soviet economy; they were already low on grain, and supplies were available from only a handful of countries. While an embargo was likely to injure them economically and perhaps even stay any further military moves, Carter emphasized that shipping grain to the Soviets now would simply be contrary to American values. But with the Iowa caucuses just weeks away, I feared a backlash from Iowa’s farmers. So, when the president called on January 2, I was astonished as he told me he and Brzezinski had already decided on a grain embargo, without the slightest consideration of the legal, economic, and political consequences.18
But could he do this with the mere stroke of a pen? It might seem patriotic that the Seafarers Union on the West Coast, from which most U.S. products were shipped to the USSR, were refusing to load any shipments to the Soviet Union. But at least 8 million tons of wheat and corn, mainly for animal feed, had to be delivered to Russia under the agreement negotiated by the Ford administration, and so far only about half of that had been shipped. If even this amount was blocked by presidential order, Brezhnev would know that Carter meant it. But if the shipment was blocked by the union, the presidential sanction would lose much of its diplomatic force because the Russians would believe the White House was using the dockside boycott as a smokescreen to avoid the domestic consequences.
What was our legal obligation to the farmers and grain brokers—the owners of the shipment—if we decreed they could not sell it abroad? And who would be liable if we did not stop the longshoremen’s boycott? These questions were not even half of it. I ran down to a meeting in the Roosevelt Room chaired by Vice President Mondale, which seemed to have drawn half the government, including Lynn Daft, my agriculture expert on the Domestic Policy Staff, who was invaluable during this crisis. We discussed the complexities of an embargo and decided that the president had authority under the Export Administration Act to stop all shipments above the basic agreement’s 8 million tons without being sued. But we had no legal authority to force longshoremen to load more grain above that limit, and the boycott was spreading to the Port of New Orleans. At the moment, the grain was on barges in the Mississippi River, where it could freeze in the January weather and disrupt the food chain in our own country. As Dale Hathaway, deputy secretary of Agriculture, pointed out, if we could not load or ship the grain that had already been signed for, “it would show the Russians they can disrupt us more than we can disrupt them.” That dilemma showed up time and again as we shaped the sanctions regimen.19
The next question was how to help the farmers who would lose their market for the remaining grain. Carter knew that cutting off this export market could pile up huge surpluses in our government reserves, which would push down prices. Our meetings addressed this as part of the cost to the Treasury for underwriting the farmers’ losses, as well as their reputation as reliable suppliers. The government—meaning the taxpayers—could buy it and put it in a storage reserve; Carter was willing to pay that price.
The immediate question was whether we would be hurting our farmers and the U.S. economy more than we would be hurting the Soviets. The answer depended upon whether they could purchase the grain from other countries. Because the decision was being made so quickly, this vital aspect of the operation received little attention. An even broader issue was whether the president would be using food as a foreign-policy weapon, a slippery slope that we all agreed would hurt our international credibility.
Carter wanted to slap on the grain embargo by the end of the day—January 3, the first working day of the New Year—and demanded an options memorandum by 3:00 p.m. As I pointed out, the legal and economic problems, I had what I described in my notes as a “hot discussion with him.” He was visibly uninterested in the details and set 4:00 p.m. for a meeting to make the final decision. With his military sense of punctuality, at 4:00 p.m. and not a minute earlier or later, Carter walked into the Roosevelt Room to face a phalanx of officials. Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland, a former Minnesota congressman and a no-nonsense Midwesterner with a great knowledge of farm programs and farm politics, gave precise figures on the state of the grain shipments. He warned of the high cost to farmers of an embargo, and not just the $3.5 billion in lost farm income. White House economic adviser Charlie Schultze estimated it would cost the government about $3 billion to buy up the embargoed grain.
In checking with farm groups, Bergland confirmed they would feel unfairly treated unless all exports to the Soviet Union were curtailed, a sweeping ban that was economically and politically impossible. Clearly worried about how the farmers would be made whole, Bergland was brutally frank: “Mr. President, we will have to adjust our farm reserve, but there will be structural damage [emphasis his, as captured in my notes] to our trade position, and as a reliable partner for trade. The embargo will have a greater economic impact here at home than on the Soviets. Mr. President, we will be shooting ourselves in the foot.” More discussion followed, but it clearly washed over Carter.
The president said, “This is the most serious consequence to world peace. Afghanistan was not previously a Soviet puppet. We cannot let them go on with impunity or they might move into Pakistan or Iran.… I don’t care if this costs $2 billion, we will save the money elsewhere.… I think the nation’s security is involved. For the world to see us pay an economic cost shows our determination.” He soon left the room, leaving no doubt what he would do, whatever the consequences.20 The wrangling over alternatives, details, and repercussions continued the next day throughout the administration—although not in the mind of the determined president.
The speechwriters were already at work on an address Carter would give to the nation Friday evening, January 4, from the Oval Office. Because he felt the need to act quickly and decisively, he announced actions that had not been thoroughly vetted among the key departments. We paid a price for his haste, but in the end the sprint of several weeks’ work at very long hours was both exhilarating and uplifting, in part because of my pride at seeing the president act so decisively under duress.
In his address he warned that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a remote country most Americans had never heard of, was an “extremely serious threat to peace” because it could be “a stepping-stone to possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies.” The United States had already helped persuade fifty nations to condemn the invasion, and he told the American people what he was going to do—recall the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, ask the Senate to delay ratification of SALT II, halt or reduce exports to the Soviets i
n high technology and other strategic products, severely curtail Soviet fishing in U.S. waters, and embargo grain shipments, which he made clear were to be fed to livestock and not intended for human consumption.
He reassured American farmers that the blocked grain would be bought up by the government to maintain steady prices and expressed confidence that other grain-exporting nations would “not replace these quantities of grain by additional shipments on their part to the Soviet Union.” This, unfortunately, was a misplaced confidence. At that point he did not pull out of the summer’s Moscow Olympics, but warned that they were also endangered by their hosts’ behavior. He closed by reminding Americans that there was “a clear lesson from history learned by the world at great cost: aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease.”21
* * *
Now we had to deal with the consequences of Carter’s decisions and further expand sanctions. It was clear to me that if there was a national security crisis abroad, we were on the brink of a different one at home. Economic and political sanctions were particularly difficult to craft, because of intense domestic interests, particularly during a presidential election season. We bumped frustratingly against the legal limits of using economic sanctions in the service of national security, and the necessity of bringing on board all economically important allies for products traded on international markets—a lesson President Obama learned in shaping tough sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program decades later.
President Carter Page 78