Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  Although always a hawk in relations with the Soviet Union, Mrs Thatcher was no absolutist. Even before her election victory, she had indicated an interest in negotiation. In July 1982, she had received the former US President Richard Nixon, whose foreign policy expertise she respected. ‘The Soviets will listen to you before they listen to us …’ Nixon told her. ‘They know you’ve got a lot of clout with our, frankly, inexperienced White House. With your credentials you can bring a new realism into East–West relations.’4 On the death of the long-time Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, in November 1982, Reagan had written to her expressing his hopes of a better relationship with the Soviets. She had replied warmly: ‘I agree very strongly with all your views, in particular the need to make it clear to the new Soviet leaders that a more constructive East/West relationship is available if they are willing to adopt a new approach.’5 She had said much the same publicly in her speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet three days later. As she grew in confidence in international affairs, she was readier to look for opportunities.

  In March 1983, through the suasion of her former private secretary Bryan Cartledge,* now Ambassador to Hungary, Mrs Thatcher met József Marjai, the Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister, in London. Malcolm Rifkind,† the junior Foreign Office minister in charge of relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,‡ recalled: ‘The first thing she said was, “So Mr Marjai, my officials tell me you have some rather unusual views on economic policy …” He said, “Yes, Madam Prime Minister. The biggest problem we have in Hungary is to convince the Hungarian people that the government has no money of its own.” Her eyes lit up. “But that’s what I’m always saying in this country!” It was a love-in from then on.’6 Gradually, the idea grew in her mind that not all Communists were necessarily alike.

  She was also spurred on by knowing that other European leaders had contacts with the Eastern bloc. As Nigel Broomfield,§ one of the Foreign Office’s Soviet experts, put it:

  Schmidt, Giscard spoke to the Russians and would talk about their exchanges when they met. She was out of that. The Embassy in Moscow kept her well informed, but at her level it is important to be able to say, ‘Well, I said to him this. And he said that.’ … If we wanted to be able to play a full role at the Great Power table we needed to have contacts at the highest level and the ability to judge for ourselves what these people were likely to do and to make them aware of our views.7

  Mrs Thatcher’s competitive spirit was aroused. She asked for a seminar of experts on the Soviet Union to be held at Chequers, the centrepiece of a broader review of the government’s approach to international affairs. The process ran parallel to a similar desire in the United States to analyse the situation and work out how to bargain from strength. In July 1983, Geoffrey Howe, now Foreign Secretary, was received by Reagan. ‘He agreed with you’, the British Ambassador, Sir Oliver Wright, recorded for Howe, in words which Mrs Thatcher underlined, ‘that we must emphasise disarmament as well as defence and said he had never been more serious about anything in his life. We could not go on as we were with nuclear weapons pointing at each other.’8

  Although Reagan and Thatcher were as one in their hatred of Communism and their belief in the Western way of life, they did not, at bottom, agree about how best to defend it. Reagan had a strong antipathy to nuclear weapons which can be traced back to the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.* Reagan, recalled one of his speech-writers, Peter Robinson, would tell a story from his undergraduate days. A friend had once said to him,

  ‘When the next war comes along we’ll just use airplanes and drop bombs on the other country.’ Reagan said, ‘I told him “Oh no. We could never do that. We are Americans. We could never bomb civilian populations.” ’ And he looked down and fell silent … you could feel that 50 years later he was still shocked by the idea … Nuclear weapons were an offence against basic notions of decency.9†

  Reagan was always looking for a means of getting beyond the dominant post-war nuclear doctrine, upon which the theory of deterrence rested, of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). On 23 March 1983, the President told a startled world that he thought he might have found it. Speaking directly to the nation from the Oval Office, the President asked, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them? … I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons … to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.’ He announced a research and development programme ‘to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles’.10 This venture was known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), often referred to, usually derisively, as Star Wars. Reagan had developed the idea in almost complete secrecy, relying on a handful of trusted advisers. Its central premise was that the US would develop a defensive missile shield which would make MAD obsolete.

  The world did not receive SDI rapturously. There was mixture of mockery that the notion was fanciful and wouldn’t work, and fear that it wasn’t and would. The Russians considered it a brazen attempt to undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty* and exempt the United States from deterrence. If the US could block Soviet missiles, reasoned Moscow, then it could launch a first strike with impunity. In Britain, the fear amounted to the same thing, though from a different point of view. Michael Heseltine, then Defence Secretary, recalled: ‘I think that the reaction to the announcement was one of despair – Oh Lord! Here we go again, the next escalation in the arms race – and then realpolitik – Oh help! What’s this going to do to Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent[?]’11 If the Soviets, too, could develop a shield sufficient to defend against Britain’s very limited nuclear arsenal then the rationale for Trident, the new generation of submarine-launched nuclear missiles which were replacing Polaris (see Volume I, pp. 571–3), would vanish overnight.

  Mrs Thatcher, who had known nothing of the run-up to the SDI speech, was given a few hours’ notice by Reagan. In a message which clearly tried to anticipate the objections, he flattered her by saying that he and she had ‘borne the responsibility to provide for our people’s security against the most awesome threat in history’. Now they had to move from offensive to defensive technologies. Notions that his country would become ‘fortress America’, ‘violate the ABM Treaty’ or ‘depart from our commitments to allies’ were ‘of course utter nonsense’.12 The benefits of SDI would not come through ‘in material terms until the turn of the century’, and they would ‘be shared with our friends and allies’.13

  In later years, Mrs Thatcher tended to give the impression that she had welcomed SDI. She boasted that her scientific education, contrasted with ‘Laid back generalists from the Foreign Office’,14 enabled her to grasp the concept and run with it. She was certainly not one of those who were appalled. But the very scientific education which she mentioned led her to be ‘dubious about the practicality’, Robert Armstrong recalled. ‘… I think she instinctively doubted whether it would be as effective as Reagan seemed to think it would be.’15 According to John Weston, the head of the Foreign Office Defence Department, ‘She was saying things like, “Well … the Star Wars thing is just a pipedream and like all dreams it will vanish with the dawning of the day.” We all thought, “Good, she’s being sensible.” ’16 Her immediate reaction was to play for time by emphasizing that SDI was a programme of research and not deployment. ‘There is a long way to go in research before we reach any development,’ she told Michael Foot in the Commons a few days later. ‘I believe in research, but the right hon. Gentleman obviously does not.’17

  The difference between research and deployment was vital to her approach. It also enabled her to gloss over the fact that she disagreed with Reagan about nuclear weapons. She never departed from the view that nuclear deterrence had worked, keeping the peace since 1945. She naturally wished, if it was safe, to stop the arms race and cut weapons stockpiles, but she did not share the President’s sunny vision of a world freed from n
uclear threat. What had been invented could not be disinvented, she insisted. She also had a particular worry about where Britain stood in all of this. Mrs Thatcher was well aware that any talk of abolishing nuclear weapons risked making Europe ‘safe for conventional war’, something NATO had striven to avoid since 1949. If the United States now saw the future in terms of SDI, what would happen to its nuclear guarantee for Europe? Might not Reagan’s policy end up serving the turn of the unilateralists? How could Britain justify Trident if its purpose was to be nullified? She did not make a great fuss about these points at this time, but she never abandoned them. They would bulk large later.

  The Chequers seminar on 8 September 1983 was carefully prepared by the officials of the Foreign Office, who saw it as their greatest opportunity to influence the Prime Minister’s thinking. They were conscious of Mrs Thatcher’s suspicion that they might be too wet towards Soviet Communism. Howe, encouraged by his good relationship with the American Secretary of State, George Shultz,* who seemed to think along similar lines, was ‘more in favour of engaging with the Soviets than Margaret’.18 In a cross reply to FCO suggestions about who should attend the seminar, Mrs Thatcher wrote:

  This is NOT the way I want it. I am not interested in gathering in every junior minister, nor everyone who has ever dealt with the subject at the FO … I want also some people who have really studied Russia – the Russian mind – and who have had some experience of living there. More than half the people on the list know less than I do.19

  Above all, Mrs Thatcher wanted to hear from experts from outside the government machine. The final list of academics and other invitees was not, in fact, displeasing to the Foreign Office,* nor were the papers which the academics submitted. What most worried Howe’s officials was any serious advocacy of destabilizing the Soviet Union. No paper did this, though one, by Dr Ronald Amann, discussed it as a possibility. The FCO’s own paper, probably thinking of Reagan’s remark earlier in the year that the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire’, counselled against ‘statements which disparage the Soviet state or its leaders’.20 Its main aim was to argue that ‘the time is ripe for a more active policy’ towards the Soviet Union aimed at a ‘gradual evolution towards a more pluralistic political and economic system’.21 Mrs Thatcher doubly underlined ‘ripe’ and ‘more active policy’, but scribbled ‘by whom?’

  Events appeared to conspire against the supporters of engagement. On 1 September 1983, the Soviets shot down a Korean civilian airliner (KAL 007), which had accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace. All 269 people on board were killed. Mrs Thatcher refrained from immediate public comment, but backed sanctions by the allies. Privately, she wrote to Reagan: ‘I share your profound horror at what occurred … This incident has vividly illustrated the true nature of the Soviet regime. Its rigidity and ruthlessness, its neuroses about spying and security, its mendacity …’22 But unlike some of the hawks in Washington, Mrs Thatcher did not believe that the West should automatically break off all contact with Moscow. ‘I also very much agree that we must continue our search for balanced and verifiable agreements with the Soviet Union,’ she concluded.23 Howe went further. He wrote to her before the seminar, arguing that the atrocity, far from showing that dialogue with the Soviets was impossible, suggested ‘the exact opposite’: ‘this incident proves how dangerous is the state of affairs where the two superpowers talk to each other more across the floor of the United Nations than they do on the Hot Line.’24 Archie Brown, one of the academics present, noted what happened when Howe tried to make a similar point at the Chequers seminar:

  just before lunch Sir Geoffrey Howe finally got in a question he had had his mouth open to put half a dozen times which was whether the rhetoric in which Western comment on the Soviet Union’s actions was couched made any difference … Before the answer could be developed, however, Mrs Thatcher butted in to say but, of course, we must condemn them in the strongest possible terms when they do something like shooting down the Korean airliner. She then announced that we should adjourn for a pre-lunch drink.25

  Mrs Thatcher had prepared for the seminar with a tough line. In what appears to be an aide-memoire, written in her own hand, she said:

  The Soviet Union does not regard disarmament as an end in itself … It seeks to use negotiations to maintain or achieve a degree of military superiority; to foster the impression that the Soviet Union is a peace-loving nation; to contain both western defence capability and its own defence costs and to seek visible endorsement by the US of its superpower status.26

  She argued in this way at Chequers and, by Brown’s account, ‘the only person on the government side of the table who ventured to contradict her throughout the entire meeting’ was Michael Heseltine.27 But she did study what the experts had written and listened to what they said. The drift of their contributions was that Britain should, indeed, engage with the Soviet leadership. She accepted this more readily from them than she did from the Foreign Office.

  She also, it seems, listened when Archie Brown developed what he had written earlier about the next generation of leaders in the Kremlin. His paper described the ‘two best-placed contenders’ as successors to the ailing Yuri Andropov (who had replaced Brezhnev as general secretary of the Communist Party) as ‘Gorbachev (52)* and Romanov (60)’. He described Gorbachev as ‘the best-educated member of the Politburo and probably the most open-minded’.28 Mrs Thatcher underlined Brown’s passage about Grigory Romanov’s ‘extravagant lifestyle’ but marked none of the remarks about Gorbachev. In conversation at the seminar, however, Brown recalled that he advanced the idea of Gorbachev as the best leader from both the Soviet and Western points of view: ‘Mrs Thatcher turned to Sir Geoffrey Howe … and said: “Should we not invite Mr Gorbachev to Britain?” Howe concurred.’29 This, it seems, was the first moment at which the name ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’ entered Mrs Thatcher’s mind.* Her suggestion that Gorbachev be invited to Britain seems significant in light of later events, but at the time it was little more than her thinking out loud. It did not reach the level of a prime ministerial instruction.† An important seed had been planted, but it had yet to germinate.

  All through the meeting, the Foreign Office officials were highly anxious, wanting to push the Prime Minister towards dialogue. One report shows how, from their point of view, things nearly went off the rails:

  The level and tone of the discussion had however deteriorated after lunch when the academics had departed. The Prime Minister made a great show of reluctance about accepting the present lack of channels to Moscow damaged our interests. She wanted to know what the purpose of a dialogue would be and what its content should be.30

  If Mrs Thatcher had known that her interest in the purpose and content of dialogue was considered a bad sign, it would have confirmed her worst suspicion about the Foreign Office – that it wanted dialogue for its own sake. But in the event, what Rifkind observed to be her ‘insatiable curiosity’31 seems to have got the better of her:

  Nevertheless, she showed signs of interest in meeting Andropov, but not in Moscow. She agreed in the end that once the KAL crisis had died down there should be an improvement in links with the Russians so long as they did not involve herself and as long as it was understood that she had the right to veto these talks if they went too far.32

  So sensitive were all involved about the seminar that John Coles, her foreign affairs private secretary, did something he could not recall doing on any other occasion.33 He asked Mrs Thatcher to look at his records in draft. ‘Her concern would have been that the party, particularly the right wing and a lot of her supporters in the country, would have been rather disappointed if she began to be open-minded about the Soviet Union,’ recalled Coles.34 He asked her to make sure that he had got it right. She said, ‘You have.’35 The conclusions of the meeting were hardly sensational. They were ‘very doubtful’ whether much ‘greater diversity’ could be expected from the Soviet Union, and so ‘Our policy should … be based on the assumption that any change in the sys
tem in at least the medium term would not be fundamental.’36 But some form of talking should start: ‘It was agreed that the aim should be to build up contacts slowly over the next few years,’ but there would be ‘no public announcement of this change of policy’.37 Dialogue would probably prove easier with Eastern European states, especially Hungary, than directly with the Soviet Union, but there should also be top-level Soviet contacts. These might include arranging for ‘senior members of the Politbureau, particularly potential successors to Andropov, to visit London’.38

  The Chequers seminar marked no dramatic reversal of Mrs Thatcher’s previous approach, but the Foreign Office was correct to see it as a moment at which it pushed her further down its preferred path than she had travelled before. Charles Powell, who was to become the most important to her of all her private secretaries, joined her the following year. He assessed the Chequers seminar (which, of course, he had not attended) thus: ‘I don’t think she was any less staunch a Cold Warrior, but tactically she thought it would be wise to find ways to try to weaken them through the soft underbelly of Eastern Europe … The overall aim remained that Communism had to be defeated, but the question really was what is the best way to do it.’39