Dupes

  Even former Soviet political officials testify to the liberating nature of Reagan's piercing pronouncement.97 Andrei Kozyrev, a longtime Soviet official who ultimately became Boris Yeltsin's foreign minister, said it had been a mistake to have called the USSR “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” No, said Kozyrev, Ronald Reagan had come up with a better title: “It was, rather, [an] Evil Empire, as it was put.”98

  Sergei Tarasenko, a high-level official in the Soviet Foreign Ministry under Mikhail Gorbachev, commented: “So the president said, ‘It is an Evil Empire!’ Okay. Well, we are an Evil Empire.”99

  Arkady Murashev, a young leader who emerged during the days of Perestroika and eventually became leader of Democratic Russia, a political party that took root after the USSR disintegrated, likewise defended Reagan: “He called us the ‘Evil Empire.’ So why did you in the West laugh at him? It's true!”100

  A slightly dissenting view came from Genrikh Trofimenko, head of the USSR's top think tank, who had a minor complaint. In retrospect, said Trofimenko, Reagan's “evil empire” description “was probably too mild.”101

  Overdue Truths

  When Ronald Reagan spoke of expansionary, evil Soviet Communism, he spoke the truth. That truth was long overdue after the 1970s, which began with détente and ended with Soviet gains and American losses all over the world, and with Jimmy Carter's kiss of Brezhnev. The millions held captive inside the evil empire—those “captive people,” those “freedom fighters,” as Reagan saw them—certainly appreciated that Reagan had spoken the truth. These people lacked in the most basic liberties, including the right to say how much they hated living under the regimes that repressed them and kept them confined within barbed-wire borders.

  Amazingly, however, the American Left—like the Soviet regime—judged Reagan not just wrong but idiotically, belligerently wrong. Many journalists, academics, and politicians in the United States failed to acknowledge the desperately needed truths that the president was speaking.

  And the Left's ridiculing of Reagan—with Soviet appreciation and backing—was only beginning. Merely two weeks after roasting Reagan for his speech in Orlando, many liberal Americans were about to unwittingly join sides again with Soviet Communist officials, this time in lampooning a major Reagan policy initiative.

  Reagan's new policy, which America's Left and the Soviet regime did their best to derail, would ultimately prove as devastating to the USSR as the president's declaration of evil.

  20

  “STAR WARS”: THE SDI SABOTAGE

  Another troubling case of American liberals in the 1980s inadvertently providing a tremendous boost to the Soviets was their ridiculing of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which liberals—starting with Senator Ted Kennedy—immediately trivialized as “Star Wars.” In so doing, they nearly sabotaged SDI, and perhaps would have if not for Reagan's extraordinary personal commitment to the program, evident from its origins in March 1983, through the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, and beyond.

  If liberals had been successful in mocking SDI into oblivion, it would have been to the great detriment of America, of those living under Soviet Communism, and of peace worldwide. It is no exaggeration to say that if SDI had been nixed, the United States would have been robbed of what turned out to be one of the most effective tools in bringing the Soviets to the negotiating table and ending the Cold War without a shot fired. Soviet officials themselves testify to that impact of SDI.

  Privately, we now know, the Kremlin was terrified by SDI and what it could mean to the USSR's ability to compete—militarily, technologically, economically, and politically—with the United States in the Cold War. Publicly, however, the Soviets joined the American Left in lampooning SDI. They seized on the “Star Wars” label that Kennedy first applied and that a partisan American press corps picked up right away, converting the pejorative into a major propaganda tool. More than that, Moscow manipulated Kennedy's term in a way that neither the Massachusetts senator nor his liberal allies in the American media could have imagined, or even recognize today. Certainly, journalists have never offered any self-critical analysis exposing how this manifestation of their political bias caused notable damage.

  In all, it is a disturbing but fascinating story that Americans did not witness in the 1980s. For the first time, here is that story.

  March 1983: The Kremlin's Really Bad Month

  Ronald Reagan made a series of bold moves in March 1983, at a time when the USSR was on the ropes.

  The Kremlin had been deeply concerned ever since Reagan's inauguration in January 1981, a total turnabout from its confident surge in the latter 1970s. The Soviet leadership was taken aback by Reagan's bravado in his very first press conference. Its fears only heightened throughout 1981 and 1982, as the president repeatedly pronounced that Communism and the Soviet Union itself were doomed, such as in his May 1981 speech at the University of Notre Dame and his June 1982 address to Britain's Parliament, to name only two examples. The Soviets stirred over what they suspected Reagan was pursuing in Poland, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua, and via relationships with the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. Moscow understood that Ronald Reagan was committed to trying to undermine the USSR.1

  Still, the Kremlin could not have imagined what was about to happen next. Reagan's first big move in March 1983 was a devastating rhetorical blow: his March 8 speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

  A week later came the disclosure of one of the Reagan administration's most significant National Security Decision Directives (NSDD). On March 16 Robert Toth of the Los Angeles Times broke the story on NSDD-75, in which the administration resolved to pursue victory in the Cold War by peacefully liberating Eastern Europe and bringing political “pluralism” to the USSR.2

  Just a week before Toth's story on NSDD-75, TASS had issued a press release warning that Reagan's evil empire speech symbolized the reality that it was now “official state policy” for the Reagan team to make its “crusade against communism … the fatal denouement to which Mr. Reagan is nudging the world.” Now, with the disclosure about NSDD-75 (which Reagan had privately signed a few weeks earlier), the Moscow Domestic Service released two statements, dubbing the directive a “subversive” attempt “to try to influence the internal situation” within the USSR. The Reagan administration, Moscow said, had set out “to exhaust the Soviet economy … to undermine the socioeconomic system and international position of the Soviet state.” A piece by Grigori Dadyants in the Soviet publication Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya stated, “Directive 75 speaks of changing the Soviet Union's domestic policy. In other words, the powers that be in Washington are threatening the course of world history, neither more nor less.”3

  Fortunately for the Soviets, certain liberal editorial boards in the West were there to reassure them. For instance, Dadyants cast doubt on Reagan's ability to change the USSR by citing editorials from the Los Angeles Times, the Toronto Star, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Dadyants quoted the Los Angeles Times as saying, “Our country simply has no means of exerting pressure of this sort [on the Soviet Union], and it was staggering to hear that the Reagan administration thinks otherwise.” The Star accused Reagan of “simply the purest stupidity,” and of needing a “new cold war.”4

  Nevertheless, Moscow remained very nervous about what the U.S. government was doing. The Soviets knew that their system was, as Reagan put it, held together by bailing wire.5 Reagan had rightly sensed Communism's perilous condition, and now he was making Moscow's life even more difficult.

  And the USSR's really bad month was about to get worse.

  On the evening of March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan disclosed to the world a secret he had shared with only a handful of his most trusted advisers: “My fellow Americans, tonight we're launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history,” declared the president in a nationally televised address. He announced his Strategic Defense Initiative, a vision for
a space-based missile-defense system.

  Coming only two weeks after the evil empire speech, and one week after the revelation about NSDD-75—not to mention other audacious military initiatives then under way, including the deployment of the MX Missile and the Pershing IIs—Reagan's remarks left Moscow shell-shocked.

  The Immediate Soviet Reaction

  The response from the Soviet side was instant. Both behind the scenes and in official news coverage, Moscow betrayed its panic.

  The CIA learned right away that the Soviet officials were shaken by the SDI announcement. Herb Meyer, CIA Director Bill Casey's right-hand man and one of the most important under-the-radar players in the Reagan administration's “takedown” strategy against the USSR,6 spent much of his time conducting Soviet vulnerability assessments. Today he recalls: “The intelligence coming in the morning of March 24—literally hours after the president's SDI speech—was different from anything we'd seen before. The Soviet Union's top military officials had understood instantly that President Reagan had found a way to win the Cold War.” Reagan had referred to SDI as a “shield over the United States,” but, Meyer says, the Soviets understood that SDI “was really a lid over the Soviet Union. It meant their missiles would be worthless.”7

  Meyer's point is especially intriguing given that many critics of SDI focused on the fact that such a missile shield was technologically difficult if not impossible to build, at least in the immediate term. (Top American scientists like Carl Sagan mocked SDI as a “pipe dream.”) While technological feasibility was a real issue, Meyer points out that such an argument ignores a more critical issue: the Soviets grasped right away that even if SDI could not shoot down all of their missiles, it introduced a “devastating” uncertainty that sent their nuclear strategy into a tailspin. “Even if [the Soviets] were able to hit New York City, Los Angeles, Washington,” Meyer explains, “they didn't know which, if any, of our missile sites, silos, Minutemen, that they could hit.”8 In other words, the question of retaliation was thrown into chaos. “They knew right away, when Reagan made that speech, that this was the bullet between the eyes,” Meyer says. He adds that it is “crucial to understand” that SDI would never need to shoot down 100 percent of Soviet missiles: “The critics didn't get this. The New York Times didn't get it.”9

  In any case, the Soviets were not so blithely confident that the SDI technology was impossible to build. The reason for this, as Meyer notes, was that years earlier Soviet physicists had begun studying the concept of missile defense—specifically, of using weapons to knock down a missile. They knew the technology could be done (as America's Patriot missiles would demonstrate against Saddam Hussein's Scuds over the skies of Israel less than ten years after Reagan's SDI speech). Soviet technical and academic journals, which Meyer and analysts at Langley studied, were filled with articles on the subject. Realizing the potential of missile defense, the Soviets had launched a comprehensive project to research such a system. Wanting to keep the military research project secret, they pulled the scientific journals from circulation. The CIA, however, had copies of the journals.10

  Ronald Reagan knew all this from his briefings—the same Reagan that the American Left derided as an uninformed idiot. After his SDI announcement, the president tried to get the American press to take notice of the Soviets’ own missile-defense project, openly talking about the “Red Shield,” or the “Soviet SDI.”11 In short, Reagan's argument to his detractors was that with SDI, America was finally pursuing what the USSR had already been pursuing on a massive scale. But the liberal press dismissed the president's arguments, just as it dismissed the very notion of missile defense.

  The Soviets may have had a head start on missile defense, but they went into panic mode the moment Reagan gave his SDI speech. Why? Because, from their own research, they knew SDI could work (at least to some degree), and they knew that the United States not only was far more technologically advanced than they were but also had far more money to invest in the project.

  Says Herb Meyer: “Once Reagan said we could do it, they [the Soviets] knew they were finished.… The intel began hitting my desk on March 24, and you could see the shift. You could see the shift immediately—immediately. Overnight. Just like that.”12

  The Long-Term Soviet Reaction

  Mikhail Gorbachev knew better than anyone the technological and financial advantages the United States had over the Soviet Union. As a result, SDI became his single greatest obsession during U.S.-USSR summit meetings. The testimonies to this are voluminous.13

  According to Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, the Soviets were “enormously frightened” by Reagan's announcement of SDI.14 Bessmertnykh said the initiative was “something very dangerous” that “made us realize we were in a very dangerous spot.” He called SDI Gorbachev's “number-one preoccupation”: “When we were talking about SDI, just the feeling that if we get involved in this SDI arms race, trying to do something like the U.S. was going to do with space-based programs, looked like a horror to Gorbachev.” Bessmertnykh said flatly that programs like SDI “accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union.”15

  Similarly, Genrikh Trofimenko said that SDI “was the most effective single act to bring [Gorbachev] to his senses—to the understanding that he could not win.” Here, of course, Trofimenko echoed Herb Meyer's statement that with SDI, the Soviets “knew they were finished.” Trofimenko added that Gorbachev “had to cry ‘uncle’ and to vie for a peaceful interlude.”16 (Interestingly, Reagan, when devising his strategy to undermine the Soviets economically, used the phrase “yell ‘Uncle.’”17)

  The power of SDI was evident in the Reagan-Gorbachev summits. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin later confirmed that Gorbachev's “principal goal” at the 1985 Geneva summit was to halt SDI.18 The same was true for the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, where Reagan chief of staff Donald Regan said that Gorbachev was worried about SDI to the point of fixation.19 Gorbachev was so concerned about SDI at Reykjavik that he actually proposed to eliminate all nuclear missiles if Reagan gave up missile defense. Likewise, at the third summit, in Washington in December 1987, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci made special note of Gorbachev's “usual tirade about SDI.”20

  In short, the Soviet government at the very highest levels was genuinely concerned about—even fearful of—SDI, and not just in the immediate aftermath of Reagan's March 1983 announcement.

  Americans could have never imagined the extent of Soviet trepidation from listening to the counsel of Democratic politicians. Former Vietnam figure John Kerry, who became the junior senator from Massachusetts in 1985 and would later be the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee, sponsored a bill to slash President Reagan's request for SDI funding. Senator Al Gore Jr., who would later be the Democrats’ 2000 presidential nominee, dismissed SDI as “not feasible,” and insisted it was “madness” to think that SDI could “pressure the Soviets economically to induce a radical change in their system.”21

  The Democrats’ words were like salve on the Soviets’ wounds. The strong anti-SDI movement among American liberals offered Moscow hope: if the Kremlin hung in there and did not let its worries be known, SDI might fall apart before Ronald Reagan could ever get the program going.

  Moscow's master propagandists would do their part to try to derail SDI. They just needed an angle on SDI, a way to belittle it in the eyes of their countrymen, of Americans, of the citizens of the world. They got the spin they needed just hours after Reagan's SDI speech.

  The spin was provided by the senior senator from Massachusetts.

  Senator Kennedy to the Rescue

  As the intelligence streaming across Herb Meyer's desk at Langley showed, Rea-gan's SDI speech sent the Soviets into a panic. But then the president's liberal critics—and more specifically, Senator Ted Kennedy—unwittingly handed Moscow a glistening pearl of propaganda with which to publicly attack the new proposal.

  Not even twenty-four hours after Reagan's speech, Senator Kennedy rushed to the Senate floor
to rebuke the president for “misleading Red-scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.”22 Kennedy's ridicule proved masterful, as it reinforced the liberal caricature of Ronald Reagan in two important ways. First, Kennedy's accusation of “misleading Red-scare tactics” raised the specter of Joe McCarthy, feeding into the liberal view that Reagan was guilty of that worst of sins: strident anti-Communism. Second, by referencing the hugely popular film Star Wars, the Massachusetts senator played off the image of Reagan as an addled ex-actor who got all his ideas from movies—even SDI. (Some liberals make this ad hominem accusation even today, despite having no reasonable evidence for the claim.)23

  The “Star Wars” term of derision immediately struck a chord. The New York Times included it in headlines typed the same day Kennedy gave his anti-SDI speech.24

  Kennedy inspired other Democratic politicians, as well as liberal columnists, to run with the imagery and sensationalize it even more. Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii followed Kennedy by charging that Reagan was trying to distract the American public with talk of “Buck Rogers” weapons, a reference to a popular space-age television hero of the day. “Mr. President,” Inouye solemnly intoned, “our scientists, our engineers, our generals, are not dunces.”25