Mao was as pleased as Khrushchev to hear that his prediction had been borne out. The Chinese leader had very selfish reasons not to want this crisis over Iraq to have continued much longer. He worried that in a summit, especially one held at the United Nations, Khrushchev might be tempted to trade favors to ensure the survival of Iraq. Mao had his own plans to stir up trouble with the Nationalist government in Taiwan, which was occupying a handful of small islands close to the Chinese coast. He did not want the Soviets to promise peace in the Chinese strait to get peace in the Middle East.
Moscow’s apparent diplomatic success in the Middle East softened the mixed results of the Mao-Khrushchev talks in Beijing. In the end, Khrushchev secured radio stations for the Soviet submarine force, an essential element of the new strategy. He did not get Chinese support for port facilities, however. The best he could get was a Chinese promise to open up ports from Tianjin (Tientsin) to North Vietnam’s Haiphong at times of war. More important, Khrushchev left with a sense that the Chinese still accepted his basic approach to world affairs.
KHRUSHCHEV RETURNED home from Beijing to celebrate his victory in the Persian Gulf. Convinced that the United States had fully intended to invade Iraq, he believed that his policy of public and private threats had stayed Eisenhower’s hand. Moscow, which had not known anything about the Anglo-American decision on July 18 to shelve plans to attack Iraq, interpreted London’s and Washington’s recognition of the Iraqi regime as the end of the threat of U.S. intervention. Khrushchev was now no longer interested in a Middle Eastern summit.
“We are now in the second phase of the struggle in the Near and Middle East,” Khrushchev announced at a formal meeting of the Presidium the next day.107 “Phase one of our strategy was to protect Iraq in the early going of its revolution,” he said.108 Phase two was now to consolidate this geopolitical gain.
Khrushchev no longer believed that a summit meeting with Eisenhower and Macmillan was necessary. “What was the goal when we suggested a summit?” he asked. “To prevent war in the Middle East and not to permit the destruction of Iraq.” To remind his colleagues why Iraq lay at the center of this crisis for Moscow, Khrushchev continued: “The destruction of Iraq is an attack on our policy from the point of view of the prestige of our country. The destruction of Iraq is then the destruction of Egypt and Syria; it would be a reversal for the national self-determination movement in the Arab world.”
With the war scare over Iraq now past, Khrushchev established the organizing principle of the next phase of the struggle. “Now there remains one thing to do: the removal of the forces from Lebanon and Jordan.” He did not believe that he needed to go to New York or to Geneva to achieve that goal. Nor did he think that this was a matter that required the presence of Eisenhower, Macmillan, or de Gaulle. Recalling what Mao had said to him, Khrushchev wondered if he really wanted to go to the Security Council at all. “Given the alphabet, would that mean I would have to sit near Chiang Kai-shek?” When he was told that his seat would be two over from that of the representative of Taiwan, he said, “[T]hat would be a bad spectacle and a bad role [for me] in this spectacle.”109
However, Khrushchev did not need the Chinese to tell him that a Security Council discussion structured around the problem of removing U.S. troops from Lebanon was not the one he wanted or needed at this time. It was Soviet policy to seek better relations with the West through high-level negotiations, but a summit would have to wait until the Americans were ready and a broad agenda, covering topics from the future of the Germanys to disarmament, could be mutually agreed upon. “Why would we go to a meeting with Eisenhower now?” he exclaimed. “To rant that he’s a son of a bitch? That we already know and there would be little else. The basis for us to meet now is very narrow, really only enough for insults.”110
Khrushchev was extremely happy with the way events had unfolded in the Middle East. He explained to his colleagues on August 4 that Moscow could not be sure which direction Qasim’s regime would take in the future. There could be no guarantees that Baghdad would continue to take Soviet advice or to maintain good relations with Iraq’s Communist Party. Yet he was impressed that Qasim had followed Moscow’s recommendation, conveyed through Nasser, that he reaffirm all previous Iraqi obligations. Indeed, Baghdad did not formally leave the Baghdad Pact for another six months. In late August Qasim deepened Khrushchev’s sense of accomplishment by deftly signaling to Moscow that though he was not a Communist, he was prepared to work with the Iraqi Communist Party. “I am not among those people who fear Communist propaganda,” he made a point of informing the newly arrived Soviet ambassador.111 In the same conversation he also signaled a level of trust with Moscow. Admitting that he lacked an intelligence organization, he requested that the Kremlin “inform him in a confidential manner on the intrigues of the colonialists and their accomplices, both within the country and beyond Iraq’s borders.”112
It turned out that the Soviet leader did not have to go to New York or anyplace else to obtain the removal of the Western troops from Lebanon. From the start the U.S. intervention had been unpopular in Lebanon. In fact the U.S. ambassador in Beirut, Robert McClintock, had all but waded out from shore to prevent the first contingent of U.S. Marines from landing. With the passing of the moment of greatest tension, Chamoun finally agreed to step down, and the leading Muslim candidate, the army chief of staff, General Fuad Chehab, was selected to replace him.113 The British had had an easier deployment in Jordan, but once U.S. troops started leaving Lebanon, Britain decided its men should go home too. On October 25 the last U.S. and British soldiers left Lebanon and Jordan respectively. Khrushchev thought he had achieved phase two.
The Iraqi crisis was a defining moment for the Soviet leader. From his perspective, the use of high-pitched warnings had brought great success. The fate of Iraq was an essential component of his policy of weakening American power in the Middle East, and he was convinced that the United States would probably not permit the destruction of the Baghdad Pact without a fight. It was this conviction that lay behind his exaggerated fear of a U.S. military adventure during the summer of 1958. Yet however distasteful to Washington, a revolution had taken hold in Iraq. There had been no Anglo-American intervention, and the Baghdad Pact was dead. For the second time in eighteen months, Khrushchev believed that fears of Soviet power had prevented the much-stronger West from destroying one of his new allies in the third world.
Until the release of his Kremlin notes and minutes in 2003, Western policy makers and scholars did not understand the significance for Khrushchev of what he viewed as the Iraqi crisis of 1958. At the time in Washington and London, where Khrushchev’s policy seemed to be judged by his inability to orchestrate a summit, the outcome of the summer tensions in the Middle East was deemed a major personal defeat for the Soviet leader. News that he had met with Mao during the crisis, which leaked to the West in August 1958, only intensified the belief that he had backed down from his calls for a summit out of weakness. It seemed to Western foreign policy watchers that Khrushchev had essentially been browbeaten by the Communist Chinese, who did not want the Soviet leader to dignify a session in New York with Chiang Kai-shek.
The West completely missed the enormous self-confidence that Khrushchev drew from the survival of the Iraqi Revolution. Instead of sensing the feeling of triumph in the Kremlin, Western analysts began predicting Khrushchev’s political demise because Eisenhower and Mao had thwarted his dreams for a great power summit. A seasoned Western diplomat, described as “not given to rash predictions,” told the New York Times, “This may even be the end of an era.”114 Indeed, it was, but not in the way that anyone in the West was predicting.
CHAPTER 8
“A BONE IN MY THROAT”
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV emerged from the 1958 Iraqi crisis convinced of two things: first, that the West, which had fully intended to destroy the progressive Iraq regime, had backed down under Soviet pressure, and second, that pressure was the only language the West understood.1
This was indeed a one-sided view of what had happened. Just as Khrushchev never did understand the complex of reasons that had led to Britain’s and France’s 1956 decision to halt their military intervention in Egypt, so he could not quite grasp that Soviet policy had little to do with Eisenhower’s reluctance to invade Iraq in the summer of 1958. But perceptions are king in international politics, and Khrushchev perceived the outcomes of both crises as huge personal successes for him. Having exaggerated the threat to his position at the start of the Iraqi crisis, he now felt exaggerated relief when his position was preserved.
“History is on our side,” Khrushchev had already told Nasser in May.2 Now that the events of the summer confirmed in his mind that circumstances in the developing world were turning in his direction, he could afford to take some additional risks to consolidate these gains. The first of these involved support for Egypt’s Aswan Dam project. For two years Soviet officials had advised Khrushchev that the USSR could not afford to provide this aid, and as late as Nasser’s 1958 visit the Kremlin had refused to offer its support. But the toppling of the Feisal regime in Iraq and the subsequent disruption of the Baghdad Pact had delighted Khrushchev. Signing an Aswan agreement would be his way of thanking Nasser and solidifying the Soviet-Egyptian relationship. In October 1958 Nasser’s military chief and deputy, Marshal Amer, was invited to Moscow to conclude the Aswan negotiations.3
If Khrushchev’s inflated sense of accomplishment had resulted only in a Soviet commitment to a vast public works project in the Egyptian desert, the West might not have needed to pay any attention to the lessons that the Soviet leadership had learned from events in Iraq. But Khrushchev’s perception of success in the Middle East had far-reaching implications for his handling of foreign policy problems elsewhere.
For the rest of the world, especially the United States and the nations of Western Europe, 1958 came to be remembered less for the short-lived tension in the Middle East than for the start of a new round of East-West clashes over the future of divided Germany, especially the lonely NATO outpost in West Berlin. Historians have come to view each of the Berlin episodes as a distinct crisis.4 The new material from the Kremlin confirms that Khrushchev launched three separate pushes for his way in Germany. The first of these occurred in November 1958.
The presumed victory in Iraq had something to do with Khrushchev’s decision to risk a confrontation with the West in the autumn of 1958. As we shall see, so too did knowledge of the imminent deployment of Soviet nuclear weapons to East Germany as part of the “new look” strategy adopted by the Kremlin in 1955. That Khrushchev chose to make this stand at this time over Germany reflects the roles played by two other men, both Germans, who helped set the stage for November 1958.
THE WIZENED West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was a skilled magus who liked to tell the story of how as a schoolboy he had orchestrated one of the largest cheating conspiracies in his secondary school’s history. When a classmate found the answers to the annual German and Latin exams, the future chancellor came up with a scheme by which all twenty-one students in the class could use these answers without getting caught. Reasoning that the authorities would be suspicious if all of them turned in perfect or near-perfect papers, the young Adenauer mandated that each boy make a certain number of errors on the examination, depending on his grades to that point. They were never caught. In fact the graduating class of 1894 was heralded as the most accomplished of the fin de siècle.5
By the fall of the 1958 the Soviet leadership had had to acknowledge that for nearly two years Adenauer had been employing his ample talents as a dissembler to play a much more dangerous game with Moscow. At some point in 1956 or early 1957 Adenauer had come to the conclusion that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) needed to acquire nuclear weapons to be a fully sovereign nation. As part of the agreements that made possible the declaration of an independent West Germany in 1955, however, Adenauer had forsworn the acquisition or development of nuclear weapons by a future West German army. This decision had been very popular with the West German people and been a prerequisite to the Soviet decision to normalize relations later that year.
Adenauer’s ideas about military power, however, were constantly in a state of flux. In the early postwar years he had thought it possible to build a sovereign West Germany without a military. Then came the Korean War, which seemed to confirm for him worst-case scenarios about the Kremlin’s willingness to use force to achieve the spread of communism.6 West Germany’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization followed as a result. By the end of the 1950s perhaps in reaction to Khrushchev’s use of nuclear bluff in the Suez crisis, Adenauer believed he had to take German self-defense one step further. In May 1957 the West Germans formally asked the United States for tactical nuclear weapons, those with a short range that could be used by infantry on a battlefield. With tactical nuclear weapons the West German Army, the Bundeswehr, would not need any other nation to defend itself. West Germany would be in control of its own security, the most essential prerequisite of sovereignty.
The German chancellor chose to keep these thoughts about the need for nuclear weapons secret from the German people until he had renewed his parliamentary majority in the elections scheduled for the fall of 1957. West German public opinion was still solidly against nuclear armaments, and he could not risk letting this become an issue in the election. Instead he campaigned hard on the promise of “no new experiments,” cleverly painting his chief rivals, the Socialist Party (SPD), as dangerous tinkerers with the status quo.7
Adenauer was especially proud of how well he managed to deceive the Soviets. In April 1957 he had arranged a meeting with the Soviet ambassador in Bonn to deny that his government then possessed nuclear weapons or had even asked for nuclear weapons from the United States. “The Soviet ambassador never asked me whether I would request nuclear weapons in the future,” the old man later said self-approvingly to Secretary of State Dulles.8 A month after this meeting with the Soviet ambassador, Adenauer formally requested “the most modern and effective weapons,” a euphemism for nuclear-capable armaments, from the United States.9
Despite the KGB’s excellent sources in West Germany, it was not until the spring of 1958 that Khrushchev began to take seriously the possibility of a West German nuclear arsenal. And only then because Adenauer intentionally revealed his objective. Following his reelection, the chancellor sensed that he could move ahead with obtaining nuclear weapons for the Bundeswehr. Although his margin of victory was not large and he needed to govern through a coalition with the small Free Democratic Party, Adenauer believed he had sufficient power to press on with his ambitions.10 After a false start in January 1958, Adenauer in March was able to shepherd through the Bundestag a law permitting the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The debate was long and rancorous. At one point an SPD deputy compared Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with the Nazi Party, causing government benches to empty in disgust. But Adenauer got what he wanted. He said that though he hoped for better relations with the Soviets, “Germany’s first task is security in [the] Federal Republic.”11
Even with seemingly clear signs that the chancellor was leading the charge for nuclear weapons, Khrushchev found it hard to believe that Adenauer was the force behind the Bundestag debate. Although he considered Adenauer clever and a formidable opponent, Khrushchev couldn’t help assuming that a man of his age—eighty-two—lacked the willpower necessary to mastermind all of these political games. Thus Khrushchev blamed the nuclear strategy on the West German minister of defense, Franz Josef Strauss, whom he described as the Hitler to Adenauer’s Hindenburg. Moreover, it seemed to Khrushchev that Adenauer was too wily a politician to be pushing the nuclear option. He assumed that Adenauer actually wanted better relations with the Soviet Union.12 His motivation, thought Khrushchev, was not due to any personal desire on the part of the chancellor, who was devoutly anti-Communist. Instead Khrushchev believed that it was German public opinion that compelled Adenaue
r to deal with the Kremlin.
Consequently, when word reached Moscow in late March 1958 that the chancellor had won the Bundeswehr debate, the Soviets responded with a public offensive directed primarily at the West German people. Foreign Minister Gromyko warned the West Germans on March 31 that their government had fallen under the same conservative leadership that had permitted Hitler to come to power in 1933, while the Supreme Soviet addressed a similarly solemn letter to the Bundestag.13 Behind the scenes the Soviets tried to enlist the help of the SPD. Soviet representatives leaked drafts of Moscow’s diplomatic protests to the SPD leadership ahead of time to sharpen public debate on the CDU’s new foreign policy.
The final maneuver was aimed directly at the old man. Using the excuse of some languishing cultural and trade agreements, Moscow arranged for Mikoyan to be invited to Bonn in mid-April 1958. Although younger than Khrushchev, Mikoyan had been a member of the Politburo, or Presidium, ten years longer, and Germany had been an area of great interest to him for a long time. As commissar for foreign trade in the 1920s Mikoyan had played a major role in making work the so-called Rapallo arrangement, named for the Italian town where Soviet and German diplomats had met to discuss military and economic cooperation. Mikoyan ultimately signed many of the documents establishing the economic relationship between Weimar Berlin and Moscow.
The goal of Mikoyan’s mission in 1958 was to establish some kind of rapport with Adenauer and to assess the reasons and the individuals behind what seemed to be a dramatic shift in West German policy. The Kremlin still believed in the Adenauer who in 1957 had stated his personal opposition to acquiring nuclear weapons.
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