CURIOUSLY, THE SETTLEMENT of the Il-28s, which had involved yet another U.S. demand followed by a Soviet retreat, did nothing to weaken Khrushchev’s basic assumption that the missile crisis as a whole, especially the shared experience of a near-nuclear disaster at the end of October, had convinced Americans that they had to take Soviet needs seriously. In this climate the Soviet leader was optimistic about future superpower negotiations to lessen the cost and dangers of the Cold War.
On November 12 Khrushchev had tried out some new ideas for the next round of talks at a farewell audience with the outgoing British ambassador Frank Roberts.42 He told Roberts that in view of an apparent swing in U.S. public opinion, he thought a comprehensive nuclear test ban possible, and that to meet some of Kennedy’s domestic concerns, he would permit international inspectors to supervise the operation of automatic seismic stations on Soviet soil. He mentioned that the Soviets were about to complete their most recent series of nuclear tests, and he believed that no further tests would be required. What he did not reveal to Roberts was that to sweeten the deal, he was even beginning to contemplate allowing a few symbolic on-site inspections of suspicious seismic activity.
Once he had piqued the British ambassador’s interest, he raised the Berlin problem, reiterating that it remained a barrier on the road to better East-West relations through a test ban and eventual disarmament. He did not push too hard but did indicate that the issue remained important to him. Berlin was one of three areas that he thought were “ripe” for a settlement at that point. The other two were a Chinese seat at the United Nations, which Khrushchev thought was inevitable, and the signature of a NATO and Warsaw Pact nonaggression treaty.
Khrushchev did not mention the ongoing intramural struggle with China to the British ambassador. Yet the Soviet leader understood that any new efforts he would be making to enhance the prospects of peaceful coexistence with the West would anger the Chinese. This no longer seemed to matter to him. The day after Kennedy lifted the naval blockade of Cuba Khrushchev launched a new policy in Southeast Asia that was sure to strengthen relations with Washington at the expense of the Sino-Soviet relationship. In early November the Pathet Lao had shot down a U.S. supply plane bound for the neutral government of Souvanna Phouma. The Pathet Lao’s formal announcement of this attack on November 21 coincided with a Kremlin discussion of yet another request from the Lao Communists for secret assistance. Since July Khrushchev had looked the other way as Soviet aircraft violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the July 1962 neutrality agreement in Laos. The Pathet Lao maintained a undeclared force in the border regions with China and North Vietnam, a force that China and the Soviet Union had been provisioning since late 1960 without telling Laos’s neutralist prime minister, Souvanna Phouma. Now Khrushchev believed he needed to end the Soviet violations. The July 1962 agreement in Laos could serve as a model for international cooperation in West Berlin. Even if it was not an effective model, at the very least any Soviet failure to meet its obligations in Laos would be used by Soviet enemies in the West to scuttle any future Berlin agreement.
At the November 21 meeting of the Presidium Khrushchev exploded when he read the Pathet Lao’s request for more secret assistance. “We will not do it!” he instructed his colleagues. For years the Soviets had tried to discourage the Pathet Lao from taking unnecessary risks, advice that usually contradicted what the Lao Communists were hearing from their supporters in Hanoi and Beijing. The one exception to this Soviet policy of caution had come during the meniscus period of Soviet foreign policy, when Khrushchev had turned a blind eye to the Chinese-and North Vietnamese–supported invasion of Nam Tha in May by the Pathet Lao. That invasion caused the deployment of additional U.S. troops in Thailand and nearly precipitated an American military intervention in Laos. In the aftermath of the missile crisis Khrushchev was no longer prepared to sit back and watch socialist allies take those risks. “Peace is the major issue [now]. Peace has been made [in the Caribbean] without winners and losers. If we continue pursuing the same policy,” said Khrushchev, “then it will not be in the interests of the leftists.” He wanted Abramov’s successor in the embassy in Vientiane to warn the Pathet Lao that if it chose to ignore Moscow’s guidance and went to war against Souvanna, it would be a war it would have to fight on its own. Believing there were bigger issues at stake, Khrushchev was prepared to wash his hands of the Lao Communists: “We did everything we could.”43
MIKOYAN STOPPED in Washington on November 29 on his way home from Havana. Khrushchev wanted the Kremlin’s envoy to reinforce his message that the time was right to move toward more substantial superpower agreements. Mikoyan was also expected to reinforce Khrushchev’s new explanation for why the Cuban crisis had happened. “[T]he Soviet Union does not deserve any reproach. No one can believe that the arms build-up in Cuba was offensive and intended against the United States.”44 Mikoyan, who had opposed the entire operation, knew that Khrushchev had considered the missiles offensive weapons. The deployment to Cuba had been the logical consequence of Khrushchev’s dangerous meniscus approach, his strategy of concerted pressure on the United States. Mikoyan had hated that policy, but in front of President Kennedy he was happy to sweep it under the carpet and pretend it had never existed.
The talk was important for other reasons. Kennedy was eager for Khrushchev’s help in eliminating the entire Soviet military presence in Cuba. Although U.S. intelligence had lowballed the actual size of the Soviet military contingent in Cuba by a factor of three, Kennedy still believed that the seventeen thousand military personnel the CIA thought Khrushchev had on the island were too many. The Soviet record of the meeting has Kennedy at one point saying, “I know that Khrushchev did not promise this in his letters to me, but I am hopeful that the Soviet Union will withdraw those troops.”45 Mikoyan’s response, which appears in both the Soviet and U.S. records of this meeting, was succinct: “We will do what we promised, nothing more and nothing less.”46
Mikoyan returned to Moscow and was hailed by the entire leadership for his stalwart effort in Cuba. Khrushchev employed the first Presidium session after Mikoyan’s return to provide a postmortem for his colleagues on the Cuban missile operation, in which he claimed it had been a tremendous success. “Cuba has been maintained,” he asserted, “as a center of the revolutionary movement.”47 Even more important than that, the crisis had demonstrated once and for all that the United States respected Soviet interests and power. “The United States was forced to acknowledge that we have our own interests in the Western Hemisphere.” Moreover, Khrushchev crowed, “We are members of the World Club. They themselves got scared.”
Creating a kind of parity in the balance of terror between the superpowers had been Khrushchev’s primary motivation for putting the missiles in Cuba. He now believed that even with them removed he had achieved that objective. In front of Mikoyan and his colleagues, he complimented himself for knowing when to withdraw the missiles: “If we had maintained our position longer, perhaps none of this would have happened.”
Khrushchev did not employ the meeting of December 3 to announced formally a new approach to foreign affairs in light of America’s newfound respect for Soviet powers. But at the tail end of the meeting he hinted that for the foreseeable future the Soviet use of pressure tactics was dead. Wherever possible Moscow would seek compromises with Washington. The hinting had come when Mikoyan reported Kennedy’s request that the Soviets remove all their remaining soldiers in Cuba. Without prompting or complaining, Khrushchev announced to his colleagues that he and the defense minister would be looking into how this might be achieved.
Over the first week of December Khrushchev continued to mull over ways to interest the United States in serious discussions. The first step, he knew, would be to remove what was left of his July threats to reissue an ultimatum on the Berlin question. The second step involved offering something to Kennedy that might make a comprehensive test ban agreement possible.
Since the very first back channel discus
sions between Robert Kennedy and Georgi Bolshakov in May 1961, the Kennedys had impressed upon Khrushchev the reality that a comprehensive test ban treaty would have to be independently verifiable for it to be approved by the U.S. Senate, which under the U.S. Constitution had to ratify all treaties. In practice this meant that there would have to be on-site inspections of a certain percentage of the unexplained seismic activity that was detected every year in the Soviet Union. The U.S. position in January 1961 was that there had to be twenty of these inspections a year. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis that number had fallen to twelve.
On October 30, at the talks in Geneva the U.S. disarmament negotiator Arthur Dean had left Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov with the distinct impression that Washington could go much lower. Indeed the U.S. position had been changing. Kennedy, who wanted an agreement, was already privately considering bringing the number down to eight. But Kuznetsov misunderstood or Dean misspoke. Somehow Kuznetsov took from this conversation that the U.S. Senate would accept a treaty so long as the Soviets undertook to provide three inspections a year.48
After he received this information from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Khrushchev decided to give the United States the right to make three unannounced inspections of Soviet territory to verify unexplained seismic activity. “When we gave our agreement,” he later explained, “we considered it to be a symbolic one. This was a concession for the president, taking his situation into consideration.”49
I N EARLY DECEMBER Khrushchev revealed to an important foreign visitor that the debate with the Chinese was playing some role in his willingness to compromise with Kennedy to achieve a test ban agreement. Noted peace activist Norman Cousins, whose day job was editor of the Saturday Review, arrived in Moscow in early December 1962 carrying a message from Pope John XXIII to Khrushchev. From men in Khrushchev’s inner circle, Cousins learned that the Soviet leader was intent on proving to the Chinese that the policy of peaceful coexistence could bring détente and benefits to the Soviet bloc.50 A few days later Khrushchev himself made that point to Cousins. “The Chinese say I was scared,” the Soviet leader told the American in a private meeting. “Of course I was scared. It would have been insane not to have been scared. I was frightened about what could happen to my country—or your country or all the other countries that would be devastated by a nuclear war. If being frightened meant that I helped avert such insanity then I’m glad I was frightened. One of the problems in the world today is that not enough people are sufficiently frightened by the danger of nuclear war.”51 Khrushchev then made a dramatic gesture to show that he believed there were at least two other world leaders who shared his understanding of the inherent destructiveness of nuclear weapons. Going over to his desk, Khrushchev pulled out some stationery. Then in his characteristic scrawl he wrote individual Christmas greetings for John Kennedy and the pope.52
In the week after meeting Cousins, Khrushchev sent two more confidential messages to Kennedy. In these letters he explicitly dispelled the threat of a renewed Berlin ultimatum and handed the president a new proposal for a test ban agreement. He had waited to make the test ban concession until the Soviet military had started its final previously scheduled series of atmospheric tests.53 Among his colleagues at the Kremlin Khrushchev claimed that allowing for three on-site inspections was “a very big concession because it allows for spies.”54 But he thought he needed to meet Kennedy “half way.”55 Khrushchev believed the stage was set for 1963 to be the year of international achievement that the downing of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 in May 1960 had denied the Soviet Union three years earlier.
JOHN KENNEDY’S third State of the Union address in January 1963 projected a sense of confidence about the direction that international events were taking. A lifelong sailor, the president drew upon seafaring language to suggest what lay ahead in the Cold War. “My friends, I close on a note of hope. We are not lulled by the momentary calm of the sea or the somewhat clearer skies above. We know the turbulence that lies below, and the storms beyond the horizon this year. Now the winds of change appear to be blowing more strongly than ever, in the world of communism as well as our own. For 175 years we have sailed with those winds at our back, and with the tides of human freedom in our favor. We steer our ship with hope, as Thomas Jefferson said, ‘leaving fear astern.’”56 The American leader sensed that something had changed in Khrushchev’s assessment of the world, or at least the Soviet leadership seemed to have abandoned the use of brinkmanship in foreign affairs. This was certainly the message he discerned in the letters that Khrushchev had been sending him secretly since the lifting of the blockade around Cuba. A third letter had arrived from Moscow just a week before that reiterated the same points. Kennedy reminded his listeners that the world was experiencing a “pause” that was no basis for smugness. “[C]omplacency or self-congratulation can imperil our security as much as the weapons of our adversary. A moment of pause is not a promise of peace. Dangerous problems remain from Cuba to the South China Sea. The world’s prognosis prescribes not a year’s vacation, but a year of obligation and opportunity.”57
Kennedy saw the growing estrangement between China and the Soviet Union as the greatest variable in the international system. “Now I think that we ought to keep in mind what’s happening between the Soviet Union and China,” he had told his foreign policy advisers in November. “Indeed, Khrushchev is attacked daily for a Munich and appeasement and is under bitter attack from the Chinese. Whether this will result in a break between them, I don’t know.” Kennedy had also noticed a shift in the tone of Khrushchev’s comments on Berlin. “He was more forthcoming about Berlin than he’s ever been the other day,” the president had remarked to his advisers. “Whether it means anything, I don’t know. But I think we should be…I completely agree that he’s a liar and Castro is impossible and I don’t have any view that Khrushchev is better than someone else in the Soviet Union and that we should be at all generous with Khrushchev because he’s under attack from the Chinese. But at least we should keep in mind that there’s a major collision going on here, and what result it will bring, whether helpful to us or not, I don’t know.”58 In his more optimistic moments Kennedy had reason to believe these tensions among the two Communist giants might move the Cold War out of the dangerous pattern of crisis and relaxation that had defined every year since his inauguration.
The day after Kennedy outlined the state of the American Union, Khrushchev gave a similarly significant address in Berlin. The Soviet leader had already concluded that 1963 would be a year, as Kennedy put it, of “obligation and opportunity.” Khrushchev used the occasion to call off publicly his threat of a new ultimatum on Berlin, the threat that he had withdrawn privately in his letter to Kennedy a month earlier. He indicated that Berlin would not be the cause of a crisis in 1963. Instead he presented the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 as “a most important step” and said that now the signing of a Soviet-East German peace treaty was “no longer the problem it was before the protective measures.”59 Khrushchev repeated his desire to put U.S. troops under the UN flag in West Berlin, but this idea was presented as a hope instead of a demand.
The spurt of activism continued. The next day the Kremlin published the texts of Khrushchev’s December letters to the White House. A week later Foreign Minister Gromyko visited the U.S. ambassador Foy Kohler to tell Kennedy that the Soviet leadership was prepared to resume talks on Berlin. Gromyko’s tone wasn’t insistent, nor was there any promise that the Soviet position had changed. Still, the manner in which the request came was a sign of a different climate from the summer of 1962.60
Khrushchev also believed it was time to extend an olive branch to the Chinese. For some reason, he had convinced himself that he could bring Mao around and achieve good relations with Beijing and Washington simultaneously. In December 1963 he called on Beijing to put an end to the daily criticism of the Kremlin in its newspapers, and he said that Soviet newspapers would do the same. His attempt to ease Sino-Soviet
tensions did not mean that all was forgiven. He was still very angry at Mao and the Chinese leaders. “The Chinese are dimwits,” Khrushchev said candidly to his Kremlin colleagues at the end of January.61 Nevertheless, he preached to his colleagues the forgiveness that he now wanted to see reflected throughout Soviet foreign policy: “[T]he attitude should be more tolerant, it is not obligatory to drag them to the cross…. We should contribute to the process of releasing [them] from erroneous positions, should help them to get rid of [their] shortcomings.”62
THE WHITE HOUSE greeted these signs of a renewed Soviet peace offensive with a mixture of disappointment and hope. There was nothing new in Khrushchev’s December letters despite their welcome tone. The Berlin letter repeated old nostrums, and the test ban message signified merely a revival of the Soviet position of the late Eisenhower period, which was still unacceptable to the United States.
Kennedy nevertheless seized upon the change in the Soviet position on test ban inspections as a reason to rethink the official U.S. position yet again. The most enthusiastic advocate of a test ban in his administration, the president worked to persuade his advisers that the U.S. demand could come down to six inspections. He acknowledged that cutting the old official position of twelve inspections in half would entail taking a greater risk that some secret Soviet tests might not be detected. But at a meeting with his key arms control advisers on February 8, 1963, the president outlined the logic behind any further concessions to the Soviets in the test ban negotiations. Freely admitting that he expected the Soviets to try to cheat, he explained that he assumed that any danger that this cheating might pose would be outweighed by the benefit to the United States of hampering the development of a Chinese nuclear force by getting Moscow to help him conclude a comprehensive worldwide nuclear test ban.63 Kennedy did have doubts he could sell six inspections to the Senate, but he was determined to try. He knew, however, that he could never sell three annual inspections.64
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