agendas and simply argued, so freely that their interpreters struggled to keep up. Gorbachev was ‘an unusual Russian’, Mrs Thatcher told Reagan at Camp David the following week, ‘in that he was much less constrained, more charming, open to discussion and debate, and did not stick to prepared notes’.80
‘I found myself liking him’, she wrote in her memoirs.81 Even Denis – equally pleasantly surprised by Gorbachev’s wife Raisa – was aware that ‘something pretty special’ was happening.82 The fact was that Mrs Thatcher relished having an opponent who was prepared to argue with her. ‘He was self- confident and though he larded his remarks with respectful references to Mr Chernenko… he did not seem in the least uneasy about entering into controversial areas of high politics.’83 Gorbachev evidently enjoyed their exchange as much as she did, even though – on her home ground – he was necessarily on the defensive much of the time. Despite their fundamental differences, Gorbachev and Mrs Thatcher were temperamentally alike: each recognised the other as a domestic radical, battling the forces of inertia in their respective countries. Famously, therefore, when she spoke to the BBC next day, Mrs Thatcher declared that this was a man she could ‘do business with’.84
They met again briefly at Chernenko’s funeral in March 1985, soon after which Gorbachev finally stepped into the top job. But she still made a point of being wary and had no intention of lowering her guard. The reality, she warned in Washington that summer, was that ‘the new brooms in the Soviet Union will not be used to sweep away Communism, only to make it more efficient – if that can be done’.85 Two months later, as if to demonstrate to Moscow that the Cold War was not over, Britain expelled twenty-five Soviet diplomats exposed as spies by the defector Oleg Gordievsky. When Gorbachev retaliated in kind, Mrs Thatcher expelled six more Russians. Yet all the while Geoffrey Howe was following up her diplomatic initiative by quietly touring all the Warsaw Pact capitals during 1984 – 5.
With her impeccable track record of standing up to the Soviets, Mrs Thatcher’s advice that Gorbachev was a different sort of Soviet leader undoubtedly impressed the Americans. James Baker – Reagan’s chief of staff, later Treasury Secretary – testified that she had ‘a profound influence’ on US thinking about Russia.86 Yet this almost certainly exaggerates her role. The truth is that the Americans were already reassessing their own approach, at least from the time Shultz became Secretary of State, and Reagan personally was as keen as she was to engage the Soviet leaders. From the moment he became President he sent a series of handwritten letters to his opposite numbers in Moscow, trying to strike a human response. From Brezhnev and Andropov he received only formal replies, but he did not give up.87 When Mrs Thatcher described her talks with Gorbachev, he was ‘simply amazed’ how closely she had followed the same line that he had taken when meeting Foreign Minister Gromyko the previous September.88 What can be said is that her clear-sighted public praise of Gorbachev helped the White House assure American public opinion that the President was not going soft when he too started to do business with the Soviet leader. On the other side she helped convince Gorbachev of Reagan’s sincerity, and encouraged him to go ahead with the November 1985 Geneva summit, despite his suspicion of the American ‘StarWars’ programme. Once Reagan and Gorbachev had started meeting directly, however, her mediating role was inevitably reduced.
Reagan’s dedication to ‘Star Wars’ – the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – was a delicate problem for Mrs Thatcher which she handled with considerable sensitivity and skill. The idea was a futuristic scheme, at the very limits of American space technology, to develop a defensive shield against incoming ballistic missiles, ultimately, it was hoped, making strategic nuclear weapons redundant. Reagan announced the project – with no prior warning to Britain or the rest of NATO – in March 1983. The allies were immediately alarmed. First of all they were sceptical of the technology and doubted that SDI would ever work with the 100 per cent certainty needed to replace the existing deterrent. Second, they feared that such an American initiative would breach the 1972 ABM Treaty and wreck the chances of further arms-control agreements by triggering a new arms race in space. Third, they feared that SDI would detach the USA from NATO: if the Americans once felt secure behind their own shield they would withdraw their nuclear protection from Europe; while if the Russians successfully followed suit, the British and French deterrents would be rendered obsolete.
Mrs Thatcher shared these fears; but she did not want to criticise the American initiative publicly because she knew Reagan was deeply committed to it. Unlike most of his advisers, who saw SDI as just another high-tech toy in the military arsenal, Reagan genuinely believed in the dream of abolishing nuclear weapons. In addition she was excited by the science, believing that, unlike ‘the laid-back generalists from the Foreign Office’ she, with her chemistry degree from forty years before, ‘had a firm grasp of the scientific concepts involved’. She was keen to support the research programme, since ‘science is unstoppable’.89 But deployment was another matter. More than anyone she worried about destabilising the Alliance, giving the Russians an excuse to walk out of arms-control negotiations, and possible American withdrawal into isolationism. She had invested too much political capital – and money – in buying Trident to be willing to see it scrapped. Above all she regarded the idea that nuclear weapons could ever be abolished as dangerous fantasy.
During 1984 her worries grew and she determined to take the lead in representing Europe’s concerns positively to the Americans. On 8 November she wrote to ask if she could call on Reagan at his ‘Western White House’ in California on her way home from signing the Hong Kong Agreement in Beijing just before Christmas. When Reagan replied that he would not be there until after Christmas, she invited herself to Washington instead. This was the most punishing schedule she ever imposed on herself (and on her staff). She left for China on the Monday evening following her Sunday talks with Gorbachev at Chequers. She signed the agreement in Beijing on the Wednesday, went on to Hong Kong to reassure the population there on Thursday, and then flew on across the Pacific and the US to Washington, from where she was helicoptered to meet the President at Camp David on Saturday morning, returning to London overnight. This involved flying right round the world – fifty-five hours of flying time – in five and a half days. Quite apart from the hours in the air, this must surely make her the only leader to have held substantial talks, on three continents, with Russian, American and Chinese leaders inside a single week.40
Yet she gave no sign of jet lag. First, as already described, she gave Reagan her favourable impression of Gorbachev; but she also passed on his defiant response to SDI. ‘Tell your friend President Reagan,’ Gorbachev had told her, ‘not to go ahead with space weapons.’ If he did, ‘the Russians would either develop their own or, more probably, develop new offensive systems superior to SDI.’ Reagan assured her that ‘Star Wars was not his term and was clearly not what he had in mind’. If the research proved successful he had actually promised to share the technology. ‘Our goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons.’ Mrs Thatcher repeated that she supported the American research programme; but when the President was joined by Shultz and his National Security Advisor ‘Bud’ Macfarlane she launched into her own worries about SDI.
She took seriously Gorbachev’s threats to retaliate. ‘We do not want our objective of increased security to result in increased Soviet nuclear weapons.’ But her real fear was that SDI would undermine nuclear deterrence, which she passionately believed had kept the peace for forty years. Moreover, in response to Reagan’s optimism that SDI would turn out to be feasible, she admitted that ‘personally she had some doubts’. Macfarlane tried to convince her, but she remained sceptical. Finally, she asked ‘if someone could come to London to give her a top- level US technical briefing’. Reagan ‘nodded agreement and said it was time to break for lunch’.
Before, during and after lunch Mrs Thatcher banged on about British Airways and the Laker anti-trust case, followed by discussion of the US economy and the Middle East. All this gave time for Charles Powell to work up a statement which she now circulated, embodying four assurances that she wanted to be able to give to the press at the end of the meeting. ‘We agreed on four points,’ the statement declared:
(1) The US, and Western, aim was not to achieve superiority, but to maintain balance, taking account of Soviet developments;
(2) SDI-related deployment would, in view of treaty obligations, have to be a matter for negotiations;
(3) The overall aim is to enhance, not undercut deterrence;
(4) East – West negotiations should aim to achieve security with reduced levels of offensive systems on both sides.90,91
This was a brilliant diplomatic coup. Reagan’s staff were not pleased at being bounced in this way; but the President happily accepted her four points, saying ‘he hoped they would quell reports of disagreement between us’.92 Thus, in exchange for publicly expressing her strong support for the research, she secured – and promptly went out and publicised – assurances that the Americans would not deploy SDI unilaterally and
