The Crusader

jobs from the pipeline construction. Despite encountering crowds that were displeased with his policies, Reagan stood his ground, explaining his rationale and ensuring that those Americans most directly affected by his policy understood the stakes of his decision.²⁷

In addition to these towns that could have benefited, large companies like Caterpillar and GE were slated to receive lucrative contracts from the construction of the pipeline, inciting a massive domestic lobbying effort to overturn Reagan’s decision and leading to congressional legislation which was poised to do precisely that. This was an inherent difficulty of Reagan’s hard stance and one that he understood from the outset. At the meeting where he made his decision to block the pipeline, he had expressed regret: “You know, this is a tough one. I know what’s right in the foreign policy aspect of it, but I hate like hell to hurt American business.” But, he insisted, “A matter of great principle is at stake.”²⁸

Later, Dwayne Andreas, chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland and director of the U.S.–USSR Trade and Economic Council, was in Sokolniki Park in Moscow when he was nabbed by an Izvestia reporter, to whom he complained that sanctions and other policies against the USSR were generating major losses for U.S. firms. He told Izvestia: “They can hardly be calculated. I can say with great assurance that the loss of deals having to do with the construction of the gas pipeline totaled $2 billion.” The losses, he worried, “will continue in the future as well, since the U.S. is losing its monopoly position in certain areas of specialized machinery.” American companies were being supplanted by competitors in Western Europe and Japan, but Reagan thought it was worth the loss.²⁹ Although he was adamantly probusiness, his hatred of the Soviets took precedence in this matter. It was a wartime mentality that the home front had to make sacrifices in order to ensure victory, and in the end, Reagan was convinced that the long-term benefits would outweigh the short-term costs.

THE FRENCH FACTOR

While the British were not pleased with the pipeline embargo, the French continued to provide the most difficult opposition. French resistance became so vocal and so fierce that on October 27 Bill Clark made a secret trip to Paris to talk with President Mitterand.³⁰ The French had been publicly disrespectful of Reagan, calling him the “cowboy from Hollywood” and other names. Mitterand and his ministers openly sniped at Reagan in the press, and Reagan, who disliked nobody, was developing a healthy disdain for the French leadership.³¹ For the sake of Franco-American relations, he thought Mitterand should learn to bite his tongue. Clark remembers: “The French wouldn’t stop. He [Reagan] leaned over to me and told me, ‘Bill, talk to them.’” Clark was dispatched “back channel” to Paris to discuss the French attitude toward Reagan, and to the USSR.³²

Mitterand lectured Clark: By pushing allies to block the pipeline, America was guilty of “hegemony” and violating sovereignty. (He was unwittingly iterating the Moscow line.³³) Believing Reagan’s prognostications of Communist demise to be greatly exaggerated, Mitterand assured Clark that nothing would come of the democratic movement in Poland; Polish society would not become more “liberal.”³⁴ All of the allies, insisted the French president, must tone down their rhetoric; but only Reagan must yield. Clark told Mitterand that neither Reagan’s personality nor principles would permit that.³⁵

Over the next few weeks, testy rebuffs transpired, including a November 12 phone call from an amiable Reagan that an angry Mitterand refused. That day, reported Time’s Laurence Barrett, might have been “the most uncivil day” in Franco-American relations since FDR and Charles de Gaulle sparred in World War II.³⁶ The next day, in a November 13 radio address, Reagan might have had Mitterand in mind when he proffered:

The balance between the United States and the Soviet Union cannot be measured in weapons and bombers alone. To a large degree, the strength of each nation is also based on economic strength. Unfortunately, the West’s economic relations with the U.S.S.R. have not always served the national security goals of the alliance. The Soviet Union faces serious economic problems. But we—and I mean all of the nations of the free world—have helped the Soviets avoid some hard economic choices by providing preferential terms of trade, by allowing them to acquire militarily relevant technology, and by providing them a market for their energy resources, even though this creates an excessive dependence on them. By giving such preferential treatment, we’ve added to our own problems—creating a situation where we have to spend more money on our defense to keep up with Soviet capabilities which we helped create. Since taking office, I have emphasized to our allies the importance of our economic, as well as our political, relationship with the Soviet Union.³⁷

Disgusted by Western Europe’s leftist leaders, it had become clear that Reagan had few friends in this endeavor.³⁸ It was a sign of his dedication and his unwavering belief in his instincts that he stayed the course.

FAREWELL PAYS OFF

In the end, Reagan did manage to achieve a major blow against the pipeline—literally—although it did not come about through diplomacy. Instead, deliverance came in the form of Gus Weiss’s good works with the Farewell Dossier.

By mid-1982, shipments of defective products—manufactured through Line X, born of the dossier—were arriving in the USSR. The products included contrived computer chips that found their way into Soviet military hardware, flawed turbines, defective plans for chemical plants, and much more. Weiss claimed that the Soviet Space Shuttle was actually built from a design rejected by NASA and fed through Line X.³⁹ In one dramatic example, rigged software bought by the Soviets triggered a huge explosion in the new Siberian gas pipeline. The software was specially designed to pass Soviet quality-acceptance tests, to work for a while, and then to malfunction. Specifically, the software ran the pumps, turbines, and valves in the pipeline but was programmed to eventually produce pressures beyond the capacity of the pipeline’s joints and welds.

All this came to a head during the summer of 1982, when a giant explosion occurred in the pipeline. According to Tom Reed, it was “the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,” and U.S. satellites picked up the explosion, which was so enormous that NOR AD feared that a small nuclear device had been detonated. As Reed recalled, initially there was a crisis-like reaction at the NSC, until Gus Weiss came strolling down the hall to tell his colleagues not to worry. “It took him [Weiss] another twenty years to tell me why,” said Reed later.⁴⁰

Although there were no human casualties from the explosion, the economic fallout was considerable.⁴¹ Ronald Reagan, with Gus Weiss’s unique help, had found his own device for obstructing the pipeline, regardless of Western Europe’s veto—and, perhaps most ironically, with French help, since it was the French who had handed over the dossier in the first place. In all, the Farewell Dossier project was, as Weiss estimated, a “great success.” The Soviets’ economic espionage backfired when they needed it most.

As for Farewell himself—that is, Colonel Vetrov—his activities were eventually discovered by the KGB and he was executed. It was Weiss’s hope that when historians sort out the reasons for the end of the Cold War, Colonel Vetrov would receive a well-deserved footnote.⁴²

THE ECONOMIC WAR CONTINUES

Amid all the controversy surrounding the pipeline embargo in 1982, Reagan continued to make prognostications on the demise of Communism,⁴³ as well as a number of moves to try to advance