The Dead Hand

The truth is we would like nothing better than to see the Russian people living in freedom and dignity instead of being trapped in a backwash of history as they are. The greatest fallacy of the Lenin-Marxist philosophy is that it is the “wave of the future.” Everything about it is primitive: compulsion in place of free initiative; coercion in place of law; militarism in place of trade; and empire-building in place of self-determination; and luxury for a chosen few at the expense of the many. We have seen nothing like it since the Age of Feudalism.

Reagan’s description of the Soviet system as backward and restrictive was a penetrating insight. But there was also a hidden contradiction in this argument. How could the Soviet Union be threatening militarily while also “primitive” and rotting from within? How could it sustain a global arms race abroad while people stood in lines at home? The answer offered by many at the time was that the Soviet military had first claim on the country’s resources, and therefore the defense sector could fatten itself while the rest of the country suffered. This was true; hypermilitarization of the Soviet state did siphon off a huge portion of the country’s resources. But it was also true that, in many instances, the internal rot sapped military power. The Soviet defense machine was undermined by the very weaknesses Reagan spotted elsewhere in the system. A reckoning was coming for the Soviet Union. And even if he did not see every detail clearly, Reagan seemed to understand the big picture very well: the system as a whole was tottering and vulnerable.

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Soviet leaders had not trusted Carter, but they reacted with anger and paranoia to Reagan. At his first press conference as president, Reagan was asked if the Kremlin was still “bent on world domination that might lead to a continuation of the Cold War” or whether “under other circumstances detente is possible.” Reagan responded that detente had been a “one way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims,” and added that Soviet leaders “have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards. I think when you do business with them, even at a detente, you keep that in mind.”

In Moscow, the aging leadership wanted most of all to preserve the strategic parity they felt they had achieved in the late 1970s, recalled Anatoly Dobrynin, former ambassador to Washington. “For all their revolutionary rhetoric,” he said, “they hated change….” They wanted some kind of military detente, even if political cooperation was out of the question, but the era of detente was over. Reagan didn’t believe in it. “In retrospect, I realize that it had been quite impossible for me at that moment to imagine anything much worse than Carter,” Dobrynin said. “But it soon became clear that in ideology and propaganda Reagan turned out to be far worse and far more threatening.”¹⁵

Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was not at the top of Reagan’s agenda in his first year, which was devoted to driving Congress to approve lower taxes, budget cuts and defense rearmament. Reagan believed that before serious attention could be given to dealing with the Soviets, the United States had to first embark on a demonstrable military buildup. Reagan resumed building the B-1 bomber Carter had canceled, pushed ahead with a new basing mode for a new land-based missile, the MX, and with construction of a new Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile with more accuracy and range. Reagan also secretly approved more aggressive U.S. naval and air maneuvers aimed at the Soviet Union. His CIA director, William Casey, expanded covert actions around the globe aimed at hemming in the Soviets. But Reagan did not rush to advance superpower diplomacy. He did not meet or talk to Soviet leaders.

After surviving an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, Reagan began to think about what he could do to end the arms race. “Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war; perhaps there was a reason I had been spared,” he recalled later. In the first week after leaving the hospital, he took out a yellow legal pad and wrote a personal letter to Brezhnev, by hand. Still in his bathrobe and pajamas, Reagan passed it around to aides at a meeting April 13. The State Department didn’t like it and rewrote it into a stiff message. Reagan didn’t like the rewrite, and in the end, Brezhnev got two letters, one formal and one in Reagan’s hand.¹⁶ James A. Baker III, who was Reagan’s chief of staff, recalled that the letter was “Reagan 101: a sermon that basically said the Soviets had it wrong on economics, politics, and international relations, and that the United States had it right. It’s as if the president thought maybe Brezhnev didn’t know this stuff and that if he just heard it, he’d come to his senses.”¹⁷ Brezhnev replied in “the standard polemical form, stressing their differences,” without any effort to be personal, recalled Dobrynin. Reagan remembered “an icy reply from Brezhnev.”¹⁸

At a private moment at an economic summit in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, French President Francois Mitterrand gave Reagan some stunning news. The French had recruited a defector in place in Moscow, whom the French had code-named “Farewell,” and he had provided a huge treasure trove of intelligence. Colonel Vladimir Vetrov was an engineer whose job was to evaluate the intelligence collected by the KGB’s technology directorate —Directorate T—responsible for finding and stealing the latest in Western high technology. A special arm of the KGB, known as Line X, carried out the thefts. Motivated to help the West, Vetrov had secretly photographed four thousand KGB documents on the program. After Mitterrand spoke to Reagan, the materials were passed to Vice President George H. W. Bush, and then to the CIA in August.

The dossier “immediately caused a storm,” recalled Thomas C. Reed, a former Pentagon official who later worked on the National Security Council staff under Reagan. “The files were incredibly explicit. They set forth the extent of Soviet penetration into U.S. and other Western laboratories, factories and government agencies.”¹⁹

Vetrov revealed the names of more than two hundred Line X officers in ten KGB stations in the West. “Reading the material caused my worst nightmares to come true,” said Gus Weiss, a White House official. “Since 1970, Line X had obtained thousands of documents and sample products in such quantity that it appeared the Soviet military and civilian sectors were in large measure running their research on that of the West, particularly the United States. Our science was supporting their national defense.”²⁰

Rather than roll up the Line X officers and expel them, Reagan approved a secret plan to exploit the Farewell dossier for economic warfare against the Soviet Union. The plan was to secretly feed the Line X officers with technology rigged to self-destruct after a certain interval. The idea came from Weiss, who approached Casey, who took it to Reagan. The CIA worked with American industry to alter products to be slipped to the KGB, matching the KGB’s shopping list. “Contrived computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline, and defective plans disturbed the output of chemical plants and a tractor factory,” Weiss said. “The Pentagon introduced misleading information pertinent to stealth aircraft, space defense, and tactical aircraft.”

Oil and gas equipment was at the top of the Soviet wish list, and the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems to automate the valves, compressors and storage facilities for a huge new pipeline to Europe. When the pipeline technology could not be purchased in the United States, the KGB shopped it from a Canadian firm. However, tipped by Vetrov, the CIA rigged the software sold from Canada to go haywire after a while, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to create pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. One day, the system exploded. “The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,” Reed recalled. The blast was starting to trigger worried looks in the U.S. government that day, he recalled, when, at the National Security Council, “Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry.” The explosion had been one of the first fruits of the Reagan confrontation.

Soviet leaders were jittery. Sometime in 1981 they realized that the United States had been tapping one of their most secret military cables linking naval bases with commanders in the Far East. The tap in the Sea of Okhotsk had been placed by U.S. submarines in an operation code-named Ivy Bells. The Soviets may have been alerted when the U.S.S. Seawolf, a reconnaissance submarine, set down by accident right atop the Soviet cable. Also, in 1980, Ronald Pelton, who had worked at the National Security Agency, began selling information about Ivy Bells to the Soviets for money.²¹ On learning of the tap, the Soviets sent a scavenger ship and found the super-secret device, pulling it up from the ocean floor. There was no mistaking what it was: one part inside said “Property of the United States Government.”²²

In May 1981, Brezhnev denounced Reagan’s policies in a secret address to a major KGB conference in Moscow. An even more dramatic speech was given by Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, who declared that the new U.S. administration was actively preparing for nuclear war. He said there was now the possibility of a nuclear