A one hundred division armoured thrust at the heart of NATO could not create more havoc.
If the West falls for this one, it deserves all it gets.
With this one proposal the new Russian leadership could change the face of German politics. How could the ruling Social Democrats refuse an offer which would liberate 20 million of their Eastern countrymen? Would they want to refuse an offer which would certainly bring them a vast new increase in votes from the East? If the Russians are serious this may well be the end of the NATO alliance as we have known it.
On the question of disarmament in Central Europe it must be said at the outset that if Germany is unprepared to defend itself it cannot expect the United States to shoulder its responsibilities.
Reunification in exchange for a disarmed Germany? This must remain for the moment a hypothetical question. The State Department does not comment on hypothetical questions.
It is unlikely that France would consider the relocation of United States military forces on French soil.
Who can any longer deny the Russians are serious when they claim they want peace?
In the U.S. Embassy it fell to Tom Yates to write the crucial position paper.
In it he attempted to assess the forces at work within the new collective leadership. His conclusion that in London Bukansky was kiteflying for Natalya Roginova and some supporting group within the Party was widely accepted when it reached Washington.
Meanwhile, a special emissary had been sent by the Administration to Bonn to gain at first hand the German Chancellor’s reaction. But Helmut Schmidt was too acute a politician to provide any answers at this stage. On German television the night after Bukansky’s speech to the British Writers’ Guild he laid down his approach. There is, as yet, no Soviet proposal. A Soviet citizen, not even a member of government, has made certain remarks about German unification. It is true that well-placed Soviet citizens abroad do not normally speak publicly without prior government approval. Nevertheless the object of this apparent new departure could easily be no more than an attempt to disrupt NATO during a period of its increasing military strength. If that is so it would be unwise for the German Federal Government to speculate. Until the Soviet Union chooses to approach the Federal Government officially, what was now widely called simply The Proposal did not exist.
Nor could the U.S. President’s embassy or the British ambassador get anything more out of Helmut Schmidt.
For Carole Yates these days before Christmas were a period of intense excitement. On December 22nd her husband, Tom, recognized by the administration as one of the U.S. Moscow embassy’s most reliable new Kremlinologists, was called to Washington to give the President a personal briefing.
Carole had seen him off at Sheremetyevo Airport. As she waved to him through the barrier and turned back toward the car park, Alexei Letsukov was crossing the concourse toward her.
In the weeks since she had last seen him she had found he occupied a large part of her waking thoughts. In some way beyond her present understanding he had become a mirror to her face. He had killed a man. And knowing that she still had talked with him, had held his arm, drank coffee in a restaurant and left him with some regret. Through him she found herself immersed in a moral problem beyond her experience as an American woman. There at home morality was sexual or at most an item not included in an annual Internal Revenue return. It was whether to buy a cheap set of tires for the car, knowing almost for certain that they were stolen. In this past month the triviality of her moral anxieties had sickened her. She had wanted to talk to Tom about it, but of course it was impossible. How could she now say to her husband that to sleep or not with a stranger seemed on the same level of moral choice as a slice of chocolate cake when dieting?
The last meeting with Letsukov had thrown her into much deeper turmoil than the first. That certainly she knew. Any residual guilt for the night they had spent together in Paris had been totally obliterated. Even the possibility of damage to her husband’s career (which had not in fact materialized) had been wiped from the slate. What now remained were two interlocking questions, almost the same yet each with their separate limits: Should Letsukov have agreed to kill the man Stepan X? And secondly, could she condone his having done it?
And here she found herself in even deeper, more troubled waters. Sitting alone in the apartment or walking sometimes along the canal bank, she had decided she could condone the act once done. But could not have, beforehand, condoned his decision to do it.
The whole incident of the last meeting with Letsukov had sent a continuing shudder through her world. She found she wanted desperately to meet him again, not for romantic or sexual reasons, but because he was now the one person to whom she could talk about what had become her problem.
The effect on her marriage had grown cumulatively throughout the weeks since the funeral. At first Tom Yates had seemed to have forgotten her meeting with Letsukov. Their lives, privy to some of the details of the great power struggle going on around them, had become tinged with that wartime urgency which can make marriages and mend minds. But Tom Yates was no fool. He could sense somehow that his wife was now living on two levels of separate absorption. And because he was a Westerner he had come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that she was in love.
In her diary Carole Yates makes clear that she would have denied it vehemently. Even when she stood before Letsukov on the concourse at Sheremetyevo Airport.
“I’ve been seeing off a delegation from the Azerbaijan Republic,” he said. “And you?”
“My husband has been called back to Washington for consultations.”
They both remembered Paris.
“Yes,” she said. “It was the same then.”
He took her to the kvas bar beside the textile factory at Khimki.
“Kvas” he said, “is a sort of peasant brew, made by dripping water through burnt bread. It can be very potent.”
“Do they serve vodka?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll have vodka.”
“And coffee?”
“Made by dripping water through burnt bread?”
He did not smile.
The half-liter was served in a bottle set in a dish of ice. He took the protruding neck of the bottle and poured vodka into their glasses. Around them Russian workmen furtively eyed her Western clothes.
“I’ve never been to a place like this before,” she said.
This time he smiled. “No, I don’t expect you have. Officially it’s the canteen of number 3617 garment factory, Khimki. The factory was moved last year to the south. Somehow the canteen remained.”
“Can anybody come here?”
“More or less.”
“You’re very distant.”
“I don’t mean to be. On the contrary, I want to thank you for not telling the American embassy what you know about me.”