During Able Archer, NATO forces changed their message formats in a way that Soviet intelligence officials had not seen in previous NATO exercises. In the practice drill, NATO also moved imaginary forces up several stages of readiness to high alert. Gordievsky reported that the KGB, in monitoring Able Archer, believed that genuine forces had gone on high alert and took seriously the idea that NATO might be on the verge of a preemptive attack. Gordievsky himself began to worry; he was growing increasingly upset with his British handlers and the CIA. “It was, ‘Jesus, what’s happening? I’m working for you guys in the name of peace, not in the name of confrontation and war,’” recalled Fritz Ermarth, who later studied the Able Archer episode for the CIA. “He was disturbed by the trend of events and the atmospherics and was ready to place some of the blame for this on U.S. policy.”10
In Washington, CIA director William Casey was carrying Gordievsky’s reports about a Soviet war scare directly to Reagan and McFarlane. Some of the more hawkish Soviet experts in the U.S. intelligence community, including Ermarth, thought at the time that Casey should not have been passing along the alarmist messages. “I was concerned that they [Soviet officials] were doing influence operations here and in Europe, getting messages through, that they were trying to spook us,” said Ermarth in an interview. “I was mad at Casey that he hadn’t sufficiently snake-checked this thing. Not that Gordievsky wasn’t being honest.”
In early 1984, under Ermarth’s direction, the CIA did a Special National Intelligence Estimate that dismissed the “war scare” as merely a Soviet propaganda campaign. “We believe strongly that Soviet actions are not inspired by, and Soviet leaders do not perceive, a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States… ,” it concluded. “Recent Soviet ‘war scare’ propaganda… is aimed primarily at discrediting U.S. policies and mobilizing ‘peace’ pressures among various audiences abroad.” However, a study by British intelligence that same year determined that Soviet officials had taken seriously the possibility of a nuclear strike against them. Several years later, another review by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board similarly found that Soviet officials had not been merely posturing but had, in fact, been genuinely afraid of war.11
Although the intelligence community was divided on the significance of the “war scare,” the episode had a clear and indisputable impact on Reagan himself. One day in late November 1983, at the end of his morning intelligence briefing, the president asked McFarlane if the Soviets really thought the United States was planning a nuclear attack. “How could they believe this?” he wondered. McFarlane reminded the president that the Soviets were edgy because the new Pershing missiles the United States was installing in Europe could hit Soviet targets within seven minutes, much more quickly than intercontinental missiles from the United States. Reagan himself later admitted to growing concern during this period with how Soviet officials viewed the United States. In his 1990 autobiography, he said that by the end of 1983, he had begun to realize “that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike.”12
When the Reagan administration and its allies began deploying the new Pershing missiles in Europe in late 1983, the Soviet Union, in response, suspended participation in all arms-control talks with the United States. According to McFarlane, in December, just before leaving Washington to spend Christmas in California, Reagan said he would like to find some way to start new high-level talks with Moscow. As secretary of state, Shultz had been gently encouraging the president for more than a year to establish more regular and direct contact with Soviet leaders. At the end of the year, over a round of golf in Palm Springs, Reagan and Shultz talked at length about the importance of opening new channels to the Soviet leadership.13
There was a political dimension to Reagan’s growing eagerness for dialogue. He was preparing to run for reelection in 1984, and his Democratic opponents were already beginning to seize upon the heightened tensions with the Soviet Union as a possible campaign issue. On January 3, 1984, in a speech to the National Press Club, former vice president Walter F. Mondale, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, warned that under the Reagan administration, the “risk of nuclear war” had increased. “It’s three minutes to midnight, and we are scarcely talking to the Soviets at all,” Mondale asserted. He promised that if he were elected president, he would have “regular contacts” with Moscow. “Mr. Reagan may become the first president since Hoover never to have met with his Soviet counterpart,” Mondale declared. 14
Reagan countered two weeks later, on January 16, 1984, with a speech about the Soviet Union that was strikingly conciliatory in tone. It marked a distinct change in emphasis from his public statements of the previous three years. In his Westminster speech in 1982, Reagan had relegated the communist system to the “ash heap of history,” and the following year, he had denounced the Soviet regime as “the evil empire.” This time, however, the president emphasized the importance of reducing the possibility of confrontation between the two countries. “Neither we nor the Soviet Union can wish away the differences between our two societies and our philosophies,” Reagan declared, “but we should always remember that we do have common interests and the foremost among them is to avoid war and reduce the level of arms.”15
Reagan had instructed his aides several weeks earlier to prepare a speech that could launch a concerted attempt at new discussions with Moscow in 1984. The speech had been ready before the end of December but had been delayed until January at the request of Nancy Reagan, in consultation with her astrologer, Joan Quigley. Most of the speech had been drafted by Jack Matlock, then the National Security Council aide for Soviet affairs, and by State Department officials. However, Reagan himself wrote the final section of the speech, which cast the abstract idea of common interests between the United States and the Soviet Union in his own distinctive style, a sentimental appeal to ordinary, unsophisticated Americans:
Just suppose with me for a moment that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, oh, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm, with a Jim and Sally, and there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted. Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments? Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living? Before they parted company, they would probably have touched on ambitions and hobbies and what they wanted for their children and problems of making ends meet. And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would be saying to Ivan: ‘Wasn’t she nice? She also teaches music.’ …They might even have decided they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon. Above all, they would have proven that people don’t make wars.16
The passage was implausible, old-fashioned, and saccharine. According to Matlock, what Reagan had first written had to be revised, because it was also sexist: in Reagan’s draft, Ivan and Jim talked about their work while Anya and Sally swapped notes about children and cooking.17 Nevertheless, giving the speech signified that Reagan was for the first time seeking public support in America for the idea of easing hostilities with the Soviet Union. At the time, Soviet officials dismissed the overture as a political stunt. “At any other time, such a speech by an American president would have been regarded as a tangible step toward improving relations with the Soviet Union,” reflected Dobrynin many years later. “But with all the other negative factors, to say nothing of the imminent presidential election, it was hard to believe in Reagan’s sincerity.”18