-4-
IMPROBABLE EMISSARY
The National Security Council decided to take Massie up on her suggestion that she return to Moscow as an informal intermediary. The hope was that she might be able to help in obtaining a resumption of cultural exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union, a first step toward an easing of the broader tensions. A plausible case could be made for sending Massie, who had written a book on Russian culture.
From the Reagan administration’s standpoint, there were several advantages to using Massie in this fashion. She was not an official representative of the U.S. government and thus could not be besieged by the Soviets with demands to justify all of the Reagan administration’s actions and utterances of the previous three years. If the Reagan White House had itself proposed a resumption of cultural exchanges, the Soviets would probably have dismissed the idea as a ruse to divert attention from the recent deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe. Moreover, through Massie and her unofficial contacts in Moscow, the Reagan administration was hoping to circumvent the two senior Soviet officials who had regularly dominated all decisions about the United States: Anatoly Dobrynin, the ambassador to Washington, and his boss, Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister. “We didn’t want everything to go through Dobrynin,” said Jack Matlock, the NSC’s Soviet expert, who felt both Gromyko and Dobrynin would be cold to the idea of resuming contacts.1
Sending a private citizen like Massie was irregular, but Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser, had a penchant for doing business with other governments outside regular channels. He had learned about the conduct of American foreign policy as a military aide to Henry Kissinger, at a time when Kissinger, as national security adviser, was keeping the State Department, even the secretary of state, in the dark about the Nixon administration’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam. McFarlane’s own clumsy attempts at Kissingerian secret diplomacy would eventually culminate in the Reagan administration’s biggest disaster, the Iran-Contra scandal, when McFarlane tried to go outside the U.S. government bureaucracy to deal with the leadership in Tehran.
Massie was not Reagan’s only conduit for back-channel discussions with Moscow. During this same period, the administration also received an offer of help from an unlikely source: Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat from Massachusetts, one of the administration’s most prominent critics. One of Kennedy’s aides, Dr. Lawrence Horowitz, had been meeting in Moscow with Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the Communist Party Central Committee’s International Department. For several years, Horowitz served as a secret message carrier between Reagan’s NSC and Zagladin. Kennedy was aware of these secret exchanges; for a long time Secretary of State George Shultz was not.2
At one juncture, McFarlane also sought to have Reagan designate Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser and onetime aide to Kissinger, as an emissary for private conversations with top Soviet leaders. But soon after McFarlane broached the idea with Reagan and invited Scowcroft to come to the White House to discuss the mission, Shultz passionately objected, arguing that all Soviet diplomacy should go through him and the State Department. Reagan knew how to handle turf battles like this one in a genial, nonconfrontational way. When Scowcroft arrived at the White House a few days later to talk in further detail about what he should say on Reagan’s behalf on an upcoming visit to Moscow, Reagan told him stories about the movie Patton for twenty minutes: how the movie was made, why Patton’s speech was in the beginning of the film. The president then stood up and said, “Well, good luck!”—thus leaving Scowcroft bewildered, Shultz mollified, and McFarlane not really humiliated.3
Massie, who had never served in government, was a different sort of intermediary from Scowcroft. She was not being sent to meet with top Soviet leaders; she was being asked to explore merely routine cultural exchanges, not major diplomatic issues such as arms control. Still, Massie moved quickly and shrewdly to enhance her status. Before leaving for Moscow on the cultural mission for the NSC, Massie said she had a single request. She wanted to meet, face-to-face, with Reagan. She argued that it would be important to be able to tell Soviet officials that she had met with the president and that what she was saying had his personal imprimatur.4
McFarlane gave his assent. He liked the idea of introducing Massie to the president. He felt that she could help Reagan to develop a better feel for people and ordinary life inside the Soviet Union. He had discovered that the president was uncomfortable dealing with conceptual matters such as arms control and balance-of-power diplomacy, and that Reagan always found issues more appealing if they were cast in human terms. Massie was the perfect vehicle for McFarlane’s goal of bringing the Soviet Union alive to Reagan, so that he would begin to see America’s Cold War adversary as more than an abstraction.
The meeting was set for January 17, 1984, the morning after Reagan’s “Ivan and Anya” speech. The president had talked in that same address about the need to search for “concrete actions that we both can take to reduce the risk of U.S.-Soviet confrontation.” Seated in the Oval Office with Reagan and his advisers, Massie asked what she should say while she was in Moscow. Could she tell Soviet officials that she had met with the president and that his newly announced effort to improve relations with the Soviet Union was more than just an election-year ploy? Could she say that if Reagan won reelection in November, his approach of seeking to avoid confrontation would continue to guide Soviet policy during his second term? Reagan said she could.
As McFarlane had hoped, Massie also began describing the situation inside the Soviet Union. She was lively: she told Russian jokes; she recounted in an animated way her arguments with Soviet officials about American policy; she spoke of the hardship of the Russian people, their economic desperation and their capacity for suffering. She also talked about subjects Reagan’s foreign-policy advisers rarely mentioned, such as the quest for spiritual values inside the Soviet Union. Reagan paid close attention. The session, held just after Reagan’s regular morning national-security briefing, lasted not more than half an hour. But Reagan was intrigued. He invited her to come back.
Reagan was seventy-two years old. It is worth recalling that at this point, three years into his presidency, he had had remarkably little contact with the Soviet Union, its leaders, or its people. He was by now interested in trying to ease tensions with Moscow and to reduce or eliminate the dangers of nuclear weapons, but he had little in the way of personal experience to guide him. He had never traveled to the Soviet Union. He had met a Soviet leader only once in his life, while he was governor, at the party President Richard Nixon gave in California during Leonid Brezhnev’s visit to the United States. In early 1983, after taking over from Alexander Haig as secretary of state, Shultz recalled, “It finally dawned on me that President Reagan had never had a real conversation with a top Communist leader, and that he wanted to have one.” Shultz had arranged a White House meeting in which Reagan talked for the first time with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, and the session had gone well. Nevertheless, Reagan’s ideas about the Soviet Union and its leaders had been formed four decades earlier, during the anti-Communist battles in Hollywood in the 1940s, and his early impressions lingered. A couple of years later, when Dobrynin was leaving his job as ambassador to return to Moscow, Reagan expressed astonishment that such a polished, urbane diplomat could represent the evil empire. “Is he really a communist?” Reagan asked.5