# From Potsdam to Perestroika:
## Conversations with Cold
Warriors

Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4's *The World Tonight*
as:

From Cold War to New World Order ?

on the 7th, 10th, 14th, 21st, and 28th of April 1995 at 10pm.

By Fred Halliday

Editor Anne Koch

Producer Sara Hawley

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EDITORIAL NOTE

The following interviews have been transcribed and edited from discussions taped with the respective interviewees during March 1995. Shorter versions of each were broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'The World Tonight' in April 1995. My special thanks are due to Anne Koch, editor of 'The World Tonight', and to Sara Hawley, my producer for all their help and encouragement. FH.

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# INTRODUCTION

## FROM POTSDAM TO PERESTROIKA: REASSESSING THE COLD WAR

The conflict between the communist countries and the West, known as the 'Cold War', dominated the world from the end of World War II, in May 1945, and for much of the rest of second half of the twentieth century: from July 1945, when the victorious allies met at Potsdam on the outskirts of a subjugated and ruined Berlin, to the failed Moscow coup of August 1991, the affairs of the world were dominated by the conflict of two competing ideological and military blocs. Although the Cold War never erupted into an all-out 'hot' war, meaning by this one in which the armed forces of the major states engaged in direct and sustained combat, it was a period of great danger, anxiety and conflict, one which led to the deaths of many millions of people and over which hung the ever-present risk of a nuclear exchange that could have devastated the globe. The fact that, in the end, such a nuclear war did not take place, and that, despite several major emergencies, the peace was kept along the dividing line in Europe, should not lead us to forget how great the danger was and how near the world came to annihilation, through accident if not through design. In the several critical confrontations over Berlin, between 1948 and 1961, and in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the risks of a third world war were significant.

The Cold War ended because of the changes in the Soviet Union following on the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in 1985. After initial scepticism in the West about the new Soviet leader's intention, it became evident by 1988 that serious negotiation was possible on a range of questions, beyond the substantial arms control agreements reached in the previous decade and a half. In 1989 Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan and, later in the year, the Berlin wall came down, an event accompanied by the collapse of all communist regimes in eastern Europe. In 1991, following the abortive coup of August 1991, the USSR itself ceased to exist. Whatever the dangers that may remain or emerge in relations between Russia and the West the Cold War, as it existed from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, has ended.

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As with any great conflict, there are many questions, of fact and interpretation, which can only now be addressed once the confrontation itself is over. If we knew much about the crises and development of East-West relations during the Cold War itself, there are many issues on which, in the few years since the conflict ended, more evidence has emerged. To give but a few examples: we now know much more about how the USSR acquired the atom bomb in 1949, on the background to the Korean war of 1950, on US thinking about the crises in Berlin between 1958 and 1961, on the processes of Soviet and US decision-making during Third World confrontations, than was the case during the Cold War itself. Representatives of the intelligence services of both sides have begun to talk about the activities, and attendant myths, that they promoted. Of all the moments of the Cold War perhaps the most dangerous was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962: as a result of a series of conferences involving Cuban, Russian and American participants in that crisis we now have a much clearer idea of how policy was formulated by all three countries. We also now know how much nearer the world came to a nuclear exchange than was realised, at least in the West, at the time.

The emergence of new facts is, however, only part of the story. Equally important is the rethinking of what the Cold War itself was about, of how accurate public perceptions of it at the time were, and of why it came to an end. It is here, as much as in the revelation of new facts, that much future debate will centre. Some see the Cold War as just another conflict between great powers, rivals for military dominance. Others question this, pointing to the limits put on military rivalry by nuclear weapons, and to the role of ideological factors, in stimulating the forty-year confrontation. For some the Cold War was mainly about Europe, and was stabilised there with agreements on Berlin in the early 1960s. For others, the Cold War was global: in this perspective, the wars that erupted in the Third World, in China, Korea and Vietnam in the late 1940s through to the wars of Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua in the 1980s were a central part of the rivalry. Nowhere is controversy greater than in regard to the question of why the Cold War ended: some, especially on the right-wing of the spectrum, see western military pressure, epitomised in Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, as crucial in forcing a Soviet retreat; others argue that western military pressure, and support for repressive governments in the Third World, served to prolong the Cold War and reduce the influence of nationalism and reform tendencies within the communist bloc.

The discussions that follow, with five Americans centrally involved in the formulation and implementation of Cold War policy, range over these issues of fact and interpretation. Limited as they are by space and by the short time-span that has elapsed since the end of the Cold War, and

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necessarily reflecting the personalities and viewpoints of the individuals involved, they offer a fascinating set of insights on the Cold War as a whole. The five men interviewed were influential in and out of government, as officials of state, policy advisers, or participants in the public debate, and represent a range of opinion, on such matters as nuclear war or Third World intervention. Paul Nitze, now 89, was either an official of state or an influential policy voice for five decades, from before the US entry into the Second World War until the end of the Reagan Administration in 1989. George Kennan made his first contribution in the 1940s and has been a distinctive, critical voice ever since. Robert McNamara entered US government with President Kennedy in 1961, Henry Kissinger with President Nixon in 1969, while Robert Gates was closely involved in security policy in the White House throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

There are some specific, recurrent, issues which dominated discussion of the Cold War when it was in train and which continue to be central to any assessment of that conflict. One is the issue of nuclear weapons themselves - their possible uses, the relation between conventional and military force, the dangers involved, and the way in which they might be deployed in crises. To a degree far greater than in any European country, discussion of nuclear weapons, and of possible uses and strategies associated with them, was part of the US public debate and a matter of bitter dispute between experts and politicians alike. A second question that, equally, provoked repeated controversy was the importance of the Third World: unlike the European states who, after 1945, were embroiled mainly in colonial conflicts in Asia and Africa, the US found itself involved in Third World wars that were part of the conflict with communist forces - in Korea and Vietnam most directly, but also, less heavily, in a range of other countries where Washington sought either to maintain its allies in power or foster rebellion from below. For Washington the Korean and Vietnam wars, in which tens of thousands of their troops died, had bitter lessons: in the former, the need to avoid a direct confrontation with China, in the latter, the risks and costs of a costly involvement in counter-guerrilla activities. The questions of whether such interventions were necessary, and of how the US disengaged from them, continue to haunt US policy-makers to-day.

A third issue that is central to all US consideration on the Cold War is the role within overall western strategy of the European allies: while the majority of the European states in NATO were concerned to maintain a US presence in Europe, and to justify this to their own public opinions, US commentators repeatedly stressed the difficulties of working with European allies who seemed bent both on going their own way, and on limiting their human and financial contributions. The theme of European

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unreliability, of the other NATO members having an easy ride, recurs in US debate, side-by-side with the commitment, which underlay justifications of a first use of nuclear weapons, to defend Western Europe from a possible Soviet attack. This difference in perspective is, however, also evident in regard to one other area of debate, namely the question of how involvement in the Cold War affected domestic politics, and the whole shape of government and economy within the western world. If, in the main, European politicians and commentators appeared to be sanguine on this point, seeing the Cold War as above all a way of defending a political and economic system, US commentators were much more insistent on how the Cold War had distorted and corrupted the United States, wrenching what had hitherto been a relatively isolationist system into a world role that it was ill-adapted to fulfil. The theme of the corruption of the republic, of a lost innocence, of the creation of a monstrous 'national security state' or, in Eisenhower's words, a 'military-industrial complex', recurs. If warnings to this effect were evident from the 1940s onwards, in concern about the militarisation of US government in peacetime, they became even more apparent with the impact of discussions on nuclear strategy and the fear of vulnerability in the late 1950s only to reach their apex with the divisions resulting from the Vietnam war in the late 1960s and the Watergate crisis of the early 1970s. The theme of how the Cold War affected the US, of whether, in Kennan's words, it enabled the USA to live up to 'its best traditions', is one that preoccupies several of those interviewed here.

To a degree greater than in any European country, the community of foreign policy experts in the USA is a group that remains close to power whether the individuals concerned are formally in, or out, of office, and this is a pattern evident in the case of the five men interviewed in this study. If Nitze was in office, under Roosevelt and then Truman from the early 1940s into the early 1950s, and held high office under Kennedy and Johnson, he was to play an important role in negotiating the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty under Nixon, in 1972, and remained an influential voice outside of office during the Carter years, only to be brought back in by Reagan as the elder statesman adviser on arms control. Kennan served as a diplomat from 1927 until 1950, and then, for brief periods, as ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, but from his independent position in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton he continued to address, and be consulted by, those in power in Washington. McNamara had by contrast a brief, condensed, period in office, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, but in the 1980s he rejoined the public debate, in alliance with Kennan and others, to criticise what he saw as the follies of the arms race. Kissinger was in office for seven years, under Nixon and Ford, but both before and after that period was an active participant in the public

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debate, beginning with his 1957 study on the use of nuclear weapons, and continuing through the 1980s with his prestigious consultancy activities. The youngest of these by far, Robert Gates, was continuously close to White House policy-making through the 1970s and 1980s: he now lives in apparent retirement in the forest of the north-west, as far from Washington as he can make it, but it would be a rash observer who suggested that this ex-CIA director, a knowledgeable insider for a quarter of a century, has forever forsaken the public debate. Whatever their other differences, Russia and America share the tendency for senior foreign policy officials never to retire.

If the lines of government office and private citizenship are blurred for these men, to a degree greater than is the case in Europe, the lines of personal and professional relation are equally complex. Kennan and Nitze, although often foes, have remained friends for decades and attend occasions at which the other is honoured. Nitze and Kissinger, on the other hand, despite having superficially similar views on the Cold War in general and nuclear war in particular, have often sparred: this was never more so than during the 1980s when Kissinger seemed, if anything, more reluctant to reach agreement with the Soviet Union than Nitze, the former hawkish critic of Kissinger's detente policy. Gates, by dint of his being in government employ for the last two decades of the Cold War, is identified less with the rivalries of office than the other two, but he has not avoided involvement in public controversy: he was a strong opponent of conciliation towards Gorbachev after 1985 and has been involved in public disputes with another senior foreign policy official, Secretary of State George Shultz, about the value of the Agency's analysis and briefings. Within the broader context of Cold War conflict, there is many an undercurrent and eddy of rivalry, personal and political, in the story of US policy-making in this era. It may be this factor of personal rivalry which, in addition to any ineluctable elixir of power, provides the incentive to remain involved in the foreign policy debate.

The interviews that follow, edited transcripts of interviews on which a series broadcast by BBC Radio 4's 'The World Tonight' was drawn, provide an insight, informative and intriguing, into how the Cold War is regarded in retrospect by these key players. At one level, each is concerned, quite legitimately, to defend his own role in this story and to rebut accusations and misrepresentations of his views and actions. Yet in such rebuttals, there are also signs of revision, of doubt, of second thoughts, at times of regret: Kennan laments the misuse of his theory of containment, Kissinger doubts the validity of the balance of power, McNamara and Nitze doubt the ideas they once had about the uses to which nuclear weapons could be put, Gates is forced to rethink his analysis of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. If history has, in one sense, handed victory to the US strategists of the Cold War, it has

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also served in some measure to give them pause for thought. Several now concede that the estimates they propounded on Soviet military potential were exaggerated. Most believe that the Cold War was bad for the USA. The involvement of the US in Third World conflicts, against militant left-wing nationalist movements, now appears to some at least mistaken. On the issue of why the Cold War ended and why communism collapsed, opinions are varied in the extreme. The discussions that follow may, in some measure, help us to come to answers about the Cold War and its outcome. It may be that, with the distortion of hindsight, and with the relief that, in the end, no nuclear exchange occurred, the Cold War should appear more manageable, calm, predictable than it did at the time: recollection in tranquillity runs the risk of losing the uncertainty, what the Russians call the *dramatizm* of events. There is enough in these interviews to remind us of that *dramatizm*. They can also serve, perhaps even more suggestively, to indicate new questions that should be asked about this strange, protracted and most dangerous, international confrontation.

Fred Halliday, London May 1995.

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FRED HALLIDAY in conversation with GEORGE KENNAN

**FH:** More than that of any other person, your name is associated with the origins of American thinking on the Cold War. An American diplomat stationed in Moscow during World War II, you were the man who, in the aftermath of the war, began to formulate the policy that you called 'containment'. In an anonymous article published under the name 'Mr X' in 1947, you warned of the dangers of Soviet aspirations. Yet despite your role in formulating this policy, you yourself became increasingly uneasy with the way US policy developed. From 1950 onwards, you were a trenchant critic of US Cold War policy, of the needless stridency it entailed and of the negative effects of the Cold War on American society. Do you now regret the way in which your original policy for containment was so interpreted?

**GK:** Up till the end of hostilities and of World War II, the military not only in Washington, but in London too, pleaded with the political authorities, for goodness sake don't offend the Russians. Anything that you can give them that's not vitally important, let them have it because we just don't want to risk their making a separate peace with Hitler. We had actually made many concessions to them at the time of the ending of the war and they'd gotten away with a lot. There were a number of places at which they were putting a combination of really political pressure with at least the shadows of military force behind it, and that was why I was talking about resisting; it was my own fault, and I've lived with that error ever since - that in the 'X' article I did not make it plain. What I had in mind was a combination of political resistance but against the background, to be sure, of a strong military force.

**FH:** It's striking that you were seen as the father of containment, yet I think it's true to say there was a clear distinction between your understanding of containment and that which came to predominate in the late forties and early fifties.

**GK:** Yes, because actually the interpretation of it, which did come to predominate, became very rapidly almost totally military. This was the thing I had to try to straighten out about my own thinking ever since.

**FH:** Do you feel that in the early version of the 'Mr X' article, which was the long telegram sent in February 1946, you bent the stick too far?

**GK:** I think I did a bit. But I was so concerned that our people were deceiving themselves about the nature of the Soviet regime. Remember that these were the same people who had concluded the non-aggression pact with Hitler. They were the same ones who had in writing authorised the shooting individually and without any charges being raised against them, of many thousands of Polish officers - far more than we thought at the time. They were to be shot individually and pushed into the trenches that they had dug. Not one tiny fraction of them had ever fired a shot in anger against the Soviet Union. This was genocide of an impardonable sort. I could go on with this, but these were the people that we were buttering up during the war and we were encouraging our people to think that we could have a fine, constructive collaboration with them when the war was over. I felt it necessary to oppose that. I didn't think that you could really have the relationship that we wanted to have with people with so much blood on their hands.

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FH: As you said, 'no intimacy of understanding is possible'.

GK: Well, with the Stalin regime that was true. This later became different and in the Brezhnev period, although Brezhnev himself was not a very imaginative man with whom you would like to talk, there were a great many officials down the line who had a much more enlightened view of the rest of the world, of us, of their own, of our own failings, men like Georgi Arbatov - he did a great deal incidentally. These were phenomena that would not have existed in Stalin's time.

FH: There is one phrase in the 'Mr X' article which refers to 'the application of counter-force'. It's not a term people may fully understand, but one would read that to mean there were places where you thought they should be probed and there was, at that time in the late forties, one area, namely the Ukraine, where the West was probing by supporting opposition groups to the Russians. What was your view of that at the time?

GK: That I had nothing against. But not war with our own forces and that's my mistake. I realise that this is a reflection of the misunderstanding I created with about three sentences.

FH: So you were in favour of probing Soviet power through opposition groups or through underground groups in Eastern Europe, but quite distinct from engaging western forces in such operations.

GK: That's absolutely true. And there wasn't much we could do about that. There were opposition guerrilla forces in southern Poland and in a few districts down there, but we had not created them. They had arisen spontaneously.

FH: How would you contrast your perception at that time with that of the other great, as it were, prophet of the Cold War namely Winston Churchill? The original version of the 'Mr X' article was sent on 22nd February 1946 and a month later Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton. Did you have a similar perception to that of Churchill?

GK: I think we very much did so. Churchill took perhaps an even more military view of this than I did. But he too realised that we couldn't go on fighting, we couldn't complete the war against Germany with a war against Russia. This would have made no sense whatsoever.

FH: In many ways the most important document that George Kennan wrote was not the 'Mr X' article of 1947, nor the Reith lectures of 1957, but the, at that time, unpublished final letter later reprinted in the second volume of your memoirs that you wrote when you were in the Soviet Union as ambassador in 1952. That lays out, most clearly of all, the alternative policies you would have pursued: we will never know whether they would have succeeded or not.

GK: No we don't, but we did misuse our power and our potential policies many times. I remember writing, when I was ambassador there in 1952, a long personal report which nobody in Washington paid the faintest attention to, about NATO. I tried to show that whatever NATO was, what we were saying about it was designed to be taken as threats in Moscow; indeed they were. We now know that, at that very time when I was writing that despatch, Stalin had come to

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the conclusion that we really did propose war, we expected to drive the competition into a
military phase. The Korean War was still on and, I didn't know this, it was highly dangerous
that he should be thinking that. You can imagine how this affected his attitude towards us,
toward me.

**FH:** On the Korean war you were critical of American policy, but presumably you didn't favour the forcible reunification of Korea by Kim Il Sung either. So what would you have done in Korea different from what was actually done?

**GK:** I would have had our forces go back to the line of division and stop there and see what we could do about negotiating an amicable end to this. The Indian government was very much interested in this. They had good relations with both sides, they wanted to mediate. I thought that our great mistake was going beyond the parallel at that time. I thought our action, the involvement of American forces, should be seen only as defensive, an action which was forced upon us in a sense. I think we made great mistakes there.

**FH:** To an outsider it seems a very intriguing set of positions. You were the father of containment, yet you were critical, not just of the early responses to Russia, but through the fifties and most famously, particularly for a British audience, in your Reith lectures of 1957, you made a very astringent criticism of western policy as a whole. You favoured the de-nuclearisation and indeed the neutralisation of Germany; you were sceptical about the nuclear build-up. You were seen as being a very tough and, in the context of the times, almost left-wing critic of Western policy. The average reader of your works and follower of your career might think that you had shifted about. You were, on the one hand, supporting Cold War policies, on the other hand seeming to be a very strong critic of them. How would you explain this perception?

**GK:** I think there is a misunderstanding of my relationship to the Cold War and of my advocacy of Cold War policies. My disagreements revolved around two things: the German question and the future of Europe, less around the question of relations with the Russians. I did, of course, oppose our stand on nuclear weapons and I opposed it from the very beginning.

**FH:** As I understand, you were not in favour of unilateral disarmament. You were in favour of a minimal nuclear deterrent.

**GK:** Yes, and above all of the principle of no first use. I would have to dispute the theory that it was an effective weapon. It was merely a device by which one could indeed, yes, create most fearful indiscriminate damage, not only in another country but very possibly even carrying over into your own.

**FH:** Looking at the 1970s in the light of your earlier writings, you argued in the 'Mr X' article and later on that the Soviet Union and the Soviet leadership would mellow, that more educated people would come to power, people with perhaps some more appreciation of the outside world, and that this would, or might, make it more easy for the West to deal with them. Whereas in the earlier period you basically said there's no point in trying to have serious negotiations with what you called the 'ravens of Red Square' - a very fine phrase - when they mellowed it would be possible to do so. In the 1970s you picked up the theme of mellowing again. However, one

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could argue that far from this mellowing at home leading to them being more cautious abroad, they actually became more active abroad. One could argue that the Soviet leader who most threatened the West, or most gave them, if you like, a run for their money, was not Lenin or Stalin, or even the mercurial Khrushchev, it was the much abused Brezhnev - it was the father of stagnation who armed Vietnam, who armed guerrillas in southern Africa, who went into Afghanistan, who supported the revolution in Nicaragua, who built up the Soviet missile capabilities in the 1970s. One can argue that there was less of a correlation between domestic mellowing and international mellowing than you had anticipated and in that sense you underestimated the potential of the Soviet system.

**GK:** What I had in mind was primarily a mellowing of the regime itself and I do consider that that happened. The things you have mentioned, the actions taken by Brezhnev, were a part and parcel of the whole atmosphere of the Cold War. It was merely a question of what you thought you could get away with on their part. They thought they could at that time succeed with a number of these ventures. It worried me less, I must say, in the Brezhnev period than it had at the high point of Stalin's supremacy because after all this was a corrupt, spiritually corrupt, old, deeply ingrained, bureaucratic establishment. The punishments now lay in the privileges which you got which could be withdrawn from you if you didn't have them...

**FH:** You mean rather than being executed, or sent to Siberia, you lost your car or your flat. In other words, a regime based much less on terror?

**GK:** In Stalin's day the punishments were much worse, much more terrible, much more dangerous. I think this was a system in Brezhnev's time which was rotten through and through, full of corruption, full of spiritual corruption and intellectual corruption. This great bureaucracy was a bureaucracy of people looking after their own comforts.

**FH:** In some ways you sometimes sound like Trotsky, who argued that as the bureaucracy consolidated so they would give up on world revolution. But of course the Trotskyists got it wrong: despite the fact that the bureaucracy consolidated, there was the revolution in China in the 1940s, there was Vietnam, there was Korea and in the 1970s you had these revolutions in the Third World, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the Vietnamese conquered the south. In other words, while this bureaucracy consolidated at home and did become mellower, remaining dictatorial, but less terroristic, they had illusions of grandeur, they had illusions that the world was going their way. They believed in parity of forces with the United States and that in some sense Khrushchev's vision of burying the West would come true. Now you are absolutely right to say the West played its part in this. It is especially paradoxical that the event that led to this more than anything else was the Cuban missile crisis, because after that the Russians said "we're not going to let you do this to us again." But in that sense the relationship between international corruption and external policy was a less reassuring one than you had anticipated.

**GK:** Yes. But I didn't think they were good enough to establish successful colonial relationships with people overseas successfully, and I thought that did not bother me as much as it bothered many other people. What they were doing in large part was only what we ourselves had done in a slightly different way. I was never very worried about that. I didn't think that they were destined to be an overseas power, comparable to the British Empire. I wrote in a number of things, not just the long telegram but even much more succinctly in other things that I

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wrote at that time, that I felt that the Soviet regime was not there for ever, that the signs of its disintegration were already visible. They were visible in the relationship of the generations. The older and the younger generations were different.

**FH:** There is a very striking passage in the 'Mr X' article where you discuss the novel by Thomas Mann, *Buddenbrooks*. You argue that the Soviet system like the Buddenbrooks merchant family will begin to decay, and is decaying, at the moment of its greatest efflorescence, of its greatest prosperity. Is it that Thomas Mann analogy which you feel has now been borne out by events in Russia?

**GK:** Yes I do. None of us are immune to the passage of the generations, to the passage of time and I don't think there are in this modern world any really permanent structures of power. They all are subject to being undermined by forces that they themselves can't even see and this was what was happening with Russia. The Second World War had a great deal to do with this. Had Stalin in the aftermath of the war turned around and given the Russian people a chance to improve their living conditions, to liberalise society a little bit to remove the terror, then I think it might have been an entirely different thing. But he didn't and by not doing it he sowed the seeds himself of the disintegration of this whole regime. After World War Two nobody believed anymore in the rhetoric of the Russian revolution. This was irrelevant to their lives.

**FH:** But in a way we come back to the point that, while they didn't believe in the rhetoric there was a belief in the Soviet Union as a great power and there was an international communist movement beyond the control of Russia, under the influence of Russia but beyond its control, which did carry it forward. And perhaps in retrospect you did underestimate the degree to which communism was not just the Soviet leadership, the 'ravens of Red Square', but was China, it was Vietnam and movements of Third World revolution which lasted well into the seventies and even early eighties, as Ronald Reagan discovered in Nicaragua.

**GK:** If you go out and light a fire in a field, and it begins to spread a little bit, it has died out where you lit it. It burns on the edges - and so it is with Russian communism. It was really dead at home in the ideological sense and very poorly understood even in the places to which it had spread. But it did have more vitality in the places that you mention.

**FH:** One of the striking themes throughout your writings from the 1940s onwards is your view of the Third World. I hope I don't misrepresent it if I say your view was that it really doesn't matter that much. If the Russians want to get involved in subsidising Third World regimes and running around the Third World, "Good Luck to them" was basically your view. You certainly weren't bothered by Vietnam, you seem not to have been too concerned about Cuba. Don't you think that you perhaps underestimated the importance of the Third World in the Cold War given the way in which this became the site of East/West rivalry and a lot of military conflict as well?

**GK:** Well, it was not that the Third World was doing anything itself. Things were being done, efforts were being made, to do things to it. But I didn't really worry about this. I remember being very much impressed with the sentence in Gibbon's *Decline and Fall*, where Gibbon said there is nothing harder in human experience than the effort by a government to establish and to retain ties of authority over distant provinces, which are separated from the mainland.

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**FH:** One particular issue here is, of course, the question of China. Now the instinct of Nixon and Kissinger in the late 1960s and 1970s was to win China, or to establish a dialogue with China, in order to isolate the Soviet Union, and in this they were remarkably successful. My sense is that you had the opposite view, which was that China was more of a threat and a more alien power than Russia, and that if you had to choose between Moscow and Peking, you would have chosen Russia as an ally in the world scene.

**GK:** I would never have said China was a threat to us but it was certainly an alien power. I was very much influenced by my subordinate on the Policy Planning staff and a colleague in the foreign service, John Davies - one of the men who Mr McCarthy got rooted out of the service - because Davies was really a man who knew China in and out. He was born and brought up there to missionary parents. I was prepared to let China entirely alone. I thought the sources of our interest in China in this country were disreputable. The China lobby were a horrible group of people and they had gotten away with all sorts of things that they never should have gotten away with. I regard the Chinese, not knowing them well, as really the French of Asia. They are a people of very high culture, they have a disliking of people who are not Chinese, there is a good deal of xenophobia in the place. I have a great respect for them, as people with enormously quick intelligence certainly, but who are rather ruthless. I would say the best thing we could do with them was simply to leave them alone, have correct, polite, relations with them, but not involve ourselves in Chinese life. We can't get over that, even now. People rush there to see whether there isn't something they can do in China.

**FH:** Would you argue that the West in some ways prolonged the Cold War? Was it that the very policies they pursued increased confrontation and that, had they pursued other policies, for example, some of the ones you advocated from the early 1950s onwards, the Cold War could have ended much sooner than it did?

**GK:** Well, of course, no-one can say what would have happened if certain things had been done or not done. All I can say is that I think that we did not exhaust our possibilities for arriving at solutions that would have been better than the continuation of the Cold War. Even way back in 1948, after the success, that was a real success of the Marshall Plan, Bohlen and I, (my friend Chip Bohlen who was also an Ambassador in Russia and a Russian expert, too, we were like intellectual brothers,) we went to the Secretary of State and, in effect, to the President, and said: "Look we've had this success now. The Russians must realise that they're not going to be able to expand their area of authority in Europe any more. The time has now come when we should discuss the future of Europe with them." I couldn't get them to do it at all. This was, I would say, one of the greatest disappointments of my life because I had never said that containment was enough in itself. It was a means to an end, it wasn't an end. I said: "If you can teach the Russians that now they've gained all that they can gain out of the outcome of World War Two, all they could gain in the sense of influence and power in Europe, now they'd better talk to us. We'll see whether we can find some sensible arrangements which would permit the withdrawal, or the large extensive withdrawal of military forces on both sides from Germany." I could never get anybody to do that.

**FH:** Looking back over the nearly fifty years since the 'Mr X' article, were major opportunities missed to reduce international tensions and bring about a peaceful environment?

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**GK:** I think they were, I think they were. I think we allowed the military considerations to run away with us in this Cold War period. There was no need really for us to do what we did to Khrushchev. It was the flying over Russia, this episode of the U-2, that really broke his back politically and forced him into a much more hard line.

**FH:** Would you say the same of the Cuban missile crisis, where he was humiliated even more? Do you think that was overplayed by the Kennedy administration?

**GK:** I don't think that it could have been handled much better from our side than it was. And I gave Jack Kennedy full marks for this because he deliberately did try to avoid achieving a success by the humiliation of the other party, which very seldom ever produces any good results. I thought that, considering the dangers involved and the test for public opinion in this country, the Cuban missile crisis was quite well handled. I wasn't around, I was at that time Ambassador in Yugoslavia, I didn't know what was going on.

**FH:** Reading through what you wrote about nuclear weapons, the fact that they can't be used and that there is no advantage in accumulating them, one is struck by how this contrasts with what most people in the American foreign policy and strategic establishment wrote, which was that superiority in nuclear weapons, and continued development of nuclear weapons, made political and strategic sense. But looking back on it, the question that strikes one, indeed struck many people at the time - I think both you and I wrote about this is in the 1980s - is "how could they have possibly thought that having all these nuclear weapons made much sense?" What possessed intelligent and, in their own ways, honest people to come up with such a lot of dangerous balderdash?

**GK:** You know, I blame here the military extensively for this misunderstanding. There had crept into the military establishments, I think it was not only our own, of this country, the view that war was a matter of destruction. That the more you could create destruction of the enemy's country, of his power, of his resources, that was the way you won wars. Yet if you fight a war it has to be for something other and better than just inflicting great destruction on another country. The world has not advanced by that and it's got to be accompanied by something more. We could have set far greater and better examples.

**FH:** Is there something about this grotesque phantasm which beyond any calculations of military balance or economics or anything else arises from American political culture? Is there something about a competitive, go-get-them, sporting, macho culture which produced this result?

**GK:** Well there is something there, namely that this country has never really evolved a theory of the relationship of military force to the long-term aims of the country and to the functioning of civilian life. In Europe you did have people who tackled this problem. You had Clausewitz, and Jomini, who tried to evolve a philosophy which would define the place of military force. We had very few models to go on about participation in a great war and our people therefore got carried away by forms of nationalist thinking which I find profoundly unfortunate.

**FH:** This touches on what is a very consistent theme in your writing, which is the role of history, of long term history, and of the culture that is produced by that history in shaping politics at any one time. You are clear about this in regard to Russia, the insecurities of invasion

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from the east and so forth, and also with regard to this country. However, if one looks at the standing of the military in society, over a long period of time, then the United States is probably the most pacific of any developed country in the world - compared to Japan, Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, France or Britain. In comparison with all these countries, if one is looking over the last two hundred years the American military have had less of a standing, and less influence on politics, and a lower social status at the level of "would you like your daughter to marry one?" than that of any other developed country. In a sense it is the lack of that militarism which people forget - they think of America as a gung-ho, John Wayne type society - the lack of that past experience in military matters which then led to this Cold War flip flop. Yet even in the period you have been involved with there have been very striking American soldiers - Eisenhower, General Marshall - who were not militaristic at all and who were the opposite of the sort of John Wayne, General McArthur types, against whom you struggled for so long.

**GK:** Well that's quite true. But precisely because of this lesser experience with military matters in the earlier centuries, except for our own civil war, we had very few models to go on about participation in a great war. Our people therefore got carried away by forms of nationalist thinking which I find profoundly unfortunate, with us and with others. I have no sympathy with nationalist enthusiasms and with people who go down the street waving flags and shouting slogans and that sort of thing.

**FH:** Coming to the end of the Soviet Union and the end of communism, you have argued very strongly that this is not a victory for the United States. We're faced with the paradox that in one sense you can be seen as having foreseen better almost than anyone else, not just the end of communism, but how it would happen. But on the other hand, you've been very insistent in the public debate here that the West, or at least the United States, did not win the Cold War. It strikes me as a very individual argument because visiting, as I have done in recent weeks, both Moscow and Washington, it's the United States' way of life which is prevailing in Russia or which many people there want to, but not the other way round. How can you argue that the West did not win?

**GK:** I would say that they lost it but not that we won it. All we had done was to encourage a lot of largely false concepts of ourselves during those years and to spend a great deal of money quite uselessly and unnecessarily on armaments. It was a wasteful, destructive, misleading situation. I wish we had never got into it.

**FH:** You wrote in the 'Mr X' article that what the West had to do or what America had to do was, I think in your words, 'to live up to its best traditions'.

**GK:** That's right.

**FH:** Now do you think they did live up to their best traditions?

**GK:** No I don't. And I don't think we have ever since. I think there's been a deterioration in our civilisation over here and a very dangerous one. And I see no end, no favourable end to it yet.

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**FH:** Underlying your attitude to the contemporary world, indeed, underlying all of your writings is, I think, a certain pessimism. You describe yourself, thinking of your forbears, as 'a gloomy Scot'.

**GK:** (Laughs)

**FH:** And you've often said that you're a comfortless messenger, you have nothing good to tell people, nothing optimistic or naive to tell people. Do you remain 'a gloomy Scot' or is there something which has brought you to a slightly more optimistic view of this long history that you've observed?

**GK:** Well, you must remember I'm now ninety-one years old and people of my age tend to disapprove of most of what they see before them.

**FH:** You always disapproved of what you saw before you...

**GK:** (laughs) That's very largely... that's quite true. I've tried always, though, to avoid one thing: in talking to younger people or writing for younger people, never to say to them that there is no hope. There maybe is hope where I can't see it, and where they do see it.

**FH:** It has often been said that you are a Jeffersonian, a believer in the benefits of agricultural life, of small town life, of resisting the pressures of modern industrial society. This, in a sense, is part of your critique, both of the policies of Soviet communism with its industrialisation and belief in forced progress, and also of what you see now happening in the United States?

**GK:** Yes I don't think either of us, either in our country or in Russia, have found the answer to the place of agriculture in the modern society. Our family has had a farm for more than half a century out there in southern Pennsylvania. I have seen something of this, and I think we both have to restudy this very greatly because I think that the only happy future would be an attempt really to reconcile agriculture with industrialisation. That is, living in smaller communities which have certain short-hour industrial employment, but putting the rest on a good deal of independent subsistence farming, as an approach both to the problems of feeding the country, but also to social problems.

**FH:** Perhaps the oldest Cold War of all, which has been going on for a mere ten thousand years, is that between town and country, and to which we have not yet found a solution. Turning to the situation after the end of the Cold War, there's been an attempt to write another 'Mr X', in the *Foreign Affairs* article by Samuel Huntington on 'the clash of civilisations'. This lays out what he sees as being the map of the post-Cold War world in which the conflict will not be between communism and the West but between these different major civilisations - Islam, Judaeo-Christian civilisation, a so-called 'Confucian world' and so forth. Do you see much sense in this?

**GK:** No, I'm sceptical about it. I don't think that the great differences that we have even with the Iranian or other extremists, are basically religious. There is something deeper and more dangerous than that in them and that, I think, really is nationalism of a certain sort.

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**FH:** I entirely agree with you. If one looks at the writings and speeches of the Ayatollah Khomeini, eighty or ninety per cent of what he says is standard Third World nationalism and populism with a little bit of Koranic clothing put on top.

**GK:** Exactly.

**FH:** And my view of Iran today is similar to yours of Russia in the 1940s, which is they have a lot of go in them yet, but they are spiralling downwards. But, like you, I also have great faith in the good sense of many people in that country, and an awareness of very rich cultural roots which they can use to get over this present period of self destructive fanaticism.

**GK:** Yes. I don't think we can change them. You can't change a great society other than your own. What I've always opposed here and what I fear in our relations with these people is that we go to them trying to say "well, we'll teach you to be like ourselves". I think that is disastrous.

**FH:** I recently met with some Iranian academics. We were discussing who was the leading Ayatollah in Iran, meaning by this the leading source of spiritual inspiration. The head of the Iranian delegation listened to all our Western orientalist speculations on this matter and then he said, "Let me tell you the name of the leading Ayatollah in Iran today. His name is Ayatollar 'Dollar' - there's no-one else who's got any authority."

**GK:** (laughs) Yes.

**FH:** Summing up, what do you see as your greatest achievement over your long career as a diplomat and as a commentator on international affairs?

**GK:** Well, goodness that is a hard question to throw at anyone. Perhaps my greatest achievement is that I have created among a great many young people the impression that I am an honest person, that I say what I mean to them. This is very important to them because they are cynical. But they are not cynical about myself and that perhaps was the best thing I could do. As for the other things I have been a good critic of American foreign policy and, if I may say so, I have usually criticised it with a decent and correct and forceful use of the English language, which they don't get much of these days.

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FRED HALLIDAY in conversation with ROBERT MCNAMARA

FH: You were the man chosen by President Kennedy in 1961 to run the Pentagon and you found yourself at the centre of two of the most contentious and dangerous episodes of the Cold War - the confrontation over Soviet missiles in Cuba that exploded in October 1962 and the US involvement in Vietnam, which led to the introduction of half a million troops into the country in 1965. I would like to begin by asking you a question about the Cuba crisis, the dangerous days of which I well remember. How close do you think we actually came to nuclear war? Do you believe that any US President would ever actually have pressed the button?

RM: First were we close to a nuclear war? During the Cuban missile crisis we were much closer to a nuclear war than I believe either President Kennedy or I understood, although we believed the danger was greater than our colleagues did. There was a time when the majority of the President's advisers were prepared to recommend that he initiate an invasion against Cuba within seventy two hours, if the Soviets did not agree to withdraw their missiles from Cuba. At that time the CIA estimated there were no nuclear warheads; there were delivery vehicles but no warheads, they said, on the soil of Cuba. The President and I were concerned there might be, and therefore we were reluctant to move with the majority. But what we have learned since is there were a hundred and sixty two nuclear warheads there, including one hundred tactical ones. If we had carried out the invasion, which was prepared to go within seventy two hours, which the majority of his advisers were recommending, there would've been nuclear war.

FH: Can I put to you the paradox that in one sense you faced the Russians down, Khrushchev had to withdraw the missiles, you scored a victory. However, one could say that the biggest defeat of the United States was the Cuban missile crisis, for this reason that the Russians drew the lesson that they had to compete with you. They had to catch up with you. The Soviet delegate at the UN, Kuznetsov, said "we will never allow you to do this to us again". And it was that humiliation which led them to chase after the Americans in the 1960s and the 1970s and the 1980s in the nuclear arms race, and which provoked so much trouble in the future.

RM: I would interpret it differently. I think it is correct to say that their experience led them to expand their nuclear force perhaps more rapidly and even to a greater degree than they otherwise would have. But in one sense, if I may say so, I don't think that was bad. They were so far behind us at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, we had...

FH: Seventeen to one I think.

RM: ...We had a seventeen to one advantage. We thought we had three thousand warheads to their roughly five hundred. Probably they had fewer than that. But we deterred them. The danger with that kind of a situation is that in a conflict they would wish to pre-empt, because they had so few warheads, they'd think "My God, we can't wait and let the US perhaps strike first". So if you are going to have two nuclear equipped opponents my belief is stability in part is a function of each believing they are deterred and this comes as a result of a greater balance than seventeen to one. So I don't think that, if the Soviets were driven to expand their force after the Cuban missile crisis more rapidly than they otherwise would have, that's necessarily bad, if it closed the gap.

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**FH:** Could I just press you on one point? If the Russians had used even a few tactical nuclear missiles in the Cuban missile crisis, would Kennedy have launched ICBMs against Soviet cities?

**RM:** I don't want to say he would have launched ICBMs against Soviet cities. I would say that the short answer is no. But what he would have done, for sure, is since we, he and I, had prohibited our commanders from equipping our potential invasion force with nuclear warheads, they would have gone, with conventional arms confronting nuclear arms. It would have been a slaughter of Americans. We however had nuclear warheads in south eastern US, we could have equipped our fighter bombers with them very quickly. We would have devastated the Soviet forces in Cuba, of which there were forty five thousand at the time - we thought there were only eight thousand, there were forty five thousand - and it would have devastated Cuba. On the question you ask, whether we would have launched against the Soviet cities: not unless the Soviet Union had reacted to the devastation of their forces in Cuba and the loss of Cuba by nuclear weapons in some fashion. Undoubtedly the Soviets would have reacted. How I don't know, perhaps against the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, perhaps some pressure in Berlin. How would it have escalated I don't know. It would have been very very dangerous.

**FH:** Your own views on nuclear weapons have evolved very interestingly. You came into office in 1961 criticising the idea of 'massive retaliation', the idea that you should throw everything you have or threaten to do so. You developed what was known as the doctrine of 'counterforce', the more specific use of weapons, if possible against military targets. But you did say, as Secretary of State for Defense, in a famous speech in 1962, that the United States would be prepared to use nuclear weapons against a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union or even against a conventional attack which could not be resisted in conventional terms. However in the 1980s you emerged, with George Kennan and others, as a very strong critic of the use of nuclear weapons, particularly of the first use of nuclear weapons. Do you see your own views as being in contradiction as between the 1960s and the 1980s?

**RM:** No I don't. But what I do see is, what I have been severely criticised for is, that my views, my public views as stated in the statement you referred to in 1962, were contrary to the advice I was giving to the President at the time. My public views, which you have quoted quite correctly, were a repetition of the then-NATO policy. Then-NATO policy in 1962 was that, in a sense, with the first movement of a Soviet military force, across the NATO border, we - NATO - would respond with nuclear weapons. When I came into the Department in January 1961 I knew nothing about nuclear weapons, but the election of 1960 had been fought in part on the issue of the so-called 'missile gap'. I immediately began to study the degree to which the West, particularly the US, was deficient in nuclear forces and what I found were two things. Number one, we weren't deficient. If there was any gap, it was a gap in which the Soviets were at a disadvantage. But more importantly, if I may say so, there was no logic, no rationale, for the NATO policy and many of your military leaders - Lord Mountbatten, Lord Carver to mention two - following their retirement, said that publicly. I therefore recommended to President Kennedy in 1962, and later to President Johnson when he came in: "Never, never, never follow NATO policy. *Never* initiate the use of nuclear weapons."

**FH:** You've mentioned that in the 1960 election campaign in which Kennedy was elected, there was a lot of talk of a 'missile gap', or a 'bomber gap', of the Soviet Union being ahead.

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This is a theme which crops up throughout the Cold War, of American politicians and strategists arguing that the Russians have nuclear superiority. Now, time and again, it turns out not to be true. It wasn't true in the early 1950s...

RM: It was never true from the mid-1950s, at least up until the 1980s.

FH: In Britain people tended to take US politicians at their word on this, be it British politicians or the press: the claim of Soviet superiority was rarely challenged. I think it was more challenged in the United States. But why was it that American politicians and generals repeatedly exaggerated Soviet strength and got away with it?

RM: Well I wouldn't say "got away with it", implying that they consciously exaggerated. I really don't think it was conscious, but rather we were constantly saying: "Today we have to put on order the nuclear weapons we need to have a deterrent against the Soviet nuclear force seven years from now". We always overestimated the action they would take in the next seven years and, therefore, from roughly 1955 to 1980, the Western nuclear forces far exceeded the levels of the Soviets. I believe that that was one of the forces that pushed them to a greater expansion of their nuclear force than they otherwise would have undertaken.

FH: Can I turn now to the question of Vietnam? It strikes me looking back on American thinking in the Cold War that the United States was haunted by two military defeats, or two humiliations. In the nuclear field they were haunted by Pearl Harbour, so there was always the fear of a sudden attack from the Russians, much more sudden and more destructive than Pearl Harbour had been. But, secondly, there was the memory of Korea, of the Chinese coming into the Korean War when American forces pressed near to the Chinese frontier at the end of 1950. Now this pertains to the question of Vietnam, because the obvious question, in retrospect, is why was the United States not able, to use American terminology, to 'go the source', to invade North Vietnam. Was it a fear of Soviet or Chinese nuclear weapons, was it a fear of the casualties, or was it a fear of a Chinese intervention in the period, say, up to 1966?

RM: It wasn't Pearl Harbour, it wasn't Korea that prevented us from invading North Vietnam. Rather it was a question of what that would lead to. Almost surely it would have led to Chinese intervention and I don't say that because of the analogy with Korea but because of the situation that existed at that time in North Vietnam and the action I think all of us expected from China. Whether I am correct in that or not we will not know until the archives are opened. I believe they will support my point. The second point however is that the chiefs, our military chiefs of staff, at times during the seven years I was in the Pentagon did recommend that we prepare to invade Vietnam. But they said: "Of course if you do that you must recognise the possible intervention of China and in that situation it may be necessary for us to use nuclear weapons". And by this time China was acquiring nuclear weapons. "And, moreover, " they said, "of course that may not only lead to a Chinese response it may lead to the Soviets joining China in responding to your invasion, or our invasion of North Vietnam." And that's what prevented it.

FH: You were held by many people to be one of the leading proponents of the war in Vietnam. It was even said at one or two points by your critics it was 'McNamara's war'. Since the end of the war or since the end of your period as Secretary of State for Defense, you have maintained a silence on the matter, but you are now publishing a book *In Retrospect* in which

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[L.C]

you say what you wish to say about the Vietnam war. Can you summarise for us what you think the lessons and the mistakes of American policy in Vietnam were?

**RM:** I think there were four major errors. There are many lessons, but there were four major errors. The first was we vastly exaggerated the degree to which the action of North Vietnam against South Vietnam was a function of Chinese and Soviet drives for hegemony in Asia. The so-called 'Domino Theory', which had been put forward by President Eisenhower and was supported by President Kennedy and President Johnson, was a reflection of a fear that the Soviets and the Chinese were attempting to extend their hegemony over all of Asia, that in South Vietnam we were confronting that threat to the security of the Western world and that it was absolutely essential therefore that we overcome it. We were wrong. The second point is that we failed to recognise that the North Vietnamese action in South Vietnam was a function of nationalism, a very strong nationalism and that there was no way the US could overcome that. If it could have been overcome at all it could only have been done by the South Vietnamese. The third error is a major lesson I don't think we have yet learned but which I think is applicable to the future of the world. It was believing, in a sense, that we were omniscient. I don't think we thought of it that way but what we did in South Vietnam was to move, by ourselves, and based on our own decision, without requiring others with comparable interests to join us in the decision and in its implementation. I say that particularly because the United Kingdom and France had as much interest in preventing an extension of Soviet and Chinese hegemony in South East Asia as we did. And yet we didn't really seek the opinion of the UK and France and we certainly didn't hesitate to move forward without their support.

**FH:** I think it is true to say that as far as Britain was concerned the left wing were against your involvement in Vietnam. The Conservatives weren't going to help you because, ten years before, the United States had landed Britain in the ditch over Suez - they thought, if you weren't going to support us over Suez, we aren't going to support you over Vietnam.

**RM:** I suspect it's more fundamental than that. You can correct me if I am wrong. I think the Conservatives probably thought, and I think they were right, that the danger of extension of Chinese and Soviet hegemony in South East Asia to the security of the West is not so great as to require UK participation. Moreover, even if it were so great, we the UK, I am putting words in their mouth thirty years later, we the UK don't believe that any action we could take or any action the US can take could prevent it.

**FH:** And I suspect there is one other reason which is that Secretary of State for Defense McNamara had landed them in the soup over the Sky Bolt missile; that was another reason for not helping you.

**RM:** Frankly I doubt it. The Sky bolt was an episode that perhaps both of us should have learned something from but I doubt very much that it affected UK and Vietnam. The fourth lesson is that we didn't organise as a government to deal with Vietnam. A very very complex problem, a geopolitical problem over the period I was in the Department, seven years, and later over the period that Nixon and Kissinger were in office and we did not organise as a government or deal with it effectively. We never concentrated responsibility in the State Department or the Defense Department or even the White House to deal with it. And we were doing fifty other things simultaneously. We were dealing with Cuba, we were dealing with the Middle East crisis,

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we were dealing with the Berlin crisis, we were dealing with domestic insurgency in the sense of civil rights. We didn't concentrate our thinking or thought with respect to it.

**FH:** When did you as Secretary of State for Defense come to the conclusion that the US should pull out of Vietnam?

**RM:** Well, that's a very good question. In the first place I recommended to President Kennedy that we plan to withdraw what were then advisory forces, sixteen thousand military personnel acting as advisers, no combat personnel, by the end of 1965, and that we take the first step by withdrawing a thousand troops before the end of, within ninety days before the end of, December 1963. President Kennedy approved that, it was announced publicly on October 2nd 1963. Secondly in January 1965, when McGeorge Bundy and I said to President Johnson, we thought our then course of action was untenable and we would either have to withdraw or go further in. We believed the issue should be debated, we leaned to going further in but we weren't certain.

**FH:** You leaned, I think, to 'unleashing American military might' and particularly....

**RM:** Not... not really. At that point we didn't think of unleashing military might. We thought of going further in, of small increments, but we later did unleash...I won't say unleash military might because that was one of the charges against us to this day that we could have won if I - or we - had unleashed military might. This is I think totally in error.

**FH:** But it was half a million troops on the ground plus the bombing of, the 'Rolling Thunder' bombing of, North Vietnam.

**RM:** You're absolutely correct, but it was not unleashing military might and as I suggest to this day, the military, I should say, believe we could have won if we had unleashed it. I don't believe there is justification for that. But to go back to your question, by late 1965 or mid 1966, I and some of my key associates, such as John McNaughton for example, believed that we could not win militarily and, ultimately, that became the basis for dividing the President and me.

**FH:** Can I ask you a more subjective question? I was of a generation of people who were opposed to the Vietnam war. But when I visit the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, which is less than a mile from where we are sitting, and I see the names of the people there born the same year as I who were cut down and haven't lived to see what I have seen in life, whether it's being a father or growing into middle age and all the pleasures and ups and downs of life, it is a very moving thing. At the same time I think how deep and how dark the gash in the earth would be, how dark the slab of marble would be, if there was a proportionate memorial to the millions of Vietnamese who were killed in that war. Is this something that has weighed on you since?

**RM:** Well of course it has. I think this is one of the great problems any person associated with military operations must face. But any person who has dealt with the management of military operations must recognise his responsibility for killing other human beings and I say killing other human beings, not only his own forces, but his opponent's forces. And I think as a human being we must all accept responsibility for the killing on both sides of these conflicts.

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**FH:** Picking up on the point you made, that one of the errors in Vietnam was underestimating the strength of nationalism and realising how strong that movement was, since leaving the Department of Defense you were President of the World Bank. You visited a lot of Third World countries, including some Communist ones such as Cuba. In that context, do you have a view as to why Communism collapsed? As you know in the United States there are many people on the left who say, "well the Soviets lost but we lost too, so there are no winners". People on the right say "the Soviet Union collapsed because of the pressure of American military expenditure", or more specifically that the Soviet Union collapsed because of Reagan's SDI programme - the Strategic Defense Initiative - the Star Wars programme, and his speeches about 'the evil empire'. Do you think it was the United States which brought communism to its knees?

**RM:** The short answer is no. And I don't think we lost too. I think the Soviets lost. Well I don't want to argue whether we won or not, but we sure as hell didn't lose. The Soviets lost. I don't think it collapsed because of the SDI or the US military expansion or the, I'll call it the belligerency of the US during the 1980s.

**FH:** You confronted Cuba in 1962, you subsequently visited Cuba as President of the World Bank, what do you think American policy towards Cuba should be now?

**RM:** I just think it's insane now. It's a function, if you will, of the Cuban expatriates in Florida and the domestic political implications of an administration, whether it be US or Republican, acting contrary to that. That's one of the problems. Another problem is that I think our society today still misunderstands what happened in Cuba. Now Castro is an absolute dictator, there's no question of that. He denies human beings civil rights, there's no question of that. But I want to tell you, one of the reasons he's survived as long as he has is, to put it simply, the infant mortality rate in Cuba is half that of the capital of the richest country in the world - this city we're in. He brought things to the Cubans they didn't have before. He brought education, he brought health, he brought nutrition. True it was a dictatorship. True it denied them human liberty.

**FH:** Mr McNamara, looking back on a very varied career as senior executive in the motor industry, seven years as Secretary of State for Defense, then several very distinguished years at the head of the World Bank, summarising your experience and your reflections on it and looking at a very uncertain world after the collapse of communism, albeit one where the nuclear threat is less, what do you think are the lessons of the wars of the twentieth century, two World Wars, the Cold War, Third World wars, for keeping the peace in the next century?

**RM:** Well let me put it, perhaps simplistically. My earliest memory is of a city exploding with joy. The city was San Francisco, the date was November 11, 1918, I was two years old. November 11, 1918, was Armistice day. The city was celebrating not only the end of World War One, which we won, but the belief that President Wilson was right, that that was a war to end all wars. And yet in the twentieth century human beings killed a hundred and sixty million other human beings in conflict. I think that's disgraceful. Should we not, therefore, at the start of the twenty first century say we are not going to permit nations to behave in ways that carry the risk of killing another hundred and sixty million human beings? I think that should be our objective for the twenty first century. We should declare it now and we should find ways to move toward it.

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FRED HALLIDAY in conversation with HENRY KISSINGER

FH: Looking back on the Cold War, when there was much discussion of the Soviet threat, did you ever think the USSR could win?

HK: I never thought the Soviets could win. I thought that under certain circumstances we might lose. I never thought they could win by their own efforts. I thought if we made a lot of mistakes, and if they got a certain momentum going, our situation could get difficult. But basically I agreed with the Kennan theory - I thought time was on our side.

FH: When you talk about periods when you could have let them win by default, are you thinking, for example, of the 1940s or the late 1950s or of the period when you were in office, the 1970s?

HK: I thought there was a period in the 1940s, when I was not really very much involved, when there was a slight chance that Western Europe could go communist, before the Marshall Plan. But I didn't really analyse that very carefully. The difficult period, I thought, was during the Berlin crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I thought there were moments when the West was teetering towards what I considered the *de facto* giving up of Berlin. That I thought would have had an effect of making Germany neutralist and nationalist. It would not have led to a Soviet victory but it would have led to a weakening, maybe even disintegration, of the Western system as it had been built up.

FH: And in the late 1970s?

HK: In the 1970s I had two conflicting views. I believed that the Soviet Union was weaker than we were, despite all the difficulties, and that in any war of movement, any diplomatic war of movement, we would have the stronger position, as we proved in the Middle East. I did think, however, it was possible - this is the conflicting view - that under the impact of the loss of Vietnam, of Watergate, of our domestic division, the Soviet Union might gain so much momentum that, against all analytic probability, they might constitute themselves as a wave of the future that would give them another ten year margin. This is why I thought we should resist in Angola. Now I under-estimated Russian weakness because I think that in that respect one can argue that it was their success in Angola that tempted them into more and more over-expansion, into Ethiopia and Afghanistan, and thereby accelerated their demise. But of course you can't adopt defeat as a principle of policy. I never believed that the communist system as we saw it in Moscow would sweep the world.

FH: On the specific issue, which was central to so much of the Cold War and to your thinking, the issue of nuclear weapons, do you ever think we came close to nuclear war? Do you think any American President, including those you knew, particularly Nixon, would ever have actually pressed the button?

HK: I don't think we came close to nuclear war. Even in the circumstances in which we went on alert, in October 1973, I, as the principal adviser and as the operator, the co-ordinator of the system, did not think so. We went on alert twice. Once was in September 1970, when the

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Syrians invaded Jordan, and the second was in October 1973. You have to understand, though, what is meant by going on alert. We have five stages of readiness. Our forces are generally in, or most frequently in, the stage of readiness four. What we did was to go from four to three, except for nuclear forces when we went to two. We never went to readiness stage one. In neither case did we think we were anywhere close to nuclear war, but we wanted to send a signal to the Soviets that we were prepared to go to war.

**FH:** You worked, however, with a man who I think even the more charitable would say had a certain instability and was among the more difficult US Presidents to work with, namely Nixon. I think you said once that if the President had his way it would have been nuclear war every week. Now obviously that was an over-statement but ...

**HK:** No, no, that is not correct... I certainly did not say that as a considered statement. I might have said that in exasperation to a staff member when some wild instruction arrived. If you worked with Nixon and you had any sense, you didn't carry out all that instruction, nor did he intend you to carry out that sort of instruction. It is wrong to say that he was one of the most unstable Presidents. He was one of the most difficult human beings, that without any question, and he could talk in an unstable way. He was, however, on quick decisions one of the most calculating, the most careful, the most thoughtful, on foreign policy issues, of the Presidents that I have known. He was absolutely the least likely of the ones that I knew to have gone to war by inadvertence. Absolutely the least likely.

**FH:** What of the evolution of your own thinking: You first made your name in 1957 with a book on the possibilities of nuclear war, at least thinking about it, as against Eisenhower and people who said it was totally unthinkable. I think you later said that you had changed your mind because you never actually met a general who agreed with you and you, in a sense, deferred to the generals. At the end of the Reagan period, on the other hand, you appeared to be moving in what most people would regard as a more hawkish direction, supporting SDI, opposing the Intermediate Nuclear Force reduction agreements in Europe. Do you think that your thoughts did change or do you feel there is an underlying consistency?

**HK:** You have to talk about different levels of issues here. I believed from the beginning, and I believe today, that for a President to announce nuclear war as being unthinkable is to invite nuclear threats under the conditions of the Cold War. Therefore, whatever I might have thought privately about my willingness in fact to go to general nuclear war, it was totally wrong to announce the unthinkability of nuclear war in a world in which you had large nuclear arsenals on both sides. That's point one. There was a period in which I thought one could adopt a deliberate strategy of limited nuclear ground war as a way of avoiding general nuclear war. As I began to know the military establishments better, I came to the view that that was probably not feasible.

**FH:** Could you say roughly when that was?

**HK:** Yes - the first conclusion about the possibility of limited nuclear war was around the 1950s, and got published a little later. The unsuitability of limited nuclear ground war I came to around 1962, give or take a year. So then I never went back to the idea of ground war fought with nuclear weapons. Then Secretary McNamara developed the theory that deterrence should be based on assured destruction, which he thought was a less nihilistic way than massive

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retaliation because it calculated only a theoretical level of damage that would be unacceptable. When I got to know the planning I saw no real distinction between that and massive retaliation, and it seemed to me that that was a nihilistic strategy and had all the same consequences, where you couldn't say it was unthinkable but where you couldn't do it either. And as time went on I felt two things: one, if nuclear war - having rejected limited nuclear ground war - if nuclear war ever had to be fought, it should really be fought in a very, though strategic, restrained way as one could imagine. The trouble was you could never get the generals to think of it in any way that seemed restrained to a normal human being. It may have been restrained in relation to the conceivable number of targets. The second issue is this, if you are President of the United States or Prime Minister or, if you are in charge of your country, it is a weird position to say that you are making the future of the world depend on the vulnerability of your populations and that you will keep your populations at risk as an instrument of stability in the world. Because if anything ever went wrong and then ninety million people get killed, what are you going to say, how are you going to explain this? This is what brought me to the SDI. I have never understood why the most humane elements of the population, the scientists, are so determined to keep the populations vulnerable. I think the basic reason is that they don't trust their government.

**FH:** It's summed up in the saying that a shield is an instrument of attack and the fear that this would provoke a Russian attack before an SDI system was in place. I think that was the most rational criticism of SDI.

**HK:** But that doesn't make all that much sense either because, if assured destruction works, then the mere fact that you're building a defence system does not make an attack more profitable.

**FH:** But I think 'working' is a bit like nuclear war, there are different levels of 'working'. Dealing with paranoid people in the Kremlin, you could never be sure.

**HK:** I don't believe the people in the Kremlin were paranoid. I would have gambled on assured destruction working while the SDI was being built rather than for all eternity condemning ourselves to total vulnerability. And my own thinking about this evolved in the following way. A group of concerned scientists came to me in the mid-1980s and asked me to sign a document. Their argument was that it wouldn't work. Of course it's a weird argument. If it doesn't work, why are they so concerned? I said: "Explain to me what 'not working' means. Supposing they shoot a thousand warheads." "Well," they said, "a thousand, it would be very effective against ninety-plus percent." And the drop-off came around five-thousand warheads. And after that it degenerated quickly. Well I said to myself, if the Soviets, in order to attack us at all, have to launch more than five thousand warheads and count on them working simultaneously, and not know which of them will get through, that is raising the threshold in a very useful way. And since then I've been a defender of SDI. Today I cannot accept the proposition that we have to live in a world where you see this chaos, and where nuclear weapons are spreading, and our government is told the American people have to be hostage to every killer that possesses a long-range weapon.

**FH:** Could we move now to the question of Vietnam and to a question which is often asked by the right but could be asked by others - what was the constraint operating on the United States on victory in Vietnam? Leaving aside the domestic constraints, was it the casualties that would have been involved in invading North Vietnam, was it the fear of Chinese intervention, a replay of

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what happened in Korea? Was it a fear of the Soviet Union? What were the international constraints?

**HK:** You have to make a distinction between the Nixon administration and the previous administrations, the distinction being that, by the time the Nixon administration came in, a bombing halt had already been agreed to. Public demonstrations were going on in the streets, the establishment and the media had turned against the war. The options were therefore much more constrained. In the beginning, when we were putting troops in and there was still support in the national consensus, in the Johnson administration, they were obsessed with the experience of Korea. They were afraid to win. They were convinced that China was not prepared to lose. Certainly they were convinced that they could not get anywhere close to the Chinese borders without triggering Chinese intervention. It turned out to be a totally mistaken judgement, totally.

**FH:** So it was the possibility of massive Chinese troops involvement, as in Korea, rather than a possible, let alone Russian, use of nuclear weapons that determined US policy.

**HK:** I didn't serve in that administration, but I do not believe they were worried about the use of Russian, let alone Chinese, nuclear weapons, since the Chinese capability was negligible at that time. There was general concern about European reactions and there was, again totally misconceived, a notion, that they would win the war in the country by a strategy of attrition. A strategy of attrition in a guerrilla war is madness: the guerrilla doesn't have to fight, so you can't wear him down. In the Nixon administration, we had two strategies. I favoured the strategy of trying to bring matters to a head when we came in and trying to do several things simultaneously that we later did over a period of time. And we teetered towards it on a number of occasions. Now when I say I favoured, I have to be fair and say I favoured it in an academic way - that is to say I would send memoranda into the President. But I did not follow these memoranda into the Oval Office, and, since I didn't, I really have no great moral claim to my advocacy because I wasn't really willing to spill the blood that was needed within the government. Nixon felt that he could risk this in the domestic climate -- the biggest constraint on him was American domestic opinion -- and so we followed the strategy of gradual extrication, with occasional lashing out to gain time and to weaken the North Vietnamese while we were doing it. It was painful.

**FH:** Turning to the constraints on the domestic side, you once said that when you came into office at the beginning of 1969 America was 'in a state of near civil war'. Other imperial countries - France over Algeria, or in the nineteenth century Britain over Ireland - had faced similar domestic worries and tensions over a colonial or Third World experience. I wonder whether in this context the fear of domestic unrest was not so much a reflection on the politics of the United States, as of your experience of Germany in the thirties, where you grew up, a sort of powerful, psychological, fear that underlay this sense of a country disintegrating under the pressure of this kind of political conflict?

**HK:** I wasn't afraid of the country disintegrating. I was afraid of our not being able to hold the country together. But, actually, Nixon was more afraid of if than I was and he did not have any German experiences. I don't think the German experience was the dominant one. I know every pop psychologist is saying that, but I don't believe it's true. The problem was that, if anything influenced me in that direction, it was that all the people that I had grown up with

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intellectually were on the other side, that all the people with whom I had spent my formative
years were opposed.

FH: Except for Samuel Huntington I think?

HK: Yes, but Samuel Huntington was not an activist on our side. That's true, Samuel Huntington would be a notable exception.

FH: Did you ever believe that by reaching agreements with the North Vietnamese you could stop them conquering the South? In other words, was the ultimate victory in 1975 a surprise to you, or did you in your heart of hearts know from 1969 that they were going to reunify the country, as they had always said they would?

HK: No, I would have preferred a different strategy but we were always too hesitant in doing the right thing. When we went into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail we should have used American forces, we should not have left that only to the Vietnamese. But President Nixon felt, and he was right, that the domestic uproar would exceed that of Cambodia. We were in the insane position that those people who claimed a monopoly on moral values in this country saw nothing wrong with Vietnamese armies on the soil of Laos and Cambodia, but would demonstrate against the violation of Laotian and Cambodian neutrality when America tried to prevent its soldiers being killed from there. Anyway we didn't do that. Nevertheless, we believed that with the various safeguards built into the agreement, the South Vietnamese would be able to resist the scale of attacks that the North Vietnamese, who were left in South Vietnam, could mount by themselves. If they reinforced beyond the limits of the agreement, which meant on a one-to-one basis through international checkpoints, we would be entitled to use air power to resist them and then, if they launched a massive attack, we would have the capability of resisting. It did not occur to us that the Congress and our critics would take the position that we did not have the right to enforce an agreement for which so many had died. It's a novel theory - if you don't have the right to enforce an agreement, any agreement becomes an act of surrender, because whatever is in the agreement can be violated. What did not occur to me was that our aid to Vietnam would be cut by fifty per cent in each of the years that South Vietnam was independent, that the Congress would take the position that we had no right to enforce the agreement and would, on top of it, pass legislation prohibiting the use of American force in, over or near Vietnam.

FH: On the question of the relationship between diplomacy and force and the whole issue of morality in the conduct of diplomacy, you've often said, in the tradition of those who in international relations terms are called 'realists', that force is necessary, this is part of international relations and only the moralists deny it. Diplomacy is fine but it has to be backed by force. But the criticism has been made of the Nixon administration that it used force in places or in the degree for which there was not an ethical justification - in other words that there should have been limits on the use of force and that these were not observed. The two most obvious cases, which you've often debated, being the case of Cambodia in 1970, both the secret bombing and the subsequent invasion or 'incursion' as it was called, and, secondly, the Christmas bombing of the North in 1972. With hindsight, do you think that the use of force and the degree of force in those two cases was justified? Do you feel easy with it yourself, as distinct from what the critics have said about it?

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**HK:** First of all I do not accept your proposition that moralists are those who don't use force and realists are those who are more prone to use force. I think an examination of history will...

**FH:** I didn't say that. I merely said that realists have always argued that force is a necessary part of international relations.

**HK:** I believe that if you look at the history of warfare probably infinitely more people have been killed by moralists defending absolute principles than by realists trying to achieve equilibrium. I feel at ease about both decisions. Let me take the Christmas bombing first. In the Christmas bombing, I recommended resumption of bombing earlier than President Nixon did but I thought in terms of the type of bombing that had been carried out through the war. President Nixon took the position that he would take the same heat for resuming ordinary bombing as for using B-52s, and he was right. I did not recommend the B-52 bombing but he was right. I do not understand the outrage about the B-52 bombing because even the North Vietnamese claim that there were less than two thousand casualties and, since we were aiming at anti-aircraft batteries and since the city of Hanoi was not struck, most of those must have been military.

**FH:** The outrage is based on the arguments that the bombing was unnecessary - you had declared that peace was 'at hand' - and secondly that the bombing was largely designed to reassure allies in the South rather than achieve military goals.

**HK:** If you read the press conference in which the phrase 'peace is at hand' was used, that was one clause in a long sentence, as part of an hour-and-a-half conference in which I explained the agreement provision by provision so that everybody could have made his own judgement of how much at hand peace was. It is always presented as if I came out from behind a curtain, said "Peace is at hand", stepped behind the curtain, the whole world then was transfixed by this pithy phrase. That isn't what happened at all. What happened was the North Vietnamese published this agreement as it stood. I had the following task: I had to convince the North Vietnamese that we were ready to continue negotiating. I had to convince the South Vietnamese that we would ask for improved conditions but that we would not break off the negotiations. Whether 'peace is as hand' was the ideal phrase to use. What I really said was "We believe that great progress has been made, that peace may be at hand and that...," so there were three 'thats' in that sentence. And incidentally I thought it was a background briefing, I didn't realise I was on live television. So the public knew exactly where we stood and the media could have analysed the terms rather than that one phrase. I believe the bombing was necessary because the Vietnamese had come to the conclusion that the new Congress was going to take us out of the war. They had become nastier and nastier in the negotiations in Paris and it is empirically the case that after the B-52 bombing they settled very rapidly, having hung up the negotiations previously.

On Cambodia, there were four North Vietnamese divisions located in Cambodia. We had made an overture to the North Vietnamese even before President Nixon came into office - in the interregnum between his election and his oath of office - informing them that we were ready to have open negotiations and that we would go very far to try to settle. Within two weeks of his coming into office, they launched the mini-Tet offensive that killed between four and five hundred Americans a week for a period of six weeks. President Nixon did not do anything at first except issue warnings. He did not want to resume the bombing of the North because we had

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just emerged from the trauma of that bombing. So we decided to bomb the bases in Cambodia. This was in an area of about five miles from the frontier into which Sihanouk had practically invited us by stating publicly that there were no Cambodians there.

**FH:** Did the Cambodian leader, Sihanouk, in effect ask you to do it, or did you do it with, in some sense, his agreement?

**HK:** No, what he did was that he told Chester Bowles, an official in the administration preceding us, and when newsmen asked him about North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, he said "These are territories in which there are no Cambodians living and there are only Vietminh there and therefore we don't know what's going on there and so we don't know what actions you, the Americans, are conducting there". That seemed to us a pretty good indication. We bombed in those areas in March 1970. Our plan was, our expectation was, that somebody would protest. Our plan was that, in case of protests, we would ask for a UN investigation, which we thought would discover the weapons. To our amazement nobody protested, neither Sihanouk nor the North Vietnamese. We then continued bombing that limited area. Secret bombing is a sort of misnomer. We handled it internally like a covert operation, at least ten Senators and some twenty five Congressmen were regularly kept informed, not of every attack but of...

**FH:** Not the Secretary of the Air Force and not the...

**HK:** Oh certainly he was informed. The book-keeping, the one wrong thing was that the book-keeping... I don't know whether the Secretary of the Air Force was informed, that's not our problem. The Secretary of Defense was certainly informed. And the Secretary of the Air Force was not... not only was the Secretary of Defense informed, it went through his office. Whether he told the Secretary of the Air Force depends entirely on where the Air Force is in the operational chain of command. Within the Pentagon it was handled perfectly normally, except for the book-keeping. Later an outrageous campaign of pretending that the bombing of a five square mile area led to the bombing of Cambodia and occasioned the murder of two million Cambodians...

**FH:** To be fair, the argument is that it was the bombing plus the subsequent invasion, which contributed to the disruption of that society.

**HK:** I think the bombing drove the Vietnamese out and that led to the disruption, that led to the invasion. Then we come to the invasion of Cambodia. We had withdrawn fifty thousand troops from Vietnam. We announced the withdrawal of another hundred and fifty thousand troops at a time when the North Vietnamese had broken out of the sanctuaries and had attempted to occupy the rest of Cambodia. We did not see how we could maintain the withdrawal from Vietnam and keep all these sanctuaries going, so we entered Cambodia for a two month period with American forces and collected about twenty thousand tons of equipment. There must be something missing in me. I do not feel that we made a mistake.

**FH:** The big question which relates to the end of your period in office is why detente failed? There are basically two answers to this. Putting it in European terms, there is a right-wing answer and a left-wing answer. The right-wing answer is detente failed because the Russians refused to honour their agreements: they didn't honour the arms agreements, they didn't honour

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the agreements on the Third World, they went for violations of detente to which the United States had to respond. The left-wing argument is that in the main the Russians did not violate the agreements - they may have pushed to the letter, but then the Americans did so as well - but detente failed because the United States refused to accept broad parity with the Russians either in strategic nuclear terms or in terms of Third World influence: therefore what I and others have called the Second Cold War was really an American attempt to get superiority again in the Third World and in the nuclear field. What's your own view as to why detente failed?

**HK:** First of all one has to understand what we understood by detente. The idea that President Nixon or I had some sort of sentimental notion that the Russians would sign an agreement, and because they said they would be restrained, we would then be able to wave this agreement while they tried to occupy countries, which the correlation of forces favoured them to take, is childish and naive. We thought that we could use detente in order to establish a pattern of relationships in which, by a combination of threats and incentives, the Soviets would always prefer not to be expansionist until the evolution of their own societies, and of our societies, would create a less directly strategically competitive pattern. That was our expectation. We were deprived of either carrot or stick as a result of our domestic debate, of which the issue of Jewish emigration, which was not a central strategic question, nevertheless was a good example: we had made great progress until this became a public issue of confrontation and detente then stalled on the strategic arms agreements. I think the Soviets were sort of pushing against the limits of it but not much more than one would expect and not much more than one could have policed. In fact the remarkable thing is that for so long detente held together. But then there came a period where the combination of the Jackson/Vanik Amendment, the Stevenson Amendment, deprived us of any carrots and the Congressional cuts of military expenditure limited any stick. So when the Soviets started going over the line in Angola, and we were on the verge of a settlement with them on Angola, the Congressional resolutions preventing us from acting led to a weird collusion between the left and the right. The result was that the thing was gradually driven out of control. Both the left and the right were waving detente and were saying "Why don't you use this great detente to keep the Soviets from acting like a great power?" That was never possible.

**FH:** Why in your view did communism collapse? Was it because of the kind of issues you've studied in your work and written about - the balance of power, predominantly military relations, or was it social and economic changes of a more internal kind? If I could put it bluntly, was it the American nuclear and military pressure on the Soviet Union or was it things like the Marshall Plan, and Basket Three of the Helsinki Agreement, which stressed the issues of human rights? Was it these more long-term social problems which undermined communism?

**HK:** I think it was a combination of both. The proximate cause was that the Reagan decisions put them under some immediate pressure at a point when the Soviet Union had a very rigid and unimaginative leadership. The curious thing about the Reagan administration is that here was a President of very limited conceptual intelligence, who was exactly the right President for that, at least for the first six years of his Presidency. Had it been eight years earlier or four years later he would have been totally irrelevant, or even dangerous, but for that period he was exactly right. He crystallised events which he didn't cause. I believe that the Soviet system created a mandarin class that was bound to lose contact with reality around it, in which the requirements for achieving leadership were so absorbing that they more and more lost touch with an understanding of the international world in which they lived. Also, while the Communist system

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had some utility in producing an industrial society, it was totally incapable of producing a post-industrial society. Those were the fundamental forces that made rejuvenation impossible and created in the Communist Party a class, like the Tibetan monks, that had no real function any more except to preserve themselves in excess. They were not needed to govern, they were not needed for science and so the Communist party became the biggest problem of the Communist state.

**FH:** Where do you see Russia fitting into the post-Cold War world? You've given the sense in the post-Cold War situation that you still see Russia as a potential threat. I hope I'm not misrepresenting you if I say you've even suggested it wouldn't be a bad thing if the Russian Federation itself broke up. What do you think Russia's place in this is?

**HK:** I would like to preserve the Russian Federation. I would also like to prevent the restoration of the Russian empire. The role of Russia depends, in my view, rather simply on one proposition - will Russia be able, for the first time in its history, to stay within its borders? It would still have eleven time zones, it would still have a territory in which St Petersburg is closer to New York than to Vladivostok, which in turn is closer to Seattle than to Moscow. So they shouldn't feel claustrophobic. If they can avoid claustrophobia in their vast territory, if they can avoid the Russian curse of over-extension, then I think we can have very normal relations with them and even co-operative relations with them in relation, for example, to Islamic fundamentalism. The day could even come when in Asia they become a crucial element in the Asian equilibrium. All of this I could foresee and for all of this I would like to preserve them. If, however, their policy leads to the reacquisition of Ukraine and Belarus and to constant pressure on all the neighbouring countries, and if they again appear at the borders of Afghanistan and the Middle East, then the surrounding countries will again begin organising defensively. Then Russia will become a problem, until its over-extension again becomes obvious.

**FH:** Your most recent book, *Diplomacy*, stresses the continued relevance of the concept of balance of power. Last year I set my students the essay "How Can the Concept of Balance of Power Be Relevant to the Post Cold War World?". What would your answer have been if you'd had to answer that question?

**HK:** Very difficult, very complicated. First of all, you have to understand the elements of power. Secondly the balance of power has never been applied on a global scale. I would answer that there are various kinds of balances of power that have to be dealt with simultaneously - economic, political, maybe military. I would really now no longer say balance of power so much as equilibrium. It's more or less the same thing, but not exactly the same thing. I would add to it an equilibrium between ends and means. It's the unanswered question of our period, for which America is very badly prepared.

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[L.C.]

FRED HALLIDAY in conversation with AMBASSADOR NITZE

**FH:** Ambassador Nitze, you were involved in the highest levels of policy-making for a period of nearly fifty years, from 1940 to 1989. You have known every President since Franklin Roosevelt and you served closely with several of them. For much of this period you were centrally involved in stressing the Soviet threat, particularly the Soviet military threat: in 1950, in the document known as NSC68, and again in the late fifties, in the Gaither report. You are perhaps best known of all for the Team B report and the Committee on the Present Danger in the mid-1970s. Do you now, in retrospect, think there was ever a time when the Soviets could have prevailed over the West? Could they ever really have won?

**PN:** There was a time in the first crisis over Berlin, in 1959. At that time I thought the Russians were generally in a superior position to us, both tactically on the ground around Berlin, but also strategically. I thought they were stronger than the United States, and could not only do us great damage but could probably, might even, prevail in a nuclear war. By 1961 I had changed my mind. A number of things happened.

**FH:** So you think that when Kennedy, for example, in the run up to the 1960 election, was talking about a 'bomber gap' or a 'missile gap' in favour of the Russians, that information was in retrospect incorrect?

**PN:** No. I was beginning to think it was incorrect. But, yes, by the time of the Cuban Missile crisis, I was totally persuaded that it was incorrect. That was a period of transition, from 1959 to 1961.

**FH:** Later on in the 1970s you were one of the major negotiators of the SALT-I agreement that was signed in 1972, limiting strategic weapons. But when it came to negotiating a second agreement, SALT-II, you expressed grave concerns. In fact you said, in effect, that the treaty should not be signed. You were one of the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger which argued, I think, that the Soviet Union had superiority over the United States at that time. Do you now think that was an accurate judgement?

**PN:** I do indeed think it was an accurate judgement.

**FH:** Looking at the figures it is hard to see how that was the case. The Committee on the Present Danger said that the Soviets were ahead in everything except the number of warheads, but if one takes, for example, the accuracy of missiles the West was far ahead. If one takes lethality, which is the combination of explosive power and accuracy, the West was over two times ahead of the Soviet Union. If one takes the degree to which missiles were undetected on submarines, the Russians didn't know where the West's submarines were, while we knew where their missile-carrying submarines were. It is very hard, with the evidence we now have, to argue that in the mid-1970s, the Soviets had superiority in any meaningful sense.

**PN:** The thing that worried me at the time was that they had much larger missiles than we did, with much greater throw-weight. They were beginning to develop this technology, which we had already exploited. The reason we were able to get along with much smaller missiles was that our

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accuracy and our technology were much better. But given the pace at which they were catching up in the field of technology, and starting with this much higher throw-weight base, it looked as though, as time went on, they would get better and better. And that point eventually passes into nuclear capability.

**FH:** What you now seem to be saying, or what we now seem to be saying, is that the Russians could have overtaken, at some point in the 1980s. But that would be different from saying that in the 1970s, when an assessment was made, for example in the Team B assessment of 1976, they already had superiority. That was the claim made by many people in the United States, including by the Committee on the Present Danger and subsequently by Reagan in the run-up to his election; the claim was that the Russians were already ahead. The evidence simply doesn't bear that out, now, or at the time.

**PN:** I think that may be correct. But that certainly is what we thought at the time.

**FH:** To what extent did you feel that the evaluation of the nuclear balance wasn't just a question of counting widgets, counting warheads, counting missile capabilities, or reload capabilities. All these things are clearly relevant, and budgets as well, but evaluation was more a matter of the overall political situation. I sometimes get the sense, reading what you wrote in the early 1950s about the Soviet threat and later on, that the real concern you had was not about the Soviet missiles, although that threat was there in a real enough sense, but was something about the weakness of western society: that yours was, in a sense, almost a moral and political judgement about the West and its ability to resist, as much as about the technical military issue itself. Would that be a fair reading of it?

**PN:** I think that's a fair reading, yes. We were troubled by a wave of pacifism in the United States at that time. Certainly there was the American Firsters. In the early fifties, the American Firsters were really the largest group in the United States. I myself was a member of the American First Group for a time. I thought we ought to stay in the United States and keep our powder dry and let the Europeans quarrel amongst themselves. But we shouldn't get ourselves involved. And later of course it was a different situation.

**FH:** So you changed. Immediately after the Second World War you would have a broadly America First position, which was, to some extent, in changed circumstances, a throw-back to the isolationism of the pre-1941 period. But something led you to change your mind, when you became head of the Policy Planning Staff in 1950 and drew up this famous document, NSC68, which was the basis of American strategy in the Cold War. What was it that led you to change your mind in that late 1940s period?

**PN:** The Russian attack against Czechoslovakia changed my mind. I thought that was unnecessary from their standpoint and indicated that the worst theories about Stalin's intentions for expansion were right.

**FH:** So you would disagree with, for example, George Kennan, who although he was a strong supporter, indeed theorist of containment, regarded both the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and the Berlin blockade which followed, as essentially defensive measures by the Soviet Union. You saw them as preludes to an offensive activity?

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[10]

PN: That's correct.

FH: Was the need to inflate the military threat therefore largely dictated by a sense of unease about American domestic politics, that you had in a sense to grab people's attention? I think this is something often ascribed to you, the "billboard effect" You have got to get this issue on the billboard, you have got to register it with the policy makers, the Congress, the press, it was therefore a need to state something in more graphic terms.

PN: That is a wholly incorrect reading of the facts. I think Dean Acheson once said that, it was quite the reverse of what we, who were drafting for NSC68, had in mind. We had no intention that it would ever become public. We had only the intention of making it clear to people within the US government. We were shocked when subsequently it leaked. It never was fully made public.

FH: But in subsequent periods there were two classic cases of threat inflation. The first was the so-called 'missile gap' of the late 1950s, when the Russians allegedly had the capability of hitting the United States in a way that was superior to the United States' ability of hitting Russia. This was what Kennedy ran for election on. But we know, when they came in, they discovered that, in fact, there was an imbalance of seventeen-to-one in America's favour, according to McNamara, of thirteen-to-one, according to others. Then, again, in the middle 1970s, talk of Soviet superiority was exaggerated. Those were public campaigns: politicians and their advisers, of whom you on occasion were one, took the view that Soviet superiority should be stressed. It sometimes struck me that what was really at stake was not Soviet superiority, it was the loss of American superiority. Many people, yourself included, believed that America had to maintain nuclear superiority, in part to compensate for Soviet conventional strengths in Europe. But you can't say publicly "we want superiority", at least you can't usually say it, although Ronald Reagan did say it in 1980. Therefore the playing up of Soviet superiority really reflected the need to defend American superiority, particularly on the part of those like yourself who believed that nuclear weapons had a political function. You believed that if you had superiority you could control international politics, and particularly control crises.

PN: Those are your words, not mine.

FH: You have written extensively on the need for the United States to maintain, not just parity, but a margin over the Soviet Union. This is not for reasons of militarism as such, it's for reasons of managing international politics. The classic case was the Cuban missile crisis when it appeared to pay off. The argument for superiority was that, with superiority, you could control the Russians and you could control international affairs. Is that not a fair rendering of your view?

PN: It is indeed a fair rendering of my view. It seemed to me important (a) not to let the Soviet Union have superiority and (b) if we could attain superiority I thought that was very much to the good. I saw nothing wrong with superiority.

FH: Is that how you would interpret the American resolution of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962? As you know better than I, there are many different interpretations as to what happened.

[L]

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You were brought in by President Kennedy, you were a member of the very important, although ad hoc, Executive Committee, the Ex-Com. You favoured a tough line, sometimes it is said a hawkish line, with regard to the Soviet missiles in Cuba, particularly on the dramatic days when it was unsure what would happen. Is your reflection now that it was nuclear superiority, rather than anything else, that got America that victory in the Cuban missile crisis?

**PN:** We had both: tactical superiority in the conventional sphere and strategic nuclear superiority. We had been able to make all their submarines surface. We knew where their submarines were. Certainly in the area of Cuba itself we had complete superiority where there to be an invasion. And it had become evident by that time that we were also superior in the strategic nuclear field.

**FH:** Is it the case, however, that you were uneasy, initially uneasy, about the middle path that Kennedy took, that you favoured a more forward policy toward Cuba, perhaps even attacking the missiles in Cuba? Or is this incorrect? What would you have done if you had been in Kennedy's shoes? Would you have done what he did?

**PN:** I thought the essential thing was to get the Russians out of Cuba. I thought we should point the finger of scorn at them, not at the Cubans themselves, because the Russians were pretending to be the defenders of a weak nation against a strong nation - the US. I thought we ought to put it right straight to the Russians. I thought that we had not only clear superiority in the conventional field, but also in the strategic nuclear field by that time and that therefore we were entitled to, it was wise for us, to put great pressure on the Russians and to get them to, certainly not to complete their deployment to Cuba, but to withdraw and publicly to withdraw. I thought we should publicly humiliate them. It was my view. I thought we were in a position to do so.

**FH:** Can I press you on this: Do you feel that this is in the end what happened? Did events follow the line you favoured, or did Kennedy draw back from some of the measures that you yourself would have favoured?

**PN:** He drew back from some of them, on McNamara's recommendation, as I remember it. He thought we ought to give them a way out which would reduce the intensity of the crisis.

**FH:** Did you favour bombing Cuba, in other words with conventional forces?

**PN:** No I did not. My view was that we should make up our minds that we must get the Russians out of Cuba, that it was important for us to do that. We had the capability, both tactical and strategic nuclear, to cause that to happen. We should use the minimum amount of force necessary to accomplish our objective. If a threat would get them out, that was good. If we had to actually use force, let's use the minimum amount of force that would accomplish the objective. If we had to invade Cuba, we had to invade. But let's not invade, let's try everything else short of that, if it accomplished the objective.

**FH:** So in the end were you happy with the outcome of the Cuba crisis? Did you feel that further concessions could have been wrung from the Russians, such as the withdrawal of troops from Cuba?

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[L]

PN: I wasn't happy with it. I thought we could have gone further in humiliating the Russians at that time. I thought we should intercept one of the ships, one of those deep hulled ships that we thought had missiles aboard, and make public the fact that they had been lying to the world about those ships, that they really did have missiles aboard those ships. I thought that that would contribute to discouraging the Russians from going down this sort of a line in the future.

FH: During the Korean War, however, you took a different position. As Head of Policy Planning in the State Department you must have realised Soviet pilots were involved in combat.

PN: We knew that they were flying the planes, because then we could intercept their communications. So clearly those planes were being flown by Russians.

FH: Did you feel there was interest in keeping out of the public view the degree to which the Russians were involved?

PN: Indeed we did. Our view was that if it were to be public knowledge that the Russians were flying those planes the questions would be "well, why don't you do something about it?" And we didn't want to do anything about it.

FH: Why was that?

PN: We didn't want to get into a war with the Russians and they didn't want to get into a war with us.

FH: You mentioned in the context of Cuba, and it's a theme that runs through your writings and your policy, that the United States had superiority, particularly in the strategic nuclear field. In your writings on nuclear strategy, you many times underline the point that you have to think about the possibility of nuclear war, undesirable and terrible as it may be. Do you think you could ever, yourself, have pressed the button, or have given a President the advice that he should do so? Or do you think that, at the last moment, you would have drawn back from that decision?

PN: I never had any doubt in my mind about that. I would not give the President the advice to use nuclear weapons. I didn't think anything was to be gained by the use of nuclear weapons, even in retaliation.

FH: But to be fair this is not the impression one would get from reading some of your writings. In public you were saying that one had to think about the possibility of it and one had to calculate now many deaths there would be in the United States, versus how many deaths in the Soviet Union. Nuclear war had to be, in some sense, thinkable, while not obviously minimised in any sense.

PN: I thought it made a difference in the way in which one could act, if one was clear in one's mind that one had superiority over the Russians. One would act differently in those circumstances, and expect the Russians to act differently, if one thought they realised that they were inferior. Under those circumstances one could be much bolder, take much greater political chances. It's a different thing than saying I would want to use the nuclear weapons.

[Lc]

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**FH:** Can we turn now to the question of Vietnam? You were Secretary of the Navy during much of the Vietnam War, 1963-1967, but you were never among those who showed great enthusiasm for that war. My impression is that you were among those in the higher levels of the American government who quite early on, along with McNamara himself perhaps, and Clark Clifford, began to think that the United States should get out. How did your thinking on Vietnam evolve? Did you initially think it was winnable, or did you always feel that this was something that should be avoided?

**PN:** I went out there when I was Secretary of the Navy because the Marines, the US Marines, were the principal US force that were initially involved. They were landed on the beach there in Vietnam, in June 1965, and they fought their way to Route One, which was the principal north-south highway. I went there and joined them ashore and was under attack along with everybody else. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were between us and the ocean there, on a mountain called Monkey Mountain. The whole position of the Marines was a very dangerous one, in my estimation. At night time they controlled the whole area, so I thought we ought to get out. I went to see Mr McNamara and told him that I thought the position was unsound.

**FH:** Do you remember when that was?

**PN:** It was early in the Vietnamese war because the only forces we had in there were the Marines. They were in Chu Lai. We had sent them in in order to protect the radar station to the north of Chu Lai. I went to see McNamara and told him that I thought the position was basically unsound and that we ought to get out. And he said: "Well, Paul, you're the one who has always told me that one of the things that the Communists take much into account is the doctrine that when the correlation of forces is unfavourable you ought to go very slowly and very carefully. But when the correlation of forces is favourable to your side you are duty bound to exploit that favourable correlation while it still exists, not let the opportunity go by. Wouldn't the Soviets consider our evacuating Vietnam at this point a favourable development to them and a sign that we considered ourselves to be weak? And wouldn't they then go on and test us in some place else?" And I said: "I think they would if we were to evacuate, I think they would test us some place else." And McNamara said: "Well do you know where that would be?" And I said: "No, I can think of lots of different places where they might consider it tactically useful to them to test us again, and not all of them would be really safer than where we are right now". And McNamara said: "Well, under those circumstances, you are not really presenting me with a useful alternative". And I said: "Well I am not, but I still think we ought to get out."

**FH:** In retrospect, do you think that the withdrawal from Vietnam did major damage to the United States? Did it contribute to undermining American power or do you think, in fact, that it cut a loss and enabled America to better consolidate?

**PN:** Well, it became politically impossible domestically for us to continue to stay there. We had to get out really. It was a political matter. I thought it would be a disaster if we were to leave Vietnam and leave our allies in Vietnam, just to abandon them, that thereafter it would be hard for us to persuade anybody that we were a reliable ally, if we abandoned allies when the going got tough for them, if we just pulled out without worrying about their future.

LC

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**FH:** Moving on to the 1980s, few would have predicted earlier in your long career the extraordinary and central role that you played during the Reagan administration. You were known as a man who had taken a relatively hard line towards the Soviet Union and was sceptical of arms control agreements. Yet you were involved early on in the 1980s in the discussions on intermediate range missiles and then later on in the 1980s with the whole range of discussions which ran, from the Reykjavik summit on, to the successful, very successful, range of agreements that were signed with Gorbachev, in the late 1980s. It appears as if the hawk had become the dove, or as if the operational pessimist you were once referred to had become quite a cautious optimist. In particular you fought many battles within the administration with those who wanted no agreements at all. They didn't want any controls on missiles and wanted to revive anti-ballistic missile defence and everything else. Do you yourself feel that was an evolution, a change in your attitude, or do you feel that this was consistent with the earlier policies that you'd espoused in the 1950s and again in the 1970s?

**PN:** It's my recollection that I thought that the objective situation had changed. I still didn't think that we wanted to get into a nuclear war. I was sure we didn't want to do that.

**FH:** How did you play it within the Reagan administration in the 1980s, persuading Reagan himself to go along with arms control measures, which I don't think he was very keen on? In particular do you feel that you were the person who reined in the Strategic Defense Initiative, that you reined in the wilder fantasies of being able to develop a strategy that would stop Soviet missiles reaching the United States?

**PN:** On the first question I think that I was important in persuading the Reagan administration to get into the arms control business. It seemed to me that it was not to our interest to get into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, it would be the last thing in the world we wanted to do. We didn't want to get into a major non-nuclear war with the Soviet Union either, because that would probably escalate and get into an uncontrollable situation. But similarly, if you looked at it from the Soviet standpoint, they would not want to get into a nuclear war, or get into a conventional war which might escalate into a nuclear war. There were therefore grounds for believing that we, and the Russians could come to an agreement about reducing the danger of war, both conventional and nuclear, through negotiations, trying to bring us into some mutually beneficial evolution where the risk of war was diminished to them and to us. It turned out that that was in fact correct, that the Russians were interested in reducing the danger of war.

**FH:** Was it difficult persuading Ronald Reagan of this?

**PN:** I believe it was not that difficult to persuade Ronald Reagan of that. He was a much more understanding kind of a person than the public realised. When he was first elected President, he asked Walt Rostow and me to come in and brief him about the arms control business. We did brief him and he brought with him Meese who was one of his principal advisers and who asked us lots of questions which I think we answered in a way which got his attention. I was surprised how carefully he listened to what we had to say, and the degree to which he seemed to really be taking it in.

**FH:** There were those around Reagan who wanted to have no arms control agreements and wanted to pursue this phantasm of a Strategic Defense Initiative - Caspar Weinberger, Richard

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[c]

Perle, Kenneth Adelman and others. You however were, involved in two especially dramatic arms control moments in the 1980s. One was the walk in the woods with the Russian intermediate nuclear force negotiator, Kvitsinsky, in 1982 I think. Then, even more dramatic, was the Reykjavik summit of 1986. You have said that the days of the Reykjavik summit were the three most exciting days of your life, that you had been preparing yourself for forty years for just such a negotiation. You sat up all night with the Soviet delegate, Marshal Akhromeyev. A deal was almost struck then: it wasn't, in part because of Russian insistence on the question of SDI being controlled and being kept within laboratory conditions. But there was also a sense, among many American experts, that Reagan had gone too far, that Reagan had, as it were, sold the family silver on strategic and other nuclear forces with the Russians. Were you alarmed by what the President had agreed to at Reykjavik, or did you feel that this was something that could be built on?

**PN:** It is my recollection that that discussion between the President and Gorbachev involved a misunderstanding. At one point I think Gorbachev said: "Why don't we get rid of all nuclear weapons?" and the President said "Yes, I agree with that". And then he said "No, I mis-spoke, I don't really propose that, what I really propose is that we get rid of all strategic nuclear systems, not all nuclear weapons".

**FH:** That would have left intermediate range missiles, bombers and tactical bombs still there, so in that sense it would have left the West and the Russians with a significant amount of nuclear weaponry.

**PN:** That's correct. I think neither side would have been happy getting rid of all nuclear weapons, because that would have meant that Iran or another country like that could have retained them.

**FH:** The achievement of major arms control agreements in the late 1980s was greatly facilitated by the changes in the Soviet Union, the advent of Gorbachev to power and all that followed. Now you were in close touch with the Russians throughout many of these years, and in particular in the 1980s, you had the confidence of some very senior people in the Soviet administration, who, while they disagreed with you, respected you - they used to refer to you as Starik, the wise old man. Based on your own observation of them over the years, do you have a feeling of why, in the end, they gave up, of why the Soviet Union collapsed, why communism failed?

**PN:** The entire object of our containment policy was to prevent the Soviet Union from profiting from the capture of other countries and not looking at its own internal problems. The moment we did contain them, and they did look inward to see what was necessary to change in their own internal economic approach, from that moment on they became engrossed with their own internal economic and political and social problems. It was that turning inward and dealing with their internal problems which really changed the Soviet Union from being an expansionist country to being one that was troubled by what it had to do internally politically, socially and economically.

**FH:** When did you realise that this was the case? When did you realise that you weren't dealing with, in your view, an expansionist or confident Soviet Union but with one that was turning in on itself and where serious negotiations would become possible?

ic

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**PN:** It was in that period between 1959 and 1961. A number of things happened during that two-year interval: one of them was that Penkovsky, a Soviet agent of the West's, was telling us a lot about the Soviet claims being grossly exaggerated, that the Soviet government was purposely trying to convey the opinion, or convey the aspect, of much greater strength than they really had. It was partly a Potemkin village kind of a concept. We had fallen for that and had taken them seriously, taken their claim seriously. But Penkovsky told us the truth about this and that took our blinders off. When we look carefully at what they really had it turned out that Penkovsky was right. They had been greatly exaggerating and we had been greatly over-estimating what their capabilities were. Our estimate as to both their conventional capabilities and their nuclear capabilities was totally changed between 1959 and 1961.

**FH:** Yet it took another thirty years for the really major agreements to be reached, the agreements that brought the Cold War to an end. Why, in your view, did it take so long?

**PN:** Soviet capabilities had been built up to a very great extent, so they had thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand nuclear weapons. Those don't disappear overnight. It was something which was just going to get stuck. You have trouble: it's harder to get rid of nuclear weapons than it is to build them. So they stayed there and the Soviet military were very careful about taking care of them. They weren't sloppy about that at all. But they certainly didn't want to see anybody else get control of them, they didn't want to loosen their control of them and they considered in a way that those nuclear weapons represented their claim to equality, to being treated with respect.

**FH:** One of the difficulties of negotiation in the Cold War was not just dealing with your enemies, but also dealing with your allies, not least with the British. You had many contacts with the British over the years, not least with Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s, how did you find dealing with Whitehall as a Cold War ally, particularly on sensitive matters to do with the British nuclear deterrent and separate British views about how much should be given away to the Russians in negotiations on security in Europe?

**PN:** Well with respect to Mrs Thatcher, I thought she was a whizz-bang. I never had any disagreement with her at all. I thought she saw the world the way I saw it. We agreed on everything, much to the disappointment of some others in her government who were quite cross with her relations with me.

**FH:** Did you find that it was difficult to deal with the British governments over the years because, in negotiating with the Russians, you were also, to some extent, negotiating about the British nuclear deterrent?

**PN:** I don't remember that we had any problems, or any really serious problems, with the British about the impact of our negotiations upon their deterrent. It worried them somewhat, but it's my recollection that it wasn't a major issue.

**FH:** What's your view of the post-Cold War world, the world since 1989? Are you one of those who are nostalgic for the Cold War and the order and predictability it brought and who believe that we now face a myriad of problems which are much more unmanageable? Or do you

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feel more confident about international relations in the world, including America's place in it, than during the days of the Soviet-American confrontation?

PN: I think the world is much less dangerous now than it was during those days prior to 1961. The danger is less but the problems are much more complex, so that it's harder to synthesise, and in an easy way, the nature of these problems that are facing us all round the world. It's a more complex world: but a less dangerous world, I think that summarises my position on it.

FH: What would you say to the next American President, or the President elected in 1996, about how America should conduct itself in the world?

PN: My recommendation to the President would be to suggest that today the United States really is in a unique position. It is today the superpower, I believe, and ineluctably so. We can't get out of that position. Many in the United States would like to get out of that position and not be so concerned by the rest of the world. But the problem arises that the moment we don't give any foresight to what should be done in this situation, something goes wrong and then we have to. Then we kick ourselves for not having been more forehanded in staving off the danger.

FH: Ambassador Nitze, looking back over fifty years, in and out of government, what do you consider to be your greatest achievements? What would you like to be remembered for most?

PN: I believe I did have something to do in perceiving that the Russians did not really want to get into a war and that it was certainly not in our interest to get into a war of any kind with the Russians, and that therefore there was an area of potential agreement between us in the realm of reducing the risks of war. The Russians could agree to that, we could agree to that, and, therefore, the framework existed in which we could move forward in a common direction. We did reduce the risks of war and did negotiate all kinds of things which contributed thereto, made it more solid. That was a worthwhile enterprise.

FH: Many Russians would agree with that estimation of your role and would be grateful to you for it. On the other side do you have great regrets for the things you got wrong?

PN: I know we got things wrong, but I am not quite sure what they were. From time to time I have tried to reconstruct history, imagining that we hadn't done this or we hadn't done that, or we had done something different. By and large I come out feeling we didn't really do such a bad job after all.

FH: In conclusion could I ask you more generally about your view of politics, a subject on which you have written recently. You have published essays on how, in your view of the world, politics should be conducted. Reading your work over the years one could say that you had a strong pessimistic streak. You were strongly influenced, in your youth, by Spengler's work, *The Decline of The West*, and there's a constant theme running through your writings of the weakness of democratic society. I think as a young man you saw some strength in Nazi Germany, you felt that they at least got some things right, while at an unacceptable cost. Have you maintained that pessimistic view throughout your life, or have the successes, particularly over the last few years, to which you have contributed, made you somewhat more optimistic about international politics?

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PN: I have an entirely different view of myself. I have been a consistent optimist. I really believe that. You can't get anything done in the world unless you are basically an optimist. There isn't any future in being a pessimist, you just sit down and the world goes by you. You have got to be an optimist if you really want to get anything done. Therefore that part of your characterisation I take strong exception to. However being an optimist you still have got to look at the pitfalls that lie in the way and take a very careful view as to how you can minimise the dangers involved. There is no point in just riding on a white horse and falling into pitfalls all the time. If you want to conduct a bold policy, you have got to be very careful in paying attention to all the details that might, if not handled correctly, get you into trouble.

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FRED HALLIDAY in conversation with ROBERT GATES

**FH:** Mr Gates, you became the fifteenth director of the CIA yet in many ways your background was different from several of those who had preceded you. One thinks of Allen Dulles, of George Bush, of James Schlesinger, of people who came from, broadly speaking, the East Coast elite. You came from the mid-West. Before becoming director, you had a very different career background within the Agency. To what extent do you think your own background and your own beliefs shaped your career as an intelligence officer, and indeed shaped your view of the Cold War?

**RG:** I was part of a different generation, one that began to join CIA in the middle 1960s as the Agency began to move away from the Ivy League Schools and recruit more broadly from around the country. I came from Kansas; one of my best friends in the Agency was from Cut and Shoot, Texas. So you had a large number of people moving into the Agency who did not come from the kind of background whence the founders of the Agency found their origins. Yet I don't think that where I came from had as much to do with shaping my views of the Soviet Union as the graduate study that I did. I began with European and American history at William and Mary College, did most of my masters work at Indiana University on Eastern Europe, and all of my doctoral work on Russia and the Soviet Union. My dissertation was on Sino-Soviet relations and specifically on how a reading of Soviet Sinologists could offer us some insights into the nature of the problems, the nature of the Soviet view of China, and also some insights into their policies. I studied particularly the relatively wide-ranging expressions of views that seemed to correlate with times when they were searching for a policy. At such moments, there was more freedom to write more boldly, if you will, and then, once policies were set, a much more uniform kind of approach to China. But I think what really had the impact on me more was the study of Russian history and the influence of the differences between Russia and Western Europe, deeply rooted in history, and the legacy of that in terms of contemporary, even Soviet, politics.

**FH:** So you saw the kind of threat that the Soviet Union presented to the West and Europe in particular as being perhaps as much to do with elements in Russian history as to do with something coming particularly from Communist ideology.

**RG:** I saw it as both. I saw that Russia had not gone through the same developmental process that the rest of Western Europe had, that in effect here was a society that had missed both the Renaissance and the Reformation, a society where economic activity from the very beginning had been initiated by the state. This was a society where the kind of diversity and growth of interest groups and factions that one saw in Western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries just didn't happen. So there was a very deep cultural gap between East and West. But I also found in my study of the Soviet Union, and I believed this very much, that ideology continued to play a part not in the sense of a lot of people who had a more extreme view where it guided their day to day decisions, but where it created the political environment in which they made decisions. Most of the Soviet leaders at least, were real believers. That helped the way they saw problems, as well as opportunities.

**FH:** In regard to the 1980s, to the Gorbachev period, the collapse of communism, and indeed of the Soviet Union, to what extent do you now feel that the Agency in which even before you

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were Director, you were playing a very central role, underestimated the degree of change in the
Soviet Union? You were on record in 1987 and again in 1988 in implying that Gorbachev was a
Soviet leader of the previous kind, in thinking that there would be a long-term conflict with the
Soviet Union, and in being sceptical (indeed I think you said so in 1988) about whether the
Russians would not again intervene to support communist parties if their regimes were
threatened. Now, it was a difficult time but do you accept that to some extent you were too
pessimistic in that period, that you didn't grasp the speed with which things were moving?

RG: First I think it's important to bear in mind what was actually happening and without the benefit of hindsight. We knew even at the time Andropov took power in late 1982 that, because of the economic crisis and the military build up in the West, there was an understanding in the Soviet leadership that they had to change things, that they couldn't compete long-term without some alteration of policies, without abandoning the stagnation of the Brezhnev years. They had to get the country moving again, if you will. The problem is, in looking back at it, that too many people forget that in important areas there was very little change in Soviet policy and Soviet behaviour until the very end of 1987 and into 1988. It was the middle of 1988 before the military budget in the Soviet Union began to decline. In other words, even through the first three years of perestroika, of Gorbachev's tenure, military spending continued at the same level that it had been before he came into power. During that period, we saw renewed aggressiveness on the part of the Soviets in Afghanistan, a whole new set of initiatives in Afghanistan to try and win the war in 1986 and 1987. Only when those failed did it become apparent to the Soviet leaders that they might as well get out, because it was a blind alley. They were sending equipment to Angola at the same level in 1986 and 1987 that they had been earlier in the 1980s, even greater support. They were providing upwards of $7bn a year in military and economic assistance and subsidies to the Cubans. They were providing $1.5 bn to the North Vietnamese. They were expanding the facilities at Camranh Bay. These things were all going on while Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union and that's what I was trying to point out to people.

Now it was clear he was trying to change things inside the country as well. Everybody understood that, but it was also equally clear, as would remain the case until 1991, that Gorbachev remained a communist. He really thought the system could be fixed. Yeltsin came to understand it had to be replaced, but Gorbachev thought it could be fixed and so his economic policies were very contradictory and usually didn't go far enough. They were implemented haphazardly, partly because he could not bring himself to abandon things like collectivised agriculture and state ownership of the big factories. He was willing to let these little co-ops go on with perhaps somewhat larger private plots for the peasants. We were right on the mark, and I think I was right on the mark, in terms of the limitations on change particularly in the economic arena inside the Soviet Union throughout. He went further than I would have expected on political reform but always retained the levers of power for himself. The KGB remained an important fact for him even in 1988, in late 1987 and into 1988. When he did his radical political change, and really in the spring of 1988 the system really changed dramatically, he did it through old-fashioned kinds of ways. One of the meetings that performed some of the most radical surgery on the Soviet system in probably two generations took forty five minutes and there was no objection. Where I underestimated Gorbachev, where I did not grasp how far he would go was during the radical shift that he made in 1988.

FH: Domestically or internationally?

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RG: Both, but primarily internationally, because in his economic plans in 1988 he still wouldn't go as far as he needed to go or even as far as many of his advisers were recommending.

I thought that, in 1988, particularly after his speech at the UN at the end of 1988 where he announced that he would withdraw, or that they were going to reduce their military by five hundred thousand; then they identified tanks and bridging equipment and the things that really mattered. That's when it became clear to people that this really represented a sharp shift in Soviet foreign policy. The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was simply viewed as a decision to end what was a running sore and a continuing problem for the Soviets. But even as they were withdrawing from Afghanistan, they were still active in some of these other places, even as they began to co-operate in the negotiations on Angola and as they began to influence the Sandinistas to try and hold an election.

FH: You had these 'regional conflicts' negotiations parallel to the negotiations on strategic weapons and intermediate range weapons. I remember in 1987 talking to James Matlock, who subsequently became ambassador in the Soviet Union, and who was one of the main people involved in these discussions in 1987-1988, and I asked him "Are you discussing anything of substance or is it just sort of diplomatic flummery? Are you really talking about these regional problems?" He laughed and had difficulty answering the question but he said "We are beginning to discuss these things and were they to continue in the way they are now going, we are really going to get results." But he said "I have to say as a career diplomat that it's a big surprise to me to be able to have really serious discussions with the Russians about Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan and of course Cambodia which was also very important."

RG: The important thing to remember is that those discussions and real movement did not begin until the end of 1987 and more particularly into 1988.

FH: Could we talk about two of the particular questions you have mentioned there, one is the Eastern European policy, the other is Afghanistan. Because Eastern Europe in a way is a good example of something where there was no identifiable Soviet decision, there was no public proclamation. Indeed the Russians, or rather Gorbachev's spokesman, Gerasimov, gave it this joke name, the 'Sinatra Doctrine': he actually got Sinatra wrong but he quoted Sinatra saying "you do it your way". Yet this was not a decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was not one of these unanimous meetings where people raise their hands. Yet in retrospect the emergence, the almost casual emergence, of this Sinatra Doctrine, was what turned the tide although people in Eastern Europe didn't really believe it until 1989. It meant that if a Communist Party was seriously threatened even in its core powers, interior, security issues, military affairs, foreign affairs, it would actually yield. Now we saw the truth of this in the semi-free, but significantly semi-free, elections in Poland in the middle of 1989 when there were at least partially free elections and a Communist Party left office. Once that had happened the rest followed in Eastern Europe. Looking back it's still very difficult, even for a historian, to say when the Sinatra doctrine became reality, when the Russians made up their minds. I was wondering, when did you realise? Did you, like the rest of us, have to wait for the Polish elections of June 1989 and then events in Hungary of that summer to realise that the Russians would not do what they had before in Czechoslovakia - they would not intervene to prop up a Communist regime - or had you come to that conclusion somewhat earlier?

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**RG:** In fact, beginning in the spring of 1985 or 1986, Gorbachev said some things in a speech to a CPSU congress that suggested that he would not intervene in Eastern Europe. There were perhaps four or five other occasions, some of which we only found out about after the fact, much later, where he told the leaders of the Warsaw Pact that they were on their own, that the Soviet Union would not send in troops. Then he was extremely explicit in this in his UN speech in 1988, saying that the Soviet Union would not intervene. He kept giving the signal: but I think you put it fairly accurately when you say that it really was only in the spring of 1989 and as the year progressed that the East Europeans themselves began to grasp that it was true.

**FH:** That they were pushing at an open door.

**RG:** That the Soviets - that Gorbachev - would not use military force to keep them in the Warsaw Pact. There were a lot of reasons for this and not all of them altruistic on Gorbachev's part. The fact is that by late 1988, 1988-1989, early 1989, the reality is that Gorbachev's entire Western policy would have been destroyed by an intervention in Eastern Europe. Perestroika would have been destroyed. Everything that he had been talking about, everything he had been doing since 1985 would have been made a lie by military intervention in Eastern Europe.

We saw a lot of important deterrents to Gorbachev intervening - the fact that he was facing problems in all of the East European countries so that, unlike in the past, they weren't faced with a situation where they could with confidence know that they could act in one and have the help of the others, or at least no further trouble in the others. It would have destroyed perestroika, it would have destroyed the relationship with the West which was so very important to him at the time: so there were a lot of very important deterrents to Gorbachev taking this action. There were obvious uncertainties. One was what kinds of pressures were at work on him inside the Soviet Union and whether, if this problem became severe enough, he might not just be thrown out. But his political position inside the Party was always very strong. Gorbachev made a lot of mistakes, but he was a master politician inside the Party and until the very end was really able to get the Party to do pretty much everything which he wanted it to do. Even when he was drastically changing the role of the Party and weakening it, he would get the votes that he needed, usually by very one-sided margins in the Party, in the Central Committee and in the Party Conference and Party Congresses. So there were a lot of considerations we thought holding Gorbachev back. But I would have to say that I don't think anybody foresaw in early 1989 that by the end of the year all of the East European countries would be out of the Soviet orbit for all practical purposes.

**FH:** I think one other very important factor is Gorbachev's own illusion about what would happen if the threat of intervention was removed. One of his advisers, Georgi Shakhnazarov, said to me "We expected that if we removed the threat of intervention the communist parties would remain in power more or less in the Hungarian way", in other words a liberal Kadar or post-Kadar like regime. There wouldn't be camps. People could travel to the West, there would be a relatively free press, the economy would be liberalised, but the core, the reserve areas of power, would remain in the hands of the communist parties and people throughout Eastern Europe would accept it. So what he was saying was that Gorbachev allowed this to happen on the basis of an illusion about the durability of liberal communist regimes and that in the end that illusion proved wrong. So what one is saying is that had Gorbachev realised what would happen, he might not have done it.

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**RG:** But you see Gorbachev was full of illusions. He thought that he could reform communism in Russia and that it would earn the public's support by being a reform, a more democratic and humane, communism and more efficient. He believed, as you suggest, that you could reform communism in Eastern Europe, that if the leaders loosened up, if they applied perestroika in Eastern Europe, that the parties would earn popular support or would have enough popular support to remain in power. I believe that Gorbachev should be considered the author of the law of unintended consequences because in these situations, his naiveté about the bases of communist power and about how unpopular it was in Eastern Europe, and how unpopular it had become in the Soviet Union, was totally at odds with reality. He proceeded both at home and in Eastern Europe on the basis of an illusion about communism that showed how dedicated a communist he was and in many important respects how naive or ignorant a communist he was.

**FH:** Could you say something more about how you viewed the Soviet leadership in general? With the kind of technical means and the information you had at your disposal in the CIA you would know a lot about certain facts about Soviet weapons, about Soviet troop deployments and, within the limits of all the variations we know, quite a lot about the Soviet economy. But as to how the Soviet leadership were actually thinking and how they would react in a crisis, presumably you were as much in the dark as anybody else - you were guessing about how a group of people would act. You weren't able to go to the Soviet Union, no-one in your situation - in fact no-one in the West - was able to talk to these people frankly. Did you feel that you had a take on what they were really thinking or do you feel in retrospect that you got it wrong - in some ways that you misinterpreted these people?

**RG:** Funnily enough I think that to a considerable degree what we have learned since the end of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives is that for even those of us who had a fairly sceptical view of these people and who saw them as antagonists...

**FH:** Sceptical you mean about their 'peace-oriented' policy?

**RG:** ... about their peace programme and about their interest in abating the competition between the two superpowers and so on. What we have learned is that the Soviets were worse in many respects than many of us thought at the time. For example, in CIA at the beginning of the 1980s, we had a huge dispute about the Soviet involvement in terrorism and the general view was that, while the Soviets supported national liberation movements that occasionally practised terrorism, they really did not have anything to do with West European terrorists - the sort of nihilistic Baader-Meinhof, Red Army Faction, kind of groups. We have found out from the Stasi files and from the Soviet Union that they not only had dealings with them, but they provided them with sanctuary, money, training, weapons, safe passage. They were far more involved with them than any of us suspected at the time. Similarly, with every suspicious thing and every issue that clouded people's view of the Soviet Union, it turned out that those who were the most suspicious of them, time and time again, were correct - from the Katyn forest massacre to the anthrax outbreak at Sverdlovsk. On every one of these occasions where we have now gotten documentation, it seems the Soviets performed in a way, or acted in a way, that was speculated about by some of the most hardline people in the West.

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FH: On this, where do you think we're now at with the story of the KGB trying to kill the Pope?

RG: I think it's one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Cold War. I have no idea.

FH: Presumably you tried to get agents in the Kremlin.

RG: Yes, we tried, but the reality is that you very, very, rarely can ever penetrate a government at the most senior levels. We have no evidence that anybody close to the White House was ever recruited by the Soviets. Maybe they did but there is no evidence of it at this point. I think we had a pretty good picture of the way they looked at the world but we were fairly ignorant of the kinds of decision processes they would go through in specific cases. For example, we really had no insight into the decision process when they went into Afghanistan.

FH: Did you foresee that they would go into Afghanistan in large numbers at the end of 1979, or were you caught on the hop by that?

RG: The Agency was surprised by it. The Agency had documented the Soviet military preparations but most of the political analysts didn't think the Soviets would do it.

FH: In November 1979, I wrote that in effect they were already participating in large scale combat, so I am interested to see that others were not so sure about that.

RG: We watched their involvement from early in 1979 as they became more and more intrusive in Afghanistan. But most of the political analysts - I was at the NSC, the National Security Council, attached to the President at the time, I was working for National Security Adviser, Brzezinski, so I wasn't involved in the analytical process - at the Agency didn't think they would go in and they gave all these rational reasons why it was a mistake for the Soviets to go in and, as it turns out, many of those arguments were made in the leadership discussions. But the one thing a lot of Western analysts failed to understand is that leaders sometimes make decisions that are not in their own interests. The rational actor model often does not prevail. People do things that in retrospect appear to have been really dumb.

FH: One of the striking mistakes that intelligence agencies seem to make and that academics in my field, international relations, also make is they look for the particular decision. But many of the most important policies are not the result of a particular decision. They're a result of long term incremental processes whereby a decision is not challenged - a very obvious example would be the American involvement in Vietnam. In a way with the Soviets as well, many of their biggest mistakes were because they didn't sit down and say "Let's brainstorm on this one, let's see whether we want to make a decision or not". Now, could I press you on one other case which in many ways was as important as Afghanistan where they didn't act but where you must have been very concerned that they would act, which is Poland. Basically with the rise of Solidarity in 1979-80 people thought there was a real possibility of another Czechoslovakia, another Hungary and it was certainly debated within the Soviet leadership: did you have a sense of decision-making on that and at what point did you realise that they would not intervene?

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**RG:** We did not have a good sense of their actual discussions and their debates. We inferred from things that were said publicly. We extrapolated from clandestine reporting that we did receive and we pieced together a mosaic that actually turns out to have been reasonably accurate: but it was based on inference and analysis of fragments of information. We believed in December of 1980, in early December, that the Soviets were in fact preparing to invade Poland.

**FH:** This was based on troop deployments.

**RG:** We saw troop deployments. Soviet teams, KGB teams had fanned across Poland and were identifying important communications nodes, and the location of Polish forces, and taking pictures of bridges and various things like that. They had a very intrusive presence in the country as they fanned out across the entirety of it. We saw the Soviets preparing their divisions to take this action. We saw this going on and it turned out that, apparently, they came very close. One of the Soviet generals has written that, in fact, they had a time and a date for actually launching the invasion and it was called off only hours before it was to have started. This would have been around December 6th or 7th, 1980.

I believe one of the things that an analyst has trouble with is that, while you're looking at the other side and what they may do, you sometimes lose track of the fact that actions by your side may shape what the other side does, affect it almost on a real time basis. Because we had good intelligence, about the troop movements and so on, we issued, that is the Carter administration issued, an extremely tough warning that was backed up by the French and the British and the Germans about what would happen if the Soviets went into Poland. How much impact that had we can't say. But it made clear that not only would the Soviets encounter tremendous economic and military costs in Poland, which we knew they were having to take into account but it would also pay a terrible political and economic price in the West. So as you may remember, the crisis just bounced back and forth. They didn't go in in December 1980. We had another scare in April 1981. The crisis continued - we began getting information thanks to Colonel Kuklinski who was reporting to us from the Polish general staff about the plans for martial law.

**FH:** He was an agent of the CIA within the Polish general staff?

**RG:** Yes, he had been working for us for about 10 years passing information about virtually all the Warsaw Pact operational plans. He was keeping us informed of a good deal of the Soviet preparations and of the dialogue between the Soviets and the Poles which was increasingly harsh; he passed us all the information on the preparation for martial law - all the documents for which were printed in the Soviet Union.

We believed again, that fall, that there was a risk of invasion but clearly what was staying the Soviet hand was that Poland was a very different problem than Czechoslovakia or Hungary. They had to take into account the very real risk that the Poles would fight, that the Poles would flood the coal mines, that there would be real resistance. Poland was also the heart of the Northern group of forces in terms of Soviet strategy with respect to NATO so this was a big problem for them. Just as they did not want to go in even in 1956 and had not wanted to go in 1970 to Poland, the Soviets clearly saw Poland as a much more difficult problem than Czechoslovakia or Hungary. In each case they looked for a way to find Poles to do the job for them, to re-establish control. And that's what happened again with Jaruzelski and the imposition

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of martial law. Throughout that whole period we had a pretty good idea of the choices, the costs and benefits, that the Soviets were examining with respect to intervention. While those costs were high, we were, at the same time, very much influenced by what we were seeing on the ground in terms of troop preparation. We did not have a good picture of their actual day-to-day deliberations but I think we had a pretty good measure of their thinking and how worried they were about the situation. In fact I wrote Bill Casey, the Director of the CIA, a memo in 1981, before the imposition of martial law, in which I said that we were failing to take into account the implications of the Soviets not acting in Poland and what that meant for the rest of Eastern Europe, that what we might begin seeing at that point was the unravelling of the whole Soviet position in Eastern Europe because of their evident unwillingness to use force in Poland. I think we had a pretty good picture of that situation and we gave pretty good warning to US policy makers that they were then able to use.

**FH:** Could we turn to the other big issue we mentioned at this time, not Eastern Europe, but Afghanistan? Now you were closely involved in support for the opposition in Afghanistan which was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA, we are talking about $2-3bn. Not only were you involved in support for the mujahideen up to the period 1988-1989 when the Russians, through an agreement with the UN pulled out, but in early February 1989 you were also involved in the very important decision to continue arming the Afghan guerillas after the Soviet forces had left: you were important in getting the President behind that in February 1989. In retrospect, do you think this was a wise policy? While the Soviet Union was weakened in Afghanistan, the West and, within the West, the CIA in particular, played a very important part in stimulating the growth of fundamentalist Islamic groups in Afghanistan who subsequently fell to fighting each other, became heavily involved in the narcotics trade and have destabilised much of the region. Did you not in a sense create a demon there which has got out of control? Might it not have been better to have pursued a more moderate policy in Afghanistan with regard to the fundamentalist forces?

**RG:** First of all our support, the role which we played, has been exaggerated in this respect. Our role in Afghanistan has been misunderstood to a considerable degree. There is no question that the United States, and CIA as its instrument, was the quartermaster corps for the mujahideen. We funnelled a tremendous amount of assistance to them and a lot of information, targeting information, and so on; but the reality is that the management of the war fell primarily to the mujahideen commanders and between us and them to the Pakistanis, to Pakistani intelligence and the Pakistani army as well. So we had very little tactical control or role in terms of the actions of the mujahideen. The Pakistanis' fundamental rule was that the most successful fighters got the most assistance and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was one of the most aggressive fighters. We knew that independently. We weren't relying on the Pakistanis to tell us that. We thought that the Pakistanis needed to give more assistance, or funnel more assistance, to Massoud and the Tajiks. There was an ethnic problem there and I think we did get the Pakistanis to give them some more.

People lose sight of the fact that our objective was to throw the Russians out of Afghanistan, or at least cause them to pay a terrible price there. Frankly, we weren't particularly concerned about what post-Soviet Afghanistan was going to look like. The truth of the matter is that we expected it to look a lot like pre-Soviet Afghanistan, a country with a weak central government and conflicting tribal leaders, the way Afghanistan has been for about as long as anyone can

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remember. The reason we continued to provide support to the mujahideen after the agreement was because the Soviets were continuing to fly in huge quantities of supplies to the Najibullah government.

**FH:** Surely your policy was in violation of the UN agreement. The agreement stipulated that you and Pakistan should stop supporting the mujahideen. It didn't say the Russians should stop supporting the Kabul government.

**RG:** We made very clear to the Soviets from the very beginning of the negotiations that as long as they refused to stop their supply of Najibullah, we were not going to stop supplying the Pakistanis or stop supplying the mujahideen. Fundamentally the Soviets, together with the other parties, tacitly agreed to go along with that.

**FH:** So the Soviets went along with what became known as 'positive symmetry', that you, in violation of the agreement, would continue to arm the guerrillas because in your view the Russians shouldn't have been supporting Najibullah.

**RG:** That's exactly right.

**FH:** And there's nothing much the Russians could have done about it, of course. But, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is a man who made his name throwing acid in the face of women students who wouldn't wear veils at Kabul University. He is a man with an extremely cruel and vicious reputation and we see now that the chaos in Afghanistan has spread not just to Pakistan, where it is a major destabilising factor, it's also put at risk the stability of post-Soviet Central Asia. In the broader scheme of things isn't this something which should cause some loss of sleep to Ronald Reagan, yourself and others, that you have stirred up this hornet's nest, with very serious consequences for the region and indeed been a major factor in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism? When Muslims say to me "The West is always against Islam", I say "No it isn't. Look at all the help the CIA gave you in Afghanistan. How can you possibly complain?"

**RG:** I don't agree with the premise that the assistance to Afghanistan gave a major boost to fundamentalism. I believe that the Iranian revolution and Iranian activities are primarily responsible for that. I think there's no question that some of these groups have continued to do this - the destabilising activities that you describe - but the reality is it's all very convenient for scholars to look back and say "Gee, if you had done this or that maybe this would have been different"...

**FH:** Mr Gates, I was in Afghanistan. I think you once said "You don't have to visit Afghanistan to support the mujahideen". Well I went to Afghanistan. I've also been in Iran, I've seen Khomeini's Iran, I've seen tens of thousands of people marching down the streets and saying "Death to liberalism" and attacking women who wouldn't wear veils and so forth. It is my view that Islamic fundamentalism is a greater threat to liberal values than almost anything else we face in the world today. In that sense the alliance with Afghanistan sent the wrong signal particularly in the post-Cold War world.

**RG:** Well I don't disagree with you on the danger posed by extremist Islamic fundamentalism. I don't disagree with that at all. But I also believe that you have to look at these decisions in the

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context of the time they were being made. We didn't know in 1985, 1986, 1983 that there
would even be a post-Cold War period within anybody's lifetime. So at that point to have
expected the kind of prophetic capability to know that by the end of the decade not only would
the Russians be out of Afghanistan but that within a year or two of that there wouldn't even be a
Soviet Union any more is asking a little much of those who were making decisions at the time.

FH: Could I bring you to one other criticism which has been made over the years - not specifically of the Agency but of people involved in intelligence evaluation in the United States in general - which is broadly speaking threat inflation, in other words exaggerating the Soviet military threat, and exaggerating both the capabilities of the Soviet military but also distorting the degree to which the Soviet Union had superiority or was likely to get superiority over the West. Now this is a theme that runs right through the Cold War, going right back to the re-evaluation of the Soviet strategy in the late 1940s. Do you think in retrospect, given the collapse of the Soviet Union, given what we know about the inefficiency of Soviet equipment - it is often said that if you wanted to drive a Soviet tank you had to be a left-handed midget and even then there was a fifty-fifty chance of you getting loaded into the breech instead of the shell - do you think that there was an inflation of Soviet military capabilities through the 1970s and 1980s, the period during which you were involved, or do you think you got it roughly right?

RG: I think that what we have learned about the Soviet military, their strategic forces as well as their conventional forces, as a result of some of the arms control agreements make quite clear that in terms of their capabilities we were very close to the mark.

FH: 'We' in the CIA?

RG: We in the Agency and also in the West. There were no significant disagreements in the West, over the assessments of the capabilities and numbers of Soviet forces. We clearly knew the numbers of their missiles. We could see how often they had launched them. We could see the number of failures they had, the number of successes they had. We saw the number of tanks they had produced. We acquired Soviet tanks, we acquired the T72.

FH: I heard the Iranians provided it to you.

RG: No they did not.

FH: I thought they sent you one captured from Iraq.

RG: Totally wrong. We knew the numbers of these weapons that were being produced. We could see them, we saw them exercise and manoeuvre. And I might add, when the time came under INF to destroy some of the missiles, the Soviets launched - the head of our on-site inspection agency, General Roland Lejoy told me this - that when the Soviets launched the SS-20s to destruction, they launched seventy missiles. They had not a single failure. The United States could not boast of that kind of a record with our missiles. So the fact is the deterioration of the Soviet military in the last half dozen years, as the resources that they have gotten have dramatically declined and as the circumstances they have faced have changed dramatically, has portrayed a Soviet military which can't even beat the Chechens. But the reality is they had extraordinary military capabilities and what the critics miss is that part of what brought the Soviet

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state down was the fact that they allocated so much of their resources to the military. It was in effect something like a Sparta, in that virtually all the best assets of the country were allocated to the military. In some cases their equipment was very crude and in others they were very sophisticated.

**FH:** But, running throughout the Cold War period, including the period when you were in senior positions in the Agency, there was much talk in the United States of the Soviet Union having attained overall superiority over the West in the nuclear field. Do you think that was ever really the case?

**RG:** It was never the case and CIA and the intelligence community never really said it. We wrote an estimate in 1973 that said that the Soviets were seeking superiority but that they recognised how difficult it would be to attain it and that if they attained it, it would be because of a lack of action on the US side, in other words they would get it by default rather than having won a competition, if you will. This was at a time when the US defence budget was under extraordinary pressure and a lot of weapons systems were in real jeopardy or did not look like they would ever be deployed. But the worst case that the US intelligence community ever came forward with was that the Soviets were seeking superiority, did not have it, and that it would be extremely difficult for them to acquire it. What we did say was that the tremendous increase they had had in strategic power had political implications around the world in the way that other countries looked at the Soviet Union, but that's about as far as we went.

**FH:** On this question of the relation between your own, as it were, technical estimates as an intelligence agency and the broader policy field, there have been recurrent disputes, some of them public, some of them not, between the Agency and your political masters. You yourself were involved publicly in two of these, one with Secretary of State Shultz and the other in a more minor way with Secretary of State Baker, in the late 1980s. Shultz's observations in his memoirs, *Turmoil and Triumph*, are quite critical of the Agency and at one point, in January 1987, he said that he felt that he was being manipulated, and that the President was being manipulated. He used a rather graphic idiom, saying that the President was being provided with 'bum dope'. These are pretty stringent criticisms from a political leader. I wondered what your view of this issue is, in retrospect.

**RG:** Secretary Shultz's criticisms in retrospect and in his memoirs are much broader and much less defining, much less well defined, than his criticisms at the time. In fact he was a very discriminating user of intelligence, probably one of the best users of intelligence that I have ever seen. Where he had problems with our intelligence, more often than not, was in areas where he was involved in a major negotiation and especially on regional issues. He thought that we disagreed with him all through the 1980s on Angola and on the willingness of Dos Santos to negotiate. At the time, I am convinced that we were right. Ultimately, because circumstances change and the Soviet leadership changed, Shultz proved to be right because they ultimately agreed to negotiate. Shultz thought that we were very slow to see change in the Soviet Union and that we were failing to see that there was any change at all. The way he characterises our analysis in his memoirs though is not a fair characterisation of what we were saying. In fact we were talking about a revolution underway in the Soviet Union. We just didn't think it was going to go as far as he did and based on the evidence at the time, it wasn't. But his instincts that it was going to go further were in fact correct. Another area that really soured Shultz was the

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information that was provided by the Operations Directorate as part of the Iran affair on what was going on inside Iran at the time. Now the information which he heard Casey, CIA Director Casey, use in the White House and in those meetings about Iran and the information that Shultz was provided with in some cases...

**FH:** This was about a 'moderate' faction inside the Iranian leadership...

**RG:** ...was not in fact the view of the analytical side of CIA. It was the view of some of the operators who were involved in the operation, and he was rightly unhappy about that because the information was wrong and it was not the view of the analytical side of the CIA. But my more important point is that there were significant areas in which George Shultz was not only in agreement with what we were providing him but was very flattering about the quality of what he was getting. George Shultz never had a single complaint about the intelligence that was provided him in the context of his negotiations on arms control - whether it was INF or START - and in fact he told us that the head of our unit supporting him could see him at any time, he had such high respect for him and the quality of the work which he did. He thought we were the only people in the government looking to the future on a number of different problems around the world. He thought our economic intelligence was terrific. So Shultz's memoirs are not as differentiated as his views were at the time. He is much more negative in this memoirs than he was when he was actually reading the intelligence and, in important areas, he was a very happy customer.

**FH:** The question that always struck me about this period was what was the United States seeking to do in Nicaragua? Was it that there were conflicting priorities as between the CIA, the White House, the NSC?

**RG:** Even Bill Casey never believed that the Contras could defeat the Sandinistas. The policy was to try and bring enough pressure on the Sandinistas to make them adhere to the agreements that they had signed in 1979 when they took power, in terms of a free election and ultimately, and partly thanks to pressure from Gorbachev, they had such an election and they lost it.

**FH:** And on the night of the election, in 1990, Jimmy Carter persuaded them to step down.

**RG:** Well I am not sure it was that as much as it was the fact that the Soviets were telling them that they wouldn't help them.

**FH:** Could we move on now to the future, to the post-Cold War world and to the role of intelligence and the CIA in it. There are those in Congress who have argued that the CIA, which was set up by Truman in the context of the Cold War, has lived its life, that it should be fundamentally reorganised or even dissolved. What is your view of the role of the Agency in this changed international situation, given the fact that the main enemy has disappeared, given the controversies that have surrounded the Agency, given such issues as the Ames scandal and so forth? Do you feel that there is a fundamental restructuring or indeed even refounding of the Agency needed or do you feel that it can, to use the current word, be 'converted' as it were from its Cold War function to a post-Cold War function?

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RG: The truth of the matter is CIA was created before the Cold War really got going and it was created primarily to avoid the kind of surprise that we had encountered at Pearl Harbour in 1941. There was a need to have all the information come to one place and at a level where it could be presented to the President and others who had the ability to act. Hence the name Central Intelligence Agency. The reality is that over the years, CIA has never been wholly a Cold War organisation. Even at the height of the Cold War, which in terms of CIA spending was in 1980, in terms of the proportion of its spending on the Soviet problem if you will, even at that point, forty per cent, just short of half of CIA's efforts, forty per cent or nearly half of its resources were being spent on problems which had nothing to do with the Soviet Union - regional conflicts, for example in the Middle East, non-proliferation, terrorism, counter-narcotics, economic intelligence and issues like this. There is at this time a vast gap between perception and reality in Washington when it comes to US intelligence. The notion that CIA and the other agencies are wandering around looking for work, looking for a new mission is wholly a myth. They have more work to do than they can deal with their reduced resources. They're getting just as many questions today on Russia as they did at the high point of the Cold War. They're just different questions. Now it's not "What are they going to do with the nuclear weapons?", it's "Where are they?" and "Who's in charge of them?" Now you have to deal with fifteen capitals in the former Soviet Union where you only had to deal with Moscow. CIA is deeply engaged in the non-proliferation arena. Everything we know about the North Korean nuclear programme, about the Iranian rearmament programme, about Iranian weapons of mass destruction, about Algeria and their efforts and so on - all of that is coming from US intelligence.

The reality is that all the time both the Congress and the President are demanding from CIA and from US intelligence, what I call the continuing river of information, that fuels the day-to-day decision making process. No-one in the White House is saying "Gee, can't we find something for CIA to do?" or "Gee, maybe we can do without CIA". The reality of this is proven by the fact that even while you read all this rhetoric and hear all this rhetoric about its mission and so on, on a bi-partisan basis across the philosophical spectrum in American politics, in Congress, they continue to vote huge sums of money to support CIA and the American intelligence community. Now there will be change, there will be restructuring. One of the sad things is there has been a great deal of restructuring already in American intelligence and in CIA, but the Agency has done a very poor job of communicating just how much has happened in the intelligence community over the last three or four years. More will happen. The new Director will make further changes. The Aspen Commission will recommend further changes. The Congress will make further changes. But I suspect it will be an evolutionary process and that there will be a lot of give and take between these three different elements. You will see an Agency that still has a global intelligence mission but one where a lot of the bureaucratic holdovers, a lot of the bureaucratic legacies, of the Cold War have been dismantled primarily as a means to save money and do things more efficiently so that they can answer the many requirements they have with the fewer resources they are receiving.

FH: So speaking as a professional intelligence man, you're not nostalgic for the Cold War. You don't feel that the Agency misses it or that you personally miss it when you get up in the morning, as a way of giving yourself a professional validation or understanding the world.

RG: When I was deputy director for intelligence in 1985 I was told that seventy five per cent of our analysts had been in CIA less than five years. CIA is a continually renewing group. It's a very young Agency. For a very high percentage of the people that are there, their memory of

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the Cold War is of the waning days, not the high points, not the periods of the greatest tension and the greatest difficulty. I think that culturally the Agency has very little problem making that kind of an adjustment.

**FH:** If you got a phone call from the White House on inauguration day 1997 and whoever he or perhaps she was who was the newly inaugurated president of the United States said "Bob, what advice can you give me in trying to make sense of the world that I'm now President of the United States in?", what would you say to them?

**RG:** I think that the most important thing is to surround himself with diverse voices. I think he needs a strong Secretary of State, a strong National Security Adviser and a strong director of Central Intelligence and he needs to be willing to allow the debate to go on so he can get some grasp of the different perspectives of these individuals, a strong Secretary of Defense too. I think that the President will still get the most independent view of what is going on around the world, and one in the most honest context, from CIA. The reality is no President and certainly not the Congress wants to depend on the Defense Department to describe the threat which they are going to face or on the State Department for an evaluation of how well our diplomacy is doing. CIA brings some of its own biases. The analysts bring their own biases to these things. But it tends not to be a bias in favour of a policy and I think that's why the triangulation is necessary, why hearing different voices is necessary for a President.

**FH:** In the outside world the CIA is known, of course, for intelligence gathering but it is known, perhaps disproportionately, for covert operations or for dirty tricks which I know make up a very small part of your budget and of your personnel. Looking back over the legacy of the Cold War, there are many cases where the CIA intervened or allegedly intervened to alter the political process, be it the Italian elections in the 1940s, Iran in the 1950s, Guyana in the 1960s, Chile in the 1970s and so forth. Here you have been charged with, not just in an unconstitutional way but in an illegitimate way, driving countries towards dictatorship or assisting dictators to come to power. Is this something which, in retrospect, you think was justified or is this a record which perhaps could have been written in a different way and in a slightly or to a large extent less interventionist way?

**RG:** Well it's a very rare thing in history for nations to be allowed to relive it and do it differently and again I think that these decisions have to be seen in context. But the most important consideration is that there was not a single one of the instances which you have mentioned where CIA did not act at presidential directive. CIA is the President's organisation. It is his unlike any organisation in the government and what happened as a result of the Congressional investigations in the mid-1970s is that CIA ceased to be purely the President's organisation and became the President's organisation and the Congress's. Since the 1970s, with the sole exception of Iran, both in the Carter administration and in the Reagan administration (both of those Presidents signed covert action findings authorisations on Iran that were not informed to the Congress - Reagan's ended up being catastrophic) every single covert action has been briefed to the Congress.

The reality is that these covert actions, with the sole exception of Iran - twice in the Carter administration and once catastrophically in the Reagan administration - have been informed to the Congress and they have had a real influence in determining whether they continue or even in

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whether they are approved and go forward in the first place. So one of the conclusions in fact of the Church Committee in 1976 was that CIA had not been a rogue elephant. It had in fact been doing the President's bidding in each of these cases so the question which you ask is really a much broader question about the making of American foreign policy and whether the American government should have wanted to try and influence those countries' internal affairs. That, I think, is a much broader question than CIA's role.

**FH:** This brings me to the question of the relationship, which you've written on quite extensively, between intelligence gathering and policy making. The assumption is, the constitutional assumption is, also the common sense assumption is, that you keep them separate and that the intelligence agencies must not get involved in making policy. You yourself have very much defended the 'integrity of analysis' as you put it. But in retrospect, do you think there have been occasions when you have crossed, you as an Agency or you as a senior intelligence official, have crossed that divide and that this has confused issues? It has been said very strongly of one of your predecessors, Bill Casey, that he did cross the divide between intelligence gathering and policy making and in a very flamboyant way which was particular to him, be it on Iran or Nicaragua or indeed on the relationship between the two, in the Irangate scandal.

**RG:** There is no question in my mind that Bill Casey crossed the line, not so much in influencing the written product of CIA or the briefings that our analysts would give, but rather in the way he would present the intelligence in the White House and in meetings. He would present it in such a way as to try and shape the policy rather than simply to inform the policy. I think the Agency's record is very strong in this respect partly because, especially since the 1970s, virtually every written briefing and assessment CIA has done has gone to the Congress where it is exposed to the full range of political scrutiny, of both parties, liberals, conservatives and everyone else. You simply can't survive in Washington unless you play it straight. In other words, one of the things I once asked when someone said "Well do you slant the intelligence for the policy maker?" I said "Slant it which way?" That assumes that the policy makers all have the same view. And I have very rarely found that to be the case. So the only way you can play it is to call it straight and as honestly as you think and let the chips fall where they may. You may be wrong but at least you have given it your best shot. I think it's a mistake for the director to be a Cabinet officer. Casey was the only CIA Cabinet officer, the only Director of Central Intelligence to be a Cabinet officer. It blurs the line. It is a mistake that the new man who has been chosen, Mr Deutch, is going to be a Cabinet officer as well.

**FH:** You were saying that Casey had slanted the evidence for policy reasons when he was in the Cabinet. In the very excited times of the early 1980s when what was called low intensity conflict and having a go at Russians and the Third World were very much on the agenda, do you feel that the charges that have been made that you also did this are justified and that you maybe made a mistake in the way you presented evidence? Here we come back to the Shultz argument.

**RG:** No. I think this issue got very thorough airing when I was nominated to be Director of Central Intelligence. A number of allegations were made. I brought documentary evidence to the table to show that in every case the allegations were either misinformed or just wrong. Many of the people who were directly involved in preparing the assessments that were questioned testified or gave sworn statements that the allegations were wrong and that there had been no

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interference with their analysis or that their analysis had reached the policy maker in some
distorted way. The Senate believed my view.

**FH:** The other kind of slanting is of course the slanting which is the professional deformation of the intelligence officer which is your sitting there in Langley, Virginia, looking at a world of threats. You've got hanging over you, as you earlier said, what I think has hung over every American politician and strategist in the Cold War, which is the fear of another Pearl Harbour, another surprise attack. Do you think in some sense that by dint of the isolation in which you worked and the kind of information you were working on, you came to have an unduly bleak view of the world? I hope you won't mind my repeating this, the anecdote told of you that when you see a bunch of flowers, you used to ask "where's the funeral?" It may have made you a good Director General of CIA - I don't know. But is there a sense in which by working in this area, in the shadows, you inevitably see the world in an unduly bleak way?

**RG:** There is a danger of only focusing on the risks and dangers in the world and I think it is endemic in the intelligence profession. This is why the President needs to listen to different voices, because just as intelligence probably causes him more worries than he may need to have, too often the diplomats will present him with too rosy a view. It is the function, the whole role, of diplomats to solve problems, to look for opportunities where there are none, to look for progress in a nuance or in a wink of an eye or a twitch of a muscle, when in fact there's nothing there. So it is the balancing of these things which the National Security Adviser and ultimately the President have to be responsible for. By the same token that CIA over the years in a number of instances, has prevented more alarmist views from prevailing, it was CIA, contrary to what the Defense Department said, that said that the SS9 blockbuster ICBM did not have independently targeted re-entry vehicles, contrary to what the Defense Department said.

**FH:** This was in the mid-1970s.

**RG:** In the mid 1970s. It was CIA in the 1970s and early 1980s which said that the Backfire Bomber was not an intercontinental bomber. It was CIA that said that the Soviet anti-aircraft missile, the SA5, could not shoot down missiles when the Defense Department said that it could.

**FH:** And these were the stuff of the right-wing campaign in America.

**RG:** It was CIA that in the early 1980s said that the rate of growth in the Soviet defence budget was falling, or had levelled off. You began the interview by talking about CIA exaggerating the threat, but at the same time here are a number of instances in which the conservatives said that CIA underestimated the threat. My argument is that if you've got both the left and the right mad at you you must be pretty close to the mark.

**FH:** Throughout the Cold War, there was a fear in the United States of a Soviet attack, a kind of nuclear version of Pearl Harbour and, more broadly, underlying much of the concern about the Soviet Union was in fact in some sense a fear that the West could lose. But in retrospect did you ever feel that the Soviets might win, that Soviet communism might in fact defeat the West in an overall sense?

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**RG:** No I really didn't. I never did think that they could win. In times like the late 1970s when after Vietnam, and as we saw the Soviets moving aggressively in places like Afghanistan and Angola, Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America, I worried they could gain some advantages which would make our strategic situation more difficult, I did not ever believe that they actually could win. I think I knew too much Russian and Soviet history and understood their weaknesses - the fact that they were really a uni-dimensional superpower, that only in their military power did they have any real claim to superpower or even great power status, that economically, socially, politically this was a very limited kind of danger. I think that my biggest worry and the worry of a lot of people was that there would be a miscalculation.

**FH:** A nuclear miscalculation?

**RG:** A miscalculation in a particular crisis or that a specific crisis could get out of hand, where a series of events would build on one other and, like before World War One, end up with governments making decisions they would never have dreamed they would be making a few weeks or a few months before, where it would not be the kind of long term "Let's attack the United States, let's get strategic superiority and destroy the West" but rather in the Yom Kippur War or some Berlin crisis or something like that, local events would develop a momentum of their own that would force fast decisions on people where they might make decisions that were terribly wrong and could create a disaster of some kind. It was that kind of potential for miscalculation, for mistakes, that I think worried most of us more than the actual risk of a Soviet victory or of a pre-meditated Soviet attack.

**FH:** If we have to write now the history of the Cold War, is there any major area which will have be rewritten once we know the full intelligence story just as we have to rewrite parts of the Second World War history because we now know about the cracking of German codes through Ultra?

**RG:** I suspect that what rewriting will have to be done, will have to be done about specific events and specific situations where we don't know enough. For example in Afghanistan we now know through the release of the Politburo minutes that really it was a decision made by a handful of the senior Politburo members and not a carefully considered decision of the Central Committee or something like that. So I think there will be some broad re-evaluation of specific events and specific decisions but I don't now see areas where there will have to be a significant reinterpretation. I will give you one example where I think there has to be a reinterpretation, because I deal with it in my own book, and that is the role of Jimmy Carter. I think that historians are going to find that, particularly through actions which Carter took covertly, he was much more aggressive toward the Soviet Union and much more willing to take them on not only in the Third World but at home than was the public perception at the time. Further my own view is, and it's a view I put forward in my book, that there is considerable continuity in many respects in US policy. One of the areas where conventional wisdom is wrong is that it holds there were significant changes or differences in policy from one President to the other when it came to dealing with the Soviets. The truth of the matter is that US relations with the Soviet Union were probably worse under Jimmy Carter than they were at any other time in the Cold War, with the possible exception of the Truman administration. Carter had a very tough policy behind the scenes on the Soviets and I believe, to a degree that both the Republicans and the

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Democrats would probably find objectionable, that there was in fact a good deal of continuity between Carter and Reagan.

**FH:** Part of this was, of course, the human rights issue, something that the conventional Cold War people understated. But it was the Helsinki agreement that put human rights on the agenda, and for all that the Russians resisted it and Brezhnev resisted it, this was a foot in the door, to Eastern Europe in particular, which Carter pushed.

**RG:** Well absolutely, and people forget that it was Gerry Ford who signed the Helsinki Final Act and went to Helsinki against the tremendous opposition of the conservatives in this country who believed that he was signing up to the Yalta accord. The reality is, though, that he, in signing that, created the foundation, created an opening, that the peoples in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe were able to use and everything from Helsinki Watch, the Orlov Group in Moscow to Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, all of these things, were born out of that Helsinki accord. So Jimmy Carter didn't begin the human rights policy any more than Ronald Reagan began the attack on Soviet legitimacy. There is tremendous continuity here in many respects and one that for political reasons people have chosen either to ignore or pretend didn't exist.

**FH:** It would be interesting to hear what the specific role of the CIA was in bringing down communism in the late 1980s.

**RG:** If you consider that the pressures on the West were military, economic, human rights and legitimacy and the Third World, CIA carried basically the entire burden on the Third World and played a contributing role, covertly, on the human rights and efforts in Eastern Europe and inside the Soviet Union itself.

**FH:** What do you think brought down Soviet communism?

**RG:** Well now the conventional wisdom of course is that the collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable - everybody knew that. The truth of the matter is that I think most people did believe that in a sort of ethereal, philosophical, sense, but I think people probably expected it to happen some time in the next century not in 1991. I believe that the collapse of the system was inevitable but there was nothing that made it inevitable in 1991. It was decisions made by Gorbachev between 1985 and 1991 as well as decisions and actions taken by the United States during the late 1970s and during the 1980s that brought the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 rather than at some indefinite date in the future. I believe that if Andropov had been fifteen years younger when he took power in 1982, we would still have a Soviet Union with us, continuing to decline economically, increasingly disadvantaged technically, especially in the military arena, but still extant.

**FH:** You say there were actions and decisions taken by the US during the period 1985-91. Can you give us some examples?

**RG:** Well I would take it back further. I believe it goes back into the 1970s. I think both the signature of the Helsinki declaration and the human rights approach of President Carter began to attack the legitimacy of the Soviet government in a way that had not been done by the American government prior to that, in terms of a direct assault on their internal affairs. This was

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accentuated or accelerated, intensified, by President Reagan with everything from the 'evil empire' speech to the continuing talk about the nature of the regime and so on. That's one. Second, I believe that at a time of growing economic crisis in the Soviet Union, as their economic problems deepened, the United States' willingness to intensify the arms race, to accelerate its own military build-up, made it impossible for the Soviets to reduce military spending in the first part of the 1980s which would have been a critical area for them to act if they were to try and alleviate pressures on their economy in other areas. There was so much investment going into the military that they not only could not reduce it but, in some respects, Soviet military spending increased in the early 1980s and even under Gorbachev. I also think that the United States, beginning with President Carter, began, in a kind of disorganised way that later became more cohesive, to wage economic war against the Soviet Union. In some cases this was just at the margins, but in a critical situation even action at the margins can make a difference, in terms of making life harder for the Soviets, in terms of making it harder for them to do anything about their economic problems. So, in these and other areas, I think that, beginning in the late 1970s, the United States in effect began a full court press on a system that was already in trouble.

**FH:** 'A full court press', is that a wrestling term?

**RG:** A basketball term - of just being on them everywhere and then finally in the Third World as well, which was begun by Carter and continued and intensified also by Reagan. In all of these areas, the United States pressured the Soviet Union all the time and was kind of on them all the time. I believe that this is one of the reasons the Soviets grasped they had to begin making changes in their system, begin a reform process particularly in the economic and military arena. My belief is that once you began really to reform the Soviet system, began to change it, that it accelerated its collapse because it couldn't be fixed. I won't get the quote exactly right but it is an apt one, and that is de Tocqueville's statement that the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it begins to reform itself.

**FH:** Well we've already heard that quote in the opposite way with regard to the Shah and the fact that he started to do that and then fell, creating many problems in 1978-1979. Going back to the question of the arms race it's very difficult - and particularly difficult for people in Europe or Britain - to get a handle on why the arms race took the form it did because the argument in the way it was presented was always about how many missiles did the Russians have, what's the throw-weight, in other words, rather technical issues. But as you've just hinted I think, the arms race was set in a political context, and it was as much to do on the one hand with bargaining in crises, of which the Cuban missile crisis was the obvious case, but also simply about squeezing the Russians. I mean by this that the arms race had a political function which was, to put it quite crudely, 'to outspend the bastards', that was the goal in some sense and so it's very interesting that you appear to confirm this in what you say.

**RG:** Well funnily enough, not many people believed that at the time. President Reagan believed you could outspend them but there weren't very many that believed it and I'm not sure that, in the early 1980s, that even I believed that. But the reality is that we can see now, in retrospect, that the effort to try and strengthen the military in the US, the huge breadth of programmes that were initiated by the Reagan administration to overcome the appearance of weakness in the military arena by the Carter administration and to overcome ten years of defence

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cuts under both Republicans and Democrats, had the effect of putting this kind of pressure on the Soviets. It would be a mistake to try and carry it too far and say that this was a well-conceived and organised strategy. The US arms build-up in the early 1980s was motivated by other considerations, not a belief that you could outspend the Soviets but rather to overcome what were perceived to be military weaknesses compared with the Soviets because of the cuts of the preceding decade. It's in retrospect that you can see the kind of pressure that it brought to bear on the Soviets.

**FH:** Was it not the case that the military weaknesses were in many cases exaggerated precisely in order to fulfil political goals that could not openly be articulated? For example, there was all the nonsense about the SS-20s giving the Soviets an advantage.

**RG:** You are trying to ascribe a knowledge and a wisdom and a strategy on the part of people that did not exist. First of all it is very difficult for the United States to make strategy in the first place. The President has to figure it out with all the contending forces in the Executive branch and then he's got to get it through a Congress that's controlled by the other party. So the idea that you can set some grand strategy and then pursue it in this case is I think a mistake. The reality is that when you look at most of the weapons that were deployed in the Reagan administration, they were begun in either the Johnson administration or in the Nixon administration.

**FH:** But the big difference is this that, throughout the history of the arms race with the single exception of space in the late 1950s, the United States was in advance. Whatever the United States did, for example putting multiple warheads on single warhead rockets, the Russians would do it five or ten years later. There are many other cases of this. The difference in the early 1980s was that with what the United States was then doing, the kind of precision engineering to one thousandths of a millimetre which you had on the Stealth Bomber or certain kinds of lasers on bombs, the Russians not only were behind, but they knew they could never catch up. It was that psychological realisation that they could never steal or copy or imitate what the Americans were doing that, as much as anything, broke their back. The argument which has been made that the Soviet Union collapsed because so much money was spent on the military misses the point that you still have to explain why the rest of the civilian economy was so inefficient. Particularly in the United States, there were many ways in which military technology helped the economy. In the USSR this did not occur.

**RG:** I don't think it's that complicated. The military had first call on both human and material resources in the Soviet Union - there was no investment in the civil economy. They got the leavings after the military were through. We got repeated reports of how the military inspectors would go into a factory and there would be ten widgets coming off of the end of the production line; and the military would pick the two that really worked well and the rest would go into the civilian economy.

**FH:** But it was an economy without spin-off. The arguments about spin-off may be exaggerated, but many things from the audio cassette to pregnancy scanning to Teflon frying pans to electrical burglar alarms and all the other things which are spin-offs - they all come from military technology. In the Soviet Union, they couldn't do it, so even the investment in the military wasn't coming into the civilian economy.

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**RG:** No exactly, that's part of the weakness. That gets at my point. But I would go back to your other point, the notion that the Soviets were always reacting to us on weapons systems is I think a mistake. For example the United States never did develop and deploy a mobile missile in the way that the Soviets deployed a rail mobile.

**FH:** But you had mobile missiles on submarines.

**RG:** But so did the Soviets.

**FH:** But the West did it first, and better.

**RG:** What I'm trying to tell you is that we did it with submarines. The Soviets followed with submarines but the Soviets took the lead in deploying an ICBM that was mobile and that was very difficult to find. The value of that strategically was illustrated in Desert Storm by the difficulty we had in trying to find something as crude as the Scud missile in Iraq. But the Soviets were the ones who deployed the rail mobile, the road mobile ICBM. We never did that.

**FH:** But the reason they did it was because they were not able to match the accuracy which the West had in submarine-launched missiles such as the Poseidon.

**RG:** By the early 1980s Soviet accuracy was within the same ballpark as the United States on their best systems.

**FH:** Moreover the Soviet submarines were all detected by the US Navy and Air Force. You knew where every single one of the ten or fifteen missile-launching Soviet submarines were. They didn't know where any of yours were.

**RG:** I suspect they knew more than we thought, thanks to John Walker, the spy who provided them with the ability to decrypt over a million US naval operational messages.

**FH:** Reflecting on the case of perhaps the most serious penetration of the CIA, the Aldrich Ames case, which has recently emerged, what do you think this tells us about the culture of the CIA and why was it so long before this rather senior Soviet mole was in fact detected within the Agency?

**RG:** First of all one should always begin with the premise that an agency like CIA has been penetrated when you have a large number of people, human weaknesses being what they are. I remember one of my predecessors telling me in 1987 when I was nominated to be Director, "Never go home at night without wondering where the mole is", not 'if' but 'where'. And I think the problem in the Agency was one of great hubris. The Agency had never been penetrated, it believed that it could not be penetrated. No-one would say that but it was the culture. Evidence today about Ames' activities that looks so obvious in hindsight was viewed through a prism of a view to disbelieve. If you don't believe you can be penetrated then you are going to look at the evidence which comes to your attention in a peculiar way, in a way which is not going to lead you to the right conclusion. I think, after all the investigations are done, that that still will be the fundamental reason. By the same token, the most important remedial action

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to prevent this kind of thing from happening again has already taken place and that is that this
illusion, this will to disbelieve, has been shattered. People will not for a long time think that the
Agency cannot be penetrated. In terms of the actual damage done, it's obviously a disaster in
terms of the human life that was lost, in terms of the ten or so agents that were apparently killed,
executed, by the Soviets. That said, we and other intelligence services have all been penetrated
now and we've all managed to survive it - we had Edward Howard in 1985 basically destroy our
Soviet operations and we came back from that. So the important thing is to understand that these
kinds of things will happen. It just happens that Aldrich Ames is the most egregious case and the
only one we know about so far of a penetration of CIA, and I think that's why it's had such a
strong political impact.

FH: It used to be said that the CIA unlike MI6 had never been penetrated and this was a source of great pride for the Agency. What you are now saying is that you all lived through this period and the same thing happened in each case.

RG: Well that's right and God knows we recruited a large number of KGB agents over the years.

FH: Has the collapse of Communism and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and the creation of this very new world led you to think back on your twenty seven years as an intelligence officer and as an adviser to several Presidents? Do you feel that in broad terms you would do again what you did, or do you have serious regrets of evaluation or of moral choice about the policies you advocated in that period?

RG: I really have very few regrets. I think that the advice which CIA and which I gave Presidents in terms of what the Soviets were about was reasonable. I think in most cases it was accurate. Where we were wrong, it was because we had wrong information or we had a wrong interpretation of something but it wasn't a moral decision. It was simply being factually wrong and I think we have been honest about those errors. But I think, overall, my own view is that the outcome is in fact a marvellous victory for the West and frankly for the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia. I think that in a way there has been no celebration of the victory because the outcome came under circumstances that no-one expected and people immediately turned to domestic considerations and so on. But the reality is that the NATO alliance led by the United States sustained a struggle, a competition, with the Soviet Union militarily and in other respects for nearly half a century and in effect carried out the prescription that George Kennan put forward in 1947, which is that, if you can contain these guys long enough, their internal contradictions eventually will bring them down. And that's exactly what happened. We maintained that containment at huge cost and sacrifice for a long time and I think it's a tremendous victory for the peoples in the West. I think they should feel better about it than they do.