Behind Closed Doors

A story of intransigence, infighting--and perhaps missed opportunities

With their walkout in Geneva, the Soviets abruptly ended a complex and controversial episode in the history of arms control. Even if they eventually return to the bargaining table, it will almost certainly not be until after they have taken the military "countermeasures" that Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov listed last week. That escalation in the arms race would require significant changes in the negotiating approach of both sides.

The record of the past four years has been one of almost unremitting Soviet intransigence, intimidation and occasional doubledealing of the sort that so dramatically ruptured the relationship between the chief negotiators at the end. The U.S. stance was weakened by indecision, bureaucratic infighting, the clash of personalities and, possibly, missed opportunities to make progress despite Soviet stonewalling. Much of what went on behind closed doors, in both Washington and Geneva, has never been told before. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott has been able to chronicle that story. With the secrecy-shrouded process now at an end, his account can be published.

The threat of a Soviet walkout has been there from the beginning. In December 1979, immediately after the Western allies adopted their "two-track" decision--to prepare for missile deployment while negotiating on a possible agreement to reduce the number of intermediate-range weapons in Europe--the Kremlin warned that NATO had "destroyed the basis for talks." The Soviets maintained that the stationing of any new U.S. missiles was unacceptable because it would upset the balance that they claimed already existed in Europe. They proposed a freeze: the U.S.S.R. would halt further deployment on its side in exchange for NATO's cancellation of its plans to install a new generation of nuclear weapons in Europe.

Moscow's position was both bogus and brazen. It was the Soviet Union that had upset the balance in the first place by deploying the mobile, triple-warhead SS-20 ballistic missile. The West Europeans urged Washington to redress the imbalance by getting the Soviets to cut back on their SS-20s while NATO evened the scales with some new weapons on its side. Nor did the Soviets quit while they were ahead. Despite declaration of a moratorium on SS-20s, they pushed ahead to complete new missile sites that had previously been under construction.

Underlying Soviet arithmetic and diplomacy was an attempt to undermine the very basis of the Atlantic Alliance by breaking an important bond between the U.S. and Western Europe. By opposing the addition of even one new intermediate-range warhead in NATO countries, the Soviets hoped to deny the U.S. the right and the ability to treat the defense of Western Europe as an extension of American self-defense.

OPENING SKIRMISHES

In the first weeks of 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan Administration was divided over whether to go ahead with either track of the NATO decision, deployment or negotiation. At a meeting in February, Richard Perle, the hawkish congressional staffer who would soon become the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, called the NATO initiative that had been approved by President Jimmy Carter "a lousy decision if ever there was one." He expressed "misgivings about the cost-benefit wisdom" of the deployments. He scoffed at the idea of paying billions of dollars for 572 weapons. "That's a hell of a

I price tag for a marginal military I fix." Fred Ikle, another longtime 1 hawk who had joined the Administration as Under Secretary of Defense fense for Policy, feared that getting s the West Europeans to accept the missiles would cause more political trouble within the alliance than the missiles were worth.

Both men had a point, but Secretary of State Alexander Haig felt it would be disastrous to "pull the plug on a promise that NATO made to itself." The new Administration was already suspect in Western Europe for its strident rhetoric toward the U.S.S.R. Cancellation of the December 1979 decision might be taken as proof of Reagan's antipathy to arms control and of his insensitivity to America's allies.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was coming to Washington at the end of February. Lawrence Eagleburger, whom Haig had designated Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, managed to insert a clear-cut endorsement of the 1979 decision into the text of remarks that Reagan would make during a public appearance with Thatcher. Eagleburger, a career diplomat and former aide to Henry Kissinger, was, like Haig, concerned with reassuring the Europeans that the new Administration felt bound to preserve a certain amount of continuity in U.S. policy. The ploy worked. Now the President had committed his Administration to following both tracks, deployment and negotiation.

In late March, Eagleburger went to Brussels for a meeting with foreign ministry officials from other NATO countries to discuss implementation of the 1979 decision. He was accompanied by the acting deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Michael Pillsbury, a protege of right-wing Senators. Pillsbury vowed that he would "keep Eagleburger from giving away the store." In practice, that meant preventing him from committing the Administration to negotiations any time soon. When Eagleburger tried to give his assent to a joint statement that contained just such an American pledge, Pillsbury warned him, "Your ass is grass back home."

Eagleburger had yet to be confirmed by the Senate as Assistant Secretary of State, and Pillsbury threatened to use his influence with conservative Republicans to block the confirmation. The attempted blackmail did not work; Eagleburger approved the statement anyway, and Pillsbury was soon dismissed from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency by the White House. He went back to Capitol Hill, where he has continued to work against Eagleburger and other Administration moderates, work against Eagleburger and other Administration moderates.

In May 1981, Haig was due to travel to Rome for a NATO foreign ministers' meeting. Anticipating European pressure, he wanted to promise to begin negotiations by the end of the year. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argued, however, that the U.S. should make no such move until the huge rearmament program that Reagan was in the process of launching was well under way and until the Soviets showed a willingness to consider deep reductions in their arsenal. "What the alliance wants, or at least what it needs," Weinberger told Haig over breakfast at the Pentagon in early April, "is leadership, not compromise." Weinberger thought that Haig was too much of a compromiser and that he was being overly solicitous of the Europeans. "Al's automatically siding with the West Europeans all the time," the Defense Secretary complained directly to Reagan.

Meanwhile, Weinberger's aide, Perle, was arguing that the resumption of negotiations should be "contingent on the completion of the work program" under which NATO would review and update its assessment of the Soviet threat before committing itself to any new negotiations. Haig exploded, " 'Work program,' my ass! It's a make-work program, that's what it is! It's the oldest stalling tactic in the book. The West Europeans will never go for it. They'll say, 'Now you're attaching preconditions and trying to get out of the talks.' "

National Security Adviser Richard Allen and hard-liners on his staff sided with the civilian leaders of the Pentagon. They also began to complain that Haig was showing signs of "clientitis," that he was too concerned with mollifying the West Europeans.

In the end, Haig went directly to Reagan and made the case for getting the talks started. While the President was still recovering from the March 1981 attempt to assassinate him, he had handwritten a letter to Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev, expressing his horror at nuclear war and his hopes for progress in arms control. Reagan agreed to let Haig announce in Rome that Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks would begin by the end of 1981.

On the question of who was to represent the U.S. in those talks, however, Haig did not get his way. He and the State Department professionals wanted a career diplomat who would be under their control. Eugene Rostow, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, recommended Paul Nitze, a veteran defense specialist and diplomat who had helped negotiate the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT I), signed by Richard Nixon in 1972. Rostow and Nitze, both Democrats, had known each other for many years, most recently through the Committee on the Present Danger, a private group that urged an American arms buildup and opposed the SALT II treaty of 1979. Haig feared that Nitze would be too powerful and independent a figure, competing too much with Haig himself. The Secretary of State's deputies scrambled to find evidence that Nitze had publicly criticized the December 1979 NATO decision and that he therefore should not be charged with carrying it out.

Nitze did indeed think it was a bad decision, but he had not said so in public. Eagleburger, meanwhile, warned that Nitze's "notorious hawkishness might scare off the allies." Rostow was adamant that he wanted Nitze. "I insist on prevailing," he said. National Security Adviser Allen backed him, saying, "We need a heavy hitter, not a utility infielder." Allen had picked Rostow to be director of the arms-control agency largely to put a check on Haig, and Nitze might serve that same end. He got the job.

THE ZERO OPTION

The Administration was also at loggerheads over what proposal to make in the INF talks. The State Department preferred an opening position that would require some reductions in the number of Soviet SS-20s and that would permit NATO to go ahead with its own deployments. Haig's principal arms-control deputy, Richard Burt, then director of State's Politico-Military Affairs Bureau, believed it would be almost impossible to get a deal before the new American missiles were in place. Therefore the U.S. needed a proposal that would look equitable to the West Europeans and that would shore up their resolve to go ahead with deployment of the new weapons in the face of a stalemate in Geneva. "The purpose of this whole exercise," the harddriving, sometimes abrasive Burt told his staff, "is maximum political advantage. It's not arms control we're engaged in, it's alliance management."

By late summer of 1981, Burt was squared off against Perle over what proposal to make. The Pentagon was advocating the zero option--elimination of all SS-20s in exchange for cancellation of the Pershing II ballistic-missile and Tomahawk cruise-missile programs. Paradoxically, that idea had originated among leftwingers in West Germany. Earlier in the year, National Security Adviser Allen had publicly derided "pacifist" elements in Western Europe who, he said, "believe that we can bargain the reduction of a deployed Soviet weapons system for a promise not to deploy our own offsetting system. Common sense, as well as the long history of arms negotiations with the Soviet Union, tells us this is illusory."

Yet in August, that is exactly what Perle urged as the Administration's proposal in the talks. Perle felt that the zero option was the best way of dramatizing the Administration's commitment to deep reductions and its claim that the Soviet Union had moved ahead of the U.S. in the arms race and must now pay a penalty in the arms-control negotiations by giving up large numbers of existing forces. Perle wrote a memorandum to Weinberger arguing that a deal of the sort the State Department was advocating, which would leave the Soviets with a significant number of SS-20s, would be militarily unacceptable to the U.S. An unequivocal, all-or-nothing zero option, he believed, would "put the Soviets on the defensive."

In addition to favoring what became known as "zero only," Perle wanted the U.S. proposal to contain a number of measures that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate: 1) existing shorter-range Soviet missiles, such as the SS-12s and SS-22s, would have to be eliminated along with the SS-20s; 2) the limits should apply "globally," in other words not only to the 243 SS-20s deployed within range of Western Europe but to an additional 90 or so in Asia; 3) there would be a ban not just on launchers but on extra rockets as well. This last measure would probably have required comprehensive, intrusive on-site inspection of Soviet production and storage facilities as well as deployment areas. Ever protective of their secrets, the Soviets have always vehemently opposed on-site verification.

During the fall of 1981, bureaucratic alliances were formed for and against various features of the prospective proposal. Perle was determined that the Joint Chiefs of Staff should support the civilian leadership of the Pentagon on the zero-only option. When it looked as though the chiefs might side with the State Department, Perle threatened to include aircraft on the agenda for the talks.

The chiefs wanted at all costs to keep aircraft out of the negotiations. They feared that limits intended to apply to aircraft in Europe might inhibit the U.S.'s freedom to station similar warplanes elsewhere in the world, even within the U.S. In the face of Perle's threat, the chiefs switched sides and reluctantly supported him on the zero option. Weinberger lobbied the President directly, suggesting that such a bold proposal might make Reagan a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

At a National Security Council meeting on Nov. 12,1981, Reagan sided with the Pentagon, although he did not go quite as far as Perle would have liked. Shorter-range missiles, for example, were to be treated separately and less stringently than the SS-20s. Reagan had paid little attention to the interagency wrangling, but he worked hard on the packaging of the final position. He pored over numerous drafts for a speech, including one that he revised while returning to Washington from Texas aboard the specially adapted Boeing 747 that was equipped to serve as his airborne command center during a nuclear war.

The President's speech unveiling the zero option on Nov. 18, 1981, drew applause from both sides of the Atlantic and from all across the political spectrum. It seemed to many the perfect opening gambit. But within weeks, the West Europeans in general and the ruling West German Social Democrats in particular began expressing anxiety over whether other moves would follow. Haig assured the allied representatives who paraded through his office that "the proposal is being forwarded in good faith. We want a Soviet reaction to it. We are prepared to listen." Haig was inviting a Soviet counterproposal and clearly implying that the U.S. would eventually compromise.

Perle, however, felt that showing any sign of flexibility would actually invite Soviet rejection and intransigence. "Haig's going around giving his own speech," he told Weinberger, "and it's different to the point of insubordination from the President's."

Perle was also concerned about Nitze. He had not actively opposed Nitze's appointment as chief negotiator, but he was apprehensive about whether Nitze would be willing to out-stonewall the Soviets. Perle knew Nitze well. He had first come to Washington under Nitze's auspices in 1969 to help campaign for stronger national defenses. Perle and Nitze had fought on the same side against Senate approval of the SALT II treaty. Nevertheless, Perle feared that Nitze was an "inveterate problem solver" who would eventually "set his sights on getting an agreement for its own sake."

The day after the INF talks opened in Geneva on Nov. 30, 1981, Perle testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He stressed that there was no middle ground between the zero option and full deployment of the 572 new American missiles called for in the December 1979 decision. He concluded his testimony with a quotation from the British statesman Samuel Hoare, reflecting ruefully on Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's "slide into surrender" to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938. The comparison between Chamberlain in Munich and Nitze in Geneva was no less invidious for being implicit.

TROUBLE ON THE HOME FRONT

The Soviets, meanwhile, had developed their own version of the zero option. As put forward by their chief negotiator in Geneva, Yuli Kvitsinsky, "If the U.S. really wants to go to zero, the U.S.S.R. is prepared to go to zero too, retaining only what it needs to offset the British and French forces." That would mean needs to offset the British and French forces." That would mean retaining about 250 Soviet bombers and missiles, including at least 162 SS-20s, while the U.S. would still have to forgo entirely its Pershing IIs and Tomahawks.

At the same time, the Kremlin made clear that it intended to use the negotiations as a way of inducing the West Europeans to postpone acceptance of the new missiles, thus missing the deadline that NATO had set for itself. "Both sides," Brezhnev declared during a visit to Bonn in November 1981, "should, for as long as the negotiations last, refrain from stationing new medium-range systems in Europe and from modernizing already existing ones."

When Nitze went to Geneva to open the negotiations at the end of November, he had only the sketchiest instructions. The bureaucracy back in Washington was still bickering over the details of the U.S. position. While waiting for those issues to be resolved, Nitze prepared a series of general opening statements, but Haig's aide Burt insisted that even these be cleared in ad vance by Washington. Nitze balked.

This was not the kind of license he felt he had been promised. In the end, Nitze's opening statements were played back to Washington only after he had delivered them to the Soviets. But the scene was set for more tension between the chief negotiator and his home office.

When Sven Kraemer, one of the hard-liners on Allen's staff at the NSC, saw cables reporting on Nitze's discussions with the Soviets in Geneva, he complained, "Once Paul gets hungry for a deal, all the instructions in the world won't keep him from trying to make any goddam deal he thinks he can cut."

When Nitze sought authority to discuss aircraft as well as missiles in INF, the bureaucracy moved to block him. Nitze complained that he was being "treated like a lackey." During one meeting in Washington, he snapped, "I'm not going to work in these conditions." The threat of a resignation was clear. Finally the Administration agreed to allow Nitze to continue discussions with the Soviets on aircraft, although he was tightly constrained from going into details.

Nitze tangled with Perle on another problem: how cruise missiles should be defined in the draft treaty that the U.S. was preparing to table in Geneva. Perle wanted the definition written in such a way that the zero option would apply only to nuclear-armed cruise missiles; those with conventional warheads would be exempt. The trouble was that the distinction would be virtually impossible for either side to verify. There would be no way to tell a nuclear-armed cruise missile from one that was conventionally armed. Besides, the Joint Chiefs took the position that a conventionally armed ground-launched cruise missile would represent too little bang for the buck, so there were no plans to deploy any.

Perle persisted. He threatened to withdraw his support for other features of the U.S. proposal unless he got his way on this issue. In one tense session at the Pentagon, he delivered a scathing indictment of the chiefs, saying they were notoriously shortsighted about new technology. At another meeting, Nitze exploded, accusing Perle of "talking rubbish," raising "phony" problems and trying to "torpedo" the negotiations.

Undeterred, Perle carried his case to the President through the NSC. With some help from William Clark, who was named in January 1982 to replace Allen as National Security Adviser, Perle won: only nuclear-armed cruise missiles would be covered by an agreement. The negotiators in Geneva were in the uncomby an agreement. The negotiators in Geneva were in the uncomfortable position of having to put forward a provision that they knew was unverifiable.

A WALK IN THE WOODS

But these were peripheral issues, and they would remain so. The central sticking point was that the Soviets showed no inclination to sanction the deployment of any new U.S. missiles in Western Europe and the Reagan Administration, by holding firm to the zero option, was not willing to let the Soviets keep any SS-20s anywhere in the U.S.S.R.

Nitze realized that there would have to be major concessions on both sides in order to break the stalemate, and he felt that a breakthrough was essential for the West. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany and other West European leaders warned him that political support for the NATO deployments was slipping; if possible, they urged, there should be an agreement of some kind by the end of 1982.

Yet by the summer of 1982, the Soviets had issued another ultimatum. One of the delegates in Geneva, Vladimir Pavlichenko, warned the Americans that once the U.S. was seen "taking practical steps toward deployment," the U.S.S.R. would "walk out of the talks in indignation." The Soviet Union, moreover, would take military "counter-measures." Kvitsinsky echoed both halves of the threat.

Soviet stubbornness was sometimes downright belligerent. At a meeting in mid-June, Kvitsinsky delivered a harsh lecture in which he warned that any agreement other than the one the Soviets had proposed would be "unacceptable." He used the word over and over, until Nitze bridled. There was plenty in the Soviet proposal that the U.S. too could brand unacceptable, Nitze responded coldly. "Fine. Why don't you tell us what's unacceptable to you?" Kvitsinsky asked. "Because," Nitze replied, "I prefer to talk about objective realities and inequalities. It's not profitable to exchange charges of unacceptability. Besides, I've never believed in the wisdom of burning bridges. And I feel somewhat uncomfortable in the presence of pyromaniacs."

Nitze had concluded that neither side could budge on the central issues without running the risk that the other side would, in his phrase, "pocket the concessions," and keep pressing for more. His answer was a comprehensive agreement containing compromises on all the essential problems. It would be presented to both governments for their consideration. He had learned from experience that it would be impossible to get formal approval in advance from Washington for all the necessary tradeoffs. But he figured that he might be able to hammer out an agreement with Kvitsinsky on his own. If successful? the resulting accord would be advantageous to the U.S. and would help solve one of the Administration's political problems: the growing perception that Reagan was letting Soviet-American relations deteriorate and arms control stagnate. A deal might also help the Republicans in the upcoming 1982 midterm elections, and it might allow Reagan and Brezhnev to hold a summit meeting.

That possibility also seemed to tantalize the Soviets. Kvitsinsky had remarked late in 1981 that the INF talks were mired down in what he called the "political phase," in which the two sides were jockeying for advantage in the eyes of their main audience, the West Europeans. The talks could not move into a "technical phase," in which concrete problems would lend them"technical phase," in which concrete problems would lend themselves to compromise, until there was some sort of agreement "at the top," between the Soviet and American leaders. Kvitsinsky said he was "hoping for a miracle" by the fall of 1982, when Reagan and Brezhnev might meet and set guidelines for an agreement, much as Gerald Ford and Brezhnev had done at Vladivostok on SALT II in 1974.

Nitze asked Kvitsinsky whether the Soviet government was "seriously interested in a well-prepared" summit in the fall of 1982. "Yes," the Soviet negotiator replied emphatically. "What subject matter is far enough along to serve as the centerpiece for such a meeting?" Nitze asked. Without hesitation, Kvitsinsky replied that only INF was. "If that's so," continued Nitze, "shouldn't we put our heads together and explore ways to contribute to that possibility?" Kvitsinsky agreed.

For weeks the two men probed and sparred. They talked over private dinners and off to one side at outdoor receptions. Kvitsinsky worried out loud about whether he might be jeopardizing his career. He and Nitze sometimes joked about the conspiratorial nature of what they were doing. "How confident are you," Kvitsinsky once asked Nitze, "that everything we're saying isn't being overheard?"

"Pretty confident," Nitze answered. "But somebody may have put a listening device up there"--and he gestured to an awning above the terrace where they were standing. "Right," said Kvitsinsky. "Better to meet in the woods." With the thinnest of smiles, Nitze objected, "But how could either of us be confident that the other didn't have a listening device in the sole of his shoe?" Kvitsinsky replied, "If that happened, each would know the other was responsible."

Half in jest, half in code, they were establishing the ground rules for a series of conversations outside the framework of the formal INF negotiations--and of their formal negotiating instructions. The climactic session took place on July 16, 1982, an overcast Friday afternoon. The two men traveled to a spot high in the Swiss Jura Mountains, near the French border, where the Soviet delegates often went to ski cross-country. As they strolled along a wooded path, they conducted a lengthy, sometimes tense bargaining session. Nitze laid out in detail what he emphasized must be a "package deal" that would be the basis of a final agreement, not of further haggling.

The key features were that the Soviets would give up their insistence on cancellation of the NATO deployments and on compensation for British and French forces; the number of Soviet SS-20s would be reduced from 243 to 75 in Europe and frozen at 90 in Asia; the U.S. would install only 75 cruise-missile launchers, with four missiles each, for a total of 300 warheads, and would cancel its plans to put Pershing II ballistic missiles in West Germany. Of the two new prospective American weapons, the Soviets were more worried about the Pershing Us, since they could reach targets in the U.S.S.R. much more quickly than could cruise missiles. Also, the Soviets have an abiding fear of German fingers anywhere near the nuclear trigger.

Kvitsinsky at first resisted the package. But then he began to suggest changes, and finally he agreed to a deal that included his proposed modifications. By now the two men were sitting on a log, and it had started to rain. Nitze had brought along a typed version of the possible agreement and a pencil and paper for Kvitsinsky to make his own copy. Huddled over their work, sheltering their papers against the drizzle, they tinkered with the language so that they could each have identical versions. The text began, "This is a joint exploratory package for the consideration of both governments; it is not an offer or a proposal by either government."

If that disclaimer had ever given way to formal endorsement by Washington and Moscow, it would have been a very good deal indeed for the U.S. The Soviet Union would have finally sanctioned the introduction of new U.S. weapons in Western Europe. In doing so, Moscow would have tacitly conceded that it had created an imbalance and that the West was entitled to redress it. The Soviets would have also abandoned their claim to compensation for the British and French nuclear forces. A freeze on Asian SS-20s would have enabled the U.S. to assure China, Japan and South Korea that European arms control was not being conducted at their expense. Under the plan, the U.S. would have ended up with more warheads on its cruise missiles than the Soviets would have had on their remaining SS-20s in Europe, and the U.S.S.R. would have agreed not to develop any longrange ground-launched cruise missiles of its own. All this would have been in exchange for one major American concession: the sacrifice of the Pershing II.

Nitze even had a military justification for giving up the Pershing II. It involved deploying instead a shorter-range version of the missile called the Pershing IB. That weapon would have had the accuracy, mobility and other high-tech advantages of the Pershing II and could hit Warsaw Pact airfields, rail transshipment points and command centers. But because of its shorter range it would not be limited by the agreement.

While both men reserved the right to disavow the deal later, only one of them was operating completely on his own. That was Nitze. Kvitsinsky had been in contact with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko about their discussions on the eve of what later became famous as "the walk in the woods." At the end of the talk, Kvitsinsky said he was not sure he would find the Kremlin receptive to the package. He told Nitze he would let him know through a colleague at the Soviet embassy in Washington, one of Ambassador

Anatoli Dobrynin's deputies, whether there was any interest back in Moscow.

A U.S. NO, A SOVIET NYET

Nitze returned to the U.S. and set about trying to persuade the Administration to approve what he had done. In early August, National Security Adviser Clark convened a special meeting of top officials: the new Secretary of State, George Shultz, Arms Control and Disarmament Director Rostow, Defense Secretary Weinberger, CIA Director William Casey and General John W Vessey Jr., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Each of these men brought one aide. Absent, however, were the two officials who had been most influential in formulating arms-control policy: Perle and Burt. Perle was combining a vacation with a stay at the Aspen Institute arms-control workshop in Colorado. Burt, who had been nominated to replace Eagleburger as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, had run into conservative opposition in the Senate, and Shultz was keeping him away from the controversial issue of arms control.

The consensus was that the package deserved careful study. Even Weinberger was cautiously favorable, in part because Ikle liked certain aspects of the scheme. A "mini-group" was set up to make a recommendation. Its chairman was Robert McFarlane, then Clark's deputy, later his successor as National Security Adviser.

McFarlane, a former Marine officer, objected on principle to the fact that Nitze had "wandered off the reservation." He drafted a memorandum for Clark to send to Shultz, reprimanding Nitze for exceeding his instructions and asking Shultz to rein him in. McFarlane also questioned the military wisdom of giving up the Pershing II, which would leave the U.S. with only cruise missiles to counter the Soviets' ballistic SS-20s.

McFarlane prompted the President to ask the Joint Chiefs if they could live without the Pershing II. The chiefs were at first taken aback. They knew that the principal purpose of both the cruise missiles and the Pershing Us was political, as symbols of the U.S. commitment to defend Western Europe with American nuclear weapons. They also knew that the strictly military rationale of the weapons was questionable, since there was no target they could reach in the Soviet Union that could not be covered by existing American weapons.

Therefore the chiefs felt a bit suspicious about being asked to pass judgment on the Nitze-Kvitsinsky scheme. One of them asked at the time, "Are we being set up to take responsibility for this thing?"

Nevertheless, the chiefs went into "the Tank," their inner sanctum in the Pentagon, to decide on a joint position. They split: Vessey and Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Gabriel leaned in favor of the plan, while Army Chief of Staff Edward C. Meyer, whose service had responsibility for the Pershing II and who therefore had a proprietary interest in seeing it continued, leaned against it, along with Chief of Naval Operations James Watkins. The chiefs' equivocal report never reached the President, who had asked for it.

By then, Perle was back in Washington. He felt the U.S. should stand firm on the zero option. He argued that while Kvitsinsky could disavow the walk-in-the-woods plan, Nitze could not, and the U.S. would be in the position of having agreed in principle to give up the Pershing II. That would let the West Germans off the hook. They would be able to claim the U.S. had admitted that NATO did not need the Pershing II after all.

Perle drafted a lengthy indictment of the plan incorporating a few of the more cautionary points made by the chiefs in their paper. This all-out attack on Nitze went to the White House purporting to be the united view of the entire Defense Department, uniformed military as well as civilians. At one meeting, Perle said he thought the whole scheme should be rejected outright. Jonathan T. Howe, director of the State Department's Politico-Military Affairs Bureau, remarked, "Ambassador Nitze deserves more of a hearing than that." Perle shot back, "Nitze doesn't deserve a damn thing."

But McFarlane insisted on a National Security Council meeting. It was held on Sept. 13, 1982. Nitze made the case for his plan, and Weinberger, working from talking points prepared by Perle, argued against it vociferously. Reagan said he was still attached to the simplicity of the original zero option. Why, he asked, could the Soviets not live without SS-20s if the U.S. could live without its new missiles in Europe?

Nitze's answer: because there was a big difference between not deploying a weapons system still under development and dismantling one that was already perfected and in place. It was inconceivable that the Soviets would ever accept a proposal that required them to remove every last one of their most modern intermediate-range missiles; that was asking for too much. "Well, Paul," the President replied, "you just tell the Soviets that you're working for one tough son of a bitch." Nitze was discouraged. Not only had the President decided against him, but it had been nearly two months since the walk in the woods, and he had heard nothing from Kvitsinsky's contact in the Soviet embassy in Washington.

Before Nitze returned to Geneva, the White House issued a presidential directive authorizing him to continue discussions on a possible compromise but ordering him to withdraw his earlier offer to give up the Pershing II. If any solution was achieved above the preferred level of zero weapons on both sides, the U.S. had to retain the right to include Pershing Us.

When Shultz met with Gromyko at the United Nations on Sept. 28, he hinted that the Administration was not willing to endorse the package deal. The Nitze-Kvitsinsky channel was useful, said Shultz; it should be kept open even though discussions to date had not broken the impasse. The Soviet Foreign Minister Listened closely but said nothing. His government had yet to respond, through any channel, on the substance of the deal.

That response came in Geneva the very next day. In his first meeting with Nitze since the summer, Kvitsinsky delivered a resounding nyet. The formal Soviet negotiating position, he said, was unchanged.

Whether the Soviet response would have been any different if the Reagan Administration had backed Nitze is a tantalizing but unanswerable question. In private, Soviet officials have said that they suspected Nitze would be unable to deliver U.S. support when word of the White House reprimand got out in late Au gust. They felt they had been tricked into tipping their hand on their own ultimate fallback position. And, most important, they emphasized that Nitze had first raised the possibility of a breakthrough in the context of a Reagan-Brezhnev summit. Perhaps the Soviet leader, who was then in failing health, might have been sufficiently tempted by a last hurrah of statesmanship to let Kvitsinsky join Nitze in cutting the Gordian knot. No one will know, because within weeks Brezhnev was dead.

"A SANDBOX EXERCISE"

Even as they rejected the deal that their negotiator had privately endorsed, the Soviets began positioning themselves to make a series of lesser, primarily cosmetic concessions. Their hope was that by demonstrating flexibility every few months, they could induce the West Europeans to postpone deployment in order to give the negotiations a chance. Then, by dragging out the extended negotiations, the Soviets could make postponement tantamount to cancellation.

The first hint of a new Soviet proposal came in mid-November 1982, when Senator Gary Hart visited Geneva and lunched with Nitze and Kvitsinsky together. Using Hart as a foil, Nitze elicited from Kvitsinsky confirmation of what Nitze had suspected would be the next Soviet ploy: an offer to reduce European SS-20s from 243 to about 150, approximately matching the 162 ballistic missiles in Britain's and France's independent nuclear arsenals.

A little more than a month later, the new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, made a live television address that in effect presented this offer. The British and French governments rejected the idea that their nuclear weapons should be on the table in Geneva at; all the superpowers, they said, had no license to bargain over the independent deterrents of other countries. But to many West Europeans, Andropov's proposal sounded Like a major concession. It also amounted to a tacit admission that the Soviets already had a large excess of SS-20s.

In Geneva, even Kvitsinsky scoffed at the notion that the British and French forces were any match for the SS-20s; comparing them was, he said, "a sandbox exercise." Nitze noted wryly that Kvitsinsky's apparent contempt for the British and French weapons negated the Soviets' own argument for counting them in an agreement. In another unguarded but revealing moment, Kvitsinsky blurted out the real purpose of the Soviet position: "You have no business in Europe!"

Meanwhile, Soviet Delegate Pavlichenko was escalating the Soviet threat that deployment would trigger an INF walkout and military "countermeasures." He hinted darkly that there might be new Soviet weapons in "Cuba and other Central American countries," a phrase that at the time could only mean Nicaragua. "How would you Like to have missiles there?" he asked. Other members of the Soviet negotiating team were issuing more credible threats: an increase in the number of SS-20s, the deployment of new shorter-range missiles in Eastern Europe, bringing submarines equipped with cruise missiles and low-flying "depressed-trajectory" ballistic missiles near the coasts of the U.S.

THE "INTERIM SOLUTION"

By then, 1982 was coming to an end, and the U.S. was still holding firm to the zero option. Nitze could see that the U.S. would need a new position of its own if it was going to sustain political support in Western Europe. He drew up a proposal that involved concessions greater than those he had been willing to make during the walk in the woods.

Nitze had been holding frequent private conversations with West German leaders, and he had become extremely pessimistic about the politi cal cost of deployment. The new missiles might go in on schedule, he felt, but the experience would be traumatic and divisive, perhaps even paralyzing, for the alliance.

This pessimism was not shared back in Washington. Nitze's recommendation for a new proposal was turned aside, and Administration officials began wondering if their man in Geneva had become an alarmist and defeatist. Eagleburger kept Nitze from joining Shultz on a tour of West European capitals in December, partly for fear that Nitze would contaminate the leaders along the way with his gloomy views. "Whoever Paul's been talking to over there," said Perle, "has got the poor man in a state of despair." Richard Burt was harsher: "Nitze's utterly spooked; he's gone around the bend; he's panicking; he's falling apart." To Nitze's face, Burt said, "Relax. The trouble will die down once we get over the hump at the end of the year."

When Nitze sought new negotiating instructions that would permit him to explore compromises other than the zero option, the State Department's Howe turned him down flat. Shortly afterward, Nitze exclaimed to one of Howe's deputies, "Good Lord, man! Don't you know the house is burning down? Do you want to wait until it burns to the ground before you do anything?" Nitze was concerned about what he saw as the steady erosion of the European consensus on the need for deployment, particularly in West Germany.

By February 1983, Burt had been confirmed in his new position as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, and he took command as the principal State Department official overseeing the Geneva talks. That meant waging a two-front battle: against Nitze's advocacy of greater concessions and Perle's championing of the zero option. It also meant accommodating pressure that was building up from across the Atlantic.

British Prime Minister Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, who had replaced Schmidt in October 1982 as West German Chancellor, were Reagan's staunchest allies; then-support for deployment was rock solid. But they both faced elections, and they needed a new, more flexible-looking U.S. proposal to help outflank their political opponents and quiet their domestic constituencies. Kohl's Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Thatcher both asked the U.S. to adopt an "interim solution," in which the Soviets would be allowed to keep a reduced force of SS-20s, while the U.S. would scale back its own deployment accordingly.

Burt developed a plan that would permit 300 warheads on each side: 100 triple-warhead Soviet SS-20s throughout the U.S.S.R. against a mixed force for NATO of 300 Pershing Us and cruise missiles. But National Security Adviser Clark favored "hanging tough on zero," and Weinberger said, "We don't want it to look as though we're letting the West German left push us around."

Nudged by the State Department, Reagan was beginning to reconsider the zero option. In his State of the Union message on Jan. 25, 1983, he had hinted that other approaches were negotiable. In a speech to the American Legion in February, which was drafted largely by the State Department and bitterly opposed by the Pentagon, Reagan outlined the criteria for an agreement other than the zero option. But not until March 30, after Kohl had resoundingly won the elections in West Germany, did Reagan formally embrace the State Department's interim solution.

By summer, however, that was not good enough for the West Germans. They were looking for more than demonstrations of good will and flexibility in Washington. They wanted an agreement in Geneva. The opposition Social Democrats urged resurrecting the walk-in-the-woods scheme. Genscher and Kohl hinted that they too thought the plan was worth one last try.

Sensing an opportunity to exploit intra-alliance tensions, the Soviets sent a number of signals of their own that they might consider the walk-in-the-woods plan if the U.S. put it forward. Even Perle, who had been Nitze's most unrelenting and effective opponent in 1982, strongly suggested to a congressional subcommittee that he might now support walk in the woods if it were made as a final U.S. offer. Weinberger was upset. He had long since become convinced that the U.S. must not, under any circumstances, give up the Pershing II.

The State Department's Burt had dismissed the walk-in-the-woods proposal more than once as a "harebrained scheme." He believed deployment of both cruise and Pershing II missiles must begin before the Soviets would negotiate seriously. He also wanted to see a breakthrough in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), which were being held simultaneously in Geneva with the purpose of reducing intercontinental U.S. and Soviet arsenals, before there was a deal on intermediate-range weapons.

Burt was able to convince Eagleburger and Shultz. In an interview with TIME, Shultz said, "I think the Pershings in some fashion are an essential part of our deployment package because their characteristics are different from the [cruise missiles']."

With both the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State opposed, Nitze stood little chance of getting the President to reconsider. In August, he made one last attempt, calling on Clark. But the National Security Adviser turned him down flat. The President, said Clark, still believed in the "gross disparity in capability" between ballistic and cruise missiles. An agreement that left the Soviets with a monopoly in ballistic missiles would be "a one-sided deal and as such unacceptable."

Burt had been refining the State Department option. The result was similar in many respects to the walk in the woods, with the important exception that the U.S. would retain the right to deploy the Pershing II. Weinberger did not want to budge. "We're doing fine," he said at an NSC meeting in mid-August. "Our position is already a good one. If it's not broken, let's not fix it."

Reagan did not agree. He was by then very conscious that he was engaged in an almost personal contest with Andropov. He did not want to let the Soviet leader, as he said at one point, "outflexible" him. On Aug. 26, Andropov played another card. Not only would the Soviet Union reduce its European SS-20s from 243 to 162 but it would "liquidate" the remaining 81 rather than redeploy them in Asia.

The Soviets, however, were still holding out for zero U.S. missiles. There was also a hidden trick. If the British and French continued with plans to modernize their own nuclear arsenals by adding multiple warheads to their submarine missiles, the Soviets would reserve the right to increase their SS-20 force.

JUST DESSERTS

On Sept. 1, Nitze was due to fly to On Sept. 1, Nitze was due to fly to Santa Barbara and receive new negotiating instructions from Reagan. That was the day the world learned that the Soviets had downed a Korean Air Lines 747 over the Sea of Japan. Soviet-American relations, which had shown some tentative signs of a warming trend, turned frigid. Still, the West Europeans were anxious for movement in Geneva. In a U.N. speech that reiterated U.S. condemnation of the Soviets for shooting down the airliner, Reagan unveiled the new State Department proposal.

Two days later, a statement was released in Moscow under Andro pov's name. It was the most comprehensive, unequivocal denunciation of a U.S. leader in decades. It said in effect that the Kremlin had given up on doing business with the Reagan Administration. It also categorically rejected the new U.S. offer. The statement read: "We are being asked to talk about helping the NATO bloc upset to its advantage the nuclear systems in the European zone." The essence of the Soviet position was still that NATO had no right to carry out its decision of 1979. For all their claims that they were trying to preserve equality, the Soviets were still seeking to protect not just an inequality in their favor but a monopoly in an important category of weapons. NATO had no choice but to press ahead with plans for deployment.

The Soviets then became increasingly explicit about their threat to walk out of the talks the moment the first U.S. missiles were in place--and perhaps before. In late October, Kvitsinsky was dining at Nitze's Geneva apartment along with Norman Clyne, a close aide to Nitze, and his wife Alice. Just as the gateau d 'orange dessert was about to be served, Mrs. Clyne jokingly told Kvitsinsky that he would not get his portion unless he revealed when the long-threatened walkout would take place. Kvitsinsky said he did not want to forgo dessert, and announced that the negotiations would end between Nov. 15 and 22. He missed his deadline by only one day. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.