Oliver's Twist (20 page)

The Soviet Union could not keep pace with this arms race and its economy was quietly stagnating when Mikhail Gorbachev assumed the leadership in 1985. As Trudeau had done years before, Reagan at last recognized that with a fresh generation of leaders at the helm of the USSR, diplomacy might have a role after all. He decided to try for significant arms reduction agreements.

I travelled with the White House press corps to the four historic U.S.-Soviet summit meetings between 1985 and 1988. At the first meeting, in Geneva, Switzerland, Reagan and Gorbachev broke the ice by recalling the cold in Canada. In spite of the chilly morning in the Swiss city, they agreed this was nothing compared with the frigid greetings they experienced on their first visits to Ottawa years before, when Reagan was on the speaking circuit and Gorby was the visiting Soviet agriculture minister. (I was still in the Prairies during his tour of western farms and, like everyone else, was surprised at this Communist's easygoing manner.)

The American intelligence agencies told Reagan, erroneously, that the Soviet economy was strong and sustainable. The foreign policy experts warned that he was being drawn into a trap. But Reagan believed Gorbachev was a departure from previous Soviet dictators, those dull and entrenched apparatchiks who kept dying every time he attempted to schedule a meeting with them. Reagan also believed that the commandstyle economy and incompetent bureaucracy were not delivering the goods to the USSR's citizens or even maintaining its military
strength. He was convinced the structure was crumbling, and he decided to test his theory.

Star Wars was questionable, both technologically and financially, but to match it would break the bank of the Soviet economy. That drew the Soviets into negotiations about arms control with the bottom-line demand that no progress could be made unless Reagan dropped his scheme. By January 1986, in the face of Reagan's stubborn refusal to abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev was begging Reagan to soften his stance. In an open letter to Reagan, Gorbachev promised unprecedented reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal if only Reagan would shut down Star Wars. The pressure on Reagan to do so came to a head at their meeting on a miserable, wet, and cold day in Reykjavik, Iceland, in mid-October 1986.

This was the big league and we all knew the game was down to its final innings. It was breathtaking to realize I was present and reporting on an event that could change the world—literally watching history on the run.

Both countries brought large delegations, but the actual face-to-face meeting took place in a small government building with most of the military and diplomatic experts waiting anxiously in rooms nearby. Those of us in the White House travelling press corps were staying at neighbouring hotels and set up our recording and editing equipment in airport hangars. The Americans had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to floodlight the historic city centre just so their anchors would have an appropriate backdrop.

I had one run-in with Icelandic culture that could have caused me great embarrassment. The local welcoming committee had invited the correspondents to discover the
delights of one of their sauna clubs. Naked as the day of our birth, we sweated through the bathhouse, whipped our backs with birch boughs, and learned that the obligatory next step was a run outdoors and down a wooden boardwalk to a bracing dip in the snow-covered ocean.

A brave reporter headed out the door so I followed but was too far along when I noticed that local news photographers were snapping pictures of the scene. There was no intention to cause us discomfort; they simply wanted to capture their Washington guests enjoying a bit of Icelandic hospitality. Clearly, these Nordic nature lovers did not share our North American horror of public nudity. Next morning the front page of the local daily paper carried a picture of the naked behinds of two reporters dashing from bathhouse to ocean. One of them was mine, and I was thankful the paper had spared readers a frontal view.

Whatever merriment this brought to the delegations, there was serious business going on and anticipation of a historic breakthrough, possibly a pledge to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But the talks foundered on Reagan's insistence that Star Wars testing be allowed to continue. The summit broke up in anger and accusations of bad faith.

For some reason of logistics I flew back to Washington on Air Force Two, normally used by the official delegation of negotiators, senior White House officials, and the American journalists. The mood was grim. It was easy to believe that a singular opportunity had slipped from our grasp and that the world was heading back into the darkest days of the Cold War. One adviser muttered that they had warned the president all along that this was a Soviet set-up. Another described how Reagan was visibly angry when he threw Gorbachev's ultimatum back in his face.
The recriminations included one presidential aide complaining bitterly that Star Wars was a nutty idea that his government should be able to jettison. They could not do so because “the old man” could not face the humiliation of killing it in exchange for Gorbachev's stunning arms reduction offer.

But the voice of one experienced Cold Warrior stood out for me. The Soviet offer had not gone down a black hole, he insisted. Informal talks with his Soviet counterparts had convinced him the country's economy was in dire trouble. It was in their interest to return to the bargaining table.

Just over a year passed before Gorbachev returned. There was no mention of Star Wars in his request for another summit, this one held in early December 1987. Gorby dropped the demand that had been the stopper. Reagan's stubbornness had paid off. Under the terms of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) signed at this meeting, Star Wars was sidestepped and the two men agreed on massive reductions in nuclear weapons. For those who have not lived under the threat of nuclear war, the significance of that deal may be difficult to grasp. The warmth of the personal relationship between the two leaders, with its promise of broader conversations to come, shone rare a light of hope on the world. It led straight to the fall of the Berlin Wall, another unwelcome Cold War relic, and—to Reagan's considerable satisfaction—to the breakup of the Soviet Union once headed by his friend Gorbachev.

In the economic realm, Reagan's record is more controversial. His spending resulted in the largest budgetary deficits in American history up to that time. He cut taxes by an astonishing 30 percent on the promise that the wealth would “trickle down,” a theory that has been largely discredited. The economic
policy was essentially unfair, rewarding the rich at the expense of low-income and particularly black citizens. Strangely, Reagan seemed insensitive to this.

Despite fears he would be a dangerous right-wing zealot, Reagan governed as a moderate conservative. After five disappointing presidencies in a row, he restored the prestige and authority of that enormously important office. He also gave back to Americans their pride and self-respect. Reagan refused to accept the concept of an America in decline, a view widely held by the intellectual class at the time. If he was ever pessimistic, he never showed it through that endlessly cheerful demeanour.

I went to the White House press room to watch Reagan's goodbye speech to the nation in January 1989. The “great communicator” was never better. He told Americans he had only provided the voice for the ideas of a great nation. He stole that line from Winston Churchill, but who knew or cared. His closing lines were perfect. “We made a difference … All in all, not bad, not bad at all.” It was corny, certainly, but then so was he.

6

THE
VULTURE
BRIGADES

The life of the war correspondent is a disorienting, gypsy existence. A strange exhilaration takes hold, a fascination with the morbid. Life on the road seems more real than life back home. Situations that should be frightening become routine, leading to the easy embrace of ever-greater risks. Confusion and chaos are eagerly anticipated aspects of the job. Then one morning, if you are lucky, you wake up with the certain, sickly knowledge that if you keep pursuing death, it will catch you.

My foreign adventures were the dirty conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the tidy and relatively uneventful U.S. invasion of Panama, and a generally benign tour of duty in Argentina, where the greatest threat most of us faced was a bad bottle of Chilean wine. To report from Washington in those years was to report from these Central and South American hot spots, all targets of the Reagan administration's aggressive attention. I became a part-time member of the international vulture brigades, that club of broadcast and newspaper correspondents who specialize in wars and revolutions.

These men and women are a breed apart. Many have been
killed or seriously injured, and among those who do survive, marriages seldom last. It is a business for the young, kids fresh out of journalism school who pick up a videocam and set out to make their reputations. But so too are there greybeards, reporters and cameramen who have become hooked on the action. I have seen war photographers, in particular, perform courageous acts to get their footage, and then drink the night away. The fearless BBC correspondent Martin Bell was proud of telling me he had covered twelve wars without a scratch. Eventually he too was wounded—in Bosnia.

The brush wars in Central America were particularly risky for reporters because we operated on our own. We did not travel under the protection of large armies. There were no medics or field hospitals to minister to our occasional wounded. Nor were there any “friendlies.” Government troops and rebel fighters alike abhorred reporters for separate but equally malicious reasons.

I owed my war experience in El Salvador to the Reagan administration's knee-jerk anti-Communism, an ideology that cost the lives of thousands in that country. Most victims were peasants, some were aid workers, and a few were priests dedicated to the tenets of liberation theology. Though officially denounced by the Vatican, this theology provided a moral rationale for Catholic priests and laymen to support the revolutionary struggle in the name of social justice.

In America, it was necessary only to brand such reformers as Communists to justify the corruption and human rights abuses of the U.S.-backed military regime or the actions of landowners who killed peasant farmers rather than accept change. The assassination squads of the Salvadoran security forces were free to do their work without interference, and the leftist guerrillas
retaliated in kind; neither side gave any quarter in that butcher shop of a civil war.

In early 1980, the activist Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, Óscar Romero, was murdered on the steps of his cathedral. Shortly after, an American lay missionary and three Catholic nuns were likewise shot to death. The United States' position became crystal clear when Secretary of State Al Haig declared that the nuns were trying to organize farm workers and were caught in the crossfire with the military. His suggestion that they may have been engaged in a firefight with the Salvadoran army indicated how far the administration was prepared to bend the truth in order to defend its policies. In fact, the nuns and the archbishop were early victims of El Salvador's military death squads.

In one of his frequent efforts to wax Churchillian, Haig had also pronounced, “the final battle for Latin America is taking place in El Salvador.” American intelligence officers whispered the party line in the ears of reporters. The Communists were no longer content with Cuba, we were told; first they would seize Central America, then Mexico. The administration was still retailing a shopworn domino theory. In their minds, El Salvador was another Vietnam, a test of American mettle that this time would not be lost to the Communists. The lessons of southeast Asia seemed to have been forgotten, and right on cue, a new generation of military advisers and mercenaries, official observers and covert spies, misguided lefties and well-meaning aid workers all headed south to witness the cataclysm. The reporters, photographers, and television crews were not far behind. True to form, Don Cameron intended to expose his viewers to the horror of war up close. He dismissed coverage
of boring diplomatic manoeuvres and demanded front-line “bang-bang.”

Such were our producers' orders when the CTV crew from Washington, equipped with bulletproof vests purchased from a Virginia arms dealer, landed at the airport in the capital city of San Salvador. The vests captured the attention of troops at the terminal, which was literally an armed camp. We were directed to a nearby police station, a steel wire–reinforced bunker about ten minutes' walk from the terminal building, to obtain the necessary photo identification and hand over our passports.

As we arrived, members of the notorious Treasury Police, distinctive in their shiny helmets, were leading out two men, perspiring and white-faced. The prisoners had their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire. While we were negotiating with the sergeant, two shots rang out, followed a few seconds later by two more reports. That told us the nature of the country we were entering: In the right circumstances, any policeman or soldier had the power of life and death over others. This rattled me somewhat, but the sergeant didn't even pause mid-sentence. Wired thumbs were favourite signatures of the Treasury Police; we were to see them on many corpses in the years ahead.