The Last Empire (14 page)

The president was gathering his thoughts about a day that he called historic in his diary. In faraway Moscow, that day had seen the declaration of a state of emergency by Gorbachev's former allies, his ousting from power on grounds of alleged poor health, and the appearance of tanks in the streets. Bush had not expected any such turn of events after his return from Moscow a few weeks earlier. He had spent the previous night at his family estate, Walker's Point, in Kennebunkport, Maine, with only one major item on his agenda:
at 6:30 a.m., before Hurricane Bob hit the coast, he was planning to play eighteen holes of golf with Brent Scowcroft, who was staying at the Nonantum Hotel in Kennebunkport, and Roger Clemens, a celebrated pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. A few minutes after retiring, Bush was awakened by a telephone call from Scowcroft. The national security adviser was not calling about the golf game or the weather that threatened to derail it. As had been the case the previous summer, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the news had to do with international politics and threatened to kill not just the game but the whole vacation: there had been a coup in Moscow.

Half an hour earlier Scowcroft had been lying peacefully in bed reading cables. The television set was tuned to the twenty-four-hour CNN news channel, and he heard the announcer say something about Gorbachev resigning for health reasons. It did not sound right: only a few weeks earlier Scowcroft had seen Gorbachev, apparently in excellent health, and he now began to listen more carefully. The next announcement from Moscow left no further doubt: the Soviet information agency, TASS, reported on Gorbachev's illness and the creation of a committee to deal with a state of emergency. Those in charge of the committee—a group of hard-liners led by Vice President Gennadii Yanaev—included the heads of the KGB and the military, Vladimir Kriuchkov and Marshal Dmitrii Yazov. All of them had been guests at Bush's reception in Moscow a few weeks earlier. Scowcroft called his deputy, Robert Gates, asking him to check the news with the CIA. He then summoned the deputy press secretary, Roman Popadiuk, who was staying in the same hotel, to draft a statement in case the report was not a hoax.

Scowcroft then called the president and told him what he knew. For the time being there was no independent confirmation from any government channel, including the CIA. “My God!” was Bush's first reaction. They discussed how to react: journalists were already knocking on the door of Popadiuk's hotel room. “The president's inclination was to condemn it outright, but if it turned out to be successful, we would be forced to live with the new leaders, however repulsive their behavior,” wrote Scowcroft later. “We decided he should be condemnatory without irrevocably burning his bridges.” Scowcroft was anything but optimistic: with so many powerful figures behind the reported coup, it would probably succeed. “Extra-constitutional”
was the term Scowcroft suggested that the president use in any public reference to the coup. Before Bush made an attempt to go back to sleep, they agreed that Scowcroft would monitor the situation throughout the night and call him at 5:30 a.m. Popadiuk issued a brief statement to the press, admitting that the administration had no independent confirmation of what was going on in Moscow. He told Scowcroft that in the morning the president would have to speak to the press, and he could not comment on the coup from a golf course. “It might be raining in the morning anyway,” responded Scowcroft. The game was definitely off.
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The morning brought little clarity, except that there was no doubt the coup had indeed taken place. What had happened to Gorbachev? What could now be expected? What was the plotters' agenda, and what did the coup mean for the future of Soviet-American relations and of the USSR itself? Everyone knew that the impact of such an event would be enormous, but no one could tell exactly what it would be.

As usual, the CIA covered all possible options. Its analysts suggested a 10 percent chance of a return to the pre-perestroika regime, a 45 percent chance of a stalemate between hard-liners and democrats, and a 45 percent chance that the coup would fail. The CIA was more skeptical than Scowcroft about the plotters' chances of success, partly because its people failed to detect any major preparations: the coup had been organized at the last moment and could not have been prepared very well. Still, it was anyone's guess how things would go. Bush spoke with Prime Minister John Major of Britain and President François Mitterrand of France. Like the American president, they had been taken completely by surprise. Bush told Mitterrand that Gorbachev too had been caught unawares. That was the line given him by Scowcroft earlier in the morning. “If they don't know, how the hell could we know?” dictated the president into his tape recorder that day. Still, it looked bad: not only had the CIA missed signs of the coming coup, but it had left the president and his national security adviser to learn the news from CNN. “The press is saying it was an intelligence failure,” said Bush to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada later that morning.
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The State Department was unprepared as well. James Baker, on vacation in Wyoming, learned of the coup from the department's Operations Center one hour after Scowcroft heard of it on television.
As he received information from Washington and advice from his assistants, themselves on vacation and scattered all over the world, Baker made notes in his hunter's notebook. Its small pages were marked at the top with an observation appropriate for a vacation but hardly for international crisis management: “Hunter will do anything for a buck $.” The first notes read, “No leverage. Certainly minimal”; “Will be hard to do business w/new guys for a while”; “Emphasize the lack of their political legitimacy.” After that, there appeared to be some hope that the situation could be reversed. “Yeltsin is key guy,” read one of the notes. “Should stay in touch with him. Portray us trying to get info. Touch base w/reformer.”

The American embassy in Moscow was in the middle of a transition: Jack Matlock had already left, and his replacement, Robert S. Strauss, had not yet been sworn in. A Texan with close links to Bush and no knowledge of Russian or diplomatic experience of any kind, Strauss was supposed to act as the president's direct liaison with Gorbachev. Now it appeared that Gorbachev had been taken out of the picture before Strauss even entered the scene. Bush called the US chargé d'affaires, Jim Collins, who had already gone next door to the Russian parliament building, known in Moscow as the White House. He told the president that the building was open but there was no sign of Boris Yeltsin, who had opposed the coup. The Americans in Moscow were in no danger, reported the chargé d'affaires.

That was the only positive news Bush could give journalists crammed into a small room of the presidential compound, where they took shelter from the rain brought by Hurricane Bob. Bush expressed deep concern about the events in Moscow. He assured the reporters that the US government was carefully following the situation, but it was too early to say how things would develop. Answering a question, he noted that coups could fail: “They can take over at first, and then they run up against the will of the people.” Following Scowcroft's advice, the president characterized the coup as “extra-constitutional” rather than unconstitutional. Bush's praise for Gorbachev and his accomplishments sounded like an elegy. He admitted that he had not tried to reach Gorbachev by phone. His main concern was whether the plotters would continue the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe begun by Gorbachev and honor START and other agreements on the control of nuclear arms. He said that US aid would
be suspended as long as “extra-constitutional” rule continued, but there would be no further sanctions unless the new leaders departed from their commitments to other countries.

Still, Bush was reluctant to burn his bridges with the coup leaders. The president found some good words to say about Vice President Yanaev and declined to support Yeltsin's call for a general strike, despite a direct question from a journalist. Privately, Bush refused to believe that Yanaev was actually in charge of the coup. That was an impression he shared with Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany. Bush liked the Soviet vice president, whom he had met on his recent trip to Moscow and Kyiv. After coming back to Washington and learning that Yanaev was a fisherman, the president had sent him some fishing lures from his own supply. He did not know whether they had reached the purported leader of the plot. At the press conference, Bush shared his “gut feeling” that Yanaev was committed to reform but admitted that his actions pointed to the contrary. Bush noted, however—correctly, as it turned out—that it was not Yanaev but the KGB and army hard-liners who were calling the shots in the coup.
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The press conference was anything but a success, as Scowcroft immediately told the president. The reporters had been taken aback by the coolness of Bush's reaction and compared it to his response to the Tiananmen Square massacre by the communist government of China more than two years earlier. To control the damage, Bush decided, on Scowcroft's advice, to interrupt his vacation. He would leave Maine in front of television cameras and head for Washington to manifest his leadership and direct involvement in dealing with the international crisis. The image would change, but not the substance of the president's response. The most important thing on the minds of administration officials that day was to look tough in front of the television cameras without provoking the coup leaders into abandoning international agreements signed by Gorbachev. Helmut Kohl told Bush that he was worried about whether the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Germany would continue. So did the East European leaders, who still had Soviet troops on their territories. The United States and its allies had managed to get much of what they wanted from Gorbachev, but would his successors continue to observe those arrangements?
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The American leaders had long been aware that the Soviet Union's policy of cooperation with the West might be short-lived, and Washington had planned accordingly. In January 1991, after hearing a CIA report on the latest developments in the Soviet Union, Secretary of State James Baker commented to his staff, “What you are telling us, fellas, is that the stock market is heading south. We need to sell.” Baker meant locking in the gains of the unprecedented bull market in US-Soviet relations. In his memoirs he wrote, “‘Selling' meant trying to get as much as we could out of the Soviets before there was an even greater turn to the right or shift into disintegration.” This policy continued into the spring and summer of 1991. Robert Gates wrote in his memoirs that in the months leading up to the coup the administration was following the approach summarized by Brent Scowcroft at a national security briefing for the president on May 31, 1991: “Our goal is to keep Gorby in power for as long as possible, while doing what we can to help head him in the right direction—and doing what is best for us in foreign policy.”

Now that Gorbachev was out of power, the task was not to forfeit what had been achieved during his tenure. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had led to the reunification of the two German states and symbolized the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Could the old walls dividing East and West be rebuilt by the new leaders in the Kremlin? No one knew. On August 19, 1991, the same day George Bush dictated his warm and compassionate virtual letter to Gorbachev, he also dictated the following into his tape recorder: “I think what we must do is see that the progress made under Gorbachev is not turned around. I'm talking about Eastern Europe, I'm talking about the reunification of Germany, I'm talking about getting the troops out of the pact countries, and the Warsaw Pact itself staying out of business. [[Soviet]] cooperation in the Middle East is vital of course, and we may not get it now, who knows?”
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Judging by his audio diary, Bush was struggling to reconcile the policies he felt he had to conduct in the interests of his country with the personal attachment he clearly felt for Gorbachev. In his thoughts, the president went back in time, trying to establish whether he or his administration could have done anything more to support Gorbachev and help him avoid the coup. Eventually he succeeded in convincing himself that nothing could have been done differently or better. In
his diary that day, Bush was eager to answer critics who claimed that he had been too supportive of Gorbachev. He saw the coup as a vindication of his earlier policies vis-à-vis the Soviet center and the republics—represented by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. “If we had pulled the rug out from under Gorbachev and swung towards Yeltsin you'd have seen a military crackdown far in excess of the ugliness that's taking place now,” wrote Bush in his diary.

A more difficult question to answer was whether the United States and its allies had done enough to support Gorbachev in London in July when he had asked for money. That question was raised by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada in a telephone conversation with Bush after the press conference. He reminded Bush of the question he had asked Helmut Kohl in London: “If a month from now, Gorbachev is overthrown and people are complaining that we haven't done enough, is what we're proposing the kind of thing we should do?” Kohl, who owed Gorbachev a debt for his role in the reunification of Germany and was the strongest advocate of granting the Soviet Union as many credits as possible, allegedly said, “Absolutely.” Both Bush and Mulroney knew that Kohl's position at the G-7 meeting in London had been much more supportive of Gorbachev than their own, but afterward they took comfort in Kohl's change of heart as he indicated that Germany would go along with the United States and the rest of the G-7 in offering Gorbachev encouragement but little money. “Any doubt in your mind that he was overthrown because he was too close to us?” asked Mulroney. “I don't think there is any doubt,” answered the president.
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