Soviet Smoke Signals
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Soviet Smoke Signals As the May 30-June 3 summit meeting between Presidents George Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev approached, it seemed that the...
...Party Chief and Prime Minister Nikita S. Khrushchev had insisted on the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey as a condition for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba...
...So had Secretary of State James A. Baker III when Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze visited Washington a few days earlier...
...President Bush received word of the ultimatum in anews agency report handed to him in Bermuda on his way to a press conference with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and he was clearly surprised and distressed...
...The pattern was repeated during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962...
...On inquiry, the Soviet government advised the United States government that the omission "was not accidental...
...Indeed, I was witness to what appeared to be a footnote to Soviet vacillation...
...That's about as bold as this Administration gets to be...
...So the end game might be dragged out, as President Bush had reason to recall...
...like the controversy over "Who lost China...
...In one letter to President Kennedy, however, Khrushchev demanded that the United States promise not to invade Cuba and omitted any reference to Turkey...
...WhileLithuania's President Vytautas Landsbergis cried "Munich," referring to the sellout of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938, President Bush cried "Budapest," referring to the abandonment of Hungary to Soviet tanks in 1956 after they had been encouraged to fight for their freedom...
...is generally unsatisfactory...
...The following January, responding to written questions from Kingsbury Smith of Hearst's International News Service, Stalin listed various complaints about the West but did not mention the currency problem...
...That was not to be...
...At first the White House said the Administration had no advance knowledge and was not a participant in the Franco-German initiative...
...Bringing to bear the prestige of Western Europe's two principal powers, the French and German leaders, having consulted with the Soviet government, offered the beleaguered Lithuanian independence forces an elegant opening for retreat...
...On April 13 Gorbachev sent an ultimatum to the Lithuanian government...
...There was also the fact that he had a heavy investment in the survival of Gorbachev, something President Dwight D. Eisenhower had never made in Khrushchev...
...Two weeks earlier, "suspension" was what a Soviet diplomat had alerted me to watch for as the basis for a compromise...
...One could imagine, as another analogy, the President fearing that he might be the target of some future debate over "Who lost Russia...
...The end game there may have started with the recent release of two of eight American captives...
...But the hostages continue to be seen as assets by the shadowy Lebanese groups holding them, if only for insurance against being hunted down or attacked...
...That, clearly, was out of fear of being accused of complicity in frustrating Lithuanian independence...
...He asserted that Lithuania had to return to the position of March 10, but did not explicitly say that the March 11 declaration of independence had to be repealed...
...The day before a delegation headed by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell of Maine had met with Gorbachev in the Kremlin and received a more conciliatory impression...
...He pronounced himself "deeply disturbed" and said his patience was not unlimited, yet obviously was reluctant to apply sanctions that might endanger the summit...
...Where was the United States...
...At one point he suggested he might postpone trade talks with the Soviet Union as a form of mild reproach, but in the end abandoned even that tap on the wrist...
...I am old enough to remember Hungary in 1956," said Bush, who was 32 and a Texas oil company executive at the time...
...What that meant was not immediately clear...
...Nine Republican Senators had by now criticized Administration timidity—the worst breach so far between Bush and Capitol Hill Republicans—and there were rumblings of further negative expressions from Congress...
...It appears that the closer one comes to the end of this grisly game, the greater the strain is likely to be...
...Then, in what may well be the prototype for the way things will work in an integrated Europe, French President François Mitterrand and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl took the initiative of proposing a suspension of Lithuania's drive for sovereignty pending negotiations...
...The Kennedy Administration seized upon that opening to start negotiating the resolution of the crisis...
...On the sidelines, praying...
...In a world where Communism is collapsing, a warravaged Iran seems ready, and Syria eager, for an accommodation with what may be the only remaining real superpower...
...A similar situation developed in the case of Lithuania...
...In March, the United States was advised in Damascus that Syria and Iran were trying to close the book on the hostage crisis by getting all who were still being held released together...
...But, looking back, it appears that the first signal of compromise came in one of those dog-that-didn't-bark omissions which sometimes make history...
...The hostages are thus no longer viewed as assets by these two countries...
...The next day a denial was issued, although not by Gorbachev...
...A few hours later the cuts in oil and gas for Lithuania started, and Matyash told me that he was not in a position to discuss the sudden change in Moscow's behavior...
...As the pressure on Lithuania escalated, so did the problem facing President Bush...
...McFarlane's mistake, said Nir, was insisting on the release of all four American hostages then being held, because the kidnappers would always want to hold on to a few as bargaining chips...
...Footnote to Vacillation One could only speculate, as the economic sanctions began to be applied, whether Gorbachev was having difficulty navigating between a desire for conciliation and the demands of Russian nationalists and the military command...
...A Wall Street Journal I NBC poll reported that Americans, by 61 to 23 per cent, thought it more important to maintain friendly ties with Gorbachev than to support Lithuanian independence...
...Nevertheless, it is one reason why the Bush Administration had what the New York Times called "a case of the mumbles" over Lithuania...
...There was as yet no great pressure from Congress or the public to go to the rescue of Lithuania...
...He demanded the repeal of three laws concerning identity cards, military conscription and the seizure of Communist Party property, threatening otherwise to cut off energy and other supplies...
...Policy-making by historical analogy—"No more Munichs...
...On a visit to Jerusalem as Vice President in July 1986, he was briefed by Israeli negotiator Amiram Nir on the failure of the Robert McFarlane mission to Teheran...
...Bush seemed to be on safe ground domestically, though...
...When the European move appeared to be well received by the Lithuanians, the White House said the President had been in close touch with Mitterrand and Kohl all along...
...They noted that the Baltic state had not been asked to revoke its declaration of independence...
...At a reception of April 17 given by Public Television to launch the documentary series Inside Gorbachev's Russia with Hedrick Smith, the Washington bureau chief of the USSR's official Tass News agency, Vladimir Matyash, approached CIA Director William Webster in my presence to advise him that the report earlier that day of acut-off of gas supplies for Lithuania was incorrect and would be denied the next day by Gorbachev...
...No more Bays of Pigs...
...At a news conference on April 24, the President talked about " some elements opposing Gorbachev" who might set the clock back to Cold War confrontation...
...Within weeks the end of the blockade was negotiated...
...Anyone who has worked in Moscow and studied Soviet ways of communicating coming policy shifts is sensitive to possibly significant deletions...
...Hostaqe End Game Consider the six-year-old Lebanese hostage crisis (how can there be a sixyear crisis...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Soviet Smoke Signals As the May 30-June 3 summit meeting between Presidents George Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev approached, it seemed that the Lithuanian crisis would be defused, if not resolved...
...This was far from a foregone conclusion when the confrontation started with the impetuous independence declaration of the newly-elected Lithuanian Parliament last March 11, in the naïve belief that a fait accompli could be created before Gorbachev assumed his authoritarian powers...
...in the 1950s...
...No more Vietnams...
...But, with Bush's luck, who needs boldness...
...Involved in the President's restraint was his reading of history...
...Investing in Gorbachev Bush's explanation that he didn't want to invoke sanctions that might egg Lithuania on to futile resistance was, at best, incomplete...
...In 1948, Stalin blockaded West Berlin in reprisal for the introduction of a new currency in the Western occupation zones of Germany, and he repeatedly insisted that abolishing the Deutsche Mark was a condition for ending the blockade...
...Matyash, complaining about my reporting what he considered an off-the-record conversation, said, "All's well thatends well...
Vol. 73 • April 1990 • No. 7
