Berlin 1961 (29 page)

President Kennedy had approved of his brother’s initial meeting with Bolshakov without consulting or advising any of his chief foreign policy advisers or Soviet experts. That reflected the Kennedys’ increased distrust of his intelligence and military apparatus following the Bay of Pigs, their penchant for clandestine activities, and their desire to put the pieces in place as carefully as possible for a smooth summit meeting.

For Khrushchev, however, Bolshakov was more of a useful pawn than a significant player. On a complex chessboard, Khrushchev could deploy Bolshakov to draw out Kennedy without revealing his own game. From the beginning, the structure of the exchange provided the Soviet leader with an advantage. President Kennedy could learn from Bolshakov only what Khrushchev and other superiors had provided him to transmit, while Bolshakov could extract much more from Bobby Kennedy, who so intimately knew the president and his thinking.

Bolshakov was just one of two channels Khrushchev was working to reach Kennedy in early May, and while top Soviet officials engaged in both to their maximum benefit, their U.S. counterparts knew only about the formal contact made five days earlier. It was then that Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had telephoned Ambassador Thompson with Khrushchev’s belated response to Kennedy’s letter of two months earlier, inviting the Soviet leader to a summit meeting.

Gromyko had apologized to Thompson that Khrushchev himself could not personally transmit his interest. The Soviet leader was leaving Moscow for yet another trip to the provinces to put the pieces in place for his October Party Congress, and he would not return until May 20. But speaking on Khrushchev’s behalf, Gromyko said the Soviet leader “deplored the fact that discord” had grown between the two countries over the Bay of Pigs and Laos.

Reading carefully scripted language, Gromyko said, “If the Soviet Union and the U.S. do not consider that there is an unbridgeable gulf between them, they should draw the appropriate conclusions from this, namely that we live on one planet and therefore ways should be found to settle appropriate questions and build up our relations.” Motivated by that end, Gromyko said Khrushchev was now ready to accept Kennedy’s invitation to meet, and believed “bridges have to be built which would link our countries.”

What Gromyko wanted to know from Thompson was whether the Kennedy invitation “remains valid or is being revised” after the Bay of Pigs. Though Gromyko had posed the question politely, its underlying message was an impertinent one. He was asking whether Kennedy still dared meet with Khrushchev after having so badly shot himself in the foot in Cuba.

With that, Khrushchev’s approach to President Kennedy had entered its third stage. The first had been Khrushchev’s initial flurry of efforts to meet Kennedy directly after the U.S. election and during his first days in office. The second had been Khrushchev’s withdrawal of interest following the new president’s hawkish State of the Union message. Now Khrushchev was again eager to meet and press his perceived advantage over a now weakened opponent.

Thompson put down the phone and prepared a cable. He immediately concluded that if the president wished to reverse a perilous worsening of relations, the dangers of agreeing to such a meeting were far outweighed by its necessity. Thompson followed his 4:00 p.m. secret telegram reporting on his conversation with Gromyko with a similarly classified message to Secretary Rusk that urged the president to grasp Khrushchev’s extended hand. Critics would argue that Kennedy was walking like wounded prey into a bear trap, but Thompson suggested Kennedy reveal publicly that he had issued the invitation to Khrushchev long before the Bay of Pigs, and that the Soviet leader was only now responding.

Thompson then laid out his arguments in favor of the meeting:

• The very prospect of such a summit would prompt the Soviets to take a “more reasonable approach” to issues such as Laos, nuclear testing, and disarmament.
  
• A face-to-face meeting would be the best place for Kennedy to influence crucial decisions of the October Party Congress that could set the stage for the superpower relationship for years to come.
  
• Because Mao Tse-tung opposed such U.S.–Soviet consultations, Thompson suggested the “mere fact of meeting will exacerbate Soviet–Chinese relations.”
  
• Finally, showing the world a willingness to talk directly to Khrushchev would influence public opinion in a way that would make it easier for Kennedy to maintain a strong U.S. position in favor of defending West Berlin’s freedoms.
  

Despite the negative turn in relations with Moscow, Thompson also argued that Khrushchev had not fundamentally altered his desire to do business with the West, nor had he abandoned his foreign policy doctrine of peaceful coexistence. Thompson often worried about being labeled by his Washington critics as a Khrushchev apologist, but he nevertheless argued that the Soviet leader had not initiated confrontation with the West in the Third World but had merely taken advantage of U.S. setbacks in Cuba, Laos, Iraq, and the Congo.

However, too much was at stake for Kennedy to agree to such a summit without preconditions that would more thoroughly test Soviet intentions—and avoid further foreign policy mistakes. Through diplomatic probes, Kennedy wanted to determine whether Khrushchev genuinely wished to improve relations.

After a day of reflection, Kennedy responded cautiously to Thompson through Rusk. Rusk wanted the ambassador to tell Khrushchev that the president “remains desirous” to meet the Soviet leader and hoped they could still do so by early June in Vienna—the Soviets’ preferred location. Kennedy regretted, however, that he couldn’t yet make a firm decision but would do so before Khrushchev returned to Moscow on May 20.

What followed were the conditions.

Most important, Rusk cabled that Thompson should relay to Khrushchev that the chances for such a summit weren’t good if the Soviets didn’t change their approach to the ongoing conflict in Laos. The Geneva talks were beginning the following week, and Kennedy wanted to end the war and achieve a neutral Laos. But the Soviets had been stalling in Geneva while fighting escalated.

Special envoy Averell Harriman, who was leading the U.S. delegation in Geneva, had reported to Kennedy that he doubted Khrushchev was ready to accept a neutral Laos because the “commies in Geneva are full of confidence and appear utterly relaxed about achieving their goals in Laos.” The Soviets, Harriman said, were maneuvering to put the U.S. in the unacceptable position of having to attend the conference before they had an effective ceasefire, hardly the actions of a country that would engage usefully in a summit meeting.

Beyond that, Rusk told Thompson that “for domestic political reasons,” the president wanted Khrushchev to provide some prospect that he would work toward Kennedy’s goal of achieving a nuclear test ban agreement during their Vienna talks. Furthermore, the president wanted assurance that any public statement in Vienna would exclude reference to Berlin, a matter he was unprepared to negotiate.

Three days later, President Kennedy was test-driving the same message via his brother as RFK sat in his undershirt with Bolshakov at the Justice Department.

It suited Bolshakov fine that Bobby had picked May 9—a national holiday in Moscow—for their first, furtive meeting. Though it was just another workday in Washington, the Soviet embassy’s staff had the day off to celebrate the sixteenth anniversary of the Nazi defeat. That served Bolshakov’s purpose of concealing even from his closest comrades the ultrasecret conduit to President Kennedy that he had established.

In going forward with the contact, Bolshakov had disregarded the opposition of his nearest superior, the station chief, or
rezident
, at the embassy for Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. For Bolshakov’s boss, it was unthinkable that a mid-level Soviet agent would establish the most important U.S.–Soviet intelligence back channel imaginable. In meeting with Robert Kennedy, Bolshakov was connecting with a man who was at the same time the president’s brother, his closest confidant, and his attorney general, thus overseeing all the counterintelligence activities of the FBI.

What gave Bolshakov the confidence to nevertheless pursue such a high-level mission was the sanction of the Soviet leader himself through Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, editor of the newspaper
Izvestia
and Bolshakov’s friend. Adzhubei had recommended Bolshakov to Khrushchev as someone who could help counsel him when he was planning his first trip to the U.S. in 1959. (Until shortly before then, Bolshakov had loyally served Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the decorated war hero and defense minister whom Khrushchev had purged.)

What followed was Bolshakov’s new posting to the U.S. under the cover of embassy information officer and editor of the English-language Soviet propaganda magazine
USSR
. It would be Bolshakov’s second tour in Washington, the first having come under cover as correspondent for the news agency TASS from 1951 to 1955.

For a cloak-and-dagger operative, Bolshakov had an unusually high profile as Washington society’s favorite Soviet. He was a gregarious, hard-drinking bon vivant with wisps of black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a central-casting Russian accent. His friends and acquaintances included a number of Kennedy circle insiders:
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee; reporter Charles Bartlett, who had introduced the president to his wife, Jacqueline; the president’s chief of staff, Kenny O’Donnell; his special counsel, Ted Sorensen; and his press secretary, Pierre Salinger.

However, Bolshakov’s most important link to Kennedy had been Frank Holeman, a Washington journalist who had been close to Nixon and was now trying to ingratiate himself with the Kennedy administration. With his six-foot-eight frame, Southern accent and manners, deep voice, and ever-present bow tie and cigar, he was known by colleagues as “the Colonel.” Though only forty years old, Holeman was a Washington fixture, having covered presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and now Kennedy. He knew Washington was all about contacts, and he had them everywhere.

Bolshakov had worked Holeman as an unpaid informant from the time they had met at a 1951 Soviet embassy lunch in the American correspondent’s honor. Holeman had endeared himself to the Kremlin by blocking a National Press Club effort to ban Soviet journalists from membership in response to the Czech government’s jailing of the entire Associated Press bureau in Prague. Explaining why he had done so, Holeman joked that the club should be a place where all parties could “swap lies.” He then went even further on behalf of the Soviets, landing club membership for a new Soviet press officer, an individual likely to be a spy.

When Bolshakov returned to Moscow in 1955, he handed off the Holeman contact to his GRU successor, Yuri Gvozdev, whose cover was as a cultural attaché. Gvozdev had passed through Holeman, who described himself as the Soviets’ “carrier pigeon,” a crucial message that the Eisenhower administration should not overreact to Khrushchev’s November 1958 Berlin ultimatum because Khrushchev would never go to war over Berlin. Working through Holeman, Gvozdev also helped lay the groundwork for Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union thereafter, handling negotiations over the conditions.

When Bolshakov replaced Gvozdev in 1959, he reacquainted himself with Holeman and the two struck up such a close friendship that their families often got together socially. As fortune would have it, Holeman had been close for some years to the new attorney general’s press secretary, Ed Guthman, to whom he had been passing on the most interesting aspects of his conversations with Bolshakov. Guthman in turn had reported the gist of those talks to Robert Kennedy. With Guthman’s blessing, Holeman on April 29 first floated the possibility of a meeting when he asked Bolshakov, “Don’t you think it would be better to meet directly with Robert Kennedy so that he receives your information at first hand?”

Ten days and countless conversations later, Bolshakov sensed something important was up when Holeman asked if he would join him for a “late lunch” at about four p.m.

“Why so late?” Bolshakov asked.

Holeman explained he had tried to reach Bolshakov several times over the course of the day but that the holiday duty officer had told him Bolshakov was at the printing office, finishing the new edition of his magazine.

A short time later, after they had settled into the chairs in the corner of a cozy, inconspicuous Georgetown restaurant, Holeman looked at his watch. When Bolshakov asked whether it was time for him to go home, Holeman said, “No, it’s our time to go. You have an appointment with Robert Kennedy at six.”

“Damn it,” said Bolshakov, looking at his old suit and frayed shirt cuffs. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Are you afraid?” asked Holeman.

“Not afraid, but I’m not ready for such a meeting.”

“You are always ready.” Holeman smiled.

At the Justice Department, Bobby told the Soviet his brother worried that tension between the two countries was caused in large degree by misunderstanding and misinterpretation of each other’s intentions and actions. Through the Bay of Pigs experience, Bobby said, his brother had learned about the dangers of taking action based on bad information. He told Bolshakov that his brother had made a mistake after the Bay of Pigs in failing to immediately fire the senior officials responsible for the operation.

“The American government and the President,” said Bobby, “are concerned that the Soviet leadership underestimates the capabilities of the U.S. government and those of the President himself.” The message he wanted Bolshakov to relay to the Kremlin could not have been clearer: If Khrushchev tried to test his brother’s resolve, the president would have no choice but to “take corrective action” and introduce a tougher approach toward Moscow.

He told Bolshakov, “At present, our principal concern is the situation in Berlin. The importance of this issue may not be evident to everybody. The President thinks that further misunderstanding of our opinions on Berlin could lead to a war.” Yet, he added, it was precisely because of the complications of the Berlin situation that the president didn’t want the Vienna meeting to focus on a matter where it would be so difficult to achieve progress.