Kissinger’s man from Moscow

When Anatoly Dobrynin died earlier this month, aged 90, the British press paid little notice. Yet it is increasingly clear that he was one of the most remarkable players in the Cold War — someone who did much to stop the conflict turning hot.

Over 24 years he served as Soviet ambassador to six US Presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan. Perhaps his most telling contribution was his role in the period of détente during the stewardship of Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s all-powerful national security adviser, and later secretary of state.

Dobrynin arrived in Washington just in time to be thrown into the Cuban Missile Crisis. At 42, he was the first Soviet envoy to the US born after the Russian revolution. Son of a plumber, he was the first member of his family to get to university. Trained as an engineer, in 1944 he entered the aircraft industry, working for the celebrated designer Yakovlev.

Although he had not wanted to be transferred to the Foreign Service, once there he discovered that his technical expertise gave him a considerable advantage, not least in his dealings with Kissinger, whose knowledge of missiles was patchy.

From his earliest days in office, in the interests of détente, Kissinger pursued an unusual friendship with the Soviet ambassador. Of all the thousands of original documents, ‘TELCONS’ and ‘MEMCONS’ that I had to study while writing my book, Kissinger’s Year: 1973, nothing surprised me more than the tone of their conversations.

When dealing with the lofty Lord Cromer, the British ambassador to Washington at the time of Edward Heath’s premiership, Kissinger would be formal, cool, and sometimes frosty, notwithstanding the fact that Britain had long been the most reliable ally of the US.

With Dobrynin, by contrast, his conversations sometimes read more like the gossipy chat of two old college roommates than exchanges between representatives of hostile superpowers.

On 25 May 1973, for instance, we find Dobrynin teasing Kissinger for having been seen with a Playboy girl. In riposte, Henry calls Anatoly a ‘dirty old man’. For Kissinger, half the joy of such badinage with ‘Anatoly’ would have been the speed with which the sophisticated Russian picked up on American humour — even if his loyalty to communism was never in doubt. But beneath the surface there was high seriousness.

On 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur war broke out between a coalition of Arab states and Israel. At 6 a.m. that morning Kissinger, asleep in the Waldorf, was taken by surprise by the Arab attack — as were the CIA and the rest of the world. His first reaction was to call not the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, or the Israeli Embassy — but Anatoly Dobrynin.

The Soviet ambassador too was befuddled with sleep, repeating each line of the Secretary of State’s call, until Kissinger exploded with irritation:

K: We are urgently communicating to the Israelis.

D: You?

K: Yes.

D: Communicate to the Israelis?

K: If this keeps up... there is going to be a war before you understand my message.

It was the kind of irritability only acceptable between old established friends. Kissinger’s motives in making communication with Dobrynin his first priority were twofold. He wanted to ascertain whether the Soviets were ‘in the plot’, backing their Arab client-states to attack Israel, and he needed to judge how war in the Middle East might affect the US-Soviet ‘Great Game’ of détente. This was always the top priority of Kissinger’s weltpolitik.

Over the course of many further calls to Dobrynin, Kissinger was able to confirm that the Kremlin was not playing a dirty game, and had not been behind Sadat’s surprise attack. Later he would complain to the Soviet ambassador: ‘Your Arab friends were terribly deceitful.’ Conversely he would frequently refer to America’s Israeli friends as ‘the madmen in the Middle East’.

The trust that Kissinger established with Brezhnev through Dobrynin had never previously exist in US-Soviet relations, and indeed would never again. Quite possibly it averted the threat of full-scale war in the Middle East, with active Russian involvement.

Yet the two buddies could also accuse each other of ‘trickery’. On 20 October 1973 Kissinger flew to Moscow at the urgent personal request of Brezhnev. Dobrynin asked to fly with him. ‘Well,’ returned Kissinger, ‘as long as you sit in the front compartment...’ The clear implication was that Kissinger did not want any backseat driving.

The downside of the ‘Henry-Anatoly’ relation was that it produced somewhat one-sided results. Dobrynin would relay to Moscow with remarkable fidelity the inner workings of the Nixon-Kissinger White House. The Kremlin, however, always distrustful, allowed few of its intentions to be passed back to Kissinger.

Nevertheless, what really mattered in the crisis of 1973 was that Brezhnev had become convinced that the US would not launch a mad surprise attack on the USSR. This was something which his predecessor Khruschev, let alone Stalin, never took for granted.

The crunch came on the night of 24 October 1973. An escalation of Soviet threats made Washington fear that they might be preparing to send in an airborne force to strike in the Middle East. Nixon was ‘off the wall’ — in fact, drunk under the pressures of Watergate. Kissinger and defense secretary Jim Schlesinger took the responsibility of ordering US forces worldwide to go to ‘DEF CON III’, the highest state of readiness outside of actual war. Intended as a warning to Brezhnev, it was a considerable risk to take — the greatest since the Cuban Missiles Crisis of 1962.

Almost immediately, however, Brezhnev backed off. We now know from post-glasnost Russian material that there was an ugly moment when bellicose generals in the Politburo demanded a tough line. Andropov of the KGB urged that the Kremlin should ‘respond to mobilisation by mobilising’. Fortunately for the peace of the world, Brezhnev brought calm and good sense to that critical meeting. He would not react; he would be conciliatory. ‘We should not be provoked by American irresponsibility,’ he concluded. ‘I am not inclined to take measures to make Soviet troops ready for action.’

The Old Bear had spoken; his authority was absolute. I am not a Sovietologist, but I am left wondering whether the reputation of the Old Bear Brezhnev should not be re-examined. Although he has hitherto been condemned as the brute who crushed Dubcek’s Prague Spring in 1968, it was surely good fortune for the world that he, rather than the excitable Khrushchev, was at the helm in 1973, taking heed of what his man in Washington — Kissinger’s friend Anatoly — was telling him.