In My Time - Dick Cheney [122]
I got on a conference call with General Powell, Admiral Mike McConnell, and Lieutenant Colonel John Barry, my junior military assistant. Powell reported on a meeting at the White House that had just wrapped up. He said that the president had been on the phone to world leaders, and although everyone was very concerned, it was clear we shouldn’t rule Gorbachev out quite yet. Intelligence reports were indicating that this was not a completed coup. There were military units milling around in Moscow, but they didn’t seem to have their act together.
One of the key questions we focused on in the first hours after we learned about the potential coup was the location of the Soviet equivalent of the nuclear “football”—the briefcase that contained the launch codes for the Soviet nuclear arsenal. With Gorbachev apparently in his dacha in the Crimea and the Soviet Minister of Defense Yazov and Marshal Akhromeyev among the coup plotters, it was not at all clear who was in control of the nuclear weapons.
McConnell reported that only three divisions were supporting the coup, and they were all within thirty miles of Moscow. The coup leaders were facing a tough choice, he said: either give up the effort or use force to try to bring it about. Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president of Russia, was standing up to the coup plotters and calling for popular resistance, McConnell said, and every hour that he stayed free was further indication that the coup plotters were not in control.
I had met Yeltsin on a few occasions, and he’d visited me in my office in the Pentagon in June 1991. By that time he had already left the Communist Party, but it was still startling to hear him declare, as he did in my office, that increasing the Soviet defense budget would be a “crime against the Russian people, who have suffered enough under seventy years of communism.” I was intrigued by his emergence and by his political success at getting himself elected president of Russia in 1991.
I talked to Brent Scowcroft after I had hung up with Powell and McConnell, and we agreed that this was potentially an extremely serious event. If the coup succeeded, all our assumptions about reform in the Soviet Union and its impact on our national security planning would be upended. By now we knew that the coup plotters included some key members of the Soviet military command structure. I thought through a list of questions we needed to consider. What exactly do the coup plotters hope to achieve? If he retains power, can Gorbachev hope to resume his reforms? Is there any possibility that this event could lead to a peaceful, orderly progression to a less hostile, demilitarized democratic Soviet Union?
And there were other matters of concern. How secure was the Soviet nuclear arsenal? Could it end up in the hands of the coup plotters or a third party? Were we about to see millions of Soviet refugees flee into Eastern Europe? Would the coup plotters use military force to crush the fledgling independence movements in places such as the Baltics, Georgia, and Armenia?
Within a few days of my return to Washington, the coup had failed, and none of the worst-case scenarios had materialized. Quite the opposite—the changes it hastened were nothing short of historic. Boris Yeltsin, standing on a tank to defy the coup plotters, had seemed to capture a spirit of defiance of old ways and old thinking that was sweeping over the U.S.S.R. During the coup, Lithuania reaffirmed its 1990 declaration of independence, and Estonia and Latvia declared theirs. On August 24, the Ukrainian parliament voted for independence, and on August 25 Byelorussia did the same. August 24 was also the day Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and dissolved the Central Committee, signifying the true end of the Soviet communist era.
On September 5 the Congress of People’s Deputies voted