Butler XIV: The Second of Two Important Experiences
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells a part of the story of General George Lee Butler. In the early 1990’s, Butler served as the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, the Air Force command in charge of delivering our nuclear weapons. After retiring from the Air Force in 1994, Butler came eventually to lead efforts for their elimination. Quotations in this piece will be cited to the page numbers where the material appears in Volumes I and II of George Lee Butler’s memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, Outskirts Press (2016).
The second important experience I want to tell you about could be said to have begun in 1988.
By May of that year, General Butler had become deputy director of one of the Joint Staff directorates in the Pentagon, the Directorate of Strategic Plans and Policy, known inside the building as J-5. The directors of the directorates reported to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
By this time, with the remarkable developments in relations with the Soviet Union that had followed the momentous meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, Butler had begun to ask what these developments would mean for the U.S. armed forces going forward.
He was invited to give a speech in May to the young officers at the National War College who had been identified as promising to be future leaders in the armed forces. He used the occasion to bring his thoughts together in a speech he entitled “Tides, Trends, and Tasks: The Security Environment of the 21st Century.” He had come to some far-reaching conclusions.
In the talk, he posited, in 1988, remember,
1) the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact, 2) the economic and political integration of Western Europe; 3) renewed and wider turmoil in the Middle East, 4) uneven global development giving rise to wide swaths of human misery plagued by drugs, debt, famine, poverty, and disease; 5) the dawn of deadly new ‘-isms’: xenophobic nationalism, radical fundamentalism, unbridled terrorism, and murderous tribalism; and 6) the incipient rise of new hegemonic powers seeking to impose imperial sway over bordering nations and regions. I, p. 359
Wasn’t he getting a little ahead of himself here? After all, the Cold War hadn’t even been declared over. That wouldn’t happen for another year, when President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev would do it at their summit in Malta.
“Whatever impact the presentation had on my audience,” General Butler wrote, “I cannot overstate the importance that thinking it through had for me in the months and years to come.”
Something terrible and sad had happened early in the Reagan administration, five years before General Butler would give his Tides, Trends, and Tasks talk. Off the Soviet Union’s east coast, a Boeing 747 civilian airliner flown by Korean Air Lines had strayed into Soviet Air Space and a Soviet fighter had shot it down. All 269 passengers had been killed. 22 children. A U.S. Congressman. The Soviets claimed that the airliner was shot down because it just might have been a military aircraft in disguise. Boeing did also make most of our military bombers. Boeing also made the airplanes used in Operation Looking Glass.
During the Reagan administration, there had been other incidents, not as tragic, but these involving military encounters. Among them, in Butler’s words, the Soviets had been “broadcasting phony navigation signals, aiming lasers at soldiers and pilots, and naval ‘shouldering,’ that is, Soviet ships deliberately bumping U.S. ships plowing the waters of the Black Sea in accordance with international law.” In the past, we also had done things that were not in accordance with international law, I’m pretty sure about that. I don’t know if we still were, just then, in 1988.
In March 1988, in Berne, Switzerland, President Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci, had met with his Soviet counterpart, Defense Minister Marshal Dimitri Yazov and expressed concern about the “dangerous military encounters” occurring between Soviet and American military forces. They could easily lead to open war between two countries. In Berne, Carlucci and Yazov had agreed that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Bill Crowe, and his Soviet counterpart, Chief of the Soviet General Staff Marshall Sergei Ahkromeyev, should meet at the Pentagon in early July to see what might be done about this problem.
Ahkromeyev’s visit to the U.S. would be highly unusual. As General Butler writes in his memoir (I, 343) “Such was the alienation in the decades-long alienation of the principal Cold War antagonists that their most-senior military officers had never met for an extended exchange in either of their respective homelands.”
When Marshall Ahkromeyev came to Washington, Admiral Crowe welcomed him as an honored guest and arranged side trips to let him experience aspects of life in the U.S., in and around Washington, D.C. at least.
As deputy director of J-5, the Directorate of Strategic Plans and Policy, Butler had observed Admiral Crowe’s hospitable treatment of Marshall Ahkromeyev and seen that the Marshall had seemed surprised by much of what he saw and experienced. Butler saw developing between Crowe and Ahkromeyev a “close rapport and a trust that transcended their ideological differences.” The two agreed, Butler said,
that it was imperative to put a stop to the type of incidents that Secretary Carlucci and Minister Yazov had discussed in Berne and that the way forward would be to initiate negotiations. . . to produce what came to be known as the Agreement on the Prevention of Dangerous Military Activities. I, 344
Soon after Marshall Ahkromeyev left to return to the Soviet Union, Butler got a call from Admiral Crowe. Crowe wanted him to lead the negotiations necessary to produce such an agreement.
At this point, Major General Butler had served only, he said, as a
low-level staffer parsing the issues and drafting Air Force positions for discussions among the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I had never sat at the negotiating table, much less headed a negotiating team.
Nevertheless, he assembled a team that would be working with his Soviet counterpart, a one-star general named Anatoly Bolyatko. Butler knew that most of the Soviet delegation would never have been to the United States and probably would be harboring deep suspicions about us. So when Bolyatko and his delegation came to Washington D.C. in early October to get the process started, General Butler did what he’d seen Admiral Crowe do with Marshall Ahkromeyev. He set out to “overwhelm the Soviet delegation with hospitality.”
One of his working assumptions was that “a close personal relationship between me and my Russian counterpart was essential to building the trust on which a meaningful outcome would hinge.”
He arranged the tables in their meeting room in a “U” shape rather than in two lines opposing each other. Butler and Bolyatko would be sitting shoulder to shoulder at the bottom of the “U.” Butler wanted to make it clear that he was not going to let the proceedings be trammeled by the traditional protocols of negotiation. Butler had not been sure Bolyatko would be comfortable with the non-standard arrangements. He was, it turned out.
At the end of Bolyatko’s visit, the two Generals seemed to have come to trust each other.
McGeorge Bundy, a diplomat and national security advisor during the Kennedy-Johnson years, wrote in his memoir that his long career had taught him that the best way to get others to trust you was to trust them.
On December 3, 1988, General Butler departed for Russia for the second stage of the negotiations. This would be General Butler’s first time in Russia. He was accorded the same treatment he had given General Bolyatko. The accommodations were fine, though obviously bugged, and, Butler noticed, generally dilapidated. As the air field had been. Bumpy runways and lights out along them.
General Butler was given a meeting, as Bolyatko had been, with Bolyatko’s superior officer, Marshall Ahkromeyev, the officer who had come to Washington to meet with Admiral Crowe. At the meeting, Butler raised what he and Bolyatko both knew would be the sticking point—what would happen if U.S. military aircraft strayed into restricted Russian airspace. You can see how this could be a hard one. Bolyatko knew that resolving this was something that would have to be addressed at a level higher than his.
In the meeting with Ahkromeyev, Butler decided to take a chance. He pointed out that military aircraft were already flying over Russia.
For example, as we speak, you are aware that U.S. C-141 cargo aircraft are ferrying inspection teams and their equipment to nuclear-armed missile sites in your country in keeping with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. With all due respect, might I ask what you would do if one of these aircraft strayed off course, perhaps due to weather or equipment malfunction…. Surely you would not shoot the aircraft down. I, 353.
Even Marshall Ahkromeyev, at his level, did not feel he was able to resolve the matter. He took it under advisement. At the meeting the next morning, General Bolyatko announced off-handedly that “based on guidance from Ahkromeyev,” an item would be added to the agenda: “border incursions by military aircraft.” Earlier the Soviets had not agreed that this matter could even be discussed. “From this point forward,” Butler wrote, “I knew that success was assured, requiring only continuing diligence on the part of our delegations to flesh out the approved agenda, put the final product together, and shepherd it through our respective bureaucracies.”
There were four more face-to-face negotiating sessions. “With success all but assured,” Butler arranged for more extensive side-trips in the United States for Bolyatko, to a shopping mall and professional basketball game, for example.
After a session in Moscow, Butler himself was able to take a side-trip to Leningrad. The regularly scheduled flight was chaotic, with the regular passengers actually fighting to board, and with safety seemingly of no concern. In Leningrad, their hosts took them to a down-at-the-heels sort of gangster-themed night club in a seedy part of the city that they apparently thought he and Dorene would like.
The next day, they went to the Hermitage museum, with its astounding collection of great works of art. “Sadly, what was also evident was the desperately poor state of repair of the buildings and grounds.” I, 357
Nothing in what Butler had read or learned from intelligence sources over the years, he said, prepared him for the desperately dilapidated and dispirited conditions he now saw.
Starting in his days as a cadet at the Air Force Academy, General Butler had been led to believe the Soviet Union and communism posed a mortal threat. Now he began to think that he might all along have been misconceiving the threat.
“What should have been an unremarkable interlude,” Butler writes, “turned into a highly instructive look behind the scenes of a Soviet Union in its last days.” I, 355
In the 1980’s, immediately after the borders of the Soviet Union were opened under Gorbachev, a friend of mine, the writer and adventurer Mark Jenkins, had ridden a bicycle from Vladivostok on the Soviet Union’s eastern coast across the swamps of Siberia to the Baltic Sea on its Western border. He wrote a remarkable book about the experience entitled Off the Map (William Morrow, 1992). Along the way he had encountered some Soviet soldiers. One boy-soldier had shouted to him from the back of the truck he was being transported in, “Sir. Sir! It is not what we have that they do not want you to see. They do not want you to see what we do not have.”
At their May meeting, Butler and Bolyatko scheduled the signing ceremony for June 12, 1989, in the U.S. After the May meeting, Butler asked if he could make a side trip to visit the facilities of the renowned (to him and other military people anyway) Spetsnaz. The Soviet special forces, whose reputation among military people was off the charts.
What he saw, he wrote, was the “final blow in demolishing the image of the Soviet Union I had been conditioned to hold, from my cadet days on: an Evil Empire bent on global domination whose ideological, economic and military prowess had to be held in check through eternal vigilance and superior counterforce.” I, 358
The signing took place on June 12, 1988 as scheduled. Afterwards, Admiral Crowe took Butler aside and said “Lee, I want you to know that in all my years in uniform I consider this one of my crowning achievements.” “I deeply appreciated his obviously heartfelt comment,” Butler wrote, “although in the grand sweep of his career, I’m sure this hardly rated a footnote.” I, 361. I think Crowe was right here, and Butler wasn’t.
It is important to notice that beginning with Secretary Carlucci’s meeting in Berne with Minister Yazov, through Admiral Crowe’s welcoming of Marshall Ahkromeyev, and Butler’s work with General Bolyatko, threats of coercion and “deterrence” had been no part of anything. The shared threat of what might happen if one of the “dangerous military activities” got out of hand was what had brought them together in the first place, and the happy result came from developing a relationship characterized by mutual respect, trust, and cooperation.
When you think about it, wasn’t the shared threat posed by the development of nuclear weapons exactly the same kind of thing? Before the nuclear arms race began, might not the shared threat posed by the existence of nuclear weapons—if it could come to be recognized by both sides—have been able to bring the “sides” together in an undertaking to build a common trust rather than each trying to protect itself from the other by the threat of retaliation?
Even before the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon, the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr had proposed to President Franklin Roosevelt just such an effort to reach that common recognition with the Soviets. President Roosevelt had seemed receptive. Winston Churchill had flatly vetoed the idea.
What had followed instead and been allowed to define the relationship between East and West was a “nuclear arms race.” Which could do nothing but exacerbate, even create, the threat it was supposedly meeting. And which at the end of the Cold War had cost the United States alone more than five trillion dollars.
The foregoing may help us understand what started to happen in Butler’s life after his service as the last CINCSAC and the first CINCSTRAT. Only five years after this Agreement to Prevent Dangerous Military Incidents was signed.
Next: The Turn I