THE SOVIET PACKAGE UNTIED 245consume. Gorbachëv had made light of America’s objections about
Soviet espionage: ‘You know about us, and we know about you. And
that’s a good thing.’ He concluded that even if a deal on intermedi-
ate-range nuclear missiles was possible, the chances of a further
agreement were slim.^56 Shevardnadze reported that Shultz had stressed
that everything depended on sanction from the American Congress.
Gorbachëv joked that even if a treaty was signed, Zaikov would cause
trouble by using the financial savings to build more rockets of other
categories. He affirmed a confidence in the approach that the Soviet
leaders had been taking: ‘We are holding to the correct line. They will
not get away from us, we will persist like this.’^57
Shevardnadze issued clear guidelines to his ministry. On 2 May he
told officials: ‘Our power lies not in our number of rockets but in a
stable and strong economy. It’s not the missile launchers that guaran-
tee the country’s security so much as high labour productivity, the
yield of cereal agriculture or the productivity of the young stud horse.’
He itemized serious ‘mistakes’ that the leadership had made before
1985: the installation of the SS-20s in Europe, the production of chem-
ical weapons, the invasion of Afghanistan and the policy on Cambodia.
He lamented that the USSR was ten years late in taking human rights
seriously after the Helsinki Final Act was signed in 1975. As regards
the Strategic Defense Initiative, Shevardnadze groaned: ‘Have we
worked out what it is? Even from the military viewpoint it’s not clear
to us, even now. And such criticism as exists of that programme is not
our own but the Western one that we’ve only picked up for hire.’ He
was mixing a fresh cocktail of foreign policy and asked his audience to
speak out even if they disliked the taste. Nobody uttered any criticism.
Shevardnadze knew better than to conclude that he had everyone on
his side. He had yet to weed out all the traditionalists. But his con-
fidence was high. He had Gorbachëv’s support. The reform of foreign
policy that the two of them had started was set to continue.^58
They were adept at making the most of events, and luck had an
influence. On 28 May a bizarre incident occurred in Soviet air space
between the Baltic Sea and Moscow when Mathias Rust, a West
German teenager, flew a Cessna aeroplane from Helsinki. It was an
unauthorized flight. Rust moved into Soviet air space at a point a little
east of Tallinn. He had a half-baked idea about delivering a manifesto
directly to Gorbachëv about how to bring peace to the world. It was a
cloudy day. Piloting very low to evade the Warsaw Pact’s radar facili-
ties, he succeeded in reaching Moscow and landed on Red Square. In