246 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
earlier years he might have been intercepted and shot down; but when
the higher defence authorities had received an alert about the aerial
incursion, they were reluctant to attack the Cessna. Their minds
turned back to the furore that had followed the destruction of South
Korean airliner KAL007. Rust was apprehended on climbing out of his
cockpit. As he eagerly explained his thinking to KGB interrogators, the
initial Soviet suspicion was that he belonged to a vast international
conspiracy. The world’s news media poked fun at the entire commu-
nist order. The mighty USSR had never looked so foolish. While its
arms talks officials had been discussing how to reduce the threat of a
world war without diminishing the USSR’s defensive capacity, the
Soviet early-warning system had been exposed as ineffective.
Gorbachëv happened to be in East Berlin for a meeting of the
Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Pact. While he was
there, he talked about the need to recognize that there was an
‘imbalance’ of forces in Europe. The Warsaw Pact had a quantitative
superiority that was unjustifiable if the USSR and its allies wished to
conciliate NATO.^59 The news about the young West German came
through by telegram and Gorbachëv immediately admitted to fellow
leaders that it was a grave humiliation.^60 Although the East European
leaders tried to express sympathy, their every word twisted a knife
in the wound. Zhivkov remarked that if a sports plane could elude the
USSR’s radar network, so too could an enemy missile.^61 (Or was
the Bulgarian leader deliberately teasing his Soviet counterpart?) But
the embarrassment was only one side of the political coin. Rust’s flight
was an adventitious occurrence for the Kremlin reformers. Gorbachëv
and Shevardnadze immediately spotted their long-sought opportunity
to put the General Staff and Defence Ministry in their place. Shevard-
nadze celebrated by opening a bottle of brandy in his hotel room.^62
When Gorbachëv convened the Politburo in Moscow on 30 May,
he asked for a report from Defence Minister Sokolov about how the
young German flyer had got so far before being spotted. Sokolov tried
everyone’s patience as he laboriously reproduced the various regional
testimonies. Gorbachëv sat back while others expressed incredulity
that no military personnel along the chain of command had seen fit
to intervene. Sokolov began to flounder. Chebrikov explained that
whereas the KGB shared responsibility for the country’s security on
land and in coastal waters, air security was entrusted to the armed
forces alone; he wanted no taint of the Rust escapade to cling to his
organization. Zaikov, as political overseer of the military industry,