264 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
Winston Churchill’s radio broadcasts.^37 American efforts to put across
the administration’s purposes were enlivened by the Worldnet TV
channel that Wick masterminded.^38 Shultz and Carlucci agreed to put
the Soviets on notice that if they wanted any kind of rapprochement,
the lies had to cease.^39 Steadily the atmosphere cleared between the
two sides as talks proceeded at the highest political levels; and the
growing trend was for the Soviet media to expose real current and past
abuses in the USSR rather than overdo the anti-American propaganda.
Moscow newspapers and magazines started to criticize policies and
practices under Stalin and Brezhnev. It was becoming open season on
the unreformed communist order.
Soviet negotiators visiting America tried to ignore the jet lag; but
they understandably always felt sleepy. The Americans worked through
the night, on US Eastern Time, while they were in Moscow. The per-
sonnel of the USSR’s General Staff stayed at their desks throughout
summits in what they cheerfully called ‘combat readiness’.^40 Who
coped the better? There is no way of saying for certain, but Adamishin
was in no doubt at the time: ‘The Americans are more punctilious,
more purposive; they know what they want and use toughness in
trying to obtain it. It has seemed to me – and perhaps I may be wrong
- that our side lacks the strictly applied intellect for the talks at hand.’^41
Reagan failed to share this confidence in the quality of service
available to him. He turned to Suzanne Massie for help with informa-
tion about everyday life in the USSR – it was she who taught him the
Russian saying ‘trust but verify’. Massie was a freelance academic
researcher on Russian history and culture, and she and her former
husband had written a bestseller about Tsar Nicholas II and his wife
Alexandra. Breezy and assertive, she made the acquaintance of
National Security Adviser McFarlane and obtained an assignment to
go to Moscow to test out Soviet official readiness to renew talks.
Through McFarlane she met and entranced the President in January
1984.^42 Reagan liked her ability to impart a sense of what life was really
like for Soviet citizens. He thought her ‘the greatest student I know of
the Russian people’.^43 She claimed direct experience of Russians high
and low. (She even recounted having received a personal message from
Gorbachëv.) While reserving judgement on Gorbachëv, she stressed
that ordinary Russians could make up their own minds and would
continue to reject the ‘Big Lies’.^44 After a trip to the USSR in September
1985 she told the President about how often she had heard ‘many
expressions of goodwill for you’.^45 In March 1986 she confided that her