Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume VI, Soviet Union, October 1986–January 1989

118. Memorandum of Conversation¹

Washington, January 28, 1988, 1:30–2 p.m.

SUBJECT

• General Powell’s Meeting with Georgiy M. Korniyenko

PARTICIPANTS

• US

  • General Colin L. Powell
  • Fritz W. Ermarth, NSC Staff (Notetaker)

• USSR

  • Georgiy Korniyenko (First Deputy Chief, International Department, Central Committee of the CPSU)
  • Ambassador Yuriy Dubinin
  • Evgeny Zolotov (Interpreter)

Georgiy Korniyenko visited General Powell for what turned out to be largely a courtesy call. He opened conversation by conveying greetings to the President from Mikhail Gorbachev, noting that he had come as part of a parliamentary delegation but really to visit old and new friends in Washington. He recalled that he had worked on US-Soviet relations since 1946. He noted “by the way” that, according to a CIA biography of him revealed after the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, the US had a good assessment of his personality. CIA biographies, he observed, were objective and “businesslike”, avoiding generalities and noting a person’s strong and weak points; they were better than comparable Soviet biographies. He then asked General Powell to comment on prospects for the INF Treaty in the Senate.²

General Powell wondered how his biography in Soviet files read, and observed, in any case, he was given to straight talk, being a military officer, not a diplomat. He said he was highly confident of ratification of the INF Treaty, noted the applause it had gotten during the President’s State of the Union address and its popularity in the US, Europe, and Asia. Most recently Egyptian President Mubarak had praised it. According to our system, General Powell continued, there would be wide-ranging debate and careful scrutiny of every line in the Treaty, with participants serving their own political aims. All manner of amendments, reservations, and understanding would be proposed, the General predicted, and he cautioned the Soviets not to overreact. In the end, he said, the Treaty would be ratified without “killer amendments” or anything requiring renegotiation.

During the INF ratification debates, General Powell continued, positions would be taken by the participants on the course of START and Defense and Space negotiations. There would be close scrutiny of all verification problems and the record of compliance and violations, e.g., Krasnoyarsk and Gomel. The Administration would be admonished to be most careful about START, especially its verification, because of its direct importance to US security. (C)

As to the future of the START negotiations themselves, General Powell said it was hard to predict. He said it would be nice to have a START agreement to sign in Moscow, but that we should be clear that a successful summit in Moscow would not require such an achievement. It was vital, he said, to complete a START agreement carefully and correctly, so as to assure its ratification. This might take more time than we had, so we should not define a successful Moscow summit as requiring this achievement, lest we set ourselves up for a disappointment. If we hurried the completion of START, critics would condemn the product for that reason. We should work to solve remaining problems as soon as possible, but recognize that they were difficult. We faced the charge of a last-minute rush to complete INF. This experience, the General continued, should instruct us to put the most difficult issues, especially verification, up front in the negotiations, in Geneva, Moscow, and Washington. (C)

INF verification approaches did indeed provide a guide to START verification, the General went on, but START would be much harder because we had to verify limits not zero forces, to which Korniyenko agreed. In this respect, the General continued, we still had to reach closure on difficult issues concerning mobile ICBMs and SLCMs; moreover, we continued to have differences on ICBM sublimits and counting rules. It was vital, the General said, to do serious work on these problems and do it right. We should put ourselves in a position such that, should we get 50 percent of the way to completion by the time of a Moscow summit, we could legitimately call that a great success, take credit, and carry on in the negotiations. If, on the other hand, we displayed a rush in the negotiations to a summit deadline, then we would run into both negotiating difficulties and serious challenges in Senate ratification. With those concerns in mind, he emphasized that we would give every effort to completing START by the time of a Moscow summit. (C)

General Powell then turned to the D&S negotiations, where he also saw difficulties. The US continued to seek a stand-alone agreement rather than a protocol to something else, such as the Soviets sought. He noted that there had arisen some controversy about the passages in the Washington Summit Joint Statement concerning research “as required” and permitted by the ABM treaty “as signed in 1972.” Korniyenko interjected that there was no comma before this second passage. There was a problem here to which our best minds should be applied, continued the General. But he urged the Soviet side to be clear that the President’s commitment to and belief in the SDI program had not diminished in the slightest, despite his awareness that Gorbachev had a different view. Korniyenko interjected that the US should have no doubt that Gorbachev’s view was very different and he held it equally strongly. (C)

We would have to find a way, said the General, for the SDI program to continue and to be passed on to the next administration intact, without being crippled by an agreement. The General recalled that Gorbachev had granted that, at some point, the US could follow its course and the Soviet side its own different course. The US side would, in the meantime, do what was permitted by the 1972 ABM Treaty “as required” by our program, which we would describe to all. General Powell hoped our explanations would help the Soviet side to understand our aims and intentions better and that a way could be found in Geneva to resolve this difficult problem. (C)

The General observed that the Soviet side had recently taken positions in Geneva that seemed to make the situation more difficult. For example, it sought to stipulate as allowed only development on systems permitted by the ABM Treaty, not development permitted by the ABM Treaty. This seemed a step backward. Korniyenko asked whether the US draft treaty didn’t say the same thing. No, replied General Powell, the US D&S text tracked the Joint Statement. What it meant was clear during sessions of the December summit, among experts and between the two leaders. Moreover, the Soviet side wanted to reserve the right to build up strategic forces beyond START limits if the other side took objectionable action with respect to the ABM Treaty, with or without a Defense and Space agreement. This would be most difficult to ratify. General Powell then asked for Korniyenko’s comments. (C)

Korniyenko shared the General’s assessment of the INF ratification picture. But he found the situation in Geneva most puzzling. He agreed that the most serious difficulties were in Defense and Space. The Soviet side took the view that the best defense in this strategic area was no defense. The US side took a different view. The meaning of the Washington Summit, according to Korniyenko, was that we would stop trying to convince each other and simply live with the ABM Treaty for an agreed period. The US draft D&S agreement, however, had to be seen as a plain attempt at converting the Soviet side to the US view; its very title referred to a “transition” to greater reliance on defensive capabilities. This was a conceptual reversal of the Washington outcome. This was very puzzling to the Soviet side. The US had put itself in a conceptual position that made agreement impossible and from which it would be hard to retreat. (C)

In the START area, Korniyenko continued, after we had simplified the matter of sublimits, the US now returned with more sublimits and sub-sublimits, regarding, for example, ICBMs with six or more warheads. He agreed that SLCMs too remained a difficult problem. (C)

Regarding SLCMs, the General responded that the problem was verification. Although the Soviet side claimed to have the technology for doing this, we were very doubtful about this. (C)

As General Powell hurriedly departed for a meeting with the President,³ he asked Korniyenko whether Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan remained independent of the creation of a transitional regime in Kabul. Korniyenko replied that it did. (C)

1. Source: Reagan Library, Ermarth Files, General Powell’s Meeting with Georgiy Korniyenko 01/28/1988. Confidential. Drafted by Ermarth. The meeting took place in Powell’s office. Ermarth sent a copy of the memorandum to Powell under a January 29 memorandum, requesting that Powell approve both the memorandum of conversation and an attached memorandum to the CIA and Department of State transmitting a copy of the memorandum of conversation. (Ibid.) A stamped notation indicates that Powell approved the recommendation. NSC Executive Secretary Paul Schott Stevens sent copies of the memorandum of conversation to Levitsky and CIA Executive Secretary H. Lawrence Sandall under a February 3 memorandum. (Ibid.)
2. On January 25, Reagan formally transmitted the INF Treaty to the U.S. Senate. (Public Papers: Reagan, 1988, Book I, pp. 81–83)
3. On January 28, Powell met with Reagan, Shultz, and Howard Baker in the White House Oval Office from 2:04 to 2:08 p.m. (Reagan Library, President’s Daily Diary) No substantive record of the meeting has been found.