Don’t Worry, Everything’s Fine : U.S. intelligence can’t be all bad, Gorbachev now agrees

In the spring of 1941, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent an urgent secret message to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, warning him that German troop movements then under way were a prelude to an invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin, mistrusting British motives, chose to ignore this alert.

He similarly refused to credit reports from the Soviet Embassy in Berlin and from a Soviet spy, which gave the exact date of the planned German invasion. Launched on June 22, it caught Soviet forces flatfooted, producing the first enormous casualties in a war that would take 26 million Soviet lives.

A half-century later another Soviet leader who decided to ignore a warning from the West came close to losing not his country, but his job.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has now revealed that weeks in advance of the attempted Aug. 18 coup against him--the White House says it was sometime in June--he received a telephone warning from President Bush about a possible putsch. The call was a follow-up to a similar warning passed by Secretary of State James A. Baker III to his Soviet counterpart. Gorbachev says he disregarded these warnings because he thought that only a “madman” would attempt a coup. Mad or not, the conspiracy went ahead, failed, and set off a political upheaval whose end is nowhere in sight.

Gorbachev’s revelation is an important footnote to history. It is also an implicit encomium to the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence, which Americans might not otherwise have learned about for some time.

“We did have some fairly specific information” about the plot, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater acknowledged. Gorbachev, meanwhile, was being told nothing by a KGB whose top officials were deeply involved in the conspiracy. He also had to contend with his own less-than-infallible intuitive sense that no one would be crazy enough to try to seize power by force. And so when Bush called, “I said that the President needn’t worry. Everything’s fine.” That bland reassurance came perilously close to serving as Gorbachev’s ironic epitaph.