By Ray McGovern, April 8, 2023
As this year’s Masters Tournament comes to an end, I am reminded that 40 years ago I was in Augusta, Georgia, during Masters week, because Secretary of State George Shultz, a golf enthusiast was there.
Shultz was one of a handful of cabinet-level officials President Ronald Reagan wanted experienced CIA analysts to brief one-on-one with The President’s Daily Brief – updated as necessary. (Back in Washington, an agency colleague substituted for me in briefing Vice President George H. W. Bush and Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger – two others normally on my daily rounds.)
It was hard to be in Augusta and not try to obtain one of those spiffy green blazers and sneak into the tournament, but I managed to resist the temptation. Instead, I went for a long run along the Savannah River; then packed up and returned to Washington.
Briefing Shultz, a Real Pro
Comparisons can be invidious. Thus, I will avoid mentioning the clowns who succeeded Shultz as secretary of state. He died two years ago at age 100, and I can only hope that, from his new perch, he is somehow insulated from seeing the damage wreaked by his successors. I am thinking, for example, of Albright, Rice, Clinton, Kerry, Tillerson, Pompeo, Blinken.
From 1982 to 1985, I briefed Shultz every other morning (three out of six days a week) with the PDB and whatever supplementary material I chose (usually from data received overnight). He was not a ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ person. You had to earn his respect.
Shultz was a no-nonsense, consummate professional with a resume that would not quit. What made it particularly interesting for me was the fact that he was at serious loggerheads with my two CIA bosses, Bobby Gates and Bill Casey.
There were a number of ways Secretary Shultz showed me that he respected my apolitical professionalism – first and foremost, my analysis (and that of the Soviet specialists I knew to be trustworthy) that Gorbachev was the real deal. It was a time when Bobby and Bill – and Weinberger – were telling Reagan that Gorbachev was just a clever Commie, and that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would never reform, much less concede power.
When I went on to another job (Deputy Chief of Analysis in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (part of the CIA, but not directly under Gates), Shultz asked me to stay in touch and come to see him whenever I had something to say that I thought he needed to hear. I did not abuse the privilege; sent him analytic pieces every couple of months; and arranged to see him only two or three times during those two years. The last time I saw Shultz, before I left FBIS, he asked me to consider coming over to State and working for him. But Bobby Gates, who ultimately controlled my career, quickly put the kibosh on that. In the end it worked out just fine for me, making my early retirement from the agency far less complicated.
Trust
During my briefings of Shultz, I was able to draw on several decades-worth of analytic experience with Russia, plus the work of those CIA analysts I trusted. Only later did I realize that for Shultz we embodied the reality that not all CIA analysts thought, well, that Gorbachev was simply a clever Commie. Shultz ultimately prevailed in the struggle with troglodytes like Weinberger, Casey, and Gates, ushering in a period of détente, arms control agreements, and mutual respect.
Regrettably, today détente is a thing of the past, the U.S. has abrogated the ABM and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty – to name just two. The kind of trust-but-verify respect that George Shultz – and ultimately Ronald Reagan – worked to build between the U.S. and Russia is no more.
Shortly before he died, Shultz published an article in The Foreign Service Journal titled “On Trust”:
Trust is a complex factor in life between communities and nations, but it is critical in determining whether cooperation or conflict—or even war or peace—will dominate the relationship. Would you trust Mike Pompeo? Antony Blinken?