Keys of This Blood by Malachi Martin

Author:Malachi Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

20

Diplomatic Connivance

At the earliest stages of any deep change in international affairs, there is a time-honored practice that governs the behavior of the great powers of the world. One of the most successful practitioners of that approach—the eighteenth-century French adventurer-statesman, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand—artfully called that secretive process la connivance diplomatique. Diplomatic connivance.

Intelligent and farseeing statesmen who contemplate a brusque departure from an established policy, Talleyrand maintained, will keep the public mind and reaction of their nations in view. Consequently, long before they reveal their new policy, they will carry on a private dialogue among themselves, exploring the most sensitive and delicate aspects of their plans.

In the privacy of diplomatic chanceries, in highly classified correspondence, in privileged person-to-person communications, agreements of substance and principle are reached. Agreements about how far each participant is willing to commit itself; about what the overall timing will be; about who other than the main parties should be informed; and about the main steps by which the general public is to be acquainted with the planned change.

Precisely that process had been in operation for more than three years before Mikhail Gorbachev began his tenure as General Secretary of the CPSU in March of 1985, bringing with him changes of a truly shocking nature and extent.

By the time Gorbachev came to the top of the Soviet heap, in fact, knowledge of what was about to come had already begun to filter from government channels, ministries and diplomatic missions outward to think tanks and paragovernmental agencies, as well as to the most influential financial, industrial, cultural and media centers. All along the way, minds were disposed and acclimatized by a process of discussions and reactions, agreements and preparations.

The surprise for some was that Gorbachev—an untried leader, after all, with no experience on the world stage—seemed to move so rapidly after his advent as General Secretary; that he seemed to master so much so quickly as to take the world by storm, and never mind learning the ropes of the normal process of diplomatic connivance.

Pope John Paul was not surprised, however. For one thing, Gorbachev was better fitted for his new international role than most Soviet bureaucrats. Even in his Stavropol days, he had shown his geopolitical bent, as well as his avid interest in and talent for international networking, on official visits he made to Belgium, Italy, West Germany, France and Canada. But that was far from the whole of it.

By the opening of the 1980s, Gorbachev was entrenched as the special protégé of KGB head Yuri Andropov. In 1982, when Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Gorbachev remained at his side. As the aging Andropov’s health declined, it was the young and trusted Gorbachev who functioned as de facto General Secretary, shuttling back and forth between Andropov’s sickroom and Moscow’s General Secretariat. It was Gorbachev who conveyed the wishes and decisions of the master on matters of deepest confidentiality and high state security to Andropov’s bureaucratic underlings. On a need-to-know basis, finally Gorbachev became privy to all there was to know.

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