Strongman, The

won’t actually start deploying interceptors until there is some shared understanding of where the Iranians are going.’
    ‘It was going to take some period of years anyway to get these sites operational,’ said Gates, ‘so we could wait for the installation of the interceptors until the Iranians had flight-tested a missile that could hit Europe.’
    The suggestion went down well because it at least delayed things, but it did little to disabuse the Russians of their conviction that they, not Iran, were the Americans’ real target. At this point Gates came up with a proposal which he now admits, with a wry smile, was certainly not agreed with the hawks back home. ‘I thought that there were a lot of things we could offer in the way of transparency, in terms of giving them access. We could even have a more or less permanent Russian presence there, like arms inspectors.’
    Within minutes the idea evolved into an offer to the Russians to have a permanent military presence, 24/7, at the US installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russians were astonished. Their chief negotiator, Anatoly Antonov, recalls: ‘We didn’t actually discuss the technicalities of where they would live and who would pay for them … but it was an interesting idea.’ 16
    Gates recalls rather ruefully: ‘All these measures that I talked about, I was just making up on the spot. If Condi and I agreed then why not see if we could make some headway with Putin?’
    Lavrov asked the Americans to put it on paper. But when Gates and Rice returned to Washington with their ad hoc proposals, there was, in Gates’ words, ‘consternation’. The ideas had to be assessed by all the relevant administration departments – defence, state, national security – in the so-called ‘interagency process’. It soon became clear that the neo-cons had not the slightest intention of giving the Russians 24/7 access to their most state-of-the-art facilities. They also belatedly consulted the Czechs and Poles, and were given short shrift. As Gates recalls, with smiling understatement: ‘There were several areas in which the interagency process here sanded off some of the sharp edges of the offers and made them less attractive.’
    The offer was put in writing, as requested, but in place of ‘permanent Russian presence’, it suggested that embassy attachés could occasionally visit the Czech and Polish sites. The Russians shook their heads with derision. Lavrov recalled in an interview: ‘We got the paper in November and not one of the proposals was in it.’
    A second 2+2 session was held in March 2008, but it was bad-tempered and unproductive. By now it was clear to the Russians that the Bush administration would not be deflected from their plans. Within a few months Washington signed the agreements it needed with Prague and Warsaw (despite the opposition of public opinion in both countries). Once again, Putin had attempted to force Washington to take Russia’s views into consideration, and failed.
    Paralysis in the Kremlin
    Putin’s increasingly tough line abroad coincided with a time of growing uncertainty at home. Working with the Kremlin, I became aware of something close to paralysis in the president’s team as he plotted his own future during 2007, the last year of his second term. Under the constitution, he could not run for a third consecutive term, and Putin repeatedly stated that he would not change the constitution to serve his own personal ends. There were many in his entourage who urged him to do so – and public-opinion polls suggested it would have been the most popular option – but Putin wanted to find another way to preserve his role.
    It was the dilemma of an autocrat who was determined, at least formally, to abide by the rules. He had no intention of leaving the scene: his statements indicated that he was afraid the course he had set Russia on could still be reversed, that he did not fully trust anyone else to defend that course as he himself would, and that he certainly did not trust ordinary people, through a democratic election, to choose the ‘correct’ path – not even by offering them two ‘approved’ candidates to choose from. Somehow, he needed to manoeuvre a trusted substitute into the driving seat – someone who would both continue his policies and not challenge his position as the ultimate ‘national leader’, running things behind the scenes. The trouble was, Putin himself did not know how to achieve