Ronald Reagan could call on all the spies in the CIA and all the Kremlinologists in the State Department, but when he sought to understand the Russian mind ahead of nuclear-disarmament talks in Iceland, he turned to a Tom Clancy thriller, previously secret British files show.
It was “Red Storm Rising,” a novel in which the Warsaw Pact invaded Germany, that the U.S. president felt best explained the Soviet Union. He told U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about it in a phone call, the day after the 1986 summit with Mikhail Gorbachev broke up without a deal. Thatcher’s private secretary, Charles Powell, regarded the statement as so sensational -- “particularly sensitive” -- that he kept it out of the main record of the conversation, and included it instead in a note of which just three copies were made for restricted circulation.
