Until now, Russia had criticised the plans but offered no constructive alternative. But in June 2007 Putin came to a G8 summit in the German seaside resort of Heiligendamm with plans of his own. Apart from the main summit business Putin had a bilateral meeting with President Bush, for which he had prepared so thoroughly that it took the American by surprise. In the week before, he consulted military experts, and the night before, in his room, Putin sketched out maps of missile trajectories and other data. Now he placed them in front of Bush and expounded in great detail why the American plans were all wrong. According to an aide who was present, Putin ‘delivered a real thesis’, explaining where the radars needed to be, why Bush was being misled by his advisers about Iran and North Korea, and why Russia felt threatened.10
Bush is said to have looked at him and said, ‘OK, I see this is really serious for you. Nobody advised me you treat this so seriously.’
‘We can’t sleep for thinking about this!’ said Putin.
‘Well, as your friend,’ said Bush, ‘I can promise that we’ll look into what you’ve said.’
But Putin had a new and concrete proposal, designed to trump the American move – while simultaneously calling their bluff on whether the system was really aimed against Iran and not Russia, as Bush claimed. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I spoke to the president of Azerbaijan yesterday. We have a radar station there, in a place called Gabala. I’m willing to offer this to you. It’s closer to Iran. We can have a joint system. You use our radar in Azerbaijan, and there’ll be no need for one in the Czech Republic.’
Putin had a stick as well as a carrot. Just days before the summit he had hinted darkly that if the Americans deployed their missile interceptors in Eastern Europe then Russia would have to retaliate by re-training Russian missiles on European targets. Now he offered to remove that threat if the Americans rethought their plans: ‘It would allow us to refrain from changing our position and retargeting our missiles. There would be no need to deploy our missile strike system in the immediate vicinity of our European borders, and no need to deploy the US missile strike system in outer space.’
It was an opportunity the Americans could not ignore: for the first time, Putin was offering to drop his opposition to missile defence, under the condition that Russia would also be involved in it. Bush promised to talk to his military advisers about it.
But within a month, sensing he had Bush’s ear, Putin was offering more. On 1 July he flew to Kennebunkport in the state of Maine for informal talks at the Bush family home at Walker’s Point, a little peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. He took a speedboat ride with George W. Bush and his father and ate a supper of lobster and swordfish with the family, together with the foreign ministers and national security advisers from each side – Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, and Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Prikhodko. ‘It was a very relaxed setting,’ says Rice. ‘We sat, I’ll never forget, in this lovely chintz-covered living room, with the ocean in the background.’11
Next day they did a spot of fishing, and Putin pulled out more initiatives. Not only would he offer the Gabala radar in Azerbaijan but he would get it modernised. And then there was a brand-new radar the Russians were about to commission at Armavir in southern Russia. That could also be used. Together they would form a joint early-warning system for common missile defence involving not just the US and Russia but the whole of NATO. The NATO–Russia Council could finally have something concrete to work on. Putin offered to host an ‘information exchange centre’ in Moscow and proposed there could be a similar one in Brussels too. ‘This would be a self-contained system that would work in real time,’ Putin went on. ‘We believe that there would then be no need to install any more facilities in Europe – I mean those facilities proposed for the Czech Republic and the missile base in Poland.’
Bush wasn’t too sure about the latter point, but the rest of Putin’s proposal made a lot of sense to him – especially as Putin seemed to place these specific missile defence proposals in the context of a whole new strategic alliance. As Sergei Lavrov recalled later: ‘Putin stressed that if we could work together on this, it would, to all intents and purposes, make us allies. The proposal was prompted by a wish to create an absolutely new relationship between us.’
The talks ended, and the two leaders were about to go outside to brief the press. Stephen Hadley took President Bush aside for a moment: ‘That was a terrific statement, exactly what we’ve been looking for from Putin. Do you think he’d be willing to say that publicly?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s ask him,’ said Bush. He approached the Russian leader and told him he thought it would help accelerate progress between the two countries if he would repeat on camera what he had said privately.12
Putin was only too happy to oblige. ‘Such cooperation,’ he told the press, ‘would bring about a major change in Russian– American relations regarding security. In fact, this would lead to the gradual development of a strategic partnership in the area of security.’
So far, so good, but the Americans had yet to see what kind of facility Putin was offering. The neo-cons in the defence establishment were highly sceptical, and saw the move as a ploy to drive a wedge between the US and the Poles and Czechs. Under-secretary of defence Eric Edelman recalls: ‘I was doubtful that this actually indicated a Russian desire to cooperate on missile defence. My view was that a lot of what they were doing was tactically aimed at preventing us moving forward on missile defence by drawing us into unproductive discussions or into other issues.’13
In September a team of experts led by the director of the Missile Defence Agency, General Patrick O’Reilly, flew out to Azerbaijan to inspect the Gabala radar station. They were not impressed by what turned out to be an ageing Soviet installation. The neo-cons were not unhappy to have their suspicions confirmed. According to Edelman, ‘What [O’Reilly] said was that this was a radar that had some capability. That it could be useful. But that it was also quite old. That it needed major upgrade. And that in order in the future to really play a role it was going to need some considerable expenditure and work.’
The team concluded that Putin’s offer could help only to monitor the threat of a missile attack. But the American vision was of a system that could defend against it – and for that they would still need other sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The more Russia-friendly axis in the administration accepted this, but did not want to throw away an olive branch they had not even expected to see, after Putin’s Munich speech. Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates met alone in the defence secretary’s office at the Pentagon. Rice recalls: ‘We’re both Russianists, and we said: what we have to do is, we have to break the code somehow, we have to find a way to scratch the itch that the Russians have about being left out of this, about it being in the Czech Republic and Poland, which was obviously a lot of the problem. And are there some things we can do as confidence-building measures?’
Gates and Rice batted ideas back and forth and eventually came up with an idea that might do the trick. In October they headed out to Moscow for what were dubbed ‘two plus two’ talks – between the foreign and defence ministers on each side: Rice and Gates, plus Lavrov and Serdyukov.
On the morning of Friday 12 October they drove out to the president’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence, travelling the same road Rice had taken a year earlier for the surprise birthday party that had ended so testily. Putin wanted to see them before the 2+2 talks got going – and he was in much the same mood as a year before. Again he kept the Americans waiting for half an hour, though he had no other meetings. Then, when he assembled the two delegations around the table, with the television cameras running, he launched into a fresh tirade against the American plans: ‘The one point I would like to make is that we hope that you will not push ahead with your prior agreements with Eastern European countries while this complex negotiating process continues. You know, we could decide together to put a missile defence system on the moon some day, but in the meantime, because of your plans, we could lose the chance to achieve something together.’