Nixon's Back Channel to Moscow

An in-depth study of the secret communications that led to unprecedented thaw between Cold War superpowers—“quite gripping [and] wonderfully revealing” (Jeremi Suri, author of Liberty’s Surest Guardian).

The détente between the United States and the Soviet Union was among the Nixon administration’s most significant foreign policy successes. The diplomatic back channel that national security advisor Henry Kissinger established with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin became the most important method of achieving this thaw in the Cold War. While Kissinger preferred back channels for streamlining communications and preventing leaks, these methods were widely criticized by State Department officials left out of the loop and by an American public weary of executive secrecy.

Richard A. Moss’s penetrating study documents and analyzes US-Soviet back channels from Nixon’s inauguration through the May 1972 Moscow Summit. He traces the evolution of confidential diplomacy and examines major flashpoints, including the 1970 crisis over Cienfuegos, Cuba, the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), US dealings with China, deescalating tensions in Berlin, and the Vietnam War. Moss argues that while the back channels improved US-Soviet relations in the short term, the Nixon-Kissinger methods provided a poor foundation for lasting policy.

Employing newly declassified documents, the Nixon tapes, and the complete record of the Kissinger-Dobrynin channel, Moss reveals the behind-the-scenes deliberations of Nixon, his advisers, and their Soviet counterparts. This is the first scholarly study to comprehensively assess the central role of confidential diplomacy in shaping America’s foreign policy during this critical era.