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European officials, who had warmly welcomed Reagan's proposal, echoed the Administration's view. They made it clear that Brezhnev's announcement did not change their commitment to install the new U.S. missiles on their soil.
The leaders of Europe's peace movement, meanwhile, were assuaged by the statements of neither Moscow nor Washington. Wim Bartels, international secretary of Holland's Inter-Church Peace Council, which helped organize an antimissile demonstration that brought 350,000 persons to Amsterdam, promised to pursue his campaign for the elimination of both the Soviet and American missiles. Said he: "We will stick harder than before to the same goals."
Although Soviet and West German diplomats had drawn up long agenda of topics for Brezhnev's visit to Bonn, including follow-up proposals to the estimated $15 billion pipeline that will bring Siberian natural gas to Western Europe (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS), the missile issue dominated the summit. Riding with Brezhnev in the Mercedes limousine that brought him from Cologne airport to Schloss Gymnich, the country mansion set aside for the Soviet leader and his elaborate entourage (see box), Schmidt told his guest: "You should not fall victim to your own propaganda about the Americans." Reagan was not the warmonger the Soviets made him out to be, the Chancellor argued, and the U.S. Administration genuinely wanted to negotiate arms control. "I know what you are saying," Brezhnev replied, "but I don't believe it."
Calmly but firmly Schmidt repeated the point throughout the two leaders' nine hours of talks. Speaking mostly from prepared texts and occasionally shouting at his host, Brezhnev rejected Schmidt's arguments. He and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko insisted that NATO and the Warsaw Pact had roughly equal nuclear forces within Europe and described the U.S. Administration as the most hostile to the Soviets in 30 years. Brezhnev confided that the only U.S. President Moscow had ever trusted was Richard Nixon. Schmidt insisted that Reagan was prepared to "negotiate, negotiate, negotiate" in order to achieve peace. Said Schmidt: "We have known each other for a long time, and I have never lied to you."
The lack of understanding between the leaders was evident in a series of acerbic exchanges during press briefings conducted jointly by Kurt Becker, Schmidt's spokesman, and his Soviet counterpart, Leonid Zamyatin. When Becker stated that the Soviets were not able to "correctly assess the intentions of the American Administration," Zamyatin snapped back that the Soviet leadership had no such problem, since the U.S., with its "violent" rhetoric, had "declared the Soviet Union as its military enemy." Later, as Becker reported Schmidt's complaints to Brezhnev that one SS-20 could destroy his home town of Hamburg, Zamyatin leaned toward the microphone and added coldly, "and Cologne and Bonn."