Miscommunications were often the seeds of war. In 1987, Admiral William J. Crowe, chairman of the Joints Chiefs under President Ronald Reagan, had established a back-channel relationship with the head of the Soviet Union’s military, to avoid an accidental war. Crowe had not informed President Reagan about his decision to take national security into his own hands and work directly with Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of the Soviet General Staff.
