Intelligence

Big business will pacify the clash of cultures

Big business will pacify the clash of cultures - Times Online

The world will move together as it builds the bodies through which we can all trust each other more

Francis Fukuyama

Professor Samuel Huntington argued in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilisations that, after the cold war, world politics would be dominated not by conflicts between rival ideologies but by conflicts between civilisations and cultures. He wrote that the power of culture would trump the integrating forces of globalisation, and that people’s loyalties would ultimately be defined communally – based on ties of religion, ethnicity and shared history.

Huntington characterised the values of the western Enlightenment, democracy and individual rights prominent among them, as projections of the values of western Christianity, reasoning that other cultures with other values would create different types of institutions.

In the decade since it was published, many have argued that the clash of civilisations hypothesis has been proved right by events. There has been a broad rise in religious energies and identity, particularly notable in the Muslim world with the emergence of radical Islamism, but also evident in south Asia, Latin America, the United States and Russia.

The issues raised by the clash of civilisations thesis are clearly relevant because they raise a key question: Are natural political spaces of trust created by culture, or can we integrate on a more global, perhaps even universal, basis?

I both agree and disagree with the “clash of civilisations” thesis. I agree that cultural factors have become the prism through which many people see international affairs today. On the other hand, I believe that this point of view underestimates the integrating forces driving global development, and the way in which the modernisation process is forcing a convergence of institutions and approaches to governance on an increasingly world-wide scale.

Huntington is right that political identity based on shared culture is not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. It would be profoundly undemocratic if global economic forces stripped local communities of their ability to decide how to structure their common political life.

It is certainly true, too, that different countries must find their own routes to modernity. The specific paths that western Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia and other countries have taken are all different.

Modernisation and development arise from the efforts of the people who live in a given society, not from those of outsiders. Countries can learn from one another, but their ability to shape outcomes in foreign lands is usually very limited. This is something that the United States has painfully learnt over the past four years in Iraq.

The question we need to address, however, is whether we are taking different paths to the same endpoint – an endpoint of a single world civilisation – or whether different human cultures are heading to fundamentally different places.

My view, contrary to Professor Huntington’s, is that modernisation itself in the long run requires the convergence of many types of institutions, regardless of cultural starting points. And economic integration between states is most productive, and results in the most durable forms of trust, when it is based on transparent rule-bound institutions rather than the looser ties of cultural affinity.

The starting point of any country’s development is the state, which Max Weber, the German sociologist, defined as a monopoly of legitimate force over a defined territory. But while the state begins with coercion, the miracle of the modern state is its ability to solve the paradox of power – namely, that a state has to be strong enough to enforce laws and provide order, yet it must constrain its own exercise of power if there is to be long-term economic growth.

It is state weakness that explains anaemic economic growth in many parts of the developing world. All societies need order, rule of law, a government that provides basic public goods and a reasonably fair distribution of resources. If rulers cannot govern effectively, if they are highly corrupt and divert public resources to private ends, if they behave arbitrarily, then they will undercut the savings and investment needed for long-term growth. It is therefore no surprise that by the end of the 1990s, better governance and more competent states became the order of the day.

How does a modern state achieve good governance? Good governance is not a gift given by rulers to the ruled. It ultimately has to be based on accountability mechanisms which ensure that rulers truly serve the interests of the ruled, not just their own interests or those of their friends and families.

Governments can be held accountable in a number of ways. The most familiar are those vertical accountability mechanisms known as elections. But there are also mechanisms of horizontal accountability that work when different parts of a government monitor each other’s performance.

Parliaments and courts, independent of the executive, are of course crucial. Furthermore, there are mechanisms outside the formal political system. Accountability requires transparency regarding the behaviour of rulers, for bad governments seldom report on their own failures and transgressions. That is why good governance requires an independent media and the institutions of civil society to monitor the behaviour of the state.

Thus, effective modern states are as notable for the constraints they put on themselves as they are for their ability to concentrate power.

Whether within or among states, trust can arise from one of two sources. The first is cultural, where trust derives from shared values, traditions and history. In all societies, trust begins with family and kinship and then slowly radiates out to a broader range of social groups. The second form of trust is based on shared interests.

This kind of trust can exist between complete strangers with nothing in common culturally and who may operate in different parts of the world. This kind of trust is based on institutions.

Of the two forms of trust, the cultural version is clearly the most natural and widespread, but it is also more primitive. All human beings organise themselves into primary social groups or cultural communities and nearly all people fall back on such groups in times of trouble or crisis.

The second form of trust expands the potential radius of trust indefinitely. It is more durable because it is based on self-interest and it is the basis of modern economic interdependence. Trust becomes increasingly anchored in reciprocal self-inter-est rather than culture as countries modernise. Globalisation provides the opportunity to expand markets far beyond the limits of one’s own community, requiring development of an impersonal, structured institutional framework by which trust can emerge between complete strangers.

A case in point: businesses in China and in Chinese-speaking societies were traditionally structured around the family. It was difficult to trust strangers or enter into business relationships with someone to whom you were not related.

While this kinship-based form of social capital worked to a degree and for a while, it was limiting. It meant that family-owned businesses could not grow into large, professionally managed companies.

There are many political reasons for countries to decide to align with one another on grounds of cultural, ethnic or historical commonality. But economic rationality demands that trust be based on more impersonal criteria and here the degree to which a country’s institutions are law-governed and transparent takes pride of place.

Integration in the global economy will be more durable and productive of shared prosperity to the extent that it can be based on interests rather than passions, on institutions rather than culture. This is not a western perspective; it is a global one.

© American Interest/ Global Viewpoint 2007

August 12, 2007 at 11:14 AM in Cold War, Middle East, Muslim background, Political | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Markus Wolf, East German Spymaster, Dies at 83

Markus Wolf, East German Spymaster, Dies at 83 - New York Times

By MARK LANDLER
Published: November 9, 2006

FRANKFURT, Nov. 9 —Markus Wolf, the famously elusive spymaster of Communist East Germany whose feats of espionage were the stuff of Cold War legend, died today. He was 83.

Known as “the man without a face” because, for years, Western intelligence agencies did not even possess a photograph of him, Mr. Wolf died in his sleep in his apartment in Berlin, according to his stepdaughter, Claudia Wall. She did not specify a cause of death.

Mr. Wolf had lived quietly in the German capital since 1997, when the last of several efforts to punish him for his role in spying against the former West Germany ended with a two-year suspended sentence.

For 34 years, Mr. Wolf headed the foreign intelligence service of East Germany’s feared Ministry of State Security, or Stasi. He ran a network of 4,000 spies who infiltrated NATO headquarters and the West German chancellery. and even brought down a chancellor, Willy Brandt.

Tall, suave and impeccably dressed, Mr. Wolf was the antithesis of the colorless apparatchiks who mainly ran East Germany. He was long rumored to be the model for Karla, the shadowy spymaster in John le Carre’s novels — something the writer denied today, as he has before.

Among Mr. Wolf’s innovations in tradecraft was the “Romeo method”: he sent young agents to romance lonely secretaries in Bonn, the former West German capital, for access to the confidential files of their bosses. A few of these affairs, he later noted, blossomed into happy marriages, though the more common outcome was betrayal and broken hearts.

The disclosure that one of his spies, Günter Guillaume, had managed to become Brandt’s personal aide toppled a man who had done more to reach out to the east than any German leader.

Mr. Wolf burnished his legend in 1997 by publishing a well-received memoir, “Man Without a Face” (Times Books). But he never escaped the taint of his association with the Stasi, East Germany’s reviled instrument of repression, or the judgment in a reunified Germany that he had been on the wrong side of history.

“His greatest success was also his greatest failure,” said Karl-Wilhelm Fricke, an author and expert on the Stasi, referring to the Brandt affair. “He never accepted moral responsibility for his actions. On the contrary, he felt wrongly persecuted. He complained of victor’s justice.”

Mr. Wolf acknowledged the moral ambiguity of his role, but chalked it up to the exigencies of his time and trade.

“One may wonder at times if the end justifies the means,” he said in 1998 in a CNN documentary, “Cold War.” “It would certainly be the simplest thing to say, ‘No, certainly not.’ But that wouldn’t be the full truth. With intelligence methods, you can’t apply the same yardstick as with ordinary morals.”

Mr. Wolf was born in 1923 in Hechingen, in southwest Germany. His father, Friedrich Wolf, a Jew, was a doctor, writer and member of the Communist Party of Germany. A decade later, the family was forced to flee by the Nazis, first to Switzerland and eventually to Moscow. In the Soviet Union, Mr. Wolf was educated at elite party schools and joined the Comintern, where he was trained for undercover work. After World War II, he went to the Soviet-occupied zone of Berlin, where he worked as a radio reporter covering, among other things, the Nuremberg war-crimes trials.

“It was ingrained in my character that if the party asked something of us, we responded obediently,” he wrote in his memoir. “They said ‘Jump’ and we said ‘How high?’ ”

After a stint as a diplomat back in Moscow, Mr. Wolf was present at the creation of the East German foreign intelligence service in 1951. Taking it over a few years later, he was able to demonstrate his loyalty to the Communist regime in all sorts of ingenious ways.

West Germany, with its economic riches and NATO military backing, was East Germany’s abiding obsession. Mr. Wolf sent his agents on an unceasing campaign to ferret out information about its plans.

He lured politicians and businessmen with sex and money. He “turned” West German agents, sending them back to spy on their masters. One of his agents, Rainer Rupp, code-named “Topaz,” worked for 25 years at NATO headquarters in Brussels and was only unmasked in 1993.

Among his few setbacks was the defection of Werner Stiller, who turned over 20,000 pages of microfilmed documents to the West Germans, as well as the first picture in decades of the “man without a face.”

Willy Brandt’s downfall could have been Mr. Wolf’s undoing, since the chancellor’s policy of rapprochement, Ostpolitik, was a momentous opportunity for East Germany. Mr. Wolf himself said later that he regretted the episode. But since his boss, the Communist Party leader, Erich Honecker, was suspicious of Brandt’s overtures, the affair had no lasting consequences for Mr. Wolf.

Mr. Wolf always drew a distinction between his work and that of the rest of the Stasi, which spied on East Germany’s own citizens. In later years — too late for critics — he expressed distaste for the Stasi’s hated leader, Erich Mielke.

By the 1980’s, Mr. Wolf was disillusioned by the Communist system. When he spoke out in favor of reform during anti-Communist rallies in 1989, however, few were willing heed an aging spy.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the legal noose drew tighter around Mr. Wolf. In his memoir, he wrote that in May 1990, the Central Intelligence Agency sent an emissary to his summer cottage with an offer of safe haven in the United States if he informed on his old colleagues. He refused.

That poisoned any goodwill he might have received from Washington. The government turned down his subsequent applications for an entry visa, rejections that the American editor of his memoir, Peter Osnos, said deeply rankled him.

In late September 1990, days before Germany’s formal reunification, Mr. Wolf fled to Moscow. He lingered there about a year, before surrendering to the Germans, who charged him with treason.

In 1993, a Dusseldorf court sentenced Mr. Wolf to six years in prison. A higher court overturned the ruling, pointing out that he had been acting for a sovereign state at the time he was intelligence chief. He was later convicted on a lesser charge of ordering illegal kidnappings.

Besides his stepdaughter, he is survived by his wife, Andrea, and three sons.

Invisible for most of his career, Mr. Wolf embarked on a rather public retirement. He wrote a book of recipes, “Secret of Russian Cooking,” and contracted with Mr. Osnos to write his memoirs.

“Getting a real, full, revealing story out of Markus Wolf was very much an act of editorial gymnastics,” Mr. Osnos said from New York. “The only real leverage I had over him was he needed the money.”

Mr. Wolf’s memoir is far from a confessional. There is much he did not disclose, and which he has now taken to the grave.

“For many men,” Mr. Osnos said, “the Cold War was a game, and he was very good at the game.”

His death came 17 years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the symbolic end of that war.

November 14, 2006 at 11:10 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The memoir of Markus Wolf, the former head of East German intelligence

Spy vs. Spy

Markus Wolf, East Germany's intelligence chief for 34 years and one of the legendary spy masters of the cold war, is best known for bringing down the West German Government of Willy Brandt. But it is an irony of history -- and emblematic of both Wolf's career and the spy business in general -- that Brandt's downfall was unintended.

Wolf, head of the foreign intelligence arm of the Stasi, East Germany's Ministry of Security, from 1952 to 1986, was a master at planting moles inside the Government in Bonn. He dispatched young ''sleeper'' agents across the border and waited patiently for years as their careers advanced in the West. One such sleeper was Gunter Guillaume, who was sent west with his wife in the mid-1950's. In time, he wormed his way up to become a top staff assistant to Brandt, a Social Democrat and a liberal whose Ostpolitik, looking toward reconciliation of the two Germanys, made him East Germany's favorite West German chancellor.

But Guillaume was caught, because the Stasi, with Teutonic precision, always remembered to radio birthday greetings to its mole; they also sent a congratulatory message when his son was born. The traffic was analyzed by Bonn's counterintelligence sleuths, who eventually figured it out and arrested Guillaume in April 1974. Ten days later, Brandt resigned.

Markus Wolf, a spy once known to the West as "the man without a face," after receiving a suspended sentence for crimes committed during the Cold War. (The Associated Press)

In ''Man Without a Face'' (written with Anne McElvoy), Wolf insists that Brandt really quit because his own party used the spy scandal to blackmail him over his many sexual liaisons; the Chancellor apparently never saw a Fraulein he didn't like. But Wolf admits that the destruction of Brandt was a disaster for East Germany and the Stasi. It was, he says, ''equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal.''

Throughout his account, Wolf has a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with his own actions, and with the Stasi's Orwellian, police-state methods and its murky operations. He defends his own role by drawing a distinction between his foreign intelligence service and the Stasi branch that acted as East Germany's own Gestapo. But the lines were often blurred.

Wolf, to be sure, comes across as a clever and cultivated man, a dedicated Communist who was perhaps a tad less rigidly ideological than his masters. But he chose to follow a dark star. Try as he may, he cannot undo the past.

Did the Stasi carry out widespread repression of its own people through a network of tens of thousands of informers? Well, yes, Wolf admits. Did the Stasi harbor international terrorists? Afraid so, Wolf says. But that was not my department, Wolf insists. It was the other guys, in Department XXII.

One is reminded of the old Tom Lehrer song:

''Once the rockets are up,

''Who cares where they come down?

''That's not my department,'' says Wernher von Braun.

Although Wolf struggles to distance himself from terrorists, elsewhere in the book he contradicts himself and concedes that the ministry ''and my department'' were, after all, involved with Carlos the Jackal, one of the world's most notorious terrorists, as well as with the murderous Red Army Faction that terrorized West Germany, and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The P.L.O. was trained in hidden camps in East Germany in ''guns, explosives and guerrilla tactics.'' One Red Army Faction group ''was instructed in firing weapons at the passenger seat of a Mercedes. A live sheepdog had been tied down as a target; the animal was killed, the car was blown up and the trainee terrorists were shown how to dispose of the wreckage.''

Wolf was amused when the C.I.A. came calling in 1990 to seek his help in uncovering the mole in its ranks who eventually turned out to be Aldrich Ames. According to Wolf, Gardner (Gus) Hathaway, the former C.I.A. counterintelligence chief, asked if Wolf knew the identity of the mole. Wolf said he did not. At the time, the Berlin wall had come down, Germany was about to be reunited and Wolf, the former spy master, was not safe. His visitor, Wolf writes, urged him to defect and cooperate with the C.I.A. He says Hathaway offered him money, plastic surgery and a pleasant life in California, all of which he politely declined.

Instead, he slipped away to Moscow, the city where he had grown up. A German Jew, Wolf was born in 1923 in rural Hechingen, near Stuttgart, the son of a Communist who was also a holistic healer, nudist, vegetarian, author, fitness freak and world-class philanderer. When the Nazis came to power, the family fled and took refuge in the Soviet Union. At the age of 11, Wolf suddenly found himself in a strange land speaking a new language. Much later, after he became chief of the East German intelligence agency, his Moscow roots and fluent Russian helped him maintain cordial relations with the K.G.B. and the Soviet leadership.

Back in East Germany after the war, Wolf joined the spy service and became its director just before he turned 30. Those were heady days: Berlin had become the world's espionage center, supplanting the Vienna of ''The Third Man.'' There were double and triple agents, defectors, kidnappings and so many betrayals that the Russians concluded it was ''impossible to know with certainty for which side any German agent was working.'' Wolf's book has caused a stir in Germany because of his charge that senior West German political leaders were also working both sides of the street and maintaining clandestine contacts with the Stasi.

Wolf penetrated the BND, West Germany's foreign intelligence service, and the C.I.A. After the collapse of East Germany, the C.I.A. was chagrined to discover, when it analyzed the Stasi files, that its agents in East Germany were actually under East German control. Wolf says flatly that all of them were working for him.

Wolf also claims that he planted two spies in the United States, code named ''Maler'' (''Painter'') and ''Klavier'' (''Piano''), both now dead, both Jewish refugees from Hitler who had served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. One, he maintains, was a prosecutor at Nuremberg. According to Wolf, he also inserted a handful of ''illegals,'' spies without benefit of diplomatic cover, into the United States. They were, he says, ''doppelgangers,'' who took the identities and names of real Americans who were unaware of their doubles' existence.

Wolf, who prided himself that his face was unknown in the West until 1979, when he was finally photographed and identified by a defector, had a close call when his Aeroflot plane ran short of fuel en route to Havana in 1965 and made an unscheduled landing at Kennedy Airport. He was not unmasked, but he says that two Chinese couriers aboard the flight began eating their secret documents.

The jig seemed up for Wolf, however, in October 1990, when the two Germanys became one. With his wife, he fled to Austria, then Moscow, but later he returned to Germany, where he was tried, found guilty of treason and sentenced to six years. In 1995 a higher court agreed with Wolf's argument that he could not be tried as a traitor to West Germany since he had worked for East Germany. But in January of this year, prosecutors put Wolf on trial again, this time on kidnapping charges. On May 27, the court delivered its verdict. Markus Wolf was found guilty -- but received a two-year suspended sentence. The old spy master had, once again, slipped out of the trap.

David Wise is the author of ''Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million.''

November 14, 2006 at 11:09 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Former East German intelligence chief Markus Wolf died last week

United Press International - Intl. Intelligence - Atlantic Eye: The spymasters' spymaster

By MARC S. ELLENBOGEN

CALGARY, British Columbia, Nov. 14 (UPI) -- His face was unknown for over 30 years. He was believed to be the archetype spy in John Le Carre's novels. He brought down powerful men and their governments.

Former East German intelligence chief Markus Wolf died last week, exactly 17 years after the fall of the Berlin wall. As a child of the Cold War -- as a U.S. Army dependent raised in Germany and later as an Army cadet -- few captured my imagination more than Col. Gen. Wolf, the spymasters' spymaster.

Markus Johannes "Mischa" Wolf was head of the GRA, the Foreign Intelligence Unit of East Germany's Ministry of State Security (MfS or Stasi). For 34 years he was the number two in the Eastern German security apparatus, known as "the man without a face" for his ability to avoid being photographed. It was only revealed in 1978, when he was finally fingered by an East-German defector.

From 1958 to 1987, Wolf ran a network of 4,000 operatives outside East Germany, infiltrating NATO HQ and the administration of Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany. "We used traditional methods to gather information, to recruit -- pressure, sex and human weakness. But, our greatest strength was a target approach, and to take advantage of the West's Achilles heal -- money," the colonel-general once said. Wolf developed one of the most effective espionage operations of the Cold War, sending shivers down the spine of Western intelligence.

In 1998, in a rare German interview, Wolf said "...our experience was that a simple Sergeant in the U.S. Army, or a technical employee in the ministry in Bonn, where not many abilities were needed apart from a willingness to furnish information, was perhaps more important and resulted in better, more secret information than a high official or a high officer. What we wanted from an agent depended on a series of factors: he had to be willing to do it, and to accept certain risks and dangers and a variety of different psychological preconditions as well. One person can take papers, photograph them without getting excited, return them, and give them away without any scruples. Finding the right people for the right job was key to our operation."

Born in what is today Baden-Wurttemberg, where I spent part of my youth and parts of my adult life, Wolf was the son of a writer and physician. His father was a member of the Communist Party of Germany and of Jewish ancestry. After Hitler took power, the family emigrated to Moscow via Switzerland. During his exile, Wolf studied at the Moscow Institute of Airplane Engineering and joined COMINTERN, where he prepared for undercover work behind enemy lines. He covered the Nurnburg Trials on behalf of the Soviet Zone Radio News Service.

In 1953, at the age of 30, he helped found the foreign intelligence service within the East German Stasi. Wolf achieved great success in penetrating the government, political and business circles of West Germany. His most famous spy was Günter Guillaume. Wolf once said, "With intelligence methods, you can't apply the same yardstick as with ordinary morals. And surely, one or the other means is justified."

Wolf continued, "The atmosphere in Berlin in the 1950's, early 1960's was a hard, it was a tough fight. It wasn't fun; it was a difficult fight for all those involved ... It was an exciting time. I lived in a small settlement at the time, which was surrounded by guards. Leading politicians of the GDR used to live only a few hundred meters away from the French sector in West Berlin. We could freely move to and fro. There were abductions -- people got kidnapped from the West to the East. We had to expect retaliation. The regime felt I might become a target. I didn't have a personal bodyguard, although I had been offered one. But I didn't like that. But of course, I had a pistol, I was armed."

Wolf retired in 1987, and sought political asylum in Russia and Austria, which was rejected. He refused an offer by the CIA to defect to the United States, and instead turned himself in to West German authorities. After German reunification Wolf was sentenced to six years in prison for espionage and treason, a decision which was later overturned, and he received a suspended sentence on lesser charges.

For many East Germans, Wolf was a symbol of the ongoing changes. He supported Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. Many dissidents saw him as a high-ranking petty criminal, a man who should have been punished severely. For others, he was, and remained, a divisive and complicated figure -- a man who propped-up a despicable system.

On a purely objective level, Markus Wolf was the best in his field, a man who did not suffer fools gladly. I acknowledge this with all due respect to those prisoners' of conscience who were tortured and imprisoned, or just abused, during the darkest years of the Cold War. Some are personal friends and colleagues.

In the words of one ranking member of Israel's Mossad: "We wanted to target him, but he had unanimous respect within the services. It would have been like culling a golden eagle. Nobody was prepared to take that step. He was the master spy."

Wolf was, as Churchill famously said about Russia, " ... a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Indeed, he represented the last of a very rare breed.

--

(UPI Columnist Marc S. Ellenbogen is chairman of the Berlin-based Global Panel Foundation and president of the Prague Society for International Cooperation. He may be reached at ellenbogen@globalpanel.org)

November 14, 2006 at 11:07 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

'Himmler was my godfather'

'Himmler was my godfather' - World - Times Online

By David Crossland
Thousands of Germans who were born under a Nazi scheme to create an Aryan master race have united to confront their past

THE children of a Nazi-era programme to breed a master race are stepping up efforts to find their true identities after a life traumatised by shame and alienation.

A group representing thousands of people born under the Lebensborn (Spring of Life) programme of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, met at the weekend in Wernigerode, the site of a Lebensborn birth clinic, to share experiences and help each other to trace their true parents — who were often committed Nazis.

Peter Naumann, the chairman of the self-help group, which was set up last year, said: “A lot of us have only recently started to seek out where we came from. When you retire you look back on your life.”

Most Lebensborn records were burnt at the end of the Second World War and the children have been confronted by silence from their families for decades. Some documents were found recently in the loft of the half-timbered Wernigerode clinic, which was a women’s hospital until 1999.

The mothers’ silence, the taint of illegitimacy and the connection with a Nazi project prompted many Lebensborn children to keep quiet about their past for decades. But the sense of shame has waned with time, and the curiosity has returned.

The programme was attached to the SS and designed to encourage women of “pure blood” to bear blond, blue-eyed children. Lebensborn, set up in late 1935, was aimed at halting the high rate of abortions of illegitimate children in Germany caused by a shortage of men to marry after the First World War. It enabled women who had become pregnant out of wedlock to give birth anonymously away from their homes. Lebensborn also ran children’s homes and an adoption service if the mother did not want to keep the child.

The fathers were in some cases married members of the SS who had heeded Himmler’s call to spread their Aryan seed. The entry requirements for the clinics were as strict as for the SS itself. The women had to prove that they and the father were of Aryan stock back to their grandparents.

The children were christened in an SS ritual in which the SS dagger was held over them as the mother swore allegiance to Nazi ideology.

Hitler believed the “Nordic race” was destined to rule the world. But many Lebensborn children ended up emotionally scarred underachievers, craving the warmth of family ties and alienated from their foster parents or mothers, who in many cases refused to speak about the programme, either out of shame or loyalty to the SS oath that they had sworn. The children’s suffering was worst in Norway, where many never recovered from the stigma of having a German father. Some were put in mental asylums.

Guntram Weber, 63, a creative writing teacher from Berlin, found out only recently that Heinrich Himmler was his godfather and that his father had been a major-general in the SS. “I suspected my mother had been lying to me for decades,” Herr Weber said. “She told me my father was a lorry driver for the Luftwaffe and died in Croatia. But there were no documents or photos.”

Acting on a hint from his stepfather, Herr Weber started researching when he was 58 and found out that he was a Lebensborn child.

“From one day to the next I knew my father was a war criminal,” he said. “He was married with three children when he got my mother pregnant. She must have been impressed by his rank. He fled to Argentina and died there in 1970.

“It gave me a feeling of low self-esteem, of loneliness, of uncertainty. But then I met other children who went through the same experience and it was a huge relief — although I haven’t been able to shake this feeling of inadequacy.”

Gisela Heidenreich, blue-eyed and tall with fair hair, found out in the 1950s that her father had been a married SS officer and her mother a secretary for Lebensborn. She started investigating her past when she was shown a magazine report about Lebensborn “studs” and “SS whores”.

“My world fell apart. My mother wasn’t a harmless quiet secretary, she was this whore who bred me,” Frau Heidenreich said.

Many of the mothers refuse to speak about Lebensborn all their lives. “Telling the truth is such a dreadful thing” said Frau Heidenreich, who has written a book about her own search for the truth.

“The guilt, the shame, the fear at having been caught up in the regime. They build a wall of lies and then someone comes along and threatens to tear it down. It’s almost life-threatening to them. That’s why they don’t talk.

“Many women swore the SS oath ‘My honour is loyalty’ which still seems to play a role in their lives. They’d rather die than tell the truth.”

NAZI EUGENICS
# About 8,000 children were born in Germany and 12,000 in occupied Norway, where soldiers were encouraged to have children with women of “Viking” blood

# Children born with birth defects were often sent to “euthanasia” clinics, where they were murdered

# There were 14 Lebensborn clinics in Germany and Austria, and 9 in Norway. There were also clinics in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and Luxembourg

# About 60 per cent of Lebensborn mothers were unmarried. The wives of Nazi officials also used the facilities

# In Communist East Germany, the Stasi intelligence service placed spies in the West under stolen Lebensborn identities by sending long-lost “sons” to make contact with mothers who had given up their child for adoption

# In some cases Lebensborn homes also took in children of “Nordic” stock kidnapped by German troops in occupied territories

November 5, 2006 at 08:28 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Details on vanished 'spy' diver

BBC NEWS | UK | Details on vanished 'spy' diver

New evidence has emerged of Britain's attempts to cover up the fate of a diver who vanished in 1956, while apparently spying on a Russian warship.

Lionel "Buster" Crabb disappeared while spying on the Ordzhonikidze - which had brought the Soviet premier to Britain for talks - in Portsmouth Harbour.

Papers released at the National Archives set out his last known hours.

And the Admiralty documents make clear that whoever sent him on his mission, it was not the Royal Navy.

'Negligence' fear

The Russian ship had brought the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev for meetings with the British prime minister Anthony Eden and his ministers.

The newly-released documents show that an officer, who is still unidentified, took Crabb out in a small boat in Portsmouth Docks and stayed onboard as the diver disappeared below the surface.

The moment it became clear that a mishap had occurred (name blanked out) was ordered to return to his ship and take no further part in the affair
Admiral Inglis
The second time Crabb did not come back, and several months later a headless corpse, identified by a friend as Crabb, was found floating along the coast.

At the time Crabb went missing, the Navy tried to say he was feared drowned in Stokes Bay - another location altogether.

The incident wrecked attempts at a rapprochement between Britain and the post-Stalin government in Moscow.

The Russians protested they were being spied upon by their hosts and, in the Commons, the government was asked if the security services were out of control.

The papers make clear that the Royal Navy was embarrassed and appalled by the affair.

It was concerned the anonymous officer would have to tell a story at a subsequent inquest "inconsistent with the impression which we have tried to convey - that this was a naval operation".

I want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
Lomond Handley
Crabb's relative

A memo from Rear Admiral JGT Inglis, director of naval intelligence, on 21 June, explained that in a "bona fide" operation, there would have been "immediate and extensive rescue operations".

And the unnamed diving officer would have also taken action.

In fact, there was no rescue operation because "a search could not be carried out beside the Russian warships".

Adm Inglis pointed out that, instead, "the moment it became clear that a mishap had occurred (name blanked out) was ordered to return to his ship and take no further part in the affair".

This could expose naval chiefs and the unidentified officer who accompanied Crabb, to charges of "negligence, lack of humanity and error of judgment", he feared.

'Strictly private'

The secret account of the anonymous officer who assisted Crabb on the day of his disappearance, was also made public for the first time.

His actions until disappearance under the surface were normal, and the conditions for diving were good. He was not seen by me again
Anonymous officer accompanying Crabb
He said he had been asked to assist him "entirely unofficially and in a strictly private capacity".

The officer said: "He carried sufficient oxygen for an absence of a maximum of two hours submerged.

"His actions until disappearance under the surface were normal, and the conditions for diving were good. He was not seen by me again."

'Embarrassing questions'

Navy officials were keen for this officer not to appear in public at a subsequent inquest.

It was decided to dispatch a temporary clerical officer to represent the Admiralty instead.

One of the secret documents explained: "He knows nothing of the background to the story and will not be able to answer any embarrassing questions even if they are asked."

The same document said: "The coroner is aware of the background to the case and is not asking for the appearance of any embarrassing naval witnesses."

The coroner ruled that it was Crabb's body that had been found.

Freedom of Information

Howard Davies, archivist at the National Archives, said the extent of the cover-up suggested there was more about the case to be told.

And Crabb's family demanded the truth.

Lomond Handley, from Poole in Dorset, one of his few living relatives, said: "The people deserve to know what happened to a man who had served his country honourably and with integrity."

The latest revelations come just four months after BBC Radio Solent obtained a report into Crabb's mission with a Freedom of Information application.

The report showed that Crabb's intelligence service handlers did not take proper precautions to protect him or the secrecy of the mission.

October 27, 2006 at 02:16 AM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Revolution revisited

TheStar.com - Revolution revisited

Oct. 15, 2006. 07:45 AM
JUDY STOFFMAN

It lasted less than two weeks, from the first euphoric student demonstrations in Budapest on Oct. 23 till its final bloody end on Nov. 4, when it was crushed by Soviet tanks, but the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 left an indelible mark on Cold War politics and continues to resonate today. Thanks to the work of historians rooting through newly released materials, the world's first televised revolution is now seen as a classic case of how the Cold War deformed international relations in ways that are still felt in Iran, Afghanistan and Latin America.

In fact, only now, 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the truth about what happened and why coming into clear focus.

"Since 1990, scholars have found a lot of new material on the revolution," says Géza Jeszenszky, a history professor at Corvinus University in Budapest and Hungary's former ambassador to the U.S., who was recently in Toronto.

"Apart from the opening of the Hungarian archives (particularly the secret files of the Communist Party and the Ministry of the Interior), part of the Soviet records pertaining to the intervention have become available, and much of the American documents, including the activities of the CIA and Radio Free Europe."

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the uprising of the Hungarian people against a brutal communist dictatorship. It is being remembered with commemorative events in Europe, the United States and Canada, where almost 38,000 Hungarian refugees — including this writer and her family — found a new home in the wake of the revolt.

Moved by televised images of brave, young Hungarians fighting for freedom against the Soviet army with rocks, Molotov cocktails, even bare hands, Canada accepted more refugees relative to its population — then only 16 million — than any other country. Immigration minister Jack Pickersgill even arranged free transit and waived the mandatory chest X-rays.

Last month, the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto sponsored a conference at which some of the most distinguished scholars in the field — Istvan Deak of Columbia University, Harvard's Mark Kramer, Nandor Dreisziger of the Royal Military College in Kingston, and a clutch of historians from Hungary such as Jeszenszky, Laszlo Borhi, Attila Pok, Laszlo Ritter — debated the events of 1956. Last week at the University of Ottawa, another conference took place titled "The 1956 Revolution 50 Years Later — Canadian and International Perspectives."

The National Arts Centre in Ottawa is presenting Hungarian music and musicians, as well as a photo exhibition by V. Tony Hauser. On Tuesday there will a gala presentation at the Canadian Museum of Civilization of Hungarian director Istvan Szabo's film Sunshine, with producer Robert Lantos present to discuss the film. Cinematheque Ontario will screen Hungarian films here in November, and the CBC will air a documentary, The Fifty-Sixers Hungarian Revolution, on Oct. 26.

New books about 1956 are rolling off the presses, and memories of those far-off days are being dusted off by those who lived through them or simply watched in horrified fascination. The images on the TV screen showed that democracy is a hardy plant, watered by underground streams, that can't be permanently smothered if people really desire it.

What happened was this: In February 1956 at the 20th Communist Party Congress, Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev made a stunning speech denouncing the crimes of Josef Stalin, who had died three years previously. The contents of this secret speech soon leaked out and kindled the hope that Hungary might free itself from Soviet domination. The country began to seethe with debate, which intensified after a brief uprising in Poznan, Poland, in June of that year. It was put down in a day but resulted in Khrushchev's assent to a more liberal form of communism in Poland under Wladyslaw Gomulka.

In Budapest, a discussion group sprang up within the Young Communists organization, calling itself the Petõfi Circle (after the heroic nationalist poet who was executed following the defeat of the 1848-49 revolt against the Hapsburg dynasty). Its members began to meet semi-openly, attracting many intellectuals who voiced discontent with the climate of repression, jail without trial, and the virtual theft of the country's resources, especially food, which was often bought below cost by the Soviets.

Sandor Kopacsi, then police chief of Budapest, who ended up in exile in Toronto working as a janitor for Ontario Hydro, wrote in his memoirs that plainclothes police were sent to check on the Petõfi Circle and came away deeply affected.

"Suddenly a majority of these `spies' declared that they were in agreement with the points made in the Petofi Circle!" Kopacsi recounted. "Together they issued a statement, which they signed, declaring themselves in solidarity with the ideas put forward by the young reformists of the party."

On Oct. 23, the pent-up discontent exploded. Groups of students and workers gathered to demonstrate at the statue, on the Buda side of the Danube, of the Polish general Józef Bem, who had aided the Hungarians in 1848, to proclaim their demands for government reform. Across the river, demonstrators also assembled around the statue of Petõfi, and the two groups joined up and pushed on to Heroes' Square, where they took hammers and blow torches to the hated statue of Josef Stalin (today the head and boot of the statue are at the National Museum in Budapest). Much to the disgust of Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador to Hungary and the KGB's man in Budapest, the police refused to intervene.

The crowd went to the state-controlled radio station asking to broadcast their demands for change, and shots were fired for the first time by Hungary's hated secret police, the AVH. After that, the fighting become general and the rebels took control of the station.

The chief demand of the demonstrators was the return to power of the popular 60-year-old Imre Nagy, ousted as premier the previous year by Communist hardliners, including the detested First Secretary of the Party, Ernõ Gerõ. Nagy had proposed much needed reforms, including breaking up 700 failed collective farms.

The outgoing premier, Andras Hegedus, handed over power to Nagy on Oct. 24 as Soviet tanks, long stationed in the country at a base near the town of Tököl, rolled into Budapest to try to restore order. The revolutionaries held them off.

Nagy organized a multi-party coalition government, got an undertaking from Moscow to pull out the tanks, and called for a ceasefire. There was a brief respite during which it appeared that the Soviets were leaving and might allow Nagy to become the Hungarian Gomulka, but then the rebels laid siege to Party headquarters and lynched defenders of the building. They also took to executing anyone suspected of being a member of the AVH. The small playground where I used to go with my father was dug up and turned into an impromptu cemetery.

We now know that Khrushchev made the decision on Oct. 31 to go back on his promise of troop withdrawal. He secretly ordered that the revolution be crushed.

According to a new book, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, Khrushchev grasped that the Hungarians, unlike the Poles, would not accept a longer leash: They wanted no leash at all. Nagy, Gati argues, did not have the political skill to work out a compromise that could have avoided bloodshed, something Krushchev realized.

At the start of November, some Soviet tanks were leaving while others were rolling across Hungary's eastern border. The revolutionary newspaper Igazsag (meaning Truth) asked in a headline on Nov. 2: "Are they coming or going?" A defiant Nagy announced the reinstatement of the multi-party system, declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw pact, and its neutrality.

Hungarians, whipped up by the frenzied rhetoric of the U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe, fully expected the United States to intervene, but neither the U.S. nor the United Nations was prepared to act. Were they distracted by the unfolding Suez Crisis in the Middle East? Most scholars today think the outcome would have been the same if there had been no Suez Crisis.

In the early hours of Nov. 4, the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. Nagy, knowing it was all over, took refuge at the Yugoslav embassy. He was later to be tried, executed and buried in an unmarked grave. His heroic behaviour during his rigged trial — his refusal to recant or apologize or resign his premiership — is beautifully described in Gati's book.

During the fighting 2,700 people died, 230 were executed afterwards — a shockingly high number for a country then of 9 million — and 200,000 crawled under barbed wires at the border to freedom in the west. My own family left behind everything, including a pair of skates — my first — that I had just received for my ninth birthday and never had a chance to use. Four decades later, on a grey February day, I went skating on the city's main rink in the Liget (the city's largest park), trying to put back the pieces of my broken childhood.

After those few heady days of freedom, Moscow set up the puppet government headed by Janos Kadar, once a friend and ally of Nagy. Kadar remained head of the Hungarian Communist Party until 1988 and introduced so-called "goulash communism," which allowed limited private enterprise. It led to Hungary being dubbed the happiest barrack in the prison that was the Soviet bloc, though it also created widespread cynicism, bribery and a thriving black market.

"The real power always rested in Moscow," recalled professor Istvan Deak at the Munk Centre conference. "The people were infantalized. I was on a streetcar in Budapest in the 1980s and noticed women talking baby talk to each other. `We are allowed to take an itsy-bitsy trip to Spain now — isn't it wonderful?'"

Discussion of 1956 — officially referred to as a counter-revolution — was taboo until Hungary's regime change of 1990, in the dying days of the Soviet Union. By then, following the 30-year-rule for classified documents, the U.S. archives were open.

"The first revelation was that the West was not trying to foster this breakout but was trying to find a modus vivendi with the Soviets; our revolution was unexpected and not welcome," says Csaba Békés, a scholar based at the 1956 Institute in Budapest and a co-editor of The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (2003). The CIA, which had orchestrated the fall of a nationalist government in Iran in 1953 and put the infamous Shah in power, had nothing to do with the revolt, the archives reveal. In October 1956, it had just one Hungarian-speaking operative in the country. The U.S., like Canada, had no embassy in Budapest, only an ineffectual legation.

"The U.S. had a double-faced policy, a non-violent policy," Békés says. "They wanted to keep alive the desire for freedom in the communist bloc until the system failed, which it was bound to do. The message got sent by Radio Free Europe, but there was no promise of help. People didn't know it was just rhetoric. False hopes were created."

Radio Free Europe, staffed by right-wing émigré Hungarians, had slandered Nagy throughout the revolt, portraying him as just another communist — which was how Washington saw him, unable to grasp that the communist world was not monolithic. This simplistic view would subsequently play out in countries around the globe during the Cold War, with the United States toppling leftist regimes (Nicaragua, Guatamala, Chile), and ignoring massive suffering perpetrated by right-wing dictators (the Congo, Iran, Chile, Argentina).

After 1956, Radio Free Europe moderated its tone. "Instead of liberation, they promoted liberalization," says Békés, one of the participating scholars in the conference last week at the University of Ottawa.

"Then came the Soviet revelation, the documents in the 1990s, which showed that they tried at first to find a political solution," Békés says. "They came to the conclusion that no preservation of the communist system was possible without intervention, because by Nov. 3 Hungary was no longer a communist country. It had undergone a social revolution."

There was never a chance that Hungary could defeat the Red Army, but Békés nevertheless calls 1956 an "outstanding moment in world history. The value of historical events is not based on their success. Victorious revolutions are not that many."

Suddenly it was clear that the Soviet bloc was held together by force, and the credibility of its ideology was permanently damaged. In the west, thousands left the Communist Party. In his memoir, Red Diaper Baby, the Canadian political scientist James Laxer has described the disillusionment of his own true-believer communist family after 1956.

In June 1989, the re-burial of Imre Nagy and four other martyrs of the Revolution signalled the peaceful end of Hungary's communist regime. Free elections took place the following year for the first time since 1948; more than half a dozen parties re-emerged as they did in 1956, with the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) winning the largest share of votes.

In the last year of his life, Janos Kadar, the quisling post-revolution Communist leader, suffered a complete mental breakdown. In April 1989, he asked to address a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. To a stunned audience, recounts Gati, Kadar delivered a confused, convoluted, nonsensical monologue about "a certain man" — evidently Imre Nagy — who was hounding him.

Kadar had given Nagy, his family and his associates a pledge of safe conduct from the Yugoslav embassy, but in reality had conspired with the KGB to have them taken off a bus, sent to house arrest in Romania, and from there to jail and certain death.

Like Lady Macbeth, he could not wash the blood off his hands. Kadar died three weeks after Imre Nagy was re-buried.

The Star's Judy Stoffman is co-translator (with Daniel Stoffman) of In The Name of the Working Class, the memoirs of Sandor Kopacsi.

October 15, 2006 at 04:23 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Subterranea Britannica

Subterranea Britannica: Home Page

CLICK HERE FOR COLD WAR NUCLEAR BUNKERS ETC

CLICK HERE FOR UNDERGROUND SITES

DISSUSED TRAIN STATIONS

December 10, 2005 at 10:11 AM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Soviet reformer broke the chains of ideology

FT.com / World / Europe - Soviet reformer broke the chains of ideology

By Arkady Ostrovsky
Published: October 19 2005 03:00 | Last updated: October 19 2005 03:00

Alexander Yakovlev, one of Russia's most respected statesmen and the ideologist of Mikhail Gorbachev's sweeping reforms of the late 1980s, died in Moscow yesterday at the age of 81.

Yakovlev, a member of the last Soviet Politburo, was one of the authors of glasnost, or openness, and perestroika, the economic and political restructuring of the Soviet Union that led to its collapse.

He was responsible for freeing the Russian media from state control, for the rethinking of foreign policy, and more generally for trying to release the country from Soviet ideology.

For generations of western Sovietologists, Yakovlev was a paradoxical figure: one of the most senior apparatchiks in the Soviet system in charge of propaganda, he was - even before Mr Gorbachev's time - one of the most liberal and accessible Soviet politicians, regularly defied the hard-line rules and ultimately put an end to Communist party ideology.

After the disintegration of the Soviet empire, Yakovlev dedicated himself to documenting and exposing the crimes of Stalinism. A historian by background, he helped make public the secret segments of the 1939 treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany which divided Poland and allowed Stalin to annex three Baltic states. More importantly, he led a commission for the rehabilitation of millions of victims of political repression.

In a country which never formally repented for the crimes against its own citizens, Yakovlev embarked on his own personal and public journey of repentance.

Ethnically Russian, he hated any form of nationalism and anti-Semitism. He was born in 1923 into a peasant family in the heart of Russia near the ancient Russian town of Yaroslavl.

He was one of the "young lieutenants" - a generation of brave and romantic young men who voluntarily joined the Red Army in 1941 to fight the German invasion of the Soviet Union. He was badly wounded in 1942 and decommissioned from the army, and started climbing the political ladder. While working in the propaganda department of the Communist party he managed to distance himself from the show-trials of Soviet dissidents.

In 1972 he published an article attacking hard-line nationalists and was "exiled" to Canada, where he worked as ambassador until 1983. Then Mr Gorbachev, a leading member of the Politburo, brought him back to Moscow. Yakovlev was one ofthe first to warn Mr Gorbachev about a looming hardline coup in August 1991.

In recent years he was depressed by the direction in which Russia was moving. In an interview with the Financial Times two years ago, he said: "Bureaucrats and apparatchiks have seized power in our country. It turns out that the giant statue of Stalin was smashed into thousands of small dictators." He leaves a widow, Nina Ivanovna, a son and a daughter.

Arkady Ostrovsky

October 19, 2005 at 10:40 AM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Spies played movie critic during Cold War

TheStar.com - Spies played movie critic during Cold War

Scoured Soviet films for intelligence

Feared Arctic attack to start invasion

JIM BRONSKILL
CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA—Canadian spies secretly analyzed Soviet movies during the Cold War in the hope of gleaning useful intelligence, a newly declassified study reveals.

For a brief time in the mid-1950s, a little-known Ottawa agency played the role of film critic "in what may have been a unique intelligence-gathering project among its Western allies," the study says.

The Joint Intelligence Bureau gathered up prints of Soviet films screened in Canada and scanned them for background scenes of special interest, such as equipment, factories and military processions.

Officials then reproduced negatives of relevant footage for the "imaginative, but short-lived" initiative, says the book-length study prepared for the federal government by Wesley Wark, a University of Toronto history professor.

"The film project was a bit like watching the May Day parades — you might just catch a glimpse of something that maybe the Soviets hadn't really meant you to see," Wark said in an interview.

Canadian Press obtained a draft copy of Wark's 265-page manuscript under the Access to Information Act.

Substantial portions of the top secret document, including an entire chapter, were considered too sensitive to release — even though the Soviet threat crumbled along with the Berlin Wall years ago.

Wark especially questions the need for continued secrecy about Canada's efforts to establish an electronic eavesdropping outpost in the far North to keep tabs on Moscow.

The study, based on thousands of pages of mostly still-secret records, traces the history of the Joint Intelligence Bureau, a division of the defence department that took on numerous secret tasks after World War II.

It churned out reports on topics ranging from airfield construction in the East Bloc to the first Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

In the early days of the Cold War, Wark's study reveals, the Canadian military feared Soviet troops would seize Arctic islands as the opening salvo of a North American invasion.

A committee of intelligence officials surmised the most likely route for an air assault was via the north, with the Russians developing "secret intermediate air bases" on Spitzbergen, in northern Greenland, and Canada's Ellesmere Island as early as the 1950s.

"The Soviet air force will be capable of attacking all vulnerable areas in Canada and the U.S.A. with guided missiles and very long range air bombardment from captured bases in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago," read one strategic assessment from 1946.

The earliest Canadian appreciations of Soviet strength were often "quite fantastical," fuelled by an unwillingness to be critical and an often fatal absence of solid intelligence, Wark said in the interview.

The desire to keep abreast of Soviet intentions prompted the creation in 1956 of a secret listening station at the top of the world in Alert, N.W.T.

Other options, such as patrolling the Arctic with a Canadian equivalent of the American U-2 spy plane, were rejected.

Nonetheless, Wark says, the Soviet threat was hugely influential in spurring the federal government to embrace and transform the North through map-making, contact with remote communities and creation of the Distant Early Warning line of radar facilities.

In 1954, the Joint Intelligence Bureau began an annual "Arctic Indoctrination" course, primarily for curious members of allied intelligence services, that took them to northern Manitoba and other remote spots.

"One of the attractions seemed to have been a `camp out on the barrens,' which involved the tour officers spending a night under canvas in Churchill, no doubt with one ear cocked for roaming polar bears," Wark writes.

In reality, it was "an exotic holiday" that generated goodwill with allies including the United States.

The movie project died in '56, perhaps because of "stupor induced ... by the tedium of having to screen numberless Soviet propaganda films," he writes.

August 15, 2005 at 08:37 AM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Study sheds light on defectors

TheStar.com - Study sheds light on defectors

Arrangements made with Britain, U.S.
Source of intelligence on East Bloc

JIM BRONSKILL
CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA - About 30 East Bloc defectors secretly settled in Canada during the early years of the Cold War, a newly declassified study reveals.

The Canadian government quietly accepted the newcomers from behind the Iron Curtain through co-operative arrangements with Britain and the United States.

The foreign allies handled the early stages of each case, including initial extraction of valuable intelligence, before securing a new identity and home for the defectors in Canada.

"Between 1945 and 1952, Canada had an intake of some 30 defectors from Soviet and Communist Bloc diplomatic and consular missions," the study says.

"For a country that had never before experienced the problems of dealing with defectors, it was a significant number."

The long-secret figure is disclosed in an unpublished manuscript prepared for the federal government by Wesley Wark, a University of Toronto history professor.

Wark was hired in late 1998 by the Privy Council Office to comb through classified archives detailing lesser-known aspects of the federal intelligence apparatus during the intriguing era.

The Canadian Press obtained a draft of the 265-page study in response to a request filed almost two years ago under the Access to Information Act.

Though much of the history concerns events that are half a century old, considerable portions of the document, including an entire chapter, were judged too sensitive to release.

Wark, who had special access to thousands of pages of still-secret records, fills in some gaps in the annals of Canadian intelligence, including the clandestine defector program.

He suspects Canada, with its vast geography, was seen as a safer haven than Britain or the United States for defectors to carve out a new life without being hunted down by the notorious KGB or other East Bloc intelligence agencies.

For Canada, the resettlement program was a means of earning its keep in the western intelligence alliance, Wark said in an interview. "It does show that the Canadians were trusted by their counterpart agencies to be able to handle these cases."

The files he viewed held little information on the defectors.

"The records that survive don't give any details about the individual cases," he said. "And my sense was that the Canadians themselves were not always privy to much in the way of detail about these people and their backgrounds."

Reg Weeks, a retired major-general who worked in Canadian military intelligence, recalls Soviet defectors being treated with caution due to lingering doubts about their loyalty.

"Because if they defected once, they could defect twice," Weeks, 83, said in an interview. "You could never be really sure."

Prior to accepting the post-war defectors, Canada had grappled with — and nearly bungled — the case of Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk who toiled in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa.

The cache of documents he slipped out of the mission in September 1945 revealed the existence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada, presaging decades of chilly relations between the East and West.

As Wark notes, Gouzenko almost paid with his life for Canadian innocence about the intelligence value of defectors, as the KGB hunted him while the Canadian government mulled over what to do. "The Gouzenko affair was a near miss, and it prompted some soul-searching by Canadian authorities."

Following the Gouzenko drama, the RCMP and the department of external affairs (now foreign affairs) created "channels of informal liaison" to discuss cases of political defection, Wark writes.

In 1953, more permanent arrangements were put in place.

The RCMP oversaw the distribution of $10,000 grants to assist defectors and an interdepartmental committee was set up as "a clearing house" to consider each case on its merits.

The original committee membership was restricted to representatives from external affairs, the security and intelligence directorate of the RCMP and the admission division of the citizenship and immigration department.

"The defector committee operated on the quiet and gave itself no written terms of reference in its early years. It met only as required," the study says.

Canadian officials did not agree on a formal definition of a defector until 1958.

It was decided that a Soviet or satellite bloc citizen who, "without the knowledge and approval of his government," sought admission to Canada and was deemed to have "considerable intelligence value" could be accepted as a defector. John Starnes, who held several key intelligence posts during the era, says defectors to Canada included diplomats, intelligence agents, codebreakers, military attaches, secretarial staff and security guards.

August 1, 2005 at 10:39 AM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Nerve gas tests revealed

TheStar.com - Nerve gas tests revealed

75 soldiers, scientists exposed to sarin, VX gas, papers show
No follow-up on health effects of 40-year-old project

BRUCE CAMPION-SMITH
OTTAWA BUREAU

OTTAWA—Scientists and soldiers crawled through terrain contaminated with deadly VX nerve agents and exposed themselves to the dangerous chemicals to understand how they worked, documents obtained by the Toronto Star show.

Military officials say the tests, done in the 1950s and `60s and involving up to 75 people, would never be allowed today.

"We'd lose our jobs," said Dr. Thomas Sawyer, a scientist at the military base in Suffield, Alta., a windswept patch of prairie that has been home to Canada's research into chemical warfare since World War II.

But it was a different story 40 years ago, as scientists and military officials worked to understand these deadly nerve agents — and develop protections against them — amidst fears that the hair-trigger Cold War would turn Europe into a chemical battleground.

News that humans had been subjected to nerve agent testing sparked an outcry in 1988, led by federal New Democrats such as MP Jim Fulton, now retired.

But, Fulton says, the government immediately clamped down on the release of information. Government officials have recently said that virtually no one's health was affected by the tests, but they admit that they're not doing any follow-up today.

A defence department document prepared in 2002 outlines how Suffield became the testing ground for sarin and VX, some of the most toxic chemicals ever developed.

Nerve agents are absorbed through the respiratory system, the skin and the eyes. They attack the nervous system and in lethal doses, can cause death in a few minutes.

In one test, five students helped test how various fabrics worked removing drops of VX nerve agent, according to the note obtained under the Access to Information Act by Ottawa researcher Ken Rubin.

In another trial in 1967, scientists exposed two people to measure how much VX vapour it took to produce miosis, a constriction of the pupil, which is usually the first symptom of exposure to nerve agents.

The two people were given gas masks with one eye exposed for the test and "were removed to a safe location as soon as they developed miosis," the document said.

The four-page document, prepared for the minister of national defence, says there were only a "handful" of tests involving the deliberate exposure of humans to nerve agents "due to the hazard these materials posed."

It says that all test subjects "had a good insight into the conditions of the experiments and the safety precautions employed."

"Most of the subjects that were used in these experiments were the scientists and technologists doing the experiments themselves," said Clement Laforce, the deputy director-general of the defence department's Suffield research operation.

"A whole lot of them are still alive today, playing hockey and riding motorcycles," he said.

"They had families, they had mortgages, they liked to take vacations just like you and me. Believe me, they would not take unnecessary risks."

But even with that caveat, officials today concede that scientists at the time didn't fully understand the long-term consequences of exposure to even small doses of the materials.

"In those years, it's pretty safe to say that the common understanding was that nerve agents at sub-lethal doses had no long-term effects," Laforce said.

But over the years, that thinking has changed and there's now a recognition that even low-doses of the toxic substances can have a lasting impact.

"There does seem — I'm not going to define low-dose — does seem that there is indeed long-term effects to low-dose exposures," Sawyer said in an interview.

However, he added that the Canadian tests, usually involving just one or two drops of the nerve agents, were so limited that there would be no lasting health effects.

And officials say the tests were vital to understand how nerve agents worked.

"You have to understand the devil you might face to be able to protect against it," Laforce said.

"Was the research useful? I guess the best statement I can make is that the Canadian Forces and, by extension, the first responders in this country are amongst the best protected against chemical agents in the world," he said.

`We would not even dream of drafting a protocol nowadays that would involve exposure of humans to nerve agents.'

Clement Laforce,

Defence department official

Among the tests that were carried out, according to the defence document:

#
Applying "very small quantities" of VX to the skin of nine "test subjects" for up to 12 hours "to determine the rate of evaporation, decomposition and absorption."

#
Placing patches of battledress contaminated with one or five drops of VX on the forearms of 10 people for up to 24 hours. The briefing notes that the battle clothing provided a "ten-fold protection factor" from the chemical.

#
Testing the ability of various fabrics in removing drops of VX from the hands of 24 people. In another trial, scientists looked at how much VX agent a person could remove with their finger from a cloth patch.

"All these experiments were carefully designed to minimize the hazard posed to the test subjects and were only conducted after extensive preliminary animal testing," the document said.

The briefing note hints at other tests in which personnel were not directly exposed to nerve agents "but which were nonetheless distinctly hazardous."

It describes "crawling trials" in which personnel wearing "full protective gear" crawled across 10 metres of terrain contaminated with VX to determine how much of the nerve agent would be picked up by their clothing. These trials, done in 1962 and 1965, involved six civilians and seven soldiers.

Laforce said the days of those kinds of tests are long gone.

"We have very strict guidelines as to any human experimentation ... and all of our protocols have to reviewed by a human ethics committee," he said.

"We would not even dream of drafting a protocol nowadays that would involve exposure of humans to nerve agents."

Fulton calls Suffield a "dark side" of the Canadian military.

"I don't think the full story of (Suffield) has been told," said Fulton, now executive director of the David Suzuki Foundation.

Fulton raised questions about the nerve agent testing during question period in 1988, and was stunned to see the government clampdown on the release of any information.

"In the 15 years I was in the House of Commons, I never saw the level of unusual security procedures that then surrounded me raising that in question period," he said in an interview last week.

"When I tried to dig into it, I found such extraordinary pushback."

A week after he raised the issue, his Parliament Hill office was broken into, and Fulton says, nothing was touched except for his paperwork on chemical testing.

"The Suffield file was the file that clearly had been tampered with," he said, adding that he has no idea who was responsible for the break-in.

Still, the public attention forced the government to promise to track down all the participants and assess whether their long-term health had been affected. The defence department established a special hotline that eventually fielded 132 calls.

But after a review, the department concluded that, with one exception, "nobody's long-term health was affected, said military spokesperson Commander Mike Considine.

He says there's been no monitoring of the soldiers' health over the years.

"We're not doing any pro-active follow-up with those folks. At the time they were reminded what the business was they were in and if anything should come up they should approach the department," he said.

"We don't know of anyone coming forward. ... As far as we're concerned, there's no issues here," he said.

However, one soldier exposed to deadly nerve agent has been compensated for his work.

In all, the federal government has paid out more than $20 million to soldiers who served as human guinea pigs in various secret chemical warfare testing programs over 30 years.

So far, 850 veterans — of the estimated 3,700 who took part in all of those programs — have each received tax-free payments of $24,000 "in recognition" of their service, said Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Sutherland, who administers the payouts.

July 19, 2005 at 03:44 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

George Kennan: Economist Obituary

Economist.com | Obituary

Mar 23rd 2005
From The Economist print edition

George Kennan, diplomat and historian, died on March 17th, aged 101

IN LATER life, George Kennan felt his words had been much misunderstood. Worse, they had �inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff.� Yet he always chose his words skilfully, making an art of cables and memos as well as his 22 books. Dean Acheson, whom Mr Kennan served when he was secretary of state, once put it this way: �The trouble with George is that he writes so beautifully, he can convince you of anything.� Then he put it another way: George reminded him of his father's old horse, which, when crossing wooden bridges, would frighten himself with the noise he had made.

Mr Kennan's most resonant words had been about the Soviet Union. He had sent them in a famous �Long Telegram��in fact, five separate cables, to avoid suspicion�that was tapped out from the American embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington on February 22nd 1946. The telegram explained that the Soviet regime was fundamentally insecure; that it feared foreign contact, and any intimation of the truth by its own people; that the regime was implacably opposed to the United States, and that its designs on the world were violent destabilisation.

This cable, one of the most shocking to come into the State Department, was followed in 1947 by an article on �The Sources of Soviet Conduct� by �X� (Mr Kennan, with his hat-brim down) in Foreign Affairs. His observations, together with Russia's behaviour in those years in Eastern Europe, set a tone in America's foreign policy that led to the founding of NATO, the post-war arms-race in both conventional and nuclear weapons, the huge growth of the secret-ops arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the disaster of Vietnam. Mr Kennan had not meant this at all.

He had certainly talked of containing Russian power by meeting it with �counterforce� wherever it began to threaten western institutions. Hence �containment�, the word that was ever after linked to him. He also proposed, in a secret memo of May 1948, a covert �political warfare� unit that would aim to roll back communism rather than merely limit it. The pressure on Russia, though, was to be pre-eminently political, diplomatic and cultural (with a shot of propaganda, such as Radio Free Europe) rather than military. To Mr Kennan's horror, the generals and politicians took his words and ran with them.

He knew Russia better than any other American at the time. He had watched the Soviet experiment from the beginning; his first Soviet memo had been sent in his 20s, when he was third secretary in Riga, predicting that the system would fail. His Russian was faultless, and he had seen the yellow of Stalin's eyes. But many Americans concluded, when the Soviet Union eventually fell, that it was Ronald Reagan's doing, and his arms race that had tipped it.

The outsider

Mr Kennan loved Germany even before he loved Russia, learning the purest form of the language at the age of eight in Kassel. He was a chief architect of the Marshall Plan, and got into deep trouble in the 1950s for proposing a unified, neutral Germany from which both America and Russia would withdraw their troops. Suggestions like this got him labelled, falsely, as a liberal. Joe McCarthy's word was stronger.

He was never, in fact, accepted in the inner circles of power. Though his height, his charm and his intellect suggested that he came from the east-coast foreign-policy elite, he hailed from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and had no private fortune. In 1953, when a jealous John Foster Dulles had fired him from the foreign service, he had no income at all. Shy and scholarly (�X� cited both Gibbon and Thomas Mann), he was a historian rather than a diplomat, and could be contrarian to a risky degree. Stalin had him expelled from Moscow in 1952, when he had been ambassador a mere five months, for being too frank about Soviet surveillance.

Despite his enormous influence under Harry Truman, Mr Kennan spent much of his time in the foreign service feeling bypassed and ignored. Though he was revered in his later years as America's greatest living diplomat, and continued to dispense sharp and sought-after commentary from Princeton, his style of big-power diplomacy inevitably came to look old-fashioned. For his part, by the end of his long life, he began to judge American foreign policy as out of focus and adrift.

At the core of his whole containment idea had been what he called �spiritual vitality�. America's destiny, he firmly believed in the 1940s, was to set an example to the world of how great democratic ideals might be put into practice. By daily and hourly proving the worth of its founding principles of liberty, justice and tolerance, America would defeat communism. History �plainly intended� it.

By the 1990s, Mr Kennan seemed to change this view. He wanted America to withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights: �this whole tendency to see ourselves as the centre of political enlightenment and as teachers...strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable.� Behind this apparent shift, however, was the old George Kennan, who had always advocated caution, subtlety and patience in the use of power, without shrillness or pushiness, and had been proved right.

March 23, 2005 at 10:59 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The Long Telegram

The Kennan ‘Long Telegram’

George Kennan

Moscow

22 February 1946

Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb. 3,11 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts, subjects of which will be roughly as follows:

(1) Basic features of postwar Soviet outlook.

(2) Background of this outlook.

(3) Its projection in practical policy on official level.

(4) Its projection on unofficial level.

(5) Practical deductions from standpoint of US policy.

I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel; but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it at once. There follows:

Part 1: Basic Features of Postwar Soviet Outlook as Put Forward by Official Propaganda Machine, Are as Follows

(a) USSR still lives in antagonistic "capitalist encirclement" with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence. As stated by Stalin in 1927 to a delegation of American workers: "In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.

(b) Capitalist world is beset with internal conflicts, inherent in nature of capitalist society. These conflicts are insoluble by means of peaceful compromise. Greatest of them is that between England and US.

(c) Internal conflicts of capitalism inevitably generate wars. Wars thus generated may be of two kinds: intra-capitalist wars between two capitalist states and wars of intervention against socialist world. Smart capitalists, vainly seeking escape from inner conflicts of capitalism, incline toward latter.

(d) Intervention against USSR, while it would be disastrous to those who undertook it, would cause renewed delay in progress of Soviet socialism and must therefore be forestalled at all costs.

(e) Conflicts between capitalist states, though likewise fraught with danger for USSR, nevertheless hold out great possibilities for advancement of socialist cause, particularly if USSR remains militarily powerful, ideologically monolithic and faithful to its present brilliant leadership.

(f) It must be borne in mind that capitalist world is not all bad. In addition to hopelessly reactionary and bourgeois elements, it includes (1) certain wholly enlightened and positive elements united in acceptable communistic parties and (2) certain other elements (now described for tactical reasons as progressive or democratic) whose reactions, aspirations and activities happen to be "objectively" favorable to interests of USSR. These last must be encouraged and utilized for Soviet purposes.

(g) Among negative elements of bourgeois-capitalist society, most dangerous of all are those whom Lenin called false friends of the people, namely moderate-socialist or social-democratic leaders (in other words, non-Communist left-wing). These are more dangerous than out-and-out reactionaries, for latter at least march under their true colors, whereas moderate left-wing leaders confuse people by employing devices of socialism to serve interests of reactionary capital.

So much for premises. To what deductions do they lead from standpoint of Soviet policy? To following:

(a) Everything must be done to advance relative strength of USSR as factor in international society. Conversely, no opportunity must be missed to reduce strength and influence, collectively as well as individually, of capitalist powers.

(b) Soviet efforts, and those of Russia�s friends abroad, must be directed toward deepening and exploiting of differences and conflicts between capitalist powers. If these eventually deepen into an "imperialist" war, this war must be turned into revolutionary upheavals within the various capitalist countries.

(c) "Democratic-progressive" elements abroad are to be utilized to maximum to bring pressure to bear on capitalist governments along lines agreeable to Soviet interests.

(d) Relentless battle must be waged against socialist and social-democratic leaders abroad.

Part 2: Background of Outlook

Before examining ramifications of this party line in practice there are certain aspects of it to which I wish to draw attention.

First, it does not represent natural outlook of Russian people. Latter are, by and large, friendly to outside world, eager for experience of it, eager to measure against it talents they are conscious of possessing, eager above all to live in peace and enjoy fruits of their own labor. Party line only represents thesis which official propaganda machine puts forward with great skill and persistence to a public often remarkably resistant in the stronghold of its innermost thoughts. But party line is binding for outlook and conduct of people who make up apparatus of power--party, secret police and Government--and it is exclusively with these that we have to deal.

Second, please note that premises on which this party line is based are for most part simply not true. Experience has shown that peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible. Basic internal conflicts in advanced countries are no longer primarily those arising out of capitalist ownership of means of production, but are ones arising from advanced urbanism and industrialism as such, which Russia has thus far been spared not by socialism but only by her own backwardness. Internal rivalries of capitalism do not always generate wars; and not all wars are attributable to this cause. To speak of possibility of intervention against USSR today, after elimination of Germany and Japan and after example of recent war, is sheerest nonsense. If not provoked by forces of intolerance and subversion, "capitalist" world of today is quite capable of living at peace with itself and with Russia. Finally, no sane person has reason to doubt sincerity of moderate socialist leaders in Western countries. Nor is it fair to deny success of their efforts to improve conditions for working population whenever, as in Scandinavia, they have been given chance to show what they could do.

Falseness of these premises, every one of which predates recent war, was amply demonstrated by that conflict itself. Anglo-American differences did not turn out to be major differences of Western world. Capitalist countries, other than those of Axis, showed no disposition to solve their differences by joining in crusade against USSR. Instead of imperialist war turning into civil wars and revolution, USSR found itself obliged to fight side by side with capitalist powers for an avowed community of aims.

Nevertheless, all these theses, however baseless and disproven, are being boldly put forward again today. What does this indicate? It indicates that Soviet party line is not based on any objective analysis of situation beyond Russia�s borders; that it has, indeed, little to do with conditions outside of Russia; that it arises mainly from basic inner-Russian necessities which existed before recent war and exist today.

At bottom of Kremlin�s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted Russian rulers rather than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundations, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smouldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for the first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin�s interpretation, become a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability. Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes. This is why Soviet purposes must always be solemnly clothed in trappings of Marxism, and why no one should underrate importance of dogma in Soviet affairs. Thus Soviet leaders are driven [by] necessities of their own past and present position to put forward a dogma which [apparent omission] outside world as evil, hostile and menacing, but as bearing within itself germs of creeping disease and destined to be wracked with growing internal convulsions until it is given final coup de grace by rising power of socialism and yields to new and better world. This thesis provides justification for that increase of military and police power of Russian state, for that isolation of Russian population from outside world, and for that fluid and constant pressure to extend limits of Russian police power which are together the natural and instinctive urges of Russian rulers. Basically this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries old movement in which conceptions of offense and defense are inextricably confused. But in new guise of international Marxism, with its honeyed promises to a desperate and war-torn outside world, it is more dangerous and insidious than ever before.

It should not be thought from above that Soviet party line is necessarily disingenuous and insincere on part of those who put it forward. Many of them are too ignorant of outside world and mentally too dependent to question [apparent omission] self-hypnotism, and who have no difficulty making themselves believe what they find it comforting and convenient to believe. Finally we have the unsolved mystery as to who, if anyone, in this great land actually receives accurate and unbiased information about outside world. In atmosphere of oriental secretiveness and conspiracy which pervades this Government, possibilities for distorting or poisoning sources and currents of information are infinite. The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth--indeed, their disbelief in its existence--leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; and I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of outside world. Here there is ample scope for the type of subtle intrigue at which Russians are past masters. Inability of foreign governments to place their case squarely before Russian policy makers--extent to which they are delivered up in their relations with Russia to good graces of obscure and unknown advisers whom they never see and cannot influence--this to my mind is most disquieting feature of diplomacy in Moscow, and one which Western statesmen would do well to keep in mind if they would understand nature of difficulties encountered here.

Part 3: Projection of Soviet Outlook in Practical Policy on Official Level

We have now seen nature and background of Soviet program. What may we expect by way of its practical implementation?

Soviet policy, as Department implies in its query under reference, is conducted on two planes: (1) official plane represented by actions undertaken officially in name of Soviet Government; and (2) subterranean plane of actions undertaken by agencies for which Soviet Government does not admit responsibility.

Policy promulgated on both planes will be calculated to serve basic policies (a) to (d) outlined in part 1. Actions taken on different planes will differ considerably, but will dovetail into each other in purpose, timing and effect.

On official plane we must look for following:

(a) Internal policy devoted to increasing in every way strength and prestige of Soviet state: intensive military-industrialization; maximum development of armed forces; great displays to impress outsiders; continued secretiveness about internal matters, designed to conceal weaknesses and to keep opponent in the dark.

(b) Wherever it is considered timely and promising, efforts will be made to advance official limits of Soviet power. For the moment, these efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points conceived of here as being of immediate strategic necessity, such as northern Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm. However, other points may at any time come into question, if and as concealed Soviet political power is extended to new areas. Thus a "friendly" Persian Government might be asked to grant Russia a port on Persian Gulf. Should Spain fall under Communist control, question of Soviet base at Gibraltar Strait might be activated. But such claims will appear on official level only when unofficial preparation is complete.

(c) Russians will participate officially in international organizations where they see opportunity of extending Soviet power or of inhibiting or diluting power of others. Moscow sees in UNO not the mechanism for a permanent and stable world society founded on mutual interest and aims of all nations, but an arena in which aims just mentioned can be favorably pursued. As long as UNO is considered here to serve this purpose, Soviets will remain with it. But if at any time they come to conclusion that it is serving to embarrass or frustrate their aims for power expansion and if they see better prospects for pursuit of these aims along other lines, they will not hesitate to abandon UNO. This would imply, however, that they felt themselves strong enough to split unity of other nations by their withdrawal, to render UNO ineffective as a threat to their aims or security, and to replace it with an international weapon more effective from their viewpoint. Thus Soviet attitude toward UNO will depend largely on loyalty of other nations to it, and on degree of vigor, decisiveness and cohesion with which these nations defend in UNO the peaceful and hopeful concept of international life, which that organization represents to our way of thinking. I reiterate, Moscow has no abstract devotion to UNO ideals. Its attitude to that organization will remain essentially pragmatic and tactical.

(d) Toward colonial areas and backward or dependent peoples, Soviet policy, even on official plane, will be directed toward weakening of power and influence and contacts of advanced Western nations, on theory that insofar as this policy is successful, there will be created a vacuum which will favor Communist-Soviet penetration. Soviet pressure for participation in trusteeship arrangements thus represents, in my opinion, a desire to be in a position to complicate and inhibit exertion of Western influence at such points rather than to provide major channel for exerting of Soviet power. Latter motive is not lacking, but for this Soviets prefer to rely on other channels than official trusteeship arrangements. Thus we may expect to find Soviets asking for admission everywhere to trusteeship or similar arrangements and using levers thus acquired to weaken Western influence among such peoples.

(e) Russians will strive energetically to develop Soviet representation in, and official ties with, countries in which they sense strong possibilities of opposition to Western centers of power. This applies to such widely separated points as Germany, Argentina, Middle Eastern countries, etc.

(f) In international economic matters, Soviet policy will really be dominated by pursuit of autarchy for Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated adjacent areas taken together. That, however, will be underlying policy. As far as official line is concerned, position is not yet clear. Soviet Government has shown strange reticence since termination hostilities on subject foreign trade. If large-scale long-term credits should be forthcoming, I believe Soviet Government may eventually again do lip service, as it did in 1930�s, to desirability of building up international economic exchanges in general. Otherwise I think it possible Soviet foreign trade may be restricted largely to Soviet�s own security sphere, including occupied areas in Germany, and that a cold official shoulder may be turned to principle of general economic collaboration among nations.

(g) With respect to cultural collaboration, lip service will likewise be rendered to desirability of deepening cultural contact between peoples, but this will not in practice be interpreted in any way which could weaken security position of Soviet peoples. Actual manifestations of Soviet policy in this respect will be restricted to arid channels of closely shepherded official visits and functions, with superabundance of vodka and speeches and dearth of permanent effects.

(h) Beyond this, Soviet official relations will take what might be called "correct" course with individual foreign governments, with great stress being laid on prestige of Soviet Union and its representatives and with punctilious attention to protocol, as distinct from good manners.

Part 4: Following May Be Said as to What We May Expect by Way of Implementation of Basic Soviet Policies on Unofficial, or Subterranean Plane, i.e., on Plane for Which Soviet Government Accepts No Responsibility.

Agencies utilized for promulgation of policies on this plane are following:

1. Inner central core of Communist parties in other countries. While many of persons who compose this category may also appear and act in unrelated public capacities, they are in reality working closely together as an underground operating directorate of world communism, a concealed Comintern12 tightly coordinated and directed by Moscow. It is important to remember that this inner core is actually working on underground lines, despite legality of parties with which it is associated.

2. Rank and file of Communist parties. Note distinction is drawn between these and persons defined in paragraph 1. This distinction has become much sharper in recent years. Whereas formerly foreign Communist parties represented a curious (and from Moscow�s standpoint often inconvenient) mixture of conspiracy and legitimate activity, now the conspiratorial element has been neatly concentrated in inner circle and ordered underground, while rank and file--no longer even taken into confidence about realities of movement--are thrust forward as bona fide internal partisans of certain political tendencies within their respective countries, genuinely innocent of conspiratorial connection with foreign states. Only in certain countries where communists are numerically strong do they now regularly appear and act as a body. As a rule they are used to penetrate, and to influence or dominate, as case may be, other organizations less likely to be suspected of being tools of Soviet Government, with a view to accomplishing their purposes through [apparent omission] organizations, rather than by direct action as a separate political party.

3. A wide variety of national associations or bodies which can be dominated or influenced by such penetration. These include: labor unions, youth leagues, women�s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines, publishing houses, etc.

4. International organizations which can be similarly penetrated through influence over various national components. Labor, youth and women�s organizations are prominent among them. Particular, almost vital, importance is attached in this connection to international labor movement. In this, Moscow sees possibility of sidetracking Western governments in world affairs and building up international lobby capable of compelling governments to take actions favorable to Soviet interests in various countries and of paralyzing actions disagreeable to USSR.

5. Russian Orthodox Church, with its foreign branches, and through it the Eastern Orthodox Church in general.

6. Pan-Slav movement and other movements (Azerbaijan, Armenian, Turcoman, etc.) based on racial groups within Soviet Union.

7. Governments or governing groups willing to lend themselves to Soviet purposes in one degree or another, such as present Bulgarian and Yugoslav governments, North Persian regime, Chinese Communists, etc. Not only propaganda machines but actual policies of these regimes can be placed extensively at disposal of USSR.

It may be expected that component parts of this far-flung apparatus will be utilized, in accordance with their individual suitability, as follows:

(a) To undermine general political and strategic potential of major Western Powers. Efforts will be made in such countries to disrupt national self-confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity. All persons with grievances, whether economic or racial, will be urged to seek redress not in mediation and compromise, but in defiant, violent struggle for destruction of other elements of society. Here poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, etc.

(b) On unofficial plane particularly violent efforts will be made to weaken power and influence of Western Powers [on] colonial, backward, or dependent peoples. On this level, no holds will be barred. Mistakes and weaknesses of Western colonial administration will be mercilessly exposed and exploited. Liberal opinion in Western countries will be mobilized to weaken colonial policies. Resentment among dependent peoples will be stimulated. And while latter are being encouraged to seek independence [from] Western Powers, Soviet dominated puppet political machines will be undergoing preparation to take over domestic power in respective colonial areas when independence is achieved.

(c) Where individual governments stand in path of Soviet purposes pressure will be brought for their removal from office. This can happen where governments directly oppose Soviet foreign policy aims (Turkey, Iran), where they seal their territories off against Communist penetration (Switzerland, Portugal), or where they compete too strongly (like Labor Government in England) for moral domination among elements which it is important for Communists to dominate. (Sometimes, two if the elements are present in a single case. Then Communist opposition becomes particularly shrill and savage.)

(d) In foreign countries Communists will, as a rule, work toward destruction of all forms of personal independence--economic, political or moral. Their system can handle only individuals who have been brought into complete dependence on higher power. Thus, persons who are financially independent--such as individual businessmen, estate owners, successful farmers, artisans--and all those who exercise local leadership or have local prestige--such as popular local clergymen or political figures--are anathema. It is not by chance that even in USSR local officials are kept constantly on move from one job to another, to prevent their taking root.

(e) Everything possible will be done to set major Western Powers against each other. Anti-British talk will be plugged among Americans, anti-American talk among British. Continentals, including Germans, will be taught to abhor both Anglo-Saxon powers. Where suspicions exist, they will be fanned; where not, ignited. No effort will be spared to discredit and combat all efforts which threaten to lead to any sort of unity or cohesion among other [apparent omission] from which Russia might be excluded. Thus, all forms of international organization not amenable to Communist penetration and control, whether it be the Catholic [apparent omission] international economic concerns, or the international fraternity of royalty and aristocracy, must expect to find themselves under fire from many, and often [apparent omission].

(f) In general, all Soviet efforts on unofficial international plane will be negative and destructive in character, designed to tear down sources of strength beyond reach of Soviet control. This is only in line with basic Soviet instinct that there can be no compromise with rival power and that constructive work can start only when Communist power is dominant. But behind all this will be applied insistent, unceasing pressure for penetration and command of key positions in administration and especially in police apparatus of foreign countries. The Soviet regime is a police regime par excellence, reared in the dim half world of Tsarist police intrigue, accustomed to think primarily in terms of police power. This should never be lost sight of in gauging Soviet motives.

Part 5. [Practical Deductions from Standpoint of US Policy]

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world�s greatest peoples and resources of world�s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived. This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. Problem of how to cope with this force [is] undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face. It should be point of departure from which our political general staff work at present juncture should proceed. It should be approached with same thoroughness and care as solution of major strategic problem in war and, if necessary, with no smaller outlay in planning effort. I cannot attempt to suggest all answers here. But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve--and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations for a more encouraging nature I should like to make.

(1) Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw--and usually does--when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.

(2) Gauged against Western world as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which Western world can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.

(3) Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another. Lenin�s death was first such transfer, and its effects wracked Soviet state for 15 years. After Stalin�s death or retirement will be second. But even this will not be final test. Soviet internal system will now be subjected, by virtue of recent territorial expansions, to series of additional strains which once proved severe tax on Tsardom. We here are convinced that never since termination of civil war have mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of Communist Party than they are today. In Russia, party has now become a great and--for the moment--highly successful apparatus of dictatorial administration, but it has ceased to be a source of emotional inspiration. Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.

(4) All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.

For these reasons I think we may approach calmly and with good heart problem of how to deal with Russia. As to how this approach should be made, I only wish to advance, by way of conclusion, following comments:

(1) Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual.

(2) We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot overemphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by Government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved. In this we need not be deterred by [ugliness?] of picture. I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown. It may also be argued that to reveal more information on our difficulties with Russia would reflect unfavorably on Russian-American relations. I feel that if there is any real risk here involved, it is one which we should have courage to face, and sooner the better. But I cannot see what we would be risking. Our stake in this country, even coming on heels of tremendous demonstrations of our friendship for Russian people, is remarkably small. We have here no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose, virtually no citizens to protect, few cultural contacts to preserve. Our only stake likes in what we hope rather than what we have; and I am convinced we have better chance of realizing those hopes if our public is enlightened and if our dealings with Russians are placed entirely on realistic and matter-of-fact basis.

(3) Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqu�s. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit--Moscow cannot help profiting by them in its foreign policies.

(4) We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And, unless we do, Russians certainly will.

(5) Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

KENNAN

March 20, 2005 at 11:52 AM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The Russian Revolution -- Fifty Years After: Its Nature and Consequences

Foreign Affairs - The Russian Revolution -- Fifty Years After: Its Nature and Consequences - George F. Kennan

By George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, October 1967
Summary:

George Kennan is a frequent contributer to Foreign Affairs. He is the author most notably of "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in this magazine in 1947 under the pseudonym "X".

In March 1917, in the third year of the Great War, the political system that had prevailed in Russia for several centuries -- namely the Tsarist autocracy -- suddenly collapsed. Signs of its disintegration had been mounting ominously for a year or two; the likelihood of its early demise had been widely sensed; yet no one expected it to come just at that moment. For a century in the past, its overthrow had been the dream of liberal and radical oppositionists, some of whom had schemed, worked, even suffered martyrdom, to bring it about. Yet its collapse, when it came, was not the immediate result of any such efforts. It fell because the strains of conducting a prolonged major war, superimposed on more basic weaknesses and problems of adjustment, were simply too much for it.

The trouble began when irregularities in the food supply led to street disorders in the capital city. Compared to ones that had occurred in the past, these disorders were not of an unusual or particularly dangerous nature. Nevertheless, the r�gime proved incapable of controlling them and restoring order. The war had taken its toll of the best units of the old army, with their relatively high morale and good discipline. The garrisons in the neighborhood of the capital, to which appeal had to be taken in the effort to restore order, were now manned by raw and semi-demoralized recruits. They refused their collaboration, disobeyed orders, fraternized with the unruly crowds and declined to support the police. In this development, the hollowness of the authority of the r�gime was at once revealed. It suddenly became apparent to everyone that "the king was naked" -- naked, in this instance, of effective support from any quarter. In the short space of a few days, the monarchy, lacking effective defenders, fell of its own weight.

Even today, a half-century later, it is difficult to assess the meaning of this collapse. Was the Tsarist autocracy so largely an anachronism, were its weaknesses and failures of such gravity, that it was bound to fall in any case at an early date, and did the war merely hasten its end? Or was it Russia's participation in the war that destroyed what would otherwise have been, for the r�gime, a reasonable chance of adjustment, of adaptation, of survival into another age?

The question is hypothetical. Ther