Tag: cold war

The Soviet-Palestinian Lie

The recent discovery that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was a KGB spy in Damascus in 1983, was discarded by many in the mainstream media as a “historical curiosity” — except that the news inconveniently came out at the time that President Vladimir Putin was trying to organize new talks between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Predictably, the Palestinian Authority immediately dismissed the news. Fatah official Nabil Shaath denied that Abbas was ever a KGB operative, and called the claim a “smear campaign.”

The discovery, far from being a “historical curiosity,” is an aspect of one of many pieces in the puzzle of the origins of 20th and 21st century Islamic terrorism. Those origins are almost always obfuscated and obscured in ill-concealed attempts at presenting a particular narrative about the causes of contemporary terrorism, while decrying all and any evidence to the contrary as “conspiracy theories.”

There is nothing conspiratorial about the latest revelation. It comes from a document in the Mitrokhin archives at the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Vasily Mitrokhin was a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service, who was later demoted to KGB archivist. At immense risk to his own life, he spent 12 years diligently copying secret KGB files that would not otherwise have become available to the public (the KGB foreign intelligence archives remain sealed from the public, despite the demise of the Soviet Union). When Mitrokhin defected from the Russia in 1992, he brought the copied files with him to the UK. The declassified parts of the Mitrokhin archives were brought to the public eye in the writings of Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, who co-wrote The Mitrokhin Archive (published in two volumes) together with the Soviet defector. Mitrokhin’s archives led, among other things, to the discovery of many KGB spies in the West and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the history of the full extent of the KGB’s influence and disinformation operations is not nearly as well-known as it should be, considering the immense influence that the KGB wielded on international affairs. The KGB conducted hostile operations against NATO as a whole, against democratic dissent within the Soviet bloc, and set in motion subversive events in Latin America and the Middle East, which resonate to this day.

The KGB, furthermore, was an extremely active player in the creation of so-called liberation movements in Latin America and in the Middle East, movements that went on to engage in lethal terrorism — as documented in, among other places, The Mitrokhin Archive, as well as in the books and writings of Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Communist official to defect from the former Soviet bloc.

Pacepa was deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service and a personal advisor to Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu before he defected to the United States in 1978. Pacepa worked with the CIA to bring down communism for more than 10 years; the agency described his cooperation as “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”

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Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War?

When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6th to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

On March 2nd, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion, Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

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The Entire Cold War Was an Avoidable Mistake

The war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945. So doing, of course, they also abruptly closed the sluice-gates to what was America’s Brobdingnagian $1.7 trillion war budget in today’s dollars (FY 2025 $). But as we noted in Part 1, that figure had shrunk by a stunning 93% to just $125 billion by 1948 as post-war demobilization proceeded apace.

And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.

And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized, along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed by the marauding Nazi armies. In all, at war’s end tens of millions of Soviet citizens had been left destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland. And that’s to say nothing of maintaining bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.

And yet and yet. Exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the inveterate out-of-power war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri. That was the opening call to the Cold War, which was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the then accidental US president from the same state delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to a joint session of Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which ignited the Cold War and the costly, suffocating web of entangling alliances that it fostered and the post-1947 American Empire that grew therefrom.

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Operation Northwoods

Operation Northwoods was a covert plan proposed in 1962 by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The operation was intended to create a series of false-flag events to justify military intervention in Cuba. It was conceived during a period of heightened tension between the United States and Cuba, following the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro’s rise to power. The primary goal of Operation Northwoods was to fabricate acts of terrorism and aggression that could be attributed to the Cuban government, thereby providing the U.S. government with a pretext for invading the island and ousting Castro.

The plan included various possible scenarios, such as staging attacks on American military installations in Guantanamo Bay, sinking boats carrying Cuban refugees, and orchestrating fake hijackings of civilian airliners. These incidents were to be designed in such a way that they would appear to be carried out by Cuban operatives. The hope was that these provocations would lead the American public and international community to support military action against Cuba. The operation’s proposals went as far as considering the possible loss of American lives, which would have been falsely blamed on the Cuban government to rally support for intervention.

Operation Northwoods was never approved, and President John F. Kennedy ultimately rejected the plan. The proposal was part of a broader effort by the U.S. government during the Cold War to contain the spread of communism, particularly in Latin America. This rejection is often viewed as a critical moment in Kennedy’s presidency, demonstrating his reluctance to escalate military conflict in Cuba, especially in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion the previous year.

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America’s Origins of Russophobia

For those that grew up in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, the explosion of Russophobia over the past decade likely came as something of a surprise. A brief survey of the history of Russophobia, however, reveals that the decade and a half after the end of the Cold War was something of an anomaly in the past century and a half of American foreign policy, with a blend of inherited geopolitical fears and ideological tensions leading to a generally anti-Russian sentiment in Washington.

Our investigation begins with the so-called “Testament of Peter the Great.” An eighteenth century forgery of largely Polish origin, it purported to show, in the words of the University of London historian Orlando Figes, that the aims of Russian foreign policy were nothing less than world domination:

“…to expand on the Baltic and Black seas, to ally with the Austrians to expel the Turks from Europe, to conquer the Levant and control the trade to the Indies, to sow dissent and confusion in Europe and become the master of the European continent.”

First published in Napoleonic France in 1812, on the eve of the Grand Armée’s ill-fated invasion of Russia, it was to go on to provide the grist for many an English fear-monger’s mill.

In 1817, Sir Robert Wilson’s A Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia in the Year 1817 luridly detailed the military and geopolitical threat supposedly posed by Russia, and a decade later George de Lacy Evans’s On the Designs of Russia repeated these earlier warnings—both were favorably received by the public and among the ruling establishment, paranoid as ever about any potential threat to British control of India. Then, in 1834, the highly influential David Urquhart published his own pamphlet, England, France, Russia and Turkey, casting Russia as the perpetual antagonist to British interests in the Near East and Central Asia.

Not everyone was fooled, however. As noted by the Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken, the great British liberals, such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, often opposed these characterizations and exaggerated threats. In turn, they were rewarded only with the scorn familiar to today’s scoffers. Indeed, the perception of Russia as a natural, age-old enemy became embedded in British geopolitical thought.

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World’s deadliest spot: the horror of Lake Karachay

Standing for just one hour at the shore of Russia’s Lake Karachay (“black water”) in 1990 would have killed you. Before it was buried beneath concrete and stone, the lake held an apocalyptic secret: over 50 times more radioactive material than was released in the Chernobyl disaster.

For decades, the Soviet Union’s Mayak nuclear facility — built in secrecy between 1946-1948 as part of Stalin’s nuclear weapons program — used this small lake in the Ural Mountains as a convenient dumping ground for its most dangerous nuclear waste, creating what the Worldwatch Institute would later describe as “the most polluted spot on Earth.” To spread the good cheer, the 1957 Kyshtym Disaster (an explosion in underground storage vats) forced officials to start dumping the radioactive schmutz in other areas, including the nearby Techa River.

The lake became even more deadly when it started drying up in 1968, exposing radioactive sediment on the shoreline. Winds swept up the contaminated dust and carried it across the countryside, irradiating half a million people. In nearby villages like Metlino, doctors worked overtime treating what they could only call the “special disease”— the compassionate servants in the Politburo forbade them from mentioning radiation in their diagnoses.

The lake bed itself was a monument to nuclear horror — its sediment, nearly 11 feet deep, was composed almost entirely of high-level radioactive waste. Between 1978 and 1986, as the deadly reality of the situation became clear, workers risked their lives to dump almost 10,000 hollow concrete blocks into the lake to keep the radioactive sediment from shifting. The project to finally bury the lake completely would take until 2015, when the last layer of rock and soil transformed Lake Karachay from a liquid nightmare into what officials euphemistically termed “a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility.”

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Program to pay nuclear fallout victims expires due to U.S. House’s inaction

Faced with the choice of expanding or at minimum extending a program to offer compensation to victims of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War, members of Congress did neither.

Despite repeated pleas from victims and their advocates, House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to allow House members to vote on a bipartisan bill that would expand and extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). As a result, the program expired Friday, leaving victims of nuclear weapons detonations at the Nevada Test Site and their families to fend for themselves.

Several Downwinders — the name applied to tens of tens of thousands of people exposed to harmful radiation from nuclear testing at the Nevada site during the 1950s and early 1960s — expressed anger and a sense of betrayal that congressional leaders allowed the program to lapse.

St. George downwinder and longtime RECA advocate Claudia Peterson called the Congress’s failure to pass the legislation “a travesty.”

“This is something our government did to their own people,” said Peterson, who has lost her father, daughter, sister, neighbors and friends to various forms of cancer. “Our government is sending money all over the world and not even taking care of our own people that they damaged [due to nuclear testing] and are responsible for.”

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America’s Cold War Doomsday Satellite

When most people think about drama surrounding the launch of a nuclear weapon, they usually think about some sort of tense face-off between two officers who don’t agree on whether or not to launch, often spurred by some sort of garbled message or unforeseen circumstance that leaves those orders in doubt. But in reality, this is actually the least dramatic portion of the entire exercise. American nuclear missile crews, regardless of which leg of the nuclear triad they fall under, train ceaselessly to execute the orders to launch under any circumstances. If the codes match…missiles fly. What *does* keep nuclear planners up at night is how to make sure the shooters end up getting the orders to fire in the first place.  

Early in the Cold War, new and maturing technologies in warfare and communications led to some interesting ideas about how to get launch orders to alert crews no matter what. Simply put, communications underpinned the entire credibility of the nuclear deterrent. The Pentagon needed a way to make absolutely sure that no matter what happened to its command and control infrastructure during the opening of a nuclear exchange, the president’s orders would be delivered. In the end, they decided that the best way to launch a bunch of missiles and set bombers flying was to launch a missile capable of delivering those commands. That missile was the AN/DRC 8 Emergency Rocket Communications System or ERCS.

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When the C.I.A. Turned Writers Into Operatives

Benjamen Walker, the creator and host of “Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything,” is a pod-maker of the mad-scientist variety: he cooks up projects using his own zeal, research, and audacious notions, then unleashes the results on the world. “Theory of Everything,” which originated in 2004, a decade before the podcast boom, has always been intellectually rigorous, funny, and whimsical, with a format that David Carr, the late Times media reporter, once described as “What are we talking about this week? Who knows! Off we go! 1984! The year, not the book.” Recently, Walker released his magnum opus, a nine-episode miniseries called “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” which he started reporting while hunkered down on a French island in the early days of the pandemic. It bears the marks of the feverish isolation of that time, conjuring a mid-century transatlantic world of left-wing intellectuals, the cultural Cold War, the C.I.A., mass culture, high culture, post-colonialism, and a whiff of conspiracy. Fittingly, it begins with “1984”—the book, not the year.

The series takes its name from the Orwell quote “All art is propaganda . . . on the other hand, not all propaganda is art”—an idea, Walker tells us, perhaps best expressed by the 1956 film version of Orwell’s novel, which was “secretly made by the C.I.A.” (This is a truthful simplification.) We hear old newsreel audio describing the film’s glamorous London première, where there were evening gowns, tuxedos, and people dressed as Thought Police. The novel, we recall, is about a totalitarian future, in which the dictator Big Brother controls and mass-surveils the populace; it ends with its once rebellious hero, Winston Smith, accepting his love for Big Brother. The 1956 film had two versions: one faithful to the novel, the other with a “happy” ending, for European audiences, screened at the première. (In it, Smith defiantly yells “Down with Big Brother!” in front of a Lenin-style propaganda poster, then dies in a hail of secret-police gunfire.) Walker chats with the British historian Tony Shaw, who argues that the U.S. government thought the movie’s “twist” made it more “anti-Soviet.” Nikita Khrushchev had just announced his policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West, and Walker believes that the film was the West’s unofficial response. “Peaceful coexistence: not an option,” he says. “Only freedom or death.”

It’s a zesty beginning, meant to draw us into the heart of Walker’s project: a group biography, as he calls it, of the writers Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Richard Wright, whose trajectories help to illuminate the shadowy maneuverings of the cultural Cold War between 1956 and 1960. (Macdonald and Tynan contributed to The New Yorker.) All three men’s lives intersect with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a lavishly funded anti-Communist organization secretly set up by the C.I.A. and headquartered in Europe, which sponsored conferences, literary magazines, art exhibitions, and other projects. Macdonald, an ornery American essayist, was a critic of Stalin and totalitarianism, and then a critic of paranoid McCarthyism. Tynan, the influential British theatre critic for The Observer, lustily called for political engagement in art, for dissent, and for “anti-anti-Americanism”; during the series’ time frame, he lives in London and New York. Wright, the American novelist and essayist (“Native Son,” “Uncle Tom’s Children”), was living in Paris, where he had moved in the forties, partly for the freedom from American racism. An anti-Communist former Communist, he was involved in many C.C.F. projects, and contended with his literary antagonist and fellow-expatriate James Baldwin, who was on the C.C.F.’s radar, too.

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